Elon Musk

Why would you?

Because they have the potential to be massive social influence machines and wealthy egomaniacs love the feel of all that power in their hands.

Whether that means they can actually control what influence these platforms have or whether they just end up ‘riding the tiger’ is another matter entirely.

Any corner of the internet that declares itself a ‘Free Speech Fundamentalist’ zone eventually ends up flooded with Nazis, Pedophiles and Scammers, basically the very worst people imaginable. As a result the ‘normies’ very sensibly decide they can’t be bothered with all this, leave and take their advertising dollars with them.

Exactly this, the few of the FB or Twitter alternatives I’ve tried (MeWe was the last I think) after failing to get a good size user base normally start to play the “Free speech” card and within weeks every other avatar is AR-16s or a misappropriated pepe the frog at which point all the normal leave. If Musk turns Twitter into a free for all it’ll dead in no time, it’s not like the internet isn’t littered with yesterday’s must be on platforms.

Anyone watched the Elon Musk Show on iPlayer? Worth watching? Is all singing his praises or actually more balanced?

I caught the last episode….he came across as a terrible human being who has never had anyone tell him “no”. And having seen his parents interviews, particularly the mother, you can see why he’s so deeply deeply unpleasant

Robert Evans did a few episodes on him in Behind The Bastards a while back. He really is a massive ****.

No longer a lefty echo chamber? Sounds great, I’ll rejoin.
Reminds me of another so called mountain bike site that’s a lefty echo chamber. Lolz

Good luck with the trolling there as it doesn’t work well for you here…

I caught the last episode….he came across as a terrible human being who has never had anyone tell him “no”. And having seen his parents interviews, particularly the mother, you can see why he’s so deeply deeply unpleasant

I never realised his father was Sir Les Patterson 😉

I would imagine his Autism has a bearing on how he acts too

I would imagine his Autism has a bearing on how he acts too

Yep, that’s the excuse I use.

Yep, that’s the excuse I use.

Not a believer then?

Or just have no experience of people with Autism?
I recognised it in him long before he “came out”

And doge hits another 10% after months of inactivity

Musk = fraud and a psychopath.

Just taken advantage of the new era of free speech on Twitter and called Farage a c**t.

*Cough* mastodon might be worth a look. Of course like all these things it needs critical mass to work.

So, if Zuckerberg is going off the rails with this Metaverse project and Musk ruins Twitter, is this the start of a new era?

Metaverse was, at least in part, a response to the fading popularity of facebook with an aging user base as the cool kids, literally, started using snapchat and then tiktok (then possibly other stuff. Not being either cool or young I dont know the finer details beyond facebook isnt doing well in that demographic). Previously it had been done by buying whatsapp and instagram but if the metaverse does work then its a massive lock in due to the hardware needed.

The meta verse is just another way to sell shit to folk dumb enough to sign up for it

And as for Elon buying Twitter?, this is a good explanation as to why he’s **** from the verge

Elon musk and Twitter

The meta verse is just another way to sell shit to folk dumb enough to sign up for it

But if you do get people paying for it then, at least for the foreseeable future, you will have them locked into your platform.
It does seem a tad hopeful and mostly based on growing up reading cyberpunk stories although that said I do know a couple of people who have had to set up facebook accounts so they can play VR games so I guess thats some success?
My general point though was facebook was already facing long term problems and the metaverse was in large part a response to it rather than some random mad decision.

And as for Elon buying Twitter?, this is a good explanation as to why he’s **** from the verge

I have enjoyed over the last couple of days reading fanboy accounts of how he is a genius who is seeing far deeper than everyone else. They seem to have missed that he spent several months trying to exit the deal but, since he chose not to do due diligence, was pretty much guaranteed to lose the case based on the initial rulings.

That Verge article is very good.

He really has skewed himself with this purchase hasn’t he?

Apparently there’s another “bluesky” thing just created by the twitter crew. I would die laughing if everyone switched in a week leaving Musk with a 40 billion crater.

Yep, that’s the excuse I use.

Works for me too.

the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted… people who should know better but keep posting anyway.

looks around

coughs uncomfortably

Not a believer then?

Having lived with it for 55 years I am very much a believer yes. But high functioning autistic people such as Musk (and me) are in more control of the way they act and think than more severely autistic people.

IF you have someone telling you how you are acting is not ‘normal’ you can actually learn to adapt your behaviours to make things smoother in life. Not saying you have to pretend to be someone else but just have the awareness of how your words and actions are seen by others.

I am very different now than I was 40 years ago due to that learning process and much happier because of it. However you do need to have a person in your life that is prepared to put up with you and also ‘coach’ you. Thanks wife 🙂

Imagine your new boss is this much of a dick

Here it is: Twitter engineers were told today to *print out* their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.

Then they were told wait, no, actually, please shred all that code you just printed out.

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— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) October 28, 2022

On the code thing… two observations from a professional software engineer…

1) peer review of code is not unusual and an excellent way to improve quality and efficiency.
2) in asking to produce all the code they’ve written in the last X days is a great way of finding out who is actually contributing and who isn’t, as well as helping truly size the team. If you’re employed as a coder, and haven’t written any code in 60 days, what have you been doing with your time?

No one is going to argue peer review or measuring output is a bad thing.

He got them to print it out.

in asking to produce all the code they’ve written in the last X days is a great way of finding out who is actually contributing and who isn’t,

Twitter’s code isn’t the product he’s bought. If Musk thinks that he can run Twitter “better” with better coding he’s even more stupid than most people already think he is.

Yep, it’s the usual content is king.

You can always fiddle with ‘better’ code but that’s not the problem.

On the code thing… two observations from a professional software engineer…

1) peer review of code is not unusual and an excellent way to improve quality and efficiency.
2) in asking to produce all the code they’ve written in the last X days is a great way of finding out who is actually contributing and who isn’t, as well as helping truly size the team. If you’re employed as a coder, and haven’t written any code in 60 days, what have you been doing with your time?

From an occasional code dabbler,

1) Peer review… on paper?

2) Surely this can be gauged from CVS commit logs? In any case, raw volume of code has to be a terrible metric for measuring programmer performance. “What have you been doing with your time?” – thinking? Actually entering code into a computer is the last stage of development, that’s the easy part. I’ve written some of my best code in lane two of the M65 or on the great white telephone.

Actually entering code into a computer is the last stage of development, that’s the easy part

Amen to that.

^^ this and you could spend days tracking down a “bug” and end up adding a single ampersand to the code base 😀
and I do some of my best thinking playing AOE 😉

Apologies @kerley
I miss read your “I” as “I’d”, which put your response into a different context 😁

1) peer review of code is not unusual and an excellent way to improve quality and efficiency.

‘peer’ being the operative word.

I’ve written some of my best code in lane two of the M65

This explains some of the interesting driving I’ve encountered around Blackburn and Burnley.

My original comment may no comment on volume of code, because I know as well that it’s a poor metric of productivity. “On paper” is one way of Musk of saying “I think you’ve produced so little, you could fit it on a piece of paper”. Apparently Twitter has around 7000 employees. For such a simple site, that’s a remarkable number of people. He’s trying to weed out the chaff.

Now it could be a developer has only written a couple of lines, but it’s a smart fix to a problem that required a lot of thought to get to it. In which case they’ll easily be able to defend it in a code review.

One who has to print out a lot may equally get challenged on how efficient their code is.

Source control system logs will only tell you what was committed and when. Not why. Because developers are uniformly shit at commenting their code, especially places like Twitter where everyone will think they’re a Rock Star Developer whose work product is so esoteric and advanced that nobody but themselves could possibly understand it and that it’s “art”.

FWIW I don’t agree with his approach but I can understand why he’s doing it.

Source control system logs will only tell you what was committed and when. Not why.

The very first (if not only) thing that commit logs should tell you, is why. That’s where you go to if you want to understand the reasons behind the code being written, they’re the best documentation of the development process and I imagine a company like Twitter enforces that rigorously.

The very first (if not only) thing that commit logs should tell you, is why

Should. They rarely do. I’ve seen vastly more code committed without any commentary than I have with.

And in my experience, tech companies like Twitter are the worst for it.

Apparently Twitter has around 7000 employees. For such a simple site, that’s a remarkable number of people. He’s trying to weed out the chaff.

My understanding is that a huge number of them will be working on defeating spam, nasty porn, scammers, etc. If you sack them, Twitter will go into a death spiral.

My understanding is that a huge number of them will be working on defeating spam, nasty porn, scammers, etc. If you sack them, Twitter will go into a death spiral.

delete anyone with a flag or emoji in their description and it’d cover about 95% of it…

Actually entering code into a computer is the last stage of development

Should be the user acceptance testing cycle…

If you’re employed as a coder

Who’s employed as a coder? Mostly it’s ‘developer’ and the development cycle involves a lot more than coding.

bensales
Free Member

Apparently Twitter has around 7000 employees. For such a simple site, that’s a remarkable number of people. He’s trying to weed out the chaff.

Eh, simplicity of site doesn’t have much to do with the staffing. They’re not all backstage whipping the hamsters. The sheer number of users and amount of traffic means lots of human intervention, unless you want it to be a free-for-all of hate speech.

Which Musk does, or at least hate speech that he agrees with, so he’s fine with culling the numbers.