Elon Musk: Smartest Guy in The World or Complete Clown?

[Norseman]

Attachment 434512

Baha

[dcpnz]

Musk man emailing around on Friday morning asking how Twitter’s underlying technology works .
Maybe shoulda figured that out before now……

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/t...e=articleShare

[simple]

All this making the suits who left on day one look like the smartest people in the room

[mcski]

I agree with the bloat. In todays corporate world everybody is a manager or supervisor. When we got bought by Lotus Development back in the day they basically demoted every manager down a level and no VP’s

Ya but that was ibm so downgrading titles doesn’t really mean anything at all in that bloatfest.

I looked at comments on one of the news links and was shocked at how many were on team Elon and thought the employees were spoiled and just over paid barristas. Funny how all these old fucks think barristas are slackers. Most couldn’t last a day grinding at a busy starbucks

[dcpnz]

Trying to keep this on track…… which Tahoe resort is going to be most overrun with Twitter ex employees on severence ?

[chaka]

It's funny but apparently this lady isn't even an astronaut, just a "space fan."

Just like Elon is apparently just a 'physics fan'.

[J. Barron DeJong]

Trying to keep this on track…… which Tahoe resort is going to be most overrun with Twitter ex employees on severence ?

Pallisades-Olympic Valley and Northstar.

[J. Barron DeJong]

https://twitter.com/ashleyfeinberg/s..._11VEtx2fvFYxQ

[east or bust]

Who was the tech guy that had the schizophrenic break (or was just heavily dosed on shrooms) who ran around naked in public? Anyone remember that?

I could see Elon heading in that direction soon.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[J. Barron DeJong]

[schuss]

If Twitter plods along with 10% of the former staff what does that say about the rest of the tech bloat?

Maybe you don’t need 3x redundant engineers.

The thing is - most modern built tech stacks will coast along for a while without issue due to the architecture.
However, over time logs get full, instances fail and need to be recycled, services need to be patched for vulnerabilities and you need to update integrations as your partners change how they do things. On a given day there's not that many "Must do's".
Over 90 days? LOTS.

[alpinevibes]

Everything will be ok with 10% of the workforce until something goes wrong. Twitter especially has been pieced together over a decade and there are weird contingencies that no one person has a grasp of.

If there was, say a big database failure, some ex-Tweeps think there’s a possibility it could take weeks to get back up and running, if it can at all.

Eliminating bloat is a good goal, but shotgunning 90% of your workforce in two weeks is not how it’s done

Something goes wrong, competition or a new competitor, desperate hackers, government entities stepping into regulate. There's not many hands or real cashflow to deal with any of it.

[evdog]

Everything will be ok with 10% of the workforce until something goes wrong. Twitter especially has been pieced together over a decade and there are weird contingencies that no one person has a grasp of.

If there was, say a big database failure, some ex-Tweeps think there’s a possibility it could take weeks to get back up and running, if it can at all.

Eliminating bloat is a good goal, but shotgunning 90% of your workforce in two weeks is not how it’s done

This ^^^

I've seen how this works out first hand. My last company tripled in size through acquisitions. It should have been common sense to pick the most capable software platform and migrate all our customers to it. But when management has a poor grasp of the technology and customer needs of each legacy company, and won't listen to people who do, bad decisions are made. Management turned over multiple times in 3-4 years before a new CTO finally listened and made the correct decision to change course to that most capable platform. But then his next move was to fire all the engineers and DBAs (database administrators) who built that platform and were the only ones who knew how to maintain it. I'm not kidding, this happened less than a month after making the decision to migrate to this platform.

The company tried to be smart and gave plenty of notice, during which time the departing staffs' job was to teach their remaining peers how to operate and maintain the platform. It took less than a week after the staff departed before a critical database error occurred and the remaining DBAs couldn't figure out how to fix it. They had to call the fired DBA back in and she fixed it in about 10 minutes. Several software updates and patches were subsequently released that had issues, and customers began reporting increasing levels of downtime as other issues arose that engineers couldn't readily fix. Within two months, the company decided to ask all of those laid off engineers and DBAs to come back. The only one who accepted was stuck on an H1B visa and couldn't work for any other company.

Stupid decisions aside, there was at least some attempt to turn things over in an orderly manner and it still went sideways. Compare to Twitter where hundreds or thousands of staff are just going poof with no planning or handover of knowledge. Yikes.

[bennymac]

"We can get money, we can increase staff—we know all the people. This is a question I asked the doctors before. Some of the people we cut, they haven’t used for many, many years, and if we have ever need them we can get them very, very quickly. And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

[bobz]

Musk’s Twitter Buy Makes No Sense – Unless It’s Part of Something Bigger

Interesting. I mean, who doesn't like a good global domination conspiracy theory? And I have to admit, this recent Twitter episode has had a "Springtime For Hitler" ring to it. Could Musk really be that incompentent? Surely he's also on a hell of a coke bender. Or maybe... ... ?????

There's too much to take apart there, so just I'll go for random pot-shots:

-- Putin's supposed to be mixed up in all this? Oh great, talk about another arch-mastermind who turns out to be a few Scud missiles short of an armory.

-- Jack Dorsey, who I presume is a smart guy, being on board with Elon's doings, doesn't really impress me. If someone overpaid me by billions of dollars, I'd be their yes-man too.

-- Their take-over-global-currency plan involves Bitcoin, even peripherally? Hahahahahahaha. As actual currency, it barely works well enough to serve the needs of ransom collectors. And, oops! x00% inflation (deflation?) rate followed by a collapse, yeah let's pay for oil shipments with that.

-- But okay, if you're pitching an investment to a Saudi prince, maybe talking up the idea of a world commerce power grab is the way to do it.

-- As for Musk and friends sooner or later wanting to gather enough banking-media-wealth-data-politics clout to pull off a modern version of the Great Depression Business Plot (read: coup), well sure, that part makes sense. And I can't say that the Trump years have given me a lot of confidence that even a semi-competent Musk-Thiel-Saudi-etc coup effort would be successfully contained.

[TBS]

The thing is - most modern built tech stacks will coast along for a while without issue due to the architecture.
However, over time logs get full, instances fail and need to be recycled, services need to be patched for vulnerabilities and you need to update integrations as your partners change how they do things. On a given day there's not that many "Must do's".
Over 90 days? LOTS.

From that NYT article posted upthread

Twitter is still operating, but it may become harder for the company to fix serious issues when they come up, former employees said. One former Twitter engineer likened the service’s current state to Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tunes cartoon character, as he runs off the edge of a cliff. Though he may still be running in midair for some time, once he looks down, he drops like a stone.

[Tamburello Rouge]

4D cHeSs!!#

[SumJongGuy]

Right now I'm very glad Twitter doesn't have much sensitive personal data like PayPal or credit card info etc.. If this were eBay or Etsy or cashapp we'd be fucked.. or Equifax!

Damn, the crypto companies crashing and burning... they have banking info right?

[CarlMega]

If Twitter plods along with 10% of the former staff what does that say about the rest of the tech bloat?

Maybe you don’t need 3x redundant engineers.

There's no doubt all companies have bloat... But you need to staff against your ambitions, execution efficiency and your consequence of failure. The dream ideal of perfect efficiency doesn't exist in any practical sense. Good companies learn that having a 'bench' is essential.

No special insight into happenings at twitter but I suspect we're about to learn/learning that many critical processes and systems now have a single point of failure and no resource redundancy. Fragile.

[TahoeJ]

A site the size of Twitter is in a constant state of software compliance and upgrading on many levels. It's amazing that Musk doesn't seem to grasp how important it is. So things will be fine for a while but it's going to be funny when there's a major outage or the site starts lagging or getting buggy. Only a matter of time.

[Supermoon]

Reports of Twitter outages have already began to spike the last few days

[shroom]

do Meta next daddy

[ironhippy]

The thing is - most modern built tech stacks will coast along for a while without issue due to the architecture.
However, over time logs get full, instances fail and need to be recycled, services need to be patched for vulnerabilities and you need to update integrations as your partners change how they do things. On a given day there's not that many "Must do's".
Over 90 days? LOTS.

This.

If they are on AWS and they don't keep their stuff up to date, they can be shut down.

The amount of vulnerabilities alone they deal with must be staggering, then add on all the other things you need to do just to keep the lights on.

The next big vulnerability could be "pingToTweet", send a ping, take over a twitter account!

[bobz]

up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code

Oy. Hey all you forest critters, send me screenshots of the most salient pine needles! What a ign'ant poseur.

Sure, the CEO needs to understand the code base (at some level). So then, sit down with a system architect, or someone close to them with a particular talent for explaining shit, get a comprehensive overview, and then talk to maybe other people about particularly critical modules and get a sense of how those work and how they interact with the rest of the system.

Next read up on the various API docs.

And then, MAYBE, if you really insist on being like Bill Gates, take one of several entry points into this or that code, with a code editor not screenshots you idiot, and jump down the rabbit hole, searching some of the class names you come across, mainly hoping you find nice concise comment blocks explaining their ins and outs. Screenshots of salient lines of code; douchebag.

[Supermoon]

When’s the last time any programmer or developer was working on production-level code and just sat down and wrote like fifty lines of code from scratch? Does that ever happen?

I know enough about that sort of thing to know I will never know enough about it, but my dev friends basically say they copy paste a lot more than people would believe. And Google how to do stuff, etc.