Nah.

If we were to enact Malthusian policies to save the world from resource depletion and climate disaster, I think a good place to start would be Twitter users.

>>451186
Pretty sure he already has, and buying Twitter is his first big mistake.

I am looking forward to how comedically unchanged twitter will be.

He's proof that you can be both a sperg and a complete cunt.

I like how he's made the cosmopolitan liberals I work with absolutely apoplectic. He must be doing something right.

>>451194

Here's a Freddo piece about just that.

>They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/just-keep-it-off-my-timeline?s=r

>>451195

>And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them.

How unreasonable.

Were I not unsurprised, I'd be very disappointed that no mass-exodus from Twitter has occurred. It is the worst site on the internet, purposefully designed to piss people off and mildly amuse them in perfect balance so as to 'maximise engagement'. In a just world the people responsible for most of Twitter's design 'features' would be subject to some kind of Nuremberg trial for computer interface design.
I suppose that was it inevitable since a faceless cunt at the helm being swapped out for an incredibly tedious cunt at the helm isn't going to do anything to make the site less addictive, but it's still unfortunate. It could've been a good excuse to jumpstart something else.

>>451196
It's unreasonable in the same way that being a NIMBY is unreasonable. A pleasant space for them, at the expense of others.

Every time I've tried to use Twitter I've found the interface to be abysmal and the content completely dull and unworthy of paying the slightest attention to.

>>451198
Twitter works if you have a reason for using it, e.g. following smaller comedians and bands to find out when and where they'll gig next and restrict what tweets you see to those people. There's sadly no option for it, you just have to repeatedly tell Twitter to not show other people's liked posts and all that trash.

Outside of functional usage like that, it's a shitshow.

>>451198
I, for one, don't even own a Twitter.

I'm not on Twitter; I've heard bad things but the Twitter screenshots I see elsewhere can sometimes be entertaining and informative in a way that the places sharing the screenshots cannot match on their own.

But really, people are angry that Elon Musk has bought Twitter because now it has an owner. But it already had an owner. Jack Dorsey owned it, and there were other shareholders too. This isn't privatisation; this is everyone realising that Twitter was never a branch of national infrastructure in the first place. And people are upset because they're finally seeing that such a cornerstone of global discourse is really just a puppet theatre that can be passed from one puppeteer to the other without asking us.

Elon has spent an eleven-digit sum of his own money to shine a light on this. Think of all the good that can come as a consequence. It won't, but wouldn't it be nice if it did?

>>451202
>But really, people are angry that Elon Musk has bought Twitter because now it has an owner.
I think they're more angry because so many people on there actively dislike him for various reasons, as well as his announced plans to make it less moderated, similar to 8chan in its heyday.
To go with your analogy, it's not a problem that it's a puppet theatre, but this new puppeteer wants to change the story and he can't even do the voices properly.

>Elon has spent an eleven-digit sum of his own money to shine a light on this.
I don't think that's true. He leveraged something or other for a loan.

>Elon Musk has bought Twitter
He has not bought it yet, whether or not the deal goes through we've yet to see.

If all the shitlibs on Twitter pooled their money, they could gazump Musk and turn it into a collectively owned democratic platform where the userbase decides on the moderation policy. It would only cost them about $200 each, and I know for certain that's pocket change to the type of arsehole who actually spends an appreciable amount of time on Twitter.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm busy coding my upcoming Twitter competitor, Prolefeed. It's going to be the world's first explicitly Marxist social media network. Anonymity will be enforced by giving everyone a state-issued furry PFP, and the only topic that will be banned is liberal identity politics.

>>451206

Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to just shift to Mastadon?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM
This Ted talk (we like TED here, right?) was pretty interesting to watch in wider context. The entire time Musk appears very uncomfortable (aspergers sure, but I've seen enough clips of him not struggling), he seems to accidentally admit he was "forced to admit lying" regarding tax or something.
Numerous semi-soundclipable comments are interspersed with forced clapps and failed attempts to snowball support and ovation. It's as though the audience is full of stooges.

>>451206

I'm going old-school.

>>451186
Thing is, I've seen so many conspiracy nuts and alt right loons claiming that Twitter will rise and Free Speech is back, alongside how this will somehow help get Donald reinstated as President.

It's like they don't seem to realise that there will still be rules, and how Musky will still have to follow the Law. I give it 2 months before they begin to decry Musk as a false flag deep state elite.

>>451219
This is something that I somewhat wish were true, not that I'm looking to run my golliwog business on the platform but I'd like to see some actual brinkmanship with the level of speech controls politicians are pushing on tech companies. Musk won't offer it because he's been talking about obeying national laws but maybe we should see if governments really have the bollocks to block Twitter and climb into the same camp as despots.

Tech companies are evil of course but so are politicians and I don't doubt for a minute that they wouldn't be leaning nearly as hard on them if it wasn't an easy shortcut for the modern aristocracy to ignore fundamental problems by pretending that it's all about naughty words. You can address the problem that young men become isolated from society or you can ban them for acting out and call it a day which is easier. And maybe Rashford could learn how to kick a ball.

>>451195

Have you been on twitter? It's brimming with just as many righty morons as it is lefty loons. The only difference is the right-wingers spread outright lies and get banned, then they cry that twitter has left-wing bias. All that will happen now is that the floodgates will be opened once more, and those spreading misinformation will be allowed to continue to do so on a global platform.

>>451208

Just skipped to the middle of this where he's talking about open-sourcing the algorithm for determining whether or not something is hate-speech, and his approach is pretty laughable and clearly borne of a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Open-sourcing something like that would mean that any nefarious agents would find reverse engineering it and absolute walk in the park, and therefore could craft speech that was hateful but did not trip the algorithm.

Furthermore, he compares doing so to Linux and Signal, however both of these are comparably non-controversial applications in this regard, and so invite very little discourse. There is no reason for politicians to care much about the contents of Linux.

However, if you opened up the "hate-speech detection" algorithm to the entire world, you are allowing every Tom, Dick & Harry to interrogate what parameters determine that the President of the United States' tweets are hateful, or whether Xi Jinping is spreading misinformation, or if Putin is playing nice. This is going to be unproductive at worst, and an absolute shit show on a global scale at best.

I was pretty apathetic to this whole thing before listening to him speak about it for 3 minutes, now it sounds like he's going to make an absolute cock and balls of it.

>>451227

Try actually reading the article, lad.

>>451229

I read a few paragraphs. Seemed to suggest that denying Nazis access to the most widely available global communication network in the history of humanity wouldn't stop them being Nazis, so we shouldn't do it.

Then I sensibly hopped off that wild ride.

>>451230

The far right have already left Twitter for Gab, Parler and Telegram. They might occasionally pop up on Twitter for some drive-by trolling, but their accounts never last long and so the platform isn't useful for them as a means of inciting, radicalising and organising amongst themselves.

Twitter had a mass purge as soon as Trump left office. All that achieved was to create a critical mass of users for platforms where fascists don't have to mince their words. Trying to suppress political thought by controlling political expression is almost always totally counter-productive, providing fuel for conspiratorial thinking and persecution complexes. Outlawing drugs doesn't get rid of them, it just makes the drug trade nastier and more dangerous.

If you actually want to prevent extremism, you need to address the social and economic conditions that foster it. You need to seriously think about the parallels between Germany in 1922 and America in 2022, about the sorts of people who were eager to don a brown shirt and the sorts of lives that had led them to that point. If people are angry about their circumstances and finding convenient scapegoats, the only way to change their minds is to find the real sources of their frustration and take meaningful steps to address them. You can't suppress anger with force, but you can dissipate it with hope.

>>451230

>I read a few paragraphs

So you didn't read it, then.

Why do I get the feeling you are exactly the sort of person that article was about.

Musk caused a complete meltdown on Twitter when he posted this recently.

>>451239
>a complete meltdown
It's funny how our perceptions are coloured by our preconceptions. I mostly saw people taking the piss out of him for it. The edit where the figure labelled "Grimes" was running away from Elon towards Chelsea Manning was quite fun.

>>451239
Are there any positions that were seen as left/centre-left that are now seen as being centre-right/right? Apart from idpol mindworms.

>>451240
Being 'ratioed', as I understand it, is the benchmark for something causing a storm on Twitter. Given the political makeup of Twitter it's not surprising it elicited a reaction.

>>451239

It's funny because, although it's clearly a very glib image, I'd actually say the truth is closer to the exact opposite of that. The right has moved ever further towards the centre, so the centre is now further left, and the left has had to come up with all sorts of cynical bollocks to retain publicity and remain relevant.

Of course the type of twitter lefty who got offended by that image wouldn't agree, but that's only because they're pre-occupied with "b-but nazi Trump built the wall January 6th!" and so on; what they're really pained by is the fact that most social causes the left championed, like women's rights and gay marriage etc, are all pretty much comfortably solved, and in the last decade or two the right has barely bothered contesting them.

It's like that thing otherlad was saying about charities, where they lose their reason to exist if the issue they exist to fight actually gets solved. The social left (not the material left) has lost most of its reason to exist, and what we see of it today is the terminal death spiral as it clutches at straws.

The flipside of this, if you want to think optimistically, is that it gives us plausible reason to hope a more materially motivated left will eventually see a resurgence to take its place.

>>451241

Left/right is mostly idpol now. There used to be a meaningful relationship between social and economic conservatism, there used to be a coherent ideological position on both sides, but now it's just a jumble of opportunism, special pleading and the salami-slicing of electoral demographics. There's more difference within the political parties than between them.

"We should have a state pension" was a stridently left-wing position a century ago, rabidly opposed by conservatives who thought that people should provide for themselves/the poor should just die in the gutter. Today, questions about the state pension are more a matter of intergenerational fairness and don't really fit on a left-right spectrum. It was hugely controversial within the Tory party when the chancellor temporarily suspended the Triple lock. Conversely, you have people on the left arguing that benefits for pensioners should be cut to fund benefits for working-age people.

The minimum wage was a fairly radical Labour policy in 1998, but now it's basically sacrosanct and the only real debate is about how much faster than inflation it should increase. The Tory party demolished the Red Wall by positioning themselves as the party for workers (as opposed to "shirkers") and picked up swathes of votes from traditionally left-wing but socially conservative workers. "The national minimum wage should go up" is now essentially a centre-right policy, positioned against left-wing support for welfare benefits. Is cutting income tax for the poorest workers a left-wing or right-wing policy? Is the recent hike in national insurance left-wing or right-wing? I'm not sure that anyone knows and I'm not sure if it matters.

Labour is no longer left wing, but to an equal extent the Tories are no longer right wing. The intelligentsia have given up on trying to understand the modern economy, so we're left with the re-hashing of irrelevant old ideological debates and empty gesture politics. Nobody on either side has anything relevant to offer, because nothing makes sense any more.

>>451242
>Being 'ratioed', as I understand it, is the benchmark for something causing a storm on Twitter
Not really. It just means more people responded derisively to a tweet than "Liked" it.
I'm sure higher numbers than usual are involved in this case but given how hard he's been attention seeking on there lately it's not very surprising. Phrasing it as "caused a complete meltdown" seems to imply he's doing le epic trolling when really he's just publicly unpopular.

>>451243

>It's like that thing otherlad was saying about charities, where they lose their reason to exist if the issue they exist to fight actually gets solved.

Agreed. Much of the liberal left agenda of the last 20 years has now been implemented in a large number of (progressive first-world) Western countries. So they have to find new things to complain about.

But I guess that's just it. It's about having things to complain about. Which is also true for the Right, the important difference being that in some ways, with all the social and political change that has happened, they actually have loads more to complain about than they did 20 years ago. Which goes some way explaining the growing popularity of right-wing demagogues and populists who pander to the feeling of loss of cultural certainty and tradition that some Right and Alt Right circles bemoan.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131680/elon-musk-sexual-misconduct-accusations-spacex-flight-attendant

>SpaceX reportedly paid a flight attendant $250,000 to ensure she didn’t speak out or sue the company after Elon Musk allegedly exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, according to a report from Business Insider. In response, Musk took to Twitter to call the accusations “utterly untrue.”


Bit of a wrongun after all, eh.

>>451616
I'm as shocked as you are. Unless you are even remotely shocked.

>>451616

I wouldn't mind being paid $250,000 just for having seen my bosses' knob. It doesn't sound like she was pressured to actually do anything.

If she wants to rat him out that's fine, but she should have to give away the money. Not back to Elon, he's got more than enough, but perhaps to a sexual assault charity or something. You know, so people who have actually been sexually assaulted benefit from it.

>>451623
Yes, low paid sexually harrassed woman should pay massive amounts of money for not being harrassed enough for some chud sucking Elon's multi-billionaire cock.

>>451621
I'm shocked and surprised.

Shocked that it's only one incident and surprised that it's taken until now for something to come out.

>>451626

Nah, I just don't like upholding the precedent that seeing a willy is traumatic. Come off it. I can hardly imagine Elon is packing a particularly intimidating pantaloon python.

Wolf crying and opportunism over sexual assault only makes it worse for genuine victims.

>chud

That word is embarrassing. Call me a retard, dickhead, arsehole, or anything else, just don't use a word that makes you sound like such a bloody fanny.

I've thought dating Grimes is basically akin to child grooming for a couple of years now.

>>451631
Because she looks young or because she's a mentalist?

>>451623
>If she wants to rat him out that's fine, but she should have to give away the money.
That was my initial thought, but it could have been any number of people who mentioned it. Friends gossiping, co-workers, etc.

>>451626
I think it's more about breaking an agreement while keeping the benefits thereof. According to the little we know, the person thought 250k was greater than the severity of harassment. Returning that money is more about honour than anything else - who'd want to keep such dirty money?

>>451632
Yes.

>>451632
I can’t express it in any other way than to say she looks and sounds exploitable.

>>451634
Probably a made to order bride tbh.

>>451633
>According to the little we know, the person thought 250k was greater than the severity of harassment.
Did she though?

>>451638

She could have reported it to the police or gone public with the allegations. She chose to go through mediation, SpaceX offered to buy her silence (with no admission of guilt) and she took the money.

I'm not particularly judging anyone in that initial scenario. If I was her I'd take the money and if I was Musk I'd offer a payout even if I was completely innocent. The issue is of breach of contract - you can take the money, you can keep your principles, but you can't have both.

Not to go all "boo hoo, poor little billionaires", but if Musk is innocent then he doesn't really have any redress. Libel is a civil matter and the damage done to his reputation is vastly greater than anything he could recover in damages. I'm inclined to believe his innocence, simply because I don't think Musk would have any shame about having a private jet full of hookers if that's what he wanted. He's not Harvey Weinstein, he's the patron saint of weaponised autism.

>>451639

>I'm not particularly judging anyone in that initial scenario. If I was her I'd take the money and if I was Musk I'd offer a payout even if I was completely innocent


In the end, it was a numbers game for SpaceX. A business decision. Hiring top-tier lawyers to fight off the charges in court probably would have cost a good portion of $250K, especially with the exorbitant fees Murrikin lawyers take, and the PR damage probably would have been far greater.

$250K is a big stack of money on a flight attendant's salary, but it's small change for a company worth $100bn. Everybody gets something, but admittedly it's skewed towards SpaceX and Musk, because they greatly benefited from making the whole thing go away and saving millions. While the flight attendant, if the incident actually happened, will have to live with not having been able to bring Musk to justice in a meaningful way, and with having been silenced, as the agreement forbade her from saying anything at all publically about the incident.

The more I read about this story, the more it just seems more probable that it did happen. Think about it, who would actually hustle a major public figure for $250K and threaten to go public against him and his company, with charges pulled out of thin air. While knowing full well what she'd be up against to get away with it. I'm not saying it's completely impossible, but just this once, it doesn't seem likely.

He's done a call out for applicants from twitter (?) for people to join his "hardcore litigation" team who'll report directly to him. So he's definitely expecting more claims soon.

>>451639
>She could have reported it to the police or gone public with the allegations.
Go find some actual women and ask them about the experience of reporting sexual assault. Going public would inevitably mean ending up in court. Not only is American litigation notoriously expensive, but unless the other guy has blatantly abused the legal process then you don't even get to recover your costs.

For a victim, the calculation here is whether to take a guaranteed $250k now or whether to take a stab at a few million a few years down the line after being made to relive the trauma again and again.

>>451647

Regardless what actually happened, taking the money weakens their standing. It's a bribe, plain as that.

Regarding what actually happened, $250k for seeing a bit of Elon Musk's cocktail sausage is easy fucking money, and the only reason you'd even think twice about it is thinking you could get a bit more.

If he's actually made her suck it, copped a feel of her arse while the security blokes blocked her exit, something actually substantial? It'd be a totally different matter. But I'm not buying it that anyone is traumatised badly enough that £250k doesn't sort it out by just seeing a knob.

>>451648
Have you considered applying to go on GB News? What they're really missing right now is another man who doesn't really believe women have to deal with even half the shit they complain about. They definitely don't have enough of those.

>>451648
You'd feel pretty fucking awkward if your boss invited you to rub the chub, and your boss doesn't have the power to send most of Twitter after you on a whim if you stand up to him. And that's before we get to the reality that, however inexplicable this may be to us, women really do absolutely feel like their life is in danger whenever they see a willy they weren't expecting.

>>451649

>another man who doesn't really believe women have to deal with even half the shit they complain about

No, you're still missing the point. I absolutely believe her. I just don't think it's a big deal.

If you'd ever been in a relationship with one, you'd be well aware half the shit they complain about is bollocks.

>>451651

>you'd be well aware half the shit they complain about is bollocks.

Maybe your testicles are just subpar then.

>>451650
>women really do absolutely feel like their life is in danger whenever they see a willy they weren't expecting

So do guys when they see a knife they weren't expecting. More men die from knife violence than women from rape. I'm not counting numbers here.

>>451665
Go and threaten someone with a knife then, if it's the same. See if you get in more trouble, less trouble, or the same amount of trouble.

Even Arr Greenandpleasant is making jokes along the lines of "I wish he'd shown me instead, I could do with $250k".

When even Rudgwick turbo-lefties are making light of it, I think it's probably worth picking another issue to show off how much of a woman respecter you are.

>THIS MAN WILL CHANGE THE INTERNET AND IT IS EXCELLENT

Maybe letting a sperg run a social network like Twitter wasn't such a good idea.

It's like he is deliberately arse fucking it into the ground, every single day a bit more.

>>455247
It started out as a joke, and now he has interest payments to make.

>>455247

>It's like he is deliberately arse fucking it into the ground

Good, finally he's done something I can get behind. Can you really tell me you will miss it?

>>455247

Twitter was losing $4m a day before Musk took over. Regardless of what the users thought, the company was dying. The status quo was guaranteed to end in failure. What Musk is doing is massively disruptive, it reeks of chaos, but it's a kind of chaos that has worked for him before - change things quickly, change your mind quickly, don't be afraid to make mistakes publicly, ignore the critics and just focus on learning hard lessons in a hurry. It might all end in tears for him, I don't know, but there really is a method to his madness. He's gambling with a $44bn investment, but it's a gamble that he can comfortably afford.

>>455250
>Twitter was losing $4m a day before Musk took over.^{[citation needed]}

>>455251

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Final_Q2'22_Earnings_Release.pdf

>>455250
What we have is known as a "really dumb fella'".

>>455252
Those numbers suggest Twitter was losing less than a million a day, which is obviously very bad. However, that means that Musk had made the issue four times worse after a week or so of being jeffe. The guy's a fucking idiot anyway, because he spent thirty-something billion of his own money on a business that was burning money.

Fucking billionaires, every one of them is a dickhead. Or at least the ones you've heard of are, the rest are just evil.

>>455252
Surely their 2022 figures are of questionable value when by this point he'd already announced a takeover plan and then announced he didn't want it anymore? (He's named in this statement!) By this point, he's already an involved party - if Twitter is currently losing money because advertisers and investors don't like him, it might be argued that it'd already be hurting from that in Q2 2022 as more risk averse people and brands decide to wait and see.
Now, my recollection is that Twitter made a loss in 2020-21 as well, but a profit in 2019 - which would seem important to remember when looking at how viable the company actually is.

>>455255
If you look at the Q2/H1 comparison, you can work out that they made a bigger loss in Q2 than Q1. Apartheid Mining Money Man himself is definitely a factor there.

Seems obvious he is going to use the database to somehow enrich the AI projects - aside from vanity (which lets be honest is a big motivator for him) thats the only angle I can think of.

>>455257

Perhaps I'm being unimaginative, but enhance in what way?

>>455255

They lost $1.1bn in 2020 and $220m in 2021. Revenues have significantly increased, but expenses have increased much faster. Jack Dorsey recently apologised to Twitter staff for expanding too quickly. Most of the staff that have been laid off were hired within the last two years. Twitter can afford to lose some short-term ad revenue, but they desperately need to cut their wage bill and their cloud infrastructure costs.

The technology behind Twitter needs to be rebuilt from scratch, which (seemingly paradoxically) necessarily requires a much smaller team than is necessary to maintain their current platform. This makes no sense to people outside of the industry, but the best way to deliver software very quickly is to involve the absolute minimum number of people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

>>455258
The entire Twitter corpus of comments/posts/conversations would make a great training set of data for an AI bot; I mean you wouldn't need to actually buy Twitter to get at it all.. but thats about the only practical use of the data/users I can think of thats anywhere near his lane.

>>455259
To what end does Twitter "need to be rebuilt from scratch"?

>>455260

>The entire Twitter corpus of comments/posts/conversations would make a great training set of data for an AI bot


That's already been tried. With disturbing results.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

>Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

>>455261
I agree with you actually - seems to work fine; I don't buy the "we need a rewrite" anytime from a team, least of all them.

Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on this - written in 2000, but everything applies today. Rewriting a body of code from scratch is the single worst thing any software team/person can do. It never works.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

>>455263

>Rewriting a body of code from scratch is the single worst thing any software team/person can do. It never works.

It depends. At some point, your old code can just become too convoluted, cumbersome and slow. Because you will have added on features time and again, but not necessarily in the most efficient and least resources-claiming way. And the more complex your code gets, the more error prone it will also become. At some point, it's less time consuming to rewrite your code than to spend your time painstakingly ironing out inconsistensies and incompatibilities. Where you draw that line is a judgement call that can go wrong. but it often doesn't.

Also, what nobody can guarantee you is that your lean new efficient code will behave exactly the way the old one did. Especially when your code interfaces with things like databases or other computers or devices or hardware, it can get tricky to figure out why your new code won't run, even though you feel it's so much more leaner and faster. And that's where a lot of reservations come from against redoing a code project from the ground up.

It's probably not a good idea to recode Twitter from square one because of its overall complexity. But for many smaller projects, it can be a viable option.

>>455265
>Also, what nobody can guarantee you is that your lean new efficient code will behave exactly the way the old one did.

Respectfully, couldn't disagree more with your post - this line highlights the problem - when you rewrite a large body of code, it's probably not the original team that is rewriting it, and you have lost all the institutional / tribal knowledge about how the system works, what the edge cases are, what bugs we encountered along the way and how it is actually used.

We can have a debate about "smaller projects" - its perfectly okay to refactor a class, a module, a subsystem, a service - however you might define that domain definition; but to the point that "Twitter needs a complete rewrite", no it does not and doing so would be an act of folly.

>>455266

All of those problems already exist at Twitter.

They moved to a microservices model, for reasons that were never entirely clear. That massively increased the cost and complexity of their infrastructure. Those services were never properly documented and were developed by fragmented teams using a variety of tools and methodologies. There's a lot of overlapping functionality, spectacularly weird bugs and massive performance problems. Dorsey hired a huge number of very smart computer scientists with no real plan for what they were going to do, so they did what all computer scientists do when left unsupervised - reinvent the wheel in arcane ways.

Laid-off Twitter staff have been saying that Twitter will start to fail completely, which is entirely correct, but not for the reasons they'd like to think - their infrastructure is such a dreadful mess that it's constantly on the brink of collapsing. They're constantly firefighting problems that nobody really understands, because of a fundamental belief that microservices are a substitute for sound architecture.

I don't expect a literal blank-page rewrite, but I do expect to see radical refactoring to bring the vast majority of core functionality back into a monolithic architecture. This can be done relatively quickly, because the Twitter product isn't all that complicated; ironically, the immense and unnecessary complexity of their infrastructure has absorbed so much engineering effort that they haven't been in a position to add much functionality.

As I said before, this could all end in tears, but there's a meaningful probability that Twitter will cut their operating costs by an order of magnitude and cut their payroll by >50% without badly affecting revenue, putting them in a position to actually start spending resources on product innovation. Elon's takeover has been massively disruptive, but that's probably a good thing when a widespread reaction to the possible demise of Twitter was "good, I hope that hellsite dies and never comes back".

>>455255

>my recollection is that Twitter made a loss in 2020-21 as well, but a profit in 2019

Either way you look at it, I think it's hard to be confident in an internet based company that somehow managed not to make money during a period of global history in which events occurred that which massively benefited basically every single other online company.

>>455266

Granted, I never worked on a project that came even close to Twitter's magnitude. The biggest things I've done was code bespoke web back and front ends that maybe served 15 to 20 unique users simultaneously at any one time. But even in that kind of environment, it can happen that features get tacked on haphazardly, worst of all by your coworkers, even worse on your day off, with poor understanding of the code's general idea and concept, and then it can incrementally start behaving weirdly and become clunky and just no longer efficient or capable of the job at hand. Let alone it'll be difficult to service.

It's not just poor commenting or ignorance or negligence. It can happen despite everybody's best efforts. And before you know it, you've got substantial code rot. The fact that a given set of employees knows the ins and outs of a codebase and its quirks and latent bugs and might therefore be irreplaceable as managers and stewards of that code shouldn't universally be an excuse to stick with and keep alive bad code.

I would actually agree with you that you don't just sit down and rewrite Twitter. But even at that kind of level of complexity, there comes a time when you're just better off at least putting parts of your codebase through an entire rewrite.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63996061

>The United Nations has joined the European Union in condemning Twitter's decision to suspend some journalists who cover the social media firm.

>Reporters for the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post were among those locked out of their accounts.

>The UN tweeted that media freedom is "not a toy" while the EU has threatened Twitter with sanctions.


It's not without merit to watch somebody go from being a progressive wet dream of a figurehead to morphing into a right-wing fascist.

If only they had warned us.

>>455659
Someone is going to have conniptions over how slanty his eyes look here.

>>455660


Could be worse.

>>455659

Hot take: Elon is doing a public service by owning the biggest electric car company and being a mad MAGA gammon. People used to argue that electric cars were just lefty liberal the shipping forecast, but they aren't saying that any more. The kind of people who go on an all-beef diet to own the libs can now own an electric car without shame.

>>455660
They don't look slanty, they look slitty, you racist.

>>455659
Where were the UN and EU when Twitter buried the Hunter Biden laptop story?

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/

>Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.

>Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.

Quelle surprise.

>>455716

Never understood the point of twitter anyway. 99 percent of posters use it to unload their mental bum rubbish. The occasional actually useful public service announcement notwithstanding.

>>455724

Yah It's like LiveJournal with a shittier interface but frighteningly good marketing. Like how certain News outlets will gush about TikTok, even though there is such an exasperating plague of mental nourishment on there that you must wonder why anyone is even telling us to look at it. FUCKING LOOOOK AAATTT IIIITTTT. I think this happens because "Haha no fuck off you deperate cunt" doesn't even make a good basis even for a Reach PLC™ Sharticle.

>>455716
Just so we're on the same page, you two know this "Twitter Files" nonsense is Musk running a limited hangout, right?

>>455733
Well he's got to hold something for negotiation, right?

>>455733

Maybe he should just wander around all the social media dives and threaten to buy them, just to make them worth fuck-all to anyone ever again. Or even better, have an slapfight with Zuckerberg á la Rich Kyanka vs. Uwe Boll. Whoever loses, we win.

>>455735
>an slapfight

Gah just fuckin knock me out

>>455733

These words make grammatical sense but I have no idea what meaning they convey.

I don't follow this nonsense, can someone please explain?

>>455729

There are local news programmes in much of the U.S. now which consist of little more than reading tweets out loud on screen and inciting equal parts vacuous warm fuzzy feelings and bitter outrage over the latest social media posts.

Lowest of the low hanging fruit that barely qualify as journalism. Thankfully not yet a big trend in Britain, but we should be vigilant.

>>455738

Not on TV maybe, but if you use any kind of news-ish homepage website like Yahoo, MSN, etc, they're packed with examples of exactly that from our local papers (which have all been bought out by some sort of IRL Buzzfeed type mega-corp).

It really is dreadful. When I'm just idly browsing at work I'll spot a headline that catches my curiosity, something like "Wigan mum faces outrage from community" or whatever, and it's literally just a tedious repost of some Facebook or Twitter comment thread. It's like if we had newspapers twenty years ago running articles like "Two men in pub disagree on best Terminator" except it's actually real and in real life. I can't find theproper words to describe how just... This is what we've come to, know what I mean?

There's no way you can convince me social media hasn't degenerated our collective intelligence. It's not just an Old Grumpy Man Misunderstands Newfangled Technology thing, because I'm only in my early 30s, I grew up with it too, from Myspace and Bebo etc in the early days, in fact I credit those early experiences with being the reason I'm confident pulling lasses on dating apps and why so many other people struggle at it; they merely adopted the internet, but I was born in it, molded by it. But I genuinely think social media (or at least just its more advanced forms like Twitter and TikTok) are toxic for our brains.

>>455744

A lot of local newspaper websites are like this. All stuff such as "Dad went to work and never came home", "Gorgeous £10 sweatshop garment clubbers 'need' in 'every colour'", "Mum in tears after encounter at Aldi checkout", "Police incident as main road closed after mobility scooter topples over", "Check your change for rare Kew Gardens 50p worth £600", "Toby Carvery brawl leads to £60m Crack Cocaine bust". Most of it is recycled with key details changes and reposted every few months.

>>455745

>"Toby Carvery brawl leads to £60m Crack Cocaine bust".

I don't think that quite fits the theme of mundane non-news to be fair.

>>455744

I remember in the run-up to the last election, there were actually news headlines on web sites along the lines of "Outrage at BoJo's proposal to do X after the election", but when you actually bothered to read the article, it was boiling down to often one single twitter user taking offence at something relatively minor and irrelevant from the Tory manifesto that they completely pulled out of context and then started a full-on twitter cunt off about. Still dutifully pretending to deliver a news story, the reporter then basically just gave the gist of half-arsedly scrolling down the ensuing thread and quoting the most outrageous responses.


Also though, what I find more than mildly annoying is all those human interest stories that really serve no purpose at all, least of all the purpose of getting a regular fill of relevant current events off the TV. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I don't fucking want to hear on the evening news about some crippled kid with cancer who got a puppy donated from the animal shelter. Not even if it's their upbeat closeout story.

>>455737
Apartheid Clyde has given some stuff to sympathetic writers and "reporters" to get them to dish the dirt on Old Twitter, meanwhile he's told staff that if any of them dares speak out and fill the gaps he's leaving he'll sue them into oblivion. And of course all the people you would expect to buy into the bullshit are doing so.

One example of the "bombshells" being reported is that "Twitter colluded with the FBI to suppress some users and the FBI paid them for it". They did this by receiving legal requests from the FBI, which they are required to comply with, and for which the FBI is required to pay them the costs of compliance.

>>455748

Alright, cheers.

But to get this straight- What you're saying is big tech company good, and only bad now that evil rich car man took over, and any implication they weren't good before is disinfo agitprop by evil rich car man and his evil rich mates with their rightoid freeze peach agenda for antisemitic homophobic racist dogwhistles. Am I right?

How do you feel about the accusation that TikTok distorts its content according to the whims of the Chinese government? Do you have any trouble believing that? Do you feel the need to scramble to their defence? Well, same for Twitter and the Yank government. Musk's involvement is quite inconsequential in my opinion, and I already firmly believed they were up to exactly that sort of shit before this "reveal".

>>455749

I think what he's saying is that it's hard to trust that we're getting the full picture from this man.

>>455750

Sure, but I doubt we were getting the full picture from the multi-billion dollar big tech company before him either.

I get the feeling a lot of people are falling for the old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing and uncritically siding with Old Twitter just because Musk is a baddie.

>>455746

It does when you read the article and it just turns out that someone spat at a member of staff and a copper used it as the catalyst to finally nab him.

>>455749
What I'm saying is, specifically and no more, that the narrative of "big tech company evil and rich car man come make everything good now" is bollocks, and since we're only getting one side of the story we have no real way to judge what in the "revelations" is actually true, to what degree, and what inferences to draw from them.

>>455753

>the narrative of "big tech company evil and rich car man come make everything good now" is bollocks

Fair, but I don't think anyone here, or anyone besides Musk's personal fanclub, for that mater, is buying that to begin with.

Whereas on the other hand I find it excessively convenient for Twitter to just go "Nah Musk done went made that up din'ee." I don't think it's exactly the height of tinfoil paranoia to assume the likes of Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, etc etc etc have some level of collusion with the intelligence agencies. In fact I think it'd be daft not to.

>>455755

We know for a fact that they do.

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

>>455755
It would be insane to believe that Twitter doesn't collude with the intelligence agencies, but that's an evergreen statement. The only thing more insane than not believing they did it in the first place would be believing that Musk or anyone else will put a stop to it.
Which is the problem at large: It doesn't matter who runs Twitter because the basic design of Twitter is evil and the institutional environment Twitter exists in is evil. It's not a management problem - the only management solution to Twitter's problems would be to appoint asset strippers who put all the servers on eBay and drag all the copper wire in their HQ down to the local scrap yard.

>>455758
I'm not sure "hey there, we're from the NSA, this is an order, and if you don't comply you're going to jail, and if you tell anyone about it you're also going to jail" is strictly speaking an invitation to collusion.

>>455762

But that's not all they do. They're quite happy to comply without the threat of going to jail, and they're quite happy to allow their platform to actively be used for propaganda, surveillance, coercion, and general spook bullshit.

>>455762

Apple have actually done the right thing, because their business model is compatible with it. They fight warrants in court, they design their infrastructure to be surveillance-resistant, they encrypt everything they can and store as little user data as possible.

FISA doesn't compel Google to track the exact location of users by default and store that data indefinitely - it's just a convenient marriage between the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism.

>>455763
Not to excuse the security services, but at a zoomed out enough level most of those things are less objectionable than their platform operating "as intended." (i.e. preying on weaknesses in human psychology and group dynamics to keep people arguing with each other so that you can show off that you've got high engagement and convert that into financial gain via advertisers and investor shenanigans.)
The security services are bad buggers, but it's nice that it's easy to point out why they're bad: Maybe you shouldn't fly people to Egypt so you can pull all their teeth out while asking questions in a language they don't speak. It's also nice that you can spell out the solution in theory: The government tells them to stop being bastards and they stop. Twitter is tougher - it's a private multinational that no individual state could-or-would take offline and you sound absolutely nuts when you start talking about infinite scroll, low character counts, retweets, and all the rest of it as though they're more socially harmful than most weapons when they're all brought together with how people act. It's not that serious mate, it's just silly nonsense, alright? Musk might lose his mind over this stupid website, so too might a few "journalists"... but everyone else is safe, alright?

>>455763
>They're quite happy to comply without the threat of going to jail
Top tip: When it comes to the security services, there's always the threat of going to jail. Or worse.

>>455764
Apple doesn't actually care about privacy. There's plenty in their history as testament to that. They provide "performative privacy", but they don't really object to surveillance capitalism. What they object to is not getting a 30% cut of everyone else's business.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/teslas-stock-is-headed-for-its-worst-month-quarter-year-on-record.html

>Tesla shares dropped 11% on Tuesday and are now down 44% in December

>Investors are bailing on the stock as challenges mount for Tesla abroad and at home, and as Elon Musk continues to spend an outsize amount of time at Twitter.


I got out of Tesla stock last year, after briefly getting in around the top and suffering an almost 15-percent loss in just a few trading days. I got stopped out and then never quite had the courage to get back in. But I guess anything was better than HODL.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/20/elon-musks-spacex-launches-test-flight-for-rocket-that-could-bring-people-to-mars

>Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blows up minutes after launch

>After a cancelled launch earlier this week due to a pressurisation issue, the 120-metre Starship rocket system took off at 8:33 am local time (2:33 pm in the UK) on Thursday. It gathered speed but then started to spin at altitude before exploding about four minutes after leaving the ground.

>It appeared that the two sections of the rocket system – the booster and cruise vessel – were unable to separate properly after takeoff, possibly causing the spacecraft to fail.

I've probably said this before, but the funniest thing about Musk taking over Twitter and making himself look like a complete cock in the process is that he didn't even want to buy it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68479242

>In its letter claiming responsibility for the attack, the Volcano Group said it sabotaged Tesla because it ate up resources and labour.

>It also accused Tesla of contaminating groundwater and using huge amounts of drinking water.


Not saying I agree with that kind of destruction and sabotage of critical infrastructure, but I understand the sentiment. EVs may be the cleaner future, but as one of the world's biggest arsecunts, just because you own an EV company doesn't make you sacrosanct. You're still an arsecunt and people are allowed to hate you and your company.

And there's reasonable beef with that factory, because locally, it actually is an environmental disaster because they cleared thousands of acres of virgin forest to build it, and the factory uses so much water that the groundwater table has been receding as a direct consequence.

>>463060
The carbon cost of replacing fossil fuel powered cars with EV ones is astronomical and not a viable change, that's reasonable beef with the factory on a global level. There's nothing really clean about it.

Can we just admit that we've complete fucked it RE climate change? This line of thinking is very much under the section titled "things I don't say irl", but I find the idea that we're going to stop, let alone reverse, the climate breakdown utterly laughable.

>>463063

We're not going to undo climate change at this point. It's all about slowing it down now. But even that is worth doing. Defeatism doesn't get you anywhere.

But it doesn't have to be a Tesla. There are increasingly other options, where a car company isn't run by a pound shop Bond villain.

>>463064
>Defeatism doesn't get you anywhere.
It gets me to any airport on the planet at around 600 mph actually.

>>463063
Honestly I think climate change is too convinient a cover for the use of weaponised weather manipulation technologies for it to be meaningfully tackled before a third world war. Also they're defrosting the Arctic to get at whatever's within the ice..

>>463065

>It gets me to any airport on the planet at around 600 mph

Don't many planes fly slower today than they used to, to save fuel and reduce emission?

>>463067

No, but also sort of yes. There hasn't really been a strategic decision to run at lower cruise speeds, but narrow body jets naturally have a cruise speed that's 40-50 knots slower than a wide body. The shift from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point operations mean that more passenger miles are being flown on smaller narrow body jets, which has unintentionally resulted in a reduction in average speeds.