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Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

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Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#491

Post by Schroedingersat »

colinmhayes wrote: post #350
ForHackernews wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up. Mostly he got lucky that his early crappy company got acquired by Paypal, and then he won the Paypal lottery. The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius. Keep in mind this is a guy who thinks a billion dollar explosive vacuum tube[0] is a better idea than... a train. [0] https://www.imeche.…

> The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius It's just so hard for me to believe this when he's had 3 successful companies. At that point he's making his own luck. I'd put the numbers at 20% luck for being able to attend expensive schools, 65% salesmanship for getting people into EVs and rockets and being a huge persona on twitter, and 15% being good at…

If a billion people put all their money on a single number on roulette five times in a row, we wouldn't call the three that won geniuses as a result.

Meritocracy is a myth. billionaires are no better at the awful game of trying to exploit others than the millions of others with privilege, intelligence, drive, and the willingness to do anything to anyone no matter how awful to make line go up. They're just the ones that won.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#492

Post by unity1001 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #356
unity1001 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. That conversation and the ideas contained within look !extremely! good to me.

So much so that knowing both of these people have seen how the sausage is made, makes me wonder if it wasn't a conversation that was entirely intended to end up on the internet.

Doesn't matter. The ideas are sound. Also, those ideas are not unusual for the people who were around during the inception of the early Internet. We all thought like that, that was the norm. We still think like that.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#493

Post by seer-zig »

ir77 wrote: post #383

two white rich guys talking about a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. dorsey should be extremely happy that twitter even took off and not lament how he is going to start a new company to fix it. if this was his principle he should have reached out to people like musk to begin with and not drive twitter to motization, etc.

What does their race have to do with the discussion?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#494

Post by fzeroracer »

hk__2 wrote: post #486
fzeroracer wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would other instances have any say over it? Like what you're describing is the purpose of decentralization. What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do. You're basically describing Reddit at that point. It's like claiming IRC isn't decentralized because the mods in a channel can kick people out for spam or whatever.

> What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do. Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down. Mastodon is li…

Okay, but the end result of your decentralization is exactly what Mastodon is. Which is in order to be truly decentralized instances should have the option to opt into one or more shared administrations. But functionally that ends up being the same thing as what you complain about which is that ultimately administration and/or accounts are localized at certain administration levels. 'Instances' in Mastodon are that administration you want.

If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#495

Post by once_inc »

jmull wrote: post #222

This seems like double-talk to me. The talk is about decentralization, but also bakes in the idea it will be done exactly to their specification. Nonsense, of course. Not to mention mastodon already exists.

As Satoshi Nakamoto noted: "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime."

I can imagine Dorsey wants to strive for the same thing: build a protocol in such a way that it becomes very difficult to change key aspects of the system.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#496

Post by mavhc »

bamboozled wrote: post #450
xedeon wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What spurred my original comment was that when I hear him talk, I think he does fail to acknowledge the people around him a little to conveniently I'm not sure if you're being facetious here. There are countless examples that exhibit the contrary. Here is one as recent as a few days ago: https://youtu.be/goT5gW57Chc?t=190 Below are a few (out of many others) prior examples: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/10515…

See my comment below but TL;DR I’d like to hear a bit more about “the great team” rather than Musk because I know behind that interview what hard work people are going through to make the things he is showing off happen. “Great job team…thanks for making me trillions” https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1536015578091048960 This one , as someone who often reads these types of mails is just a pep talk, to tell someone…

Almost all of everyone's success is built on the back of a lot of hard working individuals.

Questions are how do you get the best people, what do you tell them to work on, and how do you get good results?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#498

Post by Huh1337 »

feet wrote: post #490
Huh1337 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard anybody claim that Hyperloop vacuum tunnels were about energy savings. Hyperloop is about replacing air travel with an alternative that could offer similar or higher speeds. If you want to go 1000+ km/h (or multiples) reducing friction is a requirement and definitely not because of energy savings but because the vehicle would heat up and/or break, and then of course the turbulence and noise.

So which designs have gotten close to a significant increase over normal atmospheric bullet trains? That's addressed in my comment

Well maglevs are not used today exactly because of this issue - going past 600 km/h is dangerous - causes noise and turbulence affects the train too much, so it makes sense to venture in another direction, such as maglevs but in tunnels.

What's addressed in your comment? You didn't show any other alternative offering speeds like Hyperloop, in theory, could.

Not sure what you mean by your question about "which designs" - well, Hyperloop. Or do you expect me to hand you a finished project? It's just started. Even bullet trains took decades to get from proposal to project to finished.

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#499

Post by asoneth »

brigandish wrote: post #459
asoneth wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.) But…

They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.

When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if:

"they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"

Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence.

Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?

Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?

Re: Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022

#500

Post by hardnose »

deanCommie wrote: post #466
hardnose wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?

> "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation Yes, because bulletin board systems famously had no moderation whatsoever. Wait...

I don't know how much you remember about the transition from BBSes to the internet, but the heavy handed moderation of FidoNet is one of the exact reasons we all flooded into UseNet when it started to become available, and most likely a big part of why "FidoNet" is consigned to history's dustbin despite being, at one time, the most popular forum discussion system.
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