Science and Technology thread

[aiw]

Bunch of Tent3 "goodbye sweet board" tweets right now. Will be funny when they are posting normally by tomorrow.

 

[bfactor]

No one seems to talk about it, but seems like Instagram would be best positioned to take advantage. All of the brands, celebrities, and public figures maintain a parallel presence with verified accounts, and the infrastructure is already there. Just need to have tweak the format slightly to enable these 150-ish character posts. People could migrate there and carry on as if nothing ever happened. Almost anything else would be a massive startup investment and take time to build momentum.

 

[bfactor]

Trending topic curation team must have been let go.

 

[bfactor]

The anticipation of the platform-wide, catastrophic crash of everything is giving me Y2K vibes.

 

[StopThePumpFakesShav]

My next message on this forum will be a link to a Truth Social post indicating that Whitehead is close to returning, but still a couple weeks away as the family is being conservative.

 

[Slap the Floor]

Just laughing at this.

It seems like he wants massive layoffs, and that he didn't get enough people to leave initially and circled back to force their hands today. He was obviously aware prior to sending those emails that most of the employees would leave. Taking Twitter private allows him to do pretty much anything he wants, and all of the moves he has made since seemingly point towards that he wants to burn this to the ground. I'm curious if he will be content with just burning it to the ground or if has some ideas for rebuilding it, but it does seem like Twitter is toast at least in the short-term.

 

[Slap the Floor]

 

[Pantone287]

I don't buy that it'll die for good. Although, if it does collapse in the near-term, I wonder what Musk will do with it. It's just hard for me to envision him ever admitting failure and selling at a huge loss.

Also, there's still a small part of me that wonders if he's destroying it on purpose. I have zero theories as to why, but it's just hard for me to imagine his moves have actually been a good-faith effort. I know his "innovative genius" image is mostly BS, but I can't deny that he has a track record of having good business sense.

 

[bdotling]

Probably getting around some employment laws by doing what he is doing.

 

[DurhamSon]

Reality is much more boring than fantasy, my guess is there's no catastrophic crash but maybe an increase in glitches and bugs over the next few weeks/months and new devs are slowly hired or re-hired at a trickle in an environment where no FAANG companies are hiring.

Still see no avenue to massive profitability, but that was true long before ownership changed hands.

 

[sivartrenrag]

I've definitely noticed more instances of Twitter not serving tweets than usual, but nothing catastrophic.

 

[bfactor]

Biggest risk from my perspective is all of the infra. Everything there is built on top of open source SW and it requires a ton of work to maintain and to patch. Ex: my team spent an entire month recently being blocked because of a Linux vulnerability that allowed remote code execution. So it's not just pure performance, on any given day they are fighting multiple SEVs related to security patches. And even when fully and properly staffed these platforms are always just minutes away from being yanked from app stores. It's a lot of pressure for the On Calls, who are (typically) staffed 24/7/365 from the eng teams and in very large quantities.

 

[Pantone287]

 

[bfactor]

I think he's just given up at this point.

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

 

[aiw]

Maybe he still is a crypto-Democrat

 

[bfactor]

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

 

[DrKlahn]

I wonder if my mute still works

 

[DrKlahn]

Nope, I had to re-mute. Poorly designed product.