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Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

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Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#861

Post by sverhagen »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #854
Balgair wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (why would he care so much about this, boredom?) > due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego Unfortunately, I think it's worse than that. My belief is that it's manic phases caused by bipolar disorder. If you squint and chart these 'manic' decisions, it seems to be about every 4-5 months. In between he'll often (though not always) post some self-reflective and more 'down' things and be generally more quiet (reme…

I don't think it's OK to remotely analyze a mental illness of another person. I think that Mr. Musk is an undiluted asshole and one of the worst douchebags to ever grace our planet, which he has proven again and again. But analyzing his mental condition is sure as shit not up to me or to anybody else.

He kind of opens that door by interactively self-analyzing in the public space. Also, while you make that point, you declare a lot of judgement on his personality; is that really any better then?

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#862

Post by KingShabibo »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #837
nologic01 wrote: post #652

The world of "tech" seems to be spiralling into a realm of absurd metaverses, the dark obsessions of a tiny gang of annointed leaders, a house of cards, lies built upon lies, increasingly desperate hypes. The whole thing detached from the deteriorating human reality, a pervasive lack of empathy for our condition. Not clear how we could / should respond to this grand fiasco. Somehow tech needs to be reinvented. Much m…

> The whole thing detached from the deteriorating human reality, a pervasive lack of empathy for our condition. This is a result, not a cause. This is learned helplessness in the face of not being able to vote for change, and having no say in the policies of our country. The US government has become 100% beholden to the deep state and the oligarchy. We squabble over left/right social issues while both parties are in…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#863

Post by Pxtl »

hef19898 wrote: post #556
ethbr0 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish. As far as I can tell, it's the domain of the company he co-founded (X.com), that merged with the company that became PayPal (Confinity), that led to him briefly being CEO before Thiel took over and pivoted to focus on the PayPal service. 2000 - 2017, X.com was property of PayPal. Musk then buys it back in 2017... and then here we are. Ref: ht…

Everything Musk does looks a lot like some of my high-level, successful, Mary-Sue-like RPG characters I had. Including desogn rooted in what influenced my childhood, in Musks SpaceX case it seems to be th 50s SciFi. Well, I never had the money to try that in real life, and anyway I outgrew it before I got my drivers liscense. Looking at it from that perspective, it is borderline pathetic and just sad.

Anybody who's read their Heinlein and is aware of Musk and his father's fandom of Heinlein books can see the obvious inspiration here. It's not just the private technological innovation, it's also the libertarianism, the obsession with interplanetary colonization and a relatedly natalist form of free-love.

edit: and in the case of Errol Musk, a very genetics-driven opinion on the morality of incest, see Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love".

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#864

Post by stevenjgarner »

musha68k wrote: post #602

I don’t remember who stated this but basically there is this thought that Musk was in fact mad about how on Twitter the “common man” could indeed vocally and effectively share their disagreement with his decisions. It also might have been an impulsive decision to become relevant in “new tech” at the same time (why would he care so much about this, boredom?). Ultimately he probably just wanted to get out of that impul…

IMHO think it is something of a looking back / looking forward situation. Looking back, the Twitter brand has indeed accumulated massive goodwill. Looking forward, it would appear that some kind of LLM is replacing search (bard.google.com replacing google.com; chat.openai.com replacing bing.com). Elon has been very busy establishing the new https://x.ai/ as an alternative LLM "to understand the true nature of the universe", with no fewer than 11 new key executive technical employees this July. It is clear that looking forward, Elon has a hybrid vision of Twitter morphing not just into a WeChat clone, but going well past that and potentially knocking on the heals of ChatGPT/Bard as the next obvious incarnation of search.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#865

Post by imbnwa »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #590
martin-adams wrote: post #493

For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back. He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings…

> He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frus…

I don't think it's nonsense. Patreon, OnlyFans, etc are basically things that should've been apart of Twitter UX from the jump, all with a simple 'Subscribe ($X /month)' button, the overlap in their user interfaces is no accident. IG is already trying to do this as well already, but its niche limits its scale.

I would hazard a guess that pre-Musk Twitter, for whatever reason, had fears around bringing payments onto the service, particularly in the case of sexual content and resolving that, but this led to a situation where other services spring up to fill that void.

However, Twitter Blue was a case of having your cake-and-eating-it-too where I think Musk wanted a story on cash flow not dependent on ads ASAP. In truth, Twitter Blue should've exclusively been a service tier for creators who want to monetize content on Twitter; a case naturally requiring verificaiton. That would've given an incentive and a rationale to the extant pre-Musk creator class that bemoaned its introduction, but Musk really fucked that up by trying to exploit Right wing allegations of Twitter being biased towards the Left (which it never was, rather, the reverse was true[0]) to make up for freaking out advertisers.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#866

Post by ryanbrunner »

air7 wrote: post #318

Ah, the end of an era... http://x.com used to return a single uncached "x" as a reply. I used it countless times as a quick connectivity test. Alas, simplicity always fades...

Better to use something that's specified for usage like this and much more guaranteed to not change, like example.com.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#867

Post by cozzyd »

smcl wrote: post #535
MPSimmons wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon is really, really good at a couple of things: - Identifying inefficiencies in an existing technical solution - Making people do what he wants The things that Elon is really good at don't necessarily translate to great success in a long-term strategic vision. In a pure engineering discipline, like automotive production or aerospace engineering, they're very useful, but neither one of those things necessarily lend…

> As an example: The Boring Company. Have they pushed the boundaries though? As I understand it TBMs have been a thing for a while and plenty of pretty impressive and enormous tunnels have been built in the alps or under seas like the Channel Tunnel or the tunnel section of the Oresund bridge. This isn't my area of expertise but all I've heard so far were a few test tunnels and the Las Vegas Loop, which isn't lightin…

their "innovation" is making tunnels only big enough for a tesla instead of a train. So you save on boring cost by trading off throughput/operations cost...

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#868

Post by imtringued »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #590
martin-adams wrote: post #493

For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back. He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings…

> He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frus…

Actually it is closer to Zuckerberg‘s meta rebrand. You don't save a company by slapping in a new brand and wasting billions on VR without doing market research.

Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’

#870

Post by prerok »

WeylandYutani wrote: post #810
alexpotato wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly he probably also had/has some WeChat ambitions. Years ago I remember reading something about the Chinese microblogging sites and it was mentioned "these sites also have a character limits. However, b/c in Chinese a character can be an entire word, the 'word limits' are much longer." Moving to the 4000 character limit feels very much a response to the above.

This is my problem with Twitter. It's not meant for serious discussion. We have blogs for that. Nobody wants to read it for an interesting article about geopolitics- foreignaffairs.com already exists. Know your audience.

Well, at the time of the pandemic, our prime minister tweeted important changes to policies to have effect in the next few days.

Whether or not that was what the platform was meant for, it was what it was. And as far as I heard, our country was not the only one where this was happening.

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