Thoughts about Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#231

Post by tomhoward » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #230

tomhoward wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no evidence he wanted to walk away altogether - he just wanted to get the fairest price, and surely his investors/financiers would have been demanding he negotiate the best price he legally could.

I’m honestly flummoxed that you think there is no evidence and that you think this was his plan all along. We’ve all been very aware of what’s been happening since he made the deal in the first place. The ability to negotiate stopped then. You don’t need to make excuses for him or pretend he is infallible!

The emotionally charged words and false/baseless assertions of my position and motivations in your comment indicate a strong attachment to a position.

I didn't say and don't think "this was his plan all along". I've done nothing to make excuses for him and I don't pretend he is infallible (indeed I once wrote an op-ed in a national daily newspaper examining his flaws [1][2]).

Occam’s razor requires us to believe what all the evidence indicates and nothing more: He was originally willing to buy it at the price offered in the prevailing market conditions in April, then the market crashed and suddenly the price he offered was too high, so he tried to negotiate/force a lower price (and we must assume his investors/financiers were demanding this as any professional investor/financier would), and when this failed he just went ahead with the purchase, which he always said he was committed to.

The only thing there is evidence for is that he wanted to reduce the price, just as anyone would after such a market decline. To believe anything else requires mind-reading, which you seem to be trying to do not only of Musk but also of me.

So, please, stop trying to read people's minds and just look at the evidence before us!

[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/the-bes...

[2] https://medium.com/moonshot-labs-blog/ego-what-startup-found...

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#232

Post by LightG » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

baryphonic wrote: post #125

seydor wrote: post #47

The deconstruction has begun. Twitter management is too rightwing to last. Soon the MSM will pick up the story and will suggest the right alternative to twitter that you can use.

Not sure where you got "rightwing" from. David Sacks is to the right, Elon is center-left, and Jason Calcanis is a bigtime lib. For the past three days, rightwing Twitter has been screaming that Elon has "caved" and so on because Trump, Alex Jones and a few others haven't been unbanned. (Personally, I'd like to see the Babylon Bee brought back as a gesture of good faith, pun intended.) How is the combination of those…

Elon centre-left?

Nope, centre right at best. Or, if he is actually centre-left (neither of us will know), he has (for the last couple of years) been sucking up to the right. The effect is the same. I assumed he was playing each side off against each other so, again, the effect is the same as if he is right wing.

Calcanis maybe a lib, but his actions are hard core capitalist ... so for the sake of this situation, his actions will be right wing.

Sum total: rightwing.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#233

Post by sackbut » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

yonaguska wrote: post #86

tushonka wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The image of Elon Musk turned sour after he decided to play geo-politcs and play the Putin's peacekeeper puppet. That event, at least for me showed the true colors of Musky

I wouldn't call it "playing" geopolitics when his company is sinking money into the conflict via starlink, and he presumably has no choice in the matter. Peace is always better than war, I'm not sure when we started valuing life so cheaply. Or is it just Ukrainian lives we'll happily write off? Overwhelmingly men, and not the children of the oligarchs that are funnelling money out of the country. Ultimately, every on…

Ceding territories in a forced negotiation to only set the stage for the next conflict is not peace, it's appeasement.

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#234

Post by dnissley » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 1:31 AM UTC

mcrad wrote: post #167

marcinzm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.

Is it possible that Elon's intention here has little to do with his personal fortune, or that of his employees? Maybe he simply sees the current situation as Twitter as a cancer on society, and sees himself in a unique position (ie. rich enough) to actually do something about it. Forget about the numbers, the digital marketing/pseudo-journalism industry pretty much needs to be cut down a notch, (or stop calling itsel…

Yeah, I think a lot of people are missing that these layoffs are not necessarily about Twitter's financial situation. They are very much about it's cultural situation -- both the culture within the company (reputation for being unable to ship), and the relationship of the company with the wider culture (blue checks, narrative control, cathedrals, etc).

Re: Thoughts about Twitter

#235

Post by pm90 » Sun, Nov 06, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

tomlue wrote: post #11

I don't work at a giant company, but I'm curious: > Anyone that has worked on large, complex system knows that the margin of error in uptime and downtime is often whether the right person is within arms’ reach of their laptop. Is this true? Shouldn't giant tech companies obsess about reducing the need for human intervention?

It should be viewed as a cat and mouse game.

The general philosophy at these orgs is that the same failures should never happen _again_. So you build automation and safeguards protecting the system from the failure modes you know.

However, any complex system will have failure modes you don't know. There might be new software, new features, new APIs etc. going out that interact in complex ways. So complex systems will fail in very interesting ways. So the general philosophy in operating these systems is:

1. First get the system back into a state in which the problem is mitigated. 2. Apply some short term hacks, rollback any suspicious recent changes. 3. Have someone go a bit deeper and try to root cause what caused the failure, have a discussion about it with impacted teams (often called a postmortem) and come up with long term fixes that reduces or eliminates the root cause from happening again.