[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Stealthpizza wrote:

If twitter shall die before I wake, pray elno's fortune you shall take.

hush little musky, don't say a word

and nevermind that noise you heard

it's just the tweets that no one read

cuz your social site's now dead!

muraii wrote:
Prederick wrote:
NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow.

I've genuinely got like $20 on him turning it into Parler/Gab.

I am half-seriously wondering if he didn't take investment to buy and kill Twitter since Parler/Gab have had difficulty building their user bases.

The simplest answer is he's a moron, but between "every accusation is a confession" for his type, his friendship with Thiel and all the JAQing conspiracy sh*t he's been doing, a part of me is just like hm.........

Is it too late to have a second International GWJ Day seeing how it's looking like it'll outlast Twitter?

Prederick wrote:
muraii wrote:
Prederick wrote:
NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow.

I've genuinely got like $20 on him turning it into Parler/Gab.

I am half-seriously wondering if he didn't take investment to buy and kill Twitter since Parler/Gab have had difficulty building their user bases.

The simplest answer is he's a moron, but between "every accusation is a confession" for his type, his friendship with Thiel and all the JAQing conspiracy sh*t he's been doing, a part of me is just like hm.........

This isn't like he's Judge Doom and Twitter is the Red Car. Where's the freeway he's going to build through Toontown if Marvin Acme's will doesn't show up at midnight?

Rat Boy wrote:

Fraiser: "Niles, where are those new verified accounts?"

Niles: "Still making sure the bots are dead!"

Daphne: "Oh for Pete's sake... "

*Daphne smashes the servers.*

* Explosion! Roz enters looking like she was standing over a bomb when it went off *

Roz: "Blue check marks! Everywhere!"

Rat Boy wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Fraiser: "Niles, where are those new verified accounts?"

Niles: "Still making sure the bots are dead!"

Daphne: "Oh for Pete's sake... "

*Daphne smashes the servers.*

* Explosion! Roz enters looking like she was standing over a bomb when it went off *

Roz: "Blue check marks! Everywhere!"

I can't find the old Frasier Crane twitter account that pined for re-booting Frasier (sounds like there could be a reboot with one of the streaming services) but I think this is what I'll miss the most about Twitter.

That, and the UKR updates.

But the lulz will hurt.

I just tried signing up for tumblr and F*CK ME SIDEWAYS I AM OLD.

@MattBinder wrote:

all the why Elon Musk bought Twitter theories are overthinking it.

it’s simple.

Musk is in a right wing filter bubble. he bought Twitter believing their problems were real & that others felt the same

this is what happens when you have a lot of money & live in fantasy land

I've heard the theory it was all because Babylon Bee got suspended for being transphobic assholes.

It's too bad I didn't get a video of my dog falling down the stairs last night (he's fine, does that often when his feet go faster than his brain) and a picture of the incredibly runny sh*t he took right after that. I could have posted them on twitter and it would have made a good metaphor for...something, I don't know.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I've heard the theory it was all because Babylon Bee got suspended for being transphobic assholes.

Prederick wrote:

There's good reason to believe all of this is because The Babylon Bee got suspended at one point.

Prob not even a "theory" anymore.

@oneunderscore_ wrote:

Texts from an unknown sender, from discovery in the Elon Musk/Twitter suit.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fh3oraXXwAUxyWc?format=jpg&name=medium)

Yeah, this is absolutely one big RW op.

I think he's pretty clearly purging liberal / left elements from twitter personnel, so those that remain are either ambivalent to his "free speech maximalism," his supporters, or in hock to him due to needing an immigration visa.

Also, unsurprisingly, Stable Diffusion's making inroads into porn.

When Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI developed by startup Stability AI, was open sourced earlier this year, it didn’t take long for the internet to wield it for porn-creating purposes. Communities across Reddit and 4chan tapped the AI system to generate realistic and anime-style images of nude characters, mostly women, as well as non-consensual fake nude imagery of celebrities.

But while Reddit quickly shut down many of the subreddits dedicated to AI porn, and communities like NewGrounds, which allows some forms of adult art, banned AI-generated artwork altogether, new forums emerged to fill the gap.

By far the largest is Unstable Diffusion, whose operators are building a business around AI systems tailored to generate high-quality porn. The server’s Patreon — started to keep the server running as well as fund general development — is currently raking in over $2,500 a month from several hundred donors.

Also, sidenote:

Much of the work is ongoing, but Chaudhry tells me that some of it has already come to fruition, including a technique to “repair” distorted faces and arms in AI-generated nudes. “We are recording and addressing challenges that all AI systems run into, namely collecting a diverse dataset that is high in image quality, captioned richly with text, covering the gamut of preferences of our users,” he added.

"Collecting a diverse dataset" means "stealing art from artists and not compensating them for it."

Chaudhry says that Unstable Diffusion is looking at ways to make its models “be more equitable toward the artistic community” and “give back [to] and empower artists.” But he didn’t outline specific steps, like licensing artwork or allowing artists to preclude their work from training datasets.

WELL KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER

The Harvard Business School Professor Who Isn’t Counting Elon Musk Out

In the weeks since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company has laid off nearly half of its workers and offered the remaining employees an ultimatum: Commit to being “extremely hardcore” going forward or leave the company. According to The New York Times, hundreds of employees have opted for the latter.

On Wednesday night—as the deadline loomed—Andy Wu, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, told me that Musk’s tough, authoritarian management style “generally doesn’t work in most situations.” However, he argued, it has seemingly worked at least somewhat at Tesla and SpaceX. Wu stressed that Twitter had been in trouble prior to Musk’s acquisition, so its odds of long-term survival were already limited.

We caught up again this morning to discuss the fallout from the ultimatum. Wu was still hesitant to count Musk out. “I’ve been consistently wrong about projecting out Musk’s potential, so I really don’t want to bet against him this time,” he said. “He’s always exceeded my expectations.”

Tesla and SpaceX are markedly different. The brain trust behind making rockets and electric cars is remarkably small - although Tesla is likely to be in trouble in the coming years. All the big auto-makers are moving in that direction, so their prospects are opening up. Being a rocket scientist isn't exactly portable to a ton of other places, and an extremely small percentage of the other rocket startups have the backing of the federal government, or even a financier with as much capital as Musk.

Twitter is literally just software. Every single employee who was laid off and left has a massive potential job market to play with. Nobody is running out of a need for developers. There's even a good chance that a huge portion of them will go work with Dorsey on his new service, or start up their own. And Musk's blunders with other countries whose labor laws actually have teeth is going to burn Twitter, and him, even further. This is not like his other ventures.

It's not going to make Musk poor, but Twitter is going to become increasingly unreliable as time passes and he can't fill mission-critical roles, or fills them with sycophants who are insufficient. Its unreliability will do more to weaken Twitter's means of profitability than anything Musk has done thus far. Advertisers won't flock back to a dying platform. Nobody's buying ads on MySpace.

Not to mention, there's probably a regulatory sh*tstorm headed his way. AGAIN.

NSMike wrote:

It's not going to make Musk poor, but Twitter is going to become increasingly unreliable as time passes and he can't fill mission-critical roles, or fills them with sycophants who are insufficient.

Who is actually going to fill those roles are 24-year-old CSCI graduates, who want to get Twitter on their resume, and then go work somewhere else when they're 25. They'll be talented developers, but they'll be headed back out the door just when they're starting to know their way around the system.

The real loss when you let your longtime engineers go is the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with them. And now they're going to be the place that just churns through people who treat the job as a resume builder. It's the same reason all those side projects at Google seem so exciting at the start, then languish after about 18 months and start to slide towards their inevitable axing.

But Google marches on because those side projects are just that, side projects. They retain talent in their moneymakers. Twitter has set fire to the teams that build and maintain their core competency.

Prederick wrote:

The Harvard Business School Professor Who Isn’t Counting Elon Musk Out

In the weeks since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, the company has laid off nearly half of its workers and offered the remaining employees an ultimatum: Commit to being “extremely hardcore” going forward or leave the company. According to The New York Times, hundreds of employees have opted for the latter.

On Wednesday night—as the deadline loomed—Andy Wu, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, told me that Musk’s tough, authoritarian management style “generally doesn’t work in most situations.” However, he argued, it has seemingly worked at least somewhat at Tesla and SpaceX. Wu stressed that Twitter had been in trouble prior to Musk’s acquisition, so its odds of long-term survival were already limited.

We caught up again this morning to discuss the fallout from the ultimatum. Wu was still hesitant to count Musk out. “I’ve been consistently wrong about projecting out Musk’s potential, so I really don’t want to bet against him this time,” he said. “He’s always exceeded my expectations.”

"I've been wrong on my coin flips before so this time I'll take a different bet" isn't exactly great analysis HBS prof.

What evidence is there that a master marketer is going to turn around a services platform?

Again, the goal is to turn a profit. What is the plan for that? Torpedoing relationships with ad buyers and $8/mo by (reportedly) 125k users is some Lionel Hutz-level CEO-ing.

Also there are no government contracts and free money for Twitter like there have been for his other companies.

If the USA gave me a billion dollars I could probably hire enough engineers to build a rocket too, even though I'm not one myself.

That’s the huge point all these sycophants gloss over. Without government handouts SpaceX and Tesla aren’t able to exist.

Bootstraps!

*Legion* wrote:

Who is actually going to fill those roles are 24-year-old CSCI graduates, who want to get Twitter on their resume, and then go work somewhere else when they're 25. They'll be talented developers, but they'll be headed back out the door just when they're starting to know their way around the system.

The real loss when you let your longtime engineers go is the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with them. And now they're going to be the place that just churns through people who treat the job as a resume builder. It's the same reason all those side projects at Google seem so exciting at the start, then languish after about 18 months and start to slide towards their inevitable axing.

But Google marches on because those side projects are just that, side projects. They retain talent in their moneymakers. Twitter has set fire to the teams that build and maintain their core competency.

Each new software engineer is a drain on productivity. Training and knowledge transfer mean that established developers aren't doing the amount of work they were doing before, and the new hires are doing no real work until they understand how things fit together. I generally estimate takes 2 months before a new hire contributes the same amount that they're draining from established devs.

But that assumes there are established devs to learn from. When new hires have to figure out everything on their own, it takes a lot longer than 2 months.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

When new hires have to figure out everything on their own, it takes a lot longer than 2 months.

Not when they're

EXTREMELY HARDCORE!!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Each new software engineer is a drain on productivity. Training and knowledge transfer mean that established developers aren't doing the amount of work they were doing before, and the new hires are doing no real work until they understand how things fit together.

You're tellin' me. This right here is my life right after the holidays. I need to add two new devs to my team and I am DREADING it.

Remote work? PM me. We can football on the clock.

To bad, I really liked her movies on netflix.

LOL, he's reinstating trump based on a Twitter poll

EDIT:

After he said a council would convene. What a joke

Prederick wrote:

LOL, he's reinstating trump based on a Twitter poll

...of his own followers.

Tough to find a more self-selecting group...

Guess we know what the emergency code review was. Had to make sure his follower bots would vote the right way.