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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?


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btw I had “where have I seen the word ‘stack’ being abused?” on my mind because of this thread and the answer was Adams, who maybe… wrote a book on the concept of a “talent stack” and is trying to make it a thing. At some point he went on a rant about how being a racist troll and drawing office humor funny strips was BUT ONE TIER OF HIS TALENT STACK and that is where I noticed stack start creeping in where people aren’t talking about Hadoop and shit like that.

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Tech stack is a valid phrase when used properly…in essence, delivering content / interacting with data is often a production line-like series of events/handoffs between different software: web server, load balancer, database, various ad integration tools, security, presentation, etc.  If you’re beyond Wix-like simplicity, tying multiple elements together is an efficient and proven way to customize without writing the whole shebang yourself.

But no surprise a walking, talking prolapsed anus like Adams thinks he will sound smart by using the term to describe his army of idiots.   Also no surprise Musk would throw it around along with an arbitrary count of software elements to try quantifying bloat in an ecosystem he doesn’t understand.  

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Another week, another purge at Twitter.  This time, the Twitter Blue team was sacked:

 

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/26/23615841/twitter-blue-esther-crawford-layoffs

 

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Twitter product manager Esther Crawford no longer has a job at the company following yet another wave of layoffs, as first reported by Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform. 

Alex Heath of The Verge confirmed Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading to speculation that Twitter’s owner Elon Musk may be about to install a new regime at the company.

 

Quote

In a recent interview, Musk said, “I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place in that the product roadmap is clearly laid out” before guessing that “before the end of the year” would be a good time to find a replacement for himself as Twitter CEO.

 

 

 

 

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During her time at Twitter, Crawford emerged as one of Twitter’s most prominent product managers under Elon Musk’s leadership, and notably tweeted a picture of herself on the floor of Twitter’s office in a sleeping bag and eye mask. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” the tweet reads.

This latest round of layoffs is at least the fourth one since Musk assumed ownership of Twitter last November. According to Schiffer, the layoffs affected “well above 50” people and were spread throughout multiple departments. They also included Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021.

Crawford “began angling for a bigger role” shortly after Musk’s takeover, as documented in this inside look at Twitter from Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath. She also commented on Musk’s massive layoffs that halved the company’s workforce last year, and at the time wrote on Slack that “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”

 

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Can't find anything wrong in that layoff news/report - if you didn't think Musk was looking to install his own people, you weren't paying attention. I'm not sure where/how Twitter becomes "a financially healthy place" given how they hemorrhaged money and had a hell of a lot more revenue before Elon took over and ran off a bulk of the advertisers.

 

BTW - a few podcasts I recommend if you have time and care all that much:

HARDFORK - It's hosted by The Casey Newton (mention in the reporting). Him and his co-host, Kevin Roose, seem pretty dialed into tech news of the valley (Fridays)

ON - Kara Swisher. She knows Elon pretty well and has a lot to chime in on him. She actually finds his current heel turn to be very odd, she doesn't get it an let's it be known. (Monday-Thursdays)

PIVOT - Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway -Same as above with a co-host Galloway who like her is VERY MUCH tuned into the tech landscape and have a lot to say on Twitter given the situation (Tuesday-Fridays)

These 3 podcasts aren't solely focused on Twitter, but will give their piece as news comes out. They all have opinions and views on what is going on.

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1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Another week, another purge at Twitter.  This time, the Twitter Blue team was sacked:

I’m honestly surprised about Esther.  I don’t know her, but know somebody who worked with her, and she was a public supporter of Musk (see the pic of her sleeping in her office at night even though she’s got little kids and a husband). She also supported the layoffs publicly.

If he’s running a shitshow now with people who actually worked on Twitter before his takeover, I can’t wait to see what happens when he is done canning everybody and brings in people with no institutional knowledge whatsoever, and whose only purpose in life is to like his meme game.

And the email recommendations I’ve been getting are getting shittier and shittier, with political bullshit that I want nothing to do with, and with just shit that is clearly promoted, even it isn’t labeled as such.  I’m not liking or retweeting or responding to any of this shit.  I’m not doing anything on Twitter, just keeping DMs open for a few accounts.

4 minutes ago, dcbc said:

Isn't twitter "the media"?

Musk still doesn’t understand the First Amendment and that the users are the products and the advertisers the customers.  Expecting him to understand such a lofty concept is asking way too much.

Edited by atomheartbevo
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3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Musk still doesn’t understand the First Amendment and that the users are the products and the advertisers the customers.  Expecting him to understand such a lofty concept is asking way too much.

I don't think he cares at all; I think that this is his reply to Bezos buying the Washington post. It is a contest of who has the biggest dick media distribution

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13 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

If he’s running a shitshow now with people who actually worked on Twitter before his takeover, I can’t wait to see what happens when he is done canning everybody and brings in people with no institutional knowledge whatsoever, and whose only purpose in life is to like his meme game.

on the verge article (Newton had a byline i think) about them dropping slack they had quotes from current staff talking about the loss of institutional knowledge and how slack was helping to fill that gap via search of historical messages.

on the other hand, who cares about institutional knowledge when you are going to totally rewrite the entire stack anyway. imagine what a dumpster fire THAT will be.

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I guess since Anna Karenina Holmes Musk endorsed the "it's okay to be white" racist troll it's okay to post this here. The matter had previously bypassed my attention. Not surprised to find out it's a 4 chan thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white

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"It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is a slogan which originated as part of an organized alt-right trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017.[1] A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash.[2][3] Posters and stickers stating "It's okay to be white" were placed in streets in the United States as well as on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.[1][3]

The slogan has been supported by white supremacists including neo-Nazis.[4] Media coverage of the event, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson asking "What's the correct position? That it's not okay to be white?", was seen as reacting in the way that the trolling campaign had intended.[4]

 

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19 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

It makes sense when you realize that Scott Adams is the pointy-haired boss.

I found it funny for a brief while when I was in a similar situation.  But that was the 90s.

I could easily see Musk still liking it.

this, I worked one summer in a cubicle farm and I got some chuckles out of the strip, but in general, Office Space did it better, and Dilbert gets old pretty quick.
 

It was certainly no Calvin and Hobbes.

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22 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

It was certainly no Calvin and Hobbes.

Derail--did you hear the news that Watterson has a book coming out later this year? Collaboration with John Kascht titled The Mysteries. Adult fable running about 72 pages and scheduled for October 10th.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Watterson/9781524884949

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Since we bought him back up - Scott Adams has gone completely off the deep end. His twitter feed is a trip.

image.png.290dfc4cc7202d14050252744c761a41.png

He also has this poll up. Given the direction it's going, I'm not sure if it stays up or not. I bet he sees "What's a newspaper?" winning as him winning the poll.

image.png.1eb3cd78b93e434e60e79fd1bdc18ad4.png

37 minutes ago, BrickHorn said:

Dilbert caters to engineers’ misguided sense of comprehensive intellectual superiority. Office Space rightly mocked that arrogance. 

Silicon Valley perfected it.

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29 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Since we bought him back up - Scott Adams has gone completely off the deep end. His twitter feed is a trip.

image.png.290dfc4cc7202d14050252744c761a41.png

He also has this poll up. Given the direction it's going, I'm not sure if it stays up or not. I bet he sees "What's a newspaper?" winning as him winning the poll.

image.png.1eb3cd78b93e434e60e79fd1bdc18ad4.png

Silicon Valley perfected it.

 

He identified as black? Lmao. Alrighty there Rachel Dolezal

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5 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Anyone else think Scott and Elon are sitting in a bar somewhere drinking vodka cranberries and bitching about David Lindhagen?

 

Such bro energy and not in a good way the way the good kind is.

 

*David Lindhagen is from Crazy Stupid Love and if you haven't seen it, well you should.

spacer.png

Great movie.

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2 hours ago, Bateshorn said:

this, I worked one summer in a cubicle farm and I got some chuckles out of the strip, but in general, Office Space did it better, and Dilbert gets old pretty quick.
 

1 hour ago, BrickHorn said:

Dilbert caters to engineers’ misguided sense of comprehensive intellectual superiority. Office Space rightly mocked that arrogance. 

Not only did Office Space do it better, but Mike Judge actually evolved it into Silicon Valley.

Dilbert is still stuck in the 90s.

As is Musk.  

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12 hours ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

It probably hasn't aged very well, but somehow, the Dilbert TV show from the late '90s and early '00s was surprisingly funny at the time. I say "surprisingly" because I generally didn't find the comic strip very funny at the time. 

Still don't, but didn't then, either. 

Mostly different writing team from what I remember.

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20 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Derail--did you hear the news that Watterson has a book coming out later this year? Collaboration with John Kascht titled The Mysteries. Adult fable running about 72 pages and scheduled for October 10th.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Watterson/9781524884949

Bill Wattersons brother was a HS teacher in Austin for decades.  Just recently retired.

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23 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Just what he needs another distraction. Maybe while he's at it he can buy and try to fun a retail fast food chain, or perhaps an airline. 

One of his engineers will get the code to Dr. Sbaitso and throw in a few new things and then show it to Elon and tell him it's better than ChatGPT.  Musk won't know the difference.

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Death by a thousand cuts.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/28/technology/twitter-outages-elon-musk.html

 

Quote

After Elon Musk bought Twitter last year and eliminated thousands of its employees, many users were so alarmed by the cuts that #RIPTwitter and #GoodbyeTwitter began trending.

The social media service remains operational today. But its outages, bugs and other glitches are increasingly piling up.

In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine such incidents in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.

 

 

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Twitter’s reliability has deteriorated as Mr. Musk has repeatedly slashed the company’s work force. After another round of layoffs on Saturday, Twitter had fewer than 2,000 employees, down from 7,500 when Mr. Musk took over in October. The latest cuts affected dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online, three current and former employees said.

The technology challenges add to Mr. Musk’s issues at Twitter. The company is trying to lure back advertisers, even as Mr. Musk has waded into scandals, most recently by defending the “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams after the cartoonist made racist comments. And Twitter is under scrutiny for a rise in hate speech and its treatment of workers.

 

Quote

Twitter is unlikely to go kaput, but its technology operations have become more precarious since November, seven current and former employees said. Mr. Musk has ended operations at one of Twitter’s three main data centers, further slashed the teams that work on the company’s back-end technology such as servers and cloud storage, and gotten rid of leaders overseeing that area.

The moves have exacerbated fears that there are not enough people or institutional knowledge to triage Twitter’s problems, especially if the service one day encounters a problem its remaining workers do not know how to fix, two people with knowledge of the company’s internal operations said.

 

Spoiler

In the past, Twitter prevented breakages from escalating by having people around to diagnose and solve problems immediately. Now the platform is likely to be plagued by more glitches as it takes workers longer to pinpoint issues, the people said.

“It used to be that you’d see smaller things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of the world,” said Saagar Jha, a Twitter engineer who left last May. “When serious things break, the people who knew the systems aren’t there anymore.”

Twitter and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

In an email to employees on Monday, which was seen by The New York Times, Mr. Musk said the layoffs over the weekend were “a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution.” He said those still at the company would receive “very significant stock and other compensation awards” on March 24.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Twitter was known for regular failures and its “Fail Whale,” an image of a whale being airlifted by a flock of birds that appeared when the site did not function. Over the years, the company added hundreds of people to its infrastructure teams and improved its server technology to mitigate outages, three current and former engineers said.

After Mr. Musk took over the company, the layoffs started — followed by more substantive changes to the back-end technology. On Dec. 24, Twitter shuttered a data center in Sacramento, which had helped handle much of the web traffic to the service. That left Twitter with only two other facilities, in Atlanta and Portland, Ore.

Four days later, Twitter experienced a widespread outage, with some users getting logged out of the service or unable to view replies to their tweets.

Employee errors led to other outages. In early February, a Twitter worker deleted data from an internal service meant to prevent spam, leading to a glitch that left many people unable to tweet or to message each other, according to three people familiar with the incident.

Twitter’s engineers took several hours to diagnose the problem and restore the data stored with a backup. In that time, users received error messages that said they could not tweet because they had already posted too much. The Platformer newsletter earlier reported the cause of the problem.

A week later, an engineer testing a change to people’s Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices caused another temporary outage. The engineer disregarded a past practice of testing new features on small subsets of users and simply rolled out the change — a tweak for Spaces, Twitter’s live audio service — to a wide swath of users, two people familiar with the move said.

“Welp, I just accidentally took down Twitter,” Leah Culver, the engineer, later tweeted. The app eventually came back online after the change was reversed, she said. Ms. Culver did not respond to a request for comment.

As Mr. Musk has changed Twitter with new features, “more rough edges” have appeared on the site, said Jane Manchun Wong, an independent software engineer who studies social apps.

This month, Ms. Wong tweeted that the number of likes had dropped on a tweet of hers, catching Mr. Musk’s attention. He replied that there was a “synchronization lag,” or a delay in the amount of time it took to distribute Twitter’s data between its storage centers.

Some users have also complained that their number of followers on Twitter appears to have fallen mysteriously. Others have observed that tweets from users they had blocked — including Mr. Musk — began appearing in their feeds with no explanation.

“When there are back-end changes, sometimes things break,” Ms. Wong said.

The constant loss of workers has only added to the sense of instability, two current and former employees said. Some junior employees are overseeing products or services they have never touched before, they said, and there is no clear leadership. The company has been without a permanent head of global infrastructure since last year when Mr. Musk fired Nelson Abramson, who held that job. Mr. Musk brought on a temporary replacement, a Tesla engineer named Sheen Austin, who resigned in January.

Fixing technical challenges has also become more difficult because of changes to internal systems and communication. Last week, employees lost access to the workplace chat platform Slack, leaving them without their main mode of communicating with colleagues or the ability to see a record of how workers previously fixed problems with Twitter, three current and former employees said.

On Monday, the company brought Slack back. But it archived thousands of old Slack channels that workers had used to communicate, according to an internal email seen by The Times.

Some employees said Mr. Musk had also recently stoked more unease and distrust with an informal peer evaluation. Earlier this month, some managers received calls from Steve Davis, a trusted lieutenant of Mr. Musk’s who had led his tunneling start-up, the Boring Company, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Davis, who has overseen Twitter’s finances and reorganizations over the past five months, told those managers that they were high performers and should make lists of other high-performing employees and hand them into management, those people said.

The managers were told there were changes coming to how compensation would be handled and the feedback would be used to put those changes in place, the people said. Platformer earlier reported on these exchanges.

Less than a week later, Twitter sent employees an electronic form and ordered them to detail their February accomplishments and what they planned to achieve in March, according to an email seen by The Times.

Two days after that, more than 200 employees — including product managers and engineers responsible for carrying out rapid changes to the platform — had their email accounts frozen and lost access to Twitter’s internal systems. Mr. Musk had made another round of cuts.

 

 

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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That day when the Chinese would take offense with something Elon tweeted, and would fire a warning shot across his bow?

That day was today.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/28/chinas-ccp-warns-elon-musk-against-sharing-wuhan-lab-leak-report.html

 

Quote

A Chinese state-run newspaper issued a warning to Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he shared reporting on the U.S. Department of Energy’s “low confidence” assessment that the global Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory.

CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reported Tuesday morning on the warning from the social media pages of the Global Times, the English-language subsidiary of the government-controlled People’s Daily. The Global Times warned Musk that he could be “breaking the pot of China” after the Tesla and Twitter CEO responded to tweets that asserted that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan research laboratory.

 

 

Quote

The saying is akin to the idiom “to bite the hand that feeds you,” Yoon reported. Tesla has an expansive factory campus in Shanghai, and China is the electric vehicle manufacturer’s second largest market.

The Department of Energy concluded with “low confidence” that the Covid pandemic began in a Wuhan laboratory, but sources familiar with the matter stressed to NBC News that the conclusion was not viewed as hugely significant. The FBI reached a similar conclusion at a “moderate confidence” level in 2021.

 

Quote

The governing Chinese Communist Party has been highly sensitive to the matter, especially as it courts outside investment after months of zero-Covid lockdowns prompted nationwide protests, Yoon reported.

Musk wasn’t immediately available to comment.

 

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31 minutes ago, safe sex said:

What was the joke Adams made? I must have missed it

Elon, like most idiots just asking questions, is misrepresenting the facts. Newspapers and book sellers aren’t canceling Dilbert because it’s not funny, they’re canceling Dilbert because its creator he’s a avowed racist. 

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1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

Elon, like most idiots just asking questions, is misrepresenting the facts. Newspapers and book sellers aren’t canceling Dilbert because it’s not funny, they’re canceling Dilbert because its creator he’s a avowed racist. 

Yep, Adams said all of the quiet parts out quite loudly, and on his own podcast or whatever, and it wasn't just a few seconds of "oopsy daisy, I misspoke" it was a couple of minutes of him getting an industrial strength backhoe and digging a really nice hole that he couldn't climb out of, and all the while that he was digging, he knew he was digging it.

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very. stable. genius.

https://www.insider.com/elon-musk-twitter-livestream-new-mic-fart-noises-2023-2

what, you don't host a twitter space to "test your new mic" from the toilet?

 

 

Spoiler

Elon Musk held a 2 a.m. livestream to test a 'new mic' where he spammed listeners with fart and rooster noises for 10 minutes while laughing

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Elon Musk co-hosted a 10-minute livestream in which he treated more than 42,000 Twitter users to the dulcet tones of him testing out a "new mic." 

Musk co-hosted the Twitter Space livestream with Jason Calacanis, an investor and podcaster. The livestream primarily involved Musk laughing and experimenting with a voice transformer that distorted his voice.

"Sounds like helium from a balloon," Calacanis said at one point, to laughter from Musk. 

Calacanis then asked Musk what the time was in California.

"Uhm, I'm in — in Austin here, it's 2 a.m.," Musk said. "Wait. There's a whole sound board. Can you see the sound board?"

The livestream audience was then treated to what appeared to be the sound of flushing and water flowing. 

"Dude, you can't go on Twitter Spaces when you're in the bathroom, bro," Calacanis said.

Musk and Calacanis proceeded to test various functions on their sound board, ranging from fart noises and static to the sound of roosters crowing — all while dissolving into laughter.

After a minute or so of spamming listeners with sounds, Musk announced his voice was "back to normal" and that he thought the voice-changing function was "kind of entertaining."

"Well, I've gotta go to bed. Talk to you later," Musk said, before logging off from the Twitter Space.

Musk is, in his own words, "fairly nocturnal," and has said he usually goes to bed around 3 a.m. The Twitter CEO is known for working late — in November, he sent an email at midnight to Twitter staff telling them to work "long hours at high intensity" or quit their jobs.

He's also known for his erratic behavior on Twitter, including an April 2022 tweet saying he wanted to buy Coca Cola to "put the cocaine back" in the soft drink.

It's unclear if Musk was doing the test on Twitter Spaces for a work-related purpose, or just for fun. Musk did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

 

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World's richest man, everybody!

If you're going to fuck around, go down to South America, kill a neighbor, go on a multi-nation manhunt (but don't die in prison).  Anything but fucking around with fart noises.

Even if he wasn't a billionaire, John McAfee never had people around him telling him that his meme game was strong.

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