Twitter 2: Tweet harder

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

32 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

To be fair this is pretty much the attitude of a lot of tech start ups, which is often why there is so much burn out. It really isn't a job for everyone, or basically anyone over the age of 30, anyone with a family etc. 

My mate recently got hired as a manager at a fintech start up and his first task was to get rid of the deadwood, and there was quite a lot of people there who were happy to turn up, do a 9-5, take the money and go home. That is probably fine for a lot of places but it's not the culture for lots of these startups, so he's replaced them with younger hungrier people who are prepared to have zero life for a larger pay packet. 

I've worked at places like that and honestly, fuck it, never again. Enough people buy into that culture for it to become the norm though.

Methinks the problem, at its core, is the culture. I too have worked in a similar environment and there's a reason why most people leave, hate it after the fact, and honestly in a lot of instances it's the worst people who stay on and thrive.

But hey, you know what they say, no subgroup is more overrepresented than sociopaths in boardrooms. Shocking the world is going to shit...

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Wade1865 said:

Week -- IKR! Elon ridiculed a US senator (twice, in quick succession) on Twitter, a very public social media platform with some reach. And when Ed threatened him, Elon shrugged it off, demonstrating Ed’s impotence.

Ed Markey is on the Senate committee for communications and on science. Elon shrugging it off doesn't demonstrate Ed's impotence; it demonstrates Musk's inability to grasp who to not fuck with. 

In particular - Twitter's inability to protect government officials from being impersonated online is a new, special harm that he is adding to the platform - that beloved chaos of yours - and as it turns out that can have additional added regulations. In particular if Musk wants to do this system of accounts he may find himself being specifically regulated and under oversight if he cannot demonstrate an ability to do this. 

The interpretation that this is somehow impotent is really laughable and a bizarre fanboi vibe. Bigger, more influential companies than Twitter have come under less scrutiny. It might take a bit of time but it ain't like the US government needs Twitter, and SpaceX and Tesla are both publicly traded companies that Musk cannot dictate to entirely. 

 

[Wade1865]

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Ed Markey is on the Senate committee for communications and on science. Elon shrugging it off doesn't demonstrate Ed's impotence; it demonstrates Musk's inability to grasp who to not fuck with.

Kalnestk Oblast -- he didn’t just shrug it off, he humiliated the man! There’s literally nothing Ed can do to Elon except rage about the disrespect.

On compelling Elon to comply with USG regulations, that’s a fact. And he will comply where money and politics is inadequate.

[Heartofice]

33 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Methinks the problem, at its core, is the culture. I too have worked in a similar environment and there's a reason why most people leave, hate it after the fact, and honestly in a lot of instances it's the worst people who stay on and thrive.

But hey, you know what they say, no subgroup is more overrepresented than sociopaths in boardrooms. Shocking the world is going to shit...

It clearly works for some people. That sort of high stress environment that operates almost like a religion is maybe required for a lot of these tech firms who just need to basically break their workers to compete. You are also right that it's not a coincidence that the CEOs of these places seem to have identical personalities, sociopathic bullshit artists and bullies. Yeah I've worked for these people and they are complete arseholes, but then if then I've also worked for much friendlier, nicer and accepting people who quite frankly are not as successful. At some point that shitty behaviour sort of works, even if it's at other peoples expense. 

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, Wade1865 said:

Kalnestk Oblast -- he didn’t just shrug it off, he humiliated the man! There’s literally nothing Ed can do to Elon except rage about the disrespect.

On compelling Elon to comply with USG regulations, that’s a fact. And he will comply where money and politics is inadequate.

Markey can (and now, almost certainly will) haul Musk in front of committees over and over again. In addition to proposing rules and legislation against Twitter-like things. 

[Kalbear]

56 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It clearly works for some people. That sort of high stress environment that operates almost like a religion is maybe required for a lot of these tech firms who just need to basically break their workers to compete. You are also right that it's not a coincidence that the CEOs of these places seem to have identical personalities, sociopathic bullshit artists and bullies. Yeah I've worked for these people and they are complete arseholes, but then if then I've also worked for much friendlier, nicer and accepting people who quite frankly are not as successful. At some point that shitty behaviour sort of works, even if it's at other peoples expense. 

The notion of this being how tech companies work these days is so absurdly antiquated; it'd be like seeing coal being used to power US nuclear submarines. There are occasional ones like this - mostly in startups and gaming - but at least there they have the carrot of offering equity and stock options to make a person rich. This...has nothing. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

55 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It clearly works for some people. That sort of high stress environment that operates almost like a religion is maybe required for a lot of these tech firms who just need to basically break their workers to compete. You are also right that it's not a coincidence that the CEOs of these places seem to have identical personalities, sociopathic bullshit artists and bullies. Yeah I've worked for these people and they are complete arseholes, but then if then I've also worked for much friendlier, nicer and accepting people who quite frankly are not as successful. At some point that shitty behaviour sort of works, even if it's at other peoples expense. 

I don't think it's required. What's probably more likely is that there are examples of it working out great for some entities so others try to copy it, not questioning if the actual process is what led to the desired result. 

Then we should look at success. Zuckerberg, as an example, individually is successful, but has his creating succeeded for the world? I'd call that a hard no at this point. 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

1 hour ago, Wade1865 said:

Kalnestk Oblast -- he didn’t just shrug it off, he humiliated the man! There’s literally nothing Ed can do to Elon except rage about the disrespect.

On compelling Elon to comply with USG regulations, that’s a fact. And he will comply where money and politics is inadequate.

Elon only humiliated himself. 

[Wade1865]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Markey can (and now, almost certainly will) haul Musk in front of committees over and over again. In addition to proposing rules and legislation against Twitter-like things. 

Kalnestk Oblast -- I’m sure Ed will do so, and he should (so long as he does so morally and ethically). As much as I like Elon, the US is more important to me.

[Maithanet]

4 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The notion of this being how tech companies work these days is so absurdly antiquated; it'd be like seeing coal being used to power US nuclear submarines. There are occasional ones like this - mostly in startups and gaming - but at least there they have the carrot of offering equity and stock options to make a person rich. This...has nothing. 

Especially for existing employees who have been there for years.  If someone were to buy my company, then fire a bunch of people and demand that everyone else work extra hours to pick up the slack, I would either resign on the spot or immediately start looking for other work.  This is a giant fuck you to Twitter employees, because it's not like they have any choice in the matter, nor are they being paid extra for suddenly needing to work more hours. 

[Heartofice]

26 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The notion of this being how tech companies work these days is so absurdly antiquated; it'd be like seeing coal being used to power US nuclear submarines. There are occasional ones like this - mostly in startups and gaming - but at least there they have the carrot of offering equity and stock options to make a person rich. This...has nothing. 

That’s why I mentioned start ups earlier. It’s much more common. Also a reason I will never work at start ups again.

[Kalbear]

The real dirty secret of tech companies and why they like this sort of thing sometimes is that techies actually love doing this some times. Tech can get you into these cool areas where you're in the flow, solving problems, iterating quickly on solutions and finding cool things and seeing what can be done and it is as compelling and addictive as any 'one turn later' game. 

Programming is, or at least can be, really really fun. And when it's fun it's also incredibly productive. That's why companies are encouraging the hacker mindset and the hackathons and short iterations - because it's incredibly engaging and incredibly productive. 

But that isn't how you can run things forever. There are lots of non-fun things that have to happen too. The fun happens usually when you're not having to worry about things like regulations, or scale, or build and deployments, or making sure people are working well together, or constant changes in requirements and other things. You can't work that hard for that long unless you have some massive external motivation. You need downtime. 

Mostly, this elides the most important thing: twitter's problems and twitter's value has nothing to do with engineering. The engineers that work there are valuable because they're keeping things running, but twitter's value is almost entirely in the social capital it has. Having engineering work harder doesn't solve any of that. Twitter didn't do feature rollouts quickly because they lacked the capabilities; they don't do feature rollouts quickly because they wanted to ensure they were not going to massively harm the social capital. 

[Heartofice]

12 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

But that isn't how you can run things forever. There are lots of non-fun things that have to happen too. The fun happens usually when you're not having to worry about things like regulations, or scale, or build and deployments, or making sure people are working well together, or constant changes in requirements and other things. You can't work that hard for that long unless you have some massive external motivation. You need downtime.

When all you are worried about is just getting the next round of funding or getting bought out I guess you don’t care about long term issues like that 

[Jace, Extat]

Good... gooood... 

Seethe my children. Seethe and let your rages abound. Seethe 

The twilight of the war on tyrants is upon us! 

(I had this crazy dream last night where I was late for the bus and cried but when I looked up it was fucking Christmas. I don't know what that is about, but for now I'm calling it a good dream and blocking out the rest... kinda likd I did for Christmas that year after I missed the bus... and the antler shed... papa's carving room... oh the blood it was everywhere. It's all coming back! I told Stacey not to go into papa's shed but she wouldn't listen. The bus! Oh god the bus!) 

[Kalbear]

Apparently Musk is not willing to put in those hours either

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

17 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Apparently Musk is not willing to put in those hours either

 

Again, on the chart of the plane recognizing that they have a problem to crashing into the side of mountain, where are we?

The nose is clearly down and pulling up like Bond in Goldeneye is not an option...

[Zorral]

In case we don't know this already -- From Charlie's Antipope Diary:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/11/decision-fatigue.html#more

Quote

 

.... SpaceX ... Musk is a grandson of the guy who founded Technocracy in Canada (then emigrated to South Africa). Musk is an out-of-the-closet Technocrat. Hint: Technocracy is a totalitarian political movement associated with a bunch of stuff including space colonization, libertarianism (and, probably via the SA connection, "scientific" racism) that advocates for a society organized and run along scientific lines by a self-selected elite.

Musk's Mars colonization shtick is a bid to establish a Technocratic nation-state on Mars, not simply about colonizing space. There is a political agenda and my conclusion is that he won't relinquish control over SpaceX even if you hold a gun to his head. ....

 

 

[Werthead]

Musk's obsession with Mars makes more sense in that context of empire-building and control.

The absolute worst-case scenarios for climate change will still leave Earth a million times more inhabitable than Mars at its absolute best-case scenario. The cost of colonising Mars will be astronomical, to the tune of trillions of dollars, probably per year, for hundreds of years. Based on cold logic and rationality there is no logical reason to attempt to "colonise" Mars en masse in the same we that Europeans colonised the Americas, it's just not feasible. Scientific bases and outposts, sure, but us living on a Mars with a breathable atmosphere in anything less than millennia is ludicrous (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy manages to get it down to 200 years from the point of first landing and even that requires 100% of his terraforming ideas to work first time and even better than expected, and that would still bankrupt the human race).

To ensure the future survival of the human race, it makes far more sense to spend just a fraction of the money on a Mars colonisation effort on making Earth more habitable once again.

 

[Zorral]

Again, for those who insist on the pretense that what is clear is something their inner wide-eyed ingenue has never before encountered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

38 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Musk's obsession with Mars makes more sense in that context of empire-building and control.

Ya, MaLemade biospheres aren't good enough, big enough, to encompass the breathtaking scope of their brilliance, talents and only I can fix itedness. Most of whom are residents of earth already believe it belongs to those who live there, not to Them, and won't do what They say Do.

 

[Jace, Extat]

Power motivates itself. SpaceX is power. The human dream of foriegn shores onto which it can embed is pervasive. 

Any further analysis is wishmaking, time wasting, or simple doomsaying. Leave the masterful their follies; lest they refocus to make the masses more miserable.