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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#791

Post by chippiewill »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #758
tptacek wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem." It's hard to take any of the rest of this seriously after that "detail".

How? That point is distinctively an engineering/technical assessment whereas the others are very much not. I doubt any of them can speak with much weight on AI. That hardly means they can't make serious points about censorship, or corporate finance.

The reason it's a ludicrous claim is that while there's overlapping skill sets, the idea that you can take an AI/ML engineer working on perception or prediction or planning problems and trivially apply them to textual content filtering is laughable. They could certainly pivot across, but it would take them a good chunk of time to get up to speed, you'd be better off hiring an engineer more familiar with that particular space.

The fact that they specified it being an AI Tesla engineer is super cringe Tesla-bro stuff and the fact that the commenter would say something like that hurts their credibility in making the other fairly extreme claims.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#792

Post by rpmisms »

tenpies wrote: post #708
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this seems obvious. No reason something this fateful shouldn’t be put to shareholder vote. No good reason, at least.

Quoted post unavailable.

The massive and immediate shift from "It's a private company and they can do what they want" to chanting in unison "This is a danger to our democracy" has been horrifying to watch.

I don't own a TV, and yet I can tell you what the chiron said this morning, nearly verbatim. Ask anyone who watched it.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#793

Post by supernes »

memish wrote: post #696

Some points from the All in Pod. 1. The Twitter board of directors has become a status thing. It's like a country club. They don't have real skin in the game; they don't own much stock. They're not aligned with the shareholders. It's about status and cultural power. 2. Why should we believe that the company will become more valuable when the stock price is where it was way back in December 2013? Compare to how the S&…

I don't mean to sound rude, but Tesla engineers can't even distinguish the moon from a stoplight. Human interaction and defending against a naturally intelligent adversary are not so simple.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#794

Post by chippiewill »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #100
philistine wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's offer is at the same time an hostile offer, and conditional on obtaining financing from banks. This is never heard of in the history of hostile acquisitions, and is a BIG risk for the board to entertain any attempt by anyone to buy Twitter before they know what their loan percentages are.

Elon's offer is not a hostile offer. He has made an offer, management has not yet rejected it. It is just an offer to purchase the company, as of now. If the offer is rejected and Elon continues to attempt to gain control of the company, that would be an attempt at a hostile takeover.

The offer is technically hostile because it was unsolicited, and the offer was made at the same time he indicated he wanted to buy-out the company (usually there's a gap).

A more typical way of doing this would be to make a proposal directly to the board first. The fact that Elon did it in public means he's trying to pressure the board (via the shareholders) into taking an action they wouldn't otherwise want to take which makes it hostile.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#795

Post by [deleted] »

memish wrote: post #696

Some points from the All in Pod. 1. The Twitter board of directors has become a status thing. It's like a country club. They don't have real skin in the game; they don't own much stock. They're not aligned with the shareholders. It's about status and cultural power. 2. Why should we believe that the company will become more valuable when the stock price is where it was way back in December 2013? Compare to how the S&…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#796

Post by glogla »

memish wrote: post #701
browserman wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's AI engineers can't even solve their own problems, why do you think they could solve Twitter's?

They have solved much harder problems than spam bots.

Did they stop killing people by crashing into stationary barriers yet?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#797

Post by paisawalla »

ehsankia wrote: post #742
paisawalla wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about the hardest content problems on the internet. Look at any of Elon Musk's (or anyone in crypto's) popular tweets and you'll see a flood of incredibly obvious bots that poorly mimic his account, spamming some shit coin or advertising a BTC address. Also, you're really understating how good Tesla self-drive is. It's not full self-drive but it's a real achievement.

Yes, and Youtube and Facebook both have similar problems. There is survivalship bias at play here, you do see the bots that manage to get past the spam protection, but never see the ones that don't. For all you know, Twitter could be blocking 99% of the spam. Of course, as long as there's money in it (and there is), spammers will constantly be coming up with new and unexpected ways to bypass your systems. It's a neve…

There's a substantial qualitative difference between what gets through Youtube's and Facebook's filter, versus what gets past Twitter. They're not even practicing the current state of the art, as practiced by their peers.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#798

Post by irrational »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #773
syshum wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of the problem for twitter Google and Facebook is their ever shifting goals for content moderation to appease their politically activist employees and media critics. Something tells me Elon would have different goals that should be less of a moving target and easier to accomplish. Less subjective target like "hate speech" and more objective target like true threats of violence, illegal activity, actual b…

No. Not relevant to the discussion. Gmail has no content moderation, but spam still gets through occasionally.

Occasionally? Recently (maybe the last 6 months) I have been seeing a huge amount of spam getting through (comparatively - maybe 10 a day make it to my inbox). Previously I rarely saw any.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#799

Post by cloutchaser »

rgbrenner wrote: post #335
not2b wrote: post #184

Even before the poison pill was adopted, the evidence is the market wasn't taking Musk's offer seriously. That's because he was offering $54.20 per share (ha ha, 420), but the stock price never closed higher than $48.36. So almost $6/share was left on the table. Part of it is that Musk doesn't have $43B in cash, he'd have to raise it or borrow it. He's worth more than that but it isn't liquid; as an officer of Tesla…

It’s definitely just a stunt… he doesn’t have the money, and said he expects larger shareholders to sign on to the deal… so he can take the company private and do great profit-maximizing ideas like turning their office into a homeless shelter. He’s presented no ideas that would increase twitters profits or market share. What shareholder would sign up for this?

Wrong. He could probably borrow $43bn against Tesla shares in a few weeks at the most. He doesn't have to sell any Tesla shares.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#800

Post by chippiewill »

ehsankia wrote: post #716
darth_avocado wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem I think you underestimate how hard the problem is or you don’t fully understand how it works. The scale at which Twitter operates makes it near impossible to take down spam in real time. You don’t think Twitter is working on it, but they are. What you see is a much smaller percentage of the actual spam generated, and the reason you see it is beca…

To think that a company that has failed to create self-driving for nearly a decade could solve "content moderation", one of the hardest problem on the internet that every single of the big companies (who btw hire the best talent) have been struggling with, is truly a shocking statement to me. If all Google and Facebook couldn't solve it, why could a Tesla engineer of all people...

The idea that an AI engineer for self driving could be trivially retasked to content moderation is fairly laughable as well.

That's not to say there aren't overlapping skill sets, but the AI tech involved is quite distinct (although there is overlap, I believe some of the latest perception research is trying to adapt transformers from NLP to replace CNNs). Many of my colleagues are AI/ML engineers working on the self driving problems (perception, prediction, planning) and they're all super smart, but they'd still take a while to get up to speed in another area.

I have no idea why a serious business would hire a non-NLP specialised engineer to solve content moderation (they'd maybe hire someone who was interested in changing sub-field, but not to build out the backbone of their teams).

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