On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Of course Zuckerberg has negative credibility. He has been on an ass-kissing mission to prove to Trump he's a good boy by making culture war gestures such as removing tampons from men's bathrooms at Meta. A performative gesture far below his pay grade.
And of course adding them in the first place was also performative, he doesn't have any principles or believe in anything, none of them do. That's what they have in common, a remarkable lack of spine, sense of guilt or shame. This is a requirement.
What he said isn't technically a lie. Someone spreading pure fiction such as 'vaccines make you sterile', without even anecdotal evidence let alone case studies, is technically just 'talking about side effects'. Governments asking social media companies to do something about that is a good thing. Zuckerberg obviously knows this, what he's doing now to score good boy points with Trump is packaging that benign request into nefarious "Biden made me hide the troof!" allusions.
Inconveniently for you, Zuckerberg's claims are corroborated by internal messaging from the Twitter team. They described the Biden team as "very angry" in their meetings and they were demanding to know why certain users weren't being banned off the platform.
Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of US public policy, had detailed the White House’s pressure campaign in a series of meetings, according to Zweig.
Culbertson said in her notes that the administration was “very angry” that Twitter had not taken more aggressive action in silencing vaccine critics and wanted the company to do more, files showed.
Contrary to your claim that it was merely crackpots spreading pure fiction that were in need of being censored, there were also medical professionals with serious credentials that were being shot down for posting legitimate opinions
Among those users whom Twitter did clamp down on was Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who tweeted in March 2021 that people “with prior natural infection do not need” the COVID-19 vaccine, “[n]or [do] children.”
Kulldorff’s tweet was flagged by the site as “misleading” — even though it was in line with the vaccine policies of “numerous other countries,” Zweig wrote.
Another doctor, Andrew Bostom of Rhode Island, was permanently suspended after tweeting the results of negative studies about the vaccines and highlighting data that coronavirus was less dangerous in children than the flu — information that Zweig wrote was “legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.”
From your same link:
Zweig’s research found that much of Twitter’s COVID content moderation was conducted by bots “too crude for such nuanced work,” and contractors in places like the Philippines, whose non-medical expertise resulted in a “significant error rate.”
Ok, so some false positives got swept along as would have happened even under much better circumstances. How is this inconvenient for me? I was talking about the intent rather than the execution. Tech companies have the most imbalanced ratio of capital to labor share of any industry, of course it was going to be half-assedly automated.
As a side note, I'll never understand why anti-vaxers feel vindicated today. Hundreds of millions of us took multiple shots and we're still going about our lives without extra limbs or our dicks falling off.
They pushed to have Alex Berenson banned which you can't blame on bots or filipinos
In a Slack message from April 2021, an unidentified Twitter employee said the adminstration “had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform”.
“It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine,” Berenson had tweeted.
“Think of it — at best — as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS,” he also wrote.
If you say the vaccine doesn't stop transmission you get banned for spreading misinformation but if you say that if you take the vaccine you won't get infected it's perfectly fine. My 3 shots didn't make my dick fall off but it also didn't stop me from getting COVID.
I didn't know who that is but some quick googling tells me he isn't a doctor. And on his wiki we have "mRNA vaccines are "dangerous and ineffective" against COVID-19, and further demanding that they be withdrawn from the market immediately."
That's at best crackpot-adjacent, when he as a layman chilling in his pandemic grotto knows on a gut feeling that it's dangerous and ineffective and needs to be withdrawn immediately.
Feel free to disagree since we can't quantify it but even if it was crudely done, I think the overwhelming majority of COVID vaccine posts and accounts getting swept up by this attempt to curb misinformation were indeed in the "vaccines make you sterile" category rather than in the academic skepticism category.
You have people believing social media as a public square where people can shout from atop their soap boxes while other people simply have to figure out for themselves whether the guy is a charlatan or not. What people fail to realize is in the era of microculture cult following where people announce a peddle a certain belief, this then gets consolidated into another belief with enough overlap and you get an entire subset of misinformation believing global subculture which makes it more difficult to progress things forward because you get so much pushback from these people. The worst thing is that it's kind of a pyramid scheme where the only one's life gets better for is the cult leader status (and all the products that go along with it) the initial peddlers get. They get legitimized, they are hard to get rid of because entrechment and indoctrination and they should keep being platformed because free speech? It used to he funny with the flat earthers and the magnets things, but now it's flat out culture war territory.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
On January 19 2025 19:00 Uldridge wrote: You have people believing social media as a public square where people can shout from atop their soap boxes while other people simply have to figure out for themselves whether the guy is a charlatan or not. What people fail to realize is in the era of microculture cult following where people announce a peddle a certain belief, this then gets consolidated into another belief with enough overlap and you get an entire subset of misinformation believing global subculture which makes it more difficult to progress things forward because you get so much pushback from these people. The worst thing is that it's kind of a pyramid scheme where the only one's life gets better for is the cult leader status (and all the products that go along with it) the initial peddlers get. They get legitimized, they are hard to get rid of because entrechment and indoctrination and they should keep being platformed because free speech? It used to he funny with the flat earthers and the magnets things, but now it's flat out culture war territory.
Even if you accept that social media are a digital equivalent of the public square and the recommendation algorithm does nothing more than virtualize the size of the crowd around each soapbox, it still misses the point that the public square with soapboxes was a very scary thing. What happened there wasn't a "marketplace of ideas", it was the riling up of mob mentality. Something nobody should want.
Now add in that it's the modern day robber barons who quite literally control the recommendation algorithms which represent the "truth" of the size of the crowd around a soapbox and you have the start of a truly dystopian nightmare.
And I have worked on recommendation algorithms for large companies. They are very easily tweaked to heavily disfavor certain content. E.g. Amazon is known to favor prime program products over others. They don't make it a secret, but it means that if you have a product that better matches the search and user profile but haven't joined the prime program, you may be ranked lower than a slightly worse match that has joined prime. And if I had to guess, this is especially true for users who have not joined the prime program, because anybody using prime shipping is a net cost for Amazon (which they push onto the vendor), and if you're already subscribing to Prime anyway, then prime just costs money, but if you are not, then they can take in the subscription fee! And sure, you can even justify it as being user-friendly: prime shipping is faster and more reliable than many other shipping services. But at the end of the day it's Amazon squeezing vendors and logistics companies on one end, and users on the other, for as much profit as they can make.
And that is a benign use of such algorithms compared to someone who might want to use their power to push "truth" they agree with (or get paid to push).
@BJ I know you think the anti-vaxxers of the world were right in spreading misinformation, but no they were strictly not. Just because some of them have doctor titles doesn't absolve them from consequences. The names you posted got fired for their behavior. They didn't get censored for talking about side effects, they got censored because they're anti-vaxxers who were spreading dangerous misinformation.
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
On January 19 2025 21:02 Magic Powers wrote: @BJ I know you think the anti-vaxxers of the world were right in spreading misinformation, but no they were strictly not. Just because some of them have doctor titles doesn't absolve them from consequences. The names you posted got fired for their behavior. They didn't get censored for talking about side effects, they got censored because they're anti-vaxxers who were spreading dangerous misinformation.
I don't really feel like chasing after a moving target today so I'll just end it on providing the internal messages from Twitter that corroborate that Zuckerberg was not lying about the Biden team pressuring facebook in an "angry" way to censor things. Whether that censorship was right or wrong we can leave for another day.
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
Please put in some effort, I'm not your mom. Just asking for everything all the time makes you obnoxious, not a good person to argue with. When I said it's easy to find the links, I meant that it's easy enough that I don't feel the need to post every link I can find. It takes one minute for you to find them.
On January 19 2025 21:02 Magic Powers wrote: @BJ I know you think the anti-vaxxers of the world were right in spreading misinformation, but no they were strictly not. Just because some of them have doctor titles doesn't absolve them from consequences. The names you posted got fired for their behavior. They didn't get censored for talking about side effects, they got censored because they're anti-vaxxers who were spreading dangerous misinformation.
I don't really feel like chasing after a moving target today so I'll just end it on providing the internal messages from Twitter that corroborate that Zuckerberg was not lying about the Biden team pressuring facebook in an "angry" way to censor things. Whether that censorship was right or wrong we can leave for another day.
They were not asked to censor "side effects from mRNA vaccines." Never. Not even once. That's the claim Zuckerberg made. That's the lie he told.
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
"Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower."
I'm failing to find a source supporting that claim. In fact I can't find any engineers anywhere opposing this method.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
Please put in some effort, I'm not your mom. Just asking for everything all the time makes you obnoxious, not a good person to argue with. When I said it's easy to find the links, I meant that it's easy enough that I don't feel the need to post every link I can find. It takes one minute for you to find them.
You're not a newbie to TL.net. Sourcing your claims has been standard operating procedures for some time. If you don't have a source you can just say so. Instead you're ironically offering a retort that you'd expect from an antivaxx forum "Do YouR OwN ReSearcH"
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
"Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower."
I'm failing to find a source supporting that claim. In fact I can't find any engineers anywhere opposing this method.
You'd like a source for my claim? Sure, I'd be happy to offer one. It's an excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk. I've bolded the portion particularly relevant to my claim
The Falcon 9 had become the world's only rapidly reusable rocket. During 2020, Falcon boosters had landed safely twenty-three times, coming down upright on landing legs. The video feeds of the fiery yet gentle landings still made Musk leap from his chair. Nevertheless, he was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship's booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.
It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?"
After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
I said it was plausible, not that it was any kind of gospel truth. And it’s made plausible in combination with tons of stuff that’s very much on the record, from others, from the man’s autobiography, from interviews he gives and most notably from his own output on Twitter .
1. He’s known to be very hands-on, for better or worse, and IMO it’ll be variable. 2. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about as per the technical specifics of a platform such as Twitter. This may not be apparent to those who don’t work in similar industries, or are dedicated computing hobbyists, but it’s really, really obvious to those who do. No shame on those who can’t parse that, I can’t really assess so myself if he’s chatting about space craic.
Put 2 and 2 together and hey, it’s very plausible. Wouldn’t bet my house on it, but I’d err on the probable.
Alas I’m not in the habit of noting down every story I read for the purposes of later argumentation. I used to in my teens but after the family pet tragically was crushed beneath a teetering tower of newspaper clippings I’d saved over years for this purpose I decided I had to kick the habit.
As I said, in the immediate aftermath of the takeover and those initial firing waves, Twitter had meaningful outages because they fired and nuked the credentials of their guy/gal who accessed the product I was working on.
Mistakes happen, but if it’s amongst a backdrop of ridiculous statements, stating that pure lines of code would be a potential benchmark etc. Or the initial blue tick fiasco, or numerous other things.
If Musk wasn’t saying stupid shit all the time, or let’s say the transition was smooth as silk and Twitter was making bank now, then I’d assess various whispers rather differently.
I’ll add the caveat if I haven’t already that I’m talking this recent span of time and really Twitter rather than the totality of the man’s career
Magic is entitled to his opinion, but I am not he. It’s just not a story I ran into or have the bandwidth or real interest in right now. We have very different positions on the subject of the thread, albeit yes a shared negatively charged one. Perhaps I’ll diverge quite considerably on this one, idk.
If I’d commented on his claims here via a completely different framework of assessment than I put yours through, then yeah 100% fair to bring it up again, absolutely. But I didn’t give any kind of response to it so I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up here.
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
Please put in some effort, I'm not your mom. Just asking for everything all the time makes you obnoxious, not a good person to argue with. When I said it's easy to find the links, I meant that it's easy enough that I don't feel the need to post every link I can find. It takes one minute for you to find them.
You're not a newbie to TL.net. Sourcing your claims has been standard operating procedures for some time. If you don't have a source you can just say so. Instead you're ironically offering a retort that you'd expect from an antivaxx forum "Do YouR OwN ReSearcH"
I always look up people's claims myself before I ask for a source. That's just par for the course in civil discourse. But yes you're right that I should always expect antagonistic discourse from you at this point. I haven't experienced any civil discourse from you in a very long time.
Note that I'm only posting the links and not making any attempts to confirm or deny any part of the story. I'm not the person to argue with in case you disagree with something in those links. My point is only that the information of 50% layoffs is out there and can be found without much trouble. In fact there are some reports saying it was more than 50% and up to around 80%
And I also distinctly remember you not denying this specific piece of information a few months back when the discussion was about Twitter stock value tanking, which some claimed was a consequence of the mass layoffs. You didn't say a peep back then and now you're suddenly asking for a source.
On January 19 2025 09:07 BlackJack wrote: I don't know if I would call something "well documented" just because you've read it on reddit or twitter by some nameless sources with a personal vendetta
I mean sure it’s possible, there is plenty of it that’s pretty consistent though. Or things that aren’t nameless that broadly corroborate such tales tangentially.
I mean you’re talking a couple of years of the odd thing on Reddit or Twitter, but I do recall plenty. I especially recall Musk getting schooled on Twitter by one of his engineers, not abrasively at all, who then quickly became an ex-engineer.
Or working for a company and us having a laugh that one of Twitter’s biggest outages came when they fired and nuked the credentials of the only employee who had access to our product during the initial mass firing phase.
Amongst other things. I know most of my programmer/programming adjacent buddies who were still warmly disposed or neutral on him started to feel he’s full of shit, because he would talk so much bullshit about an area of their expertise.
I wouldn’t say it’s immutable proof of certain charges, but it does seem rather cumulatively plausible. In mitigation perhaps his management style works differently in the context of a company he was involved in shaping, rather than one he acquired with a different ethos.
A couple pages back MP said Zuckerberg's claim that the Biden White House pressured him to delete posts related to vaccine side effects was bogus and a lie.
But apparently some nameless ex-employees who we can't even source but we remember reading something about on Reddit and Twitter speak the gospel. If only Zuckerberg had as much credibility as some unknown mid-level employee on Twitter whose upset that their company was acquired by Musk and maybe has an agenda. I'm filing the uneven levels of skepticism being applied here under "I'm going to believe what I want to believe."
Elon will tell anyone who listens how much he likes to micromanage minor production issues. He brags about it without understanding that it’s not a good thing. It’s like a general bragging about how he micromanages a platoon during an assault.
If you’re willing to take the demotion to lieutenant, put the time in to acquire that skill set, and gain the experience to understand it then that could be a value add but you’d have to stop doing general things. But just assuming that being a general makes you a genius at taking a trench and taking operational decisions away from your lieutenants is dangerous.
There’s not much reason to question whether Elon does that. He brags about doing it and his employees complain about him doing it. The question is whether he is some genius savant who can listen to the basic details of a problem for five minutes, immediately cut to the heart of the issue, find a solution that is practical, simple, revolutionary, and effective, and see it achieved despite having zero follow through. My position is that he is not.
Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower. A year ago you could have cited those engineers as evidence that Musk is a detriment because he's making them chase after stupid goals and lacks the expertise to know if it's possible. But now they are catching the booster with the launch tower so there's that...
Neither of us really have intimate knowledge of the inner workings of either company. You prefer to cite nameless sources on Reddit to show that Musk is a puttering dolt going around fucking everything up. oBlade is asking if that's the case then why have all the other EV and space startups not had anything near the success of Tesla and SpaceX even with Elon actively sabotaging everything. Most people have acknowledged his business acumen and just think he's a cunt in other areas, but there are a couple that won't answer the question because their visceral hatred of Elon doesn't allow them to give him credit for anything.
"Most of the engineers at SpaceX opposed trying to catch the starship booster with the launch tower because it's a really challenging thing to do and if you fuck it up you blow up your launch tower."
I'm failing to find a source supporting that claim. In fact I can't find any engineers anywhere opposing this method.
You'd like a source for my claim? Sure, I'd be happy to offer one. It's an excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk. I've bolded the portion particularly relevant to my claim
The Falcon 9 had become the world's only rapidly reusable rocket. During 2020, Falcon boosters had landed safely twenty-three times, coming down upright on landing legs. The video feeds of the fiery yet gentle landings still made Musk leap from his chair. Nevertheless, he was not enamored with the landing legs being planned for Starship's booster. They added weight, thus cutting the size of the payloads the booster could lift.
"Why don't we try to use the tower to catch it?" he [ELON] asked. He was referring to the tower that holds the rocket on the launchpad. Musk had already come up with the idea of using that tower to stack the rocket; it had a set of arms that could pick up the first-stage booster, place it on the launch mount, then pick up the second-stage spacecraft, and place it atop the booster. Now he was suggesting that these arms could also be used to catch the booster when it returned to Earth.
It was a wild idea, and there was a lot of consternation in the room. "If the booster comes back down to the tower and crashes into it, you can't launch the next rocket for a long time," Bill Riley says. "But we agreed to study different ways to do it."
A few weeks later, just after Christmas 2020, the team gathered to brainstorm. Most engineers argued against trying to use the tower to catch the booster. The stacking arms were already dangerously complex. After more than an hour of argument, a consensus was forming to stick with the old idea of putting landing legs on the booster. But Stephen Harlow, the vehicle engineering director, kept arguing for the more audacious approach. "We have this tower, so why not try to use it?"
After another hour of debate, Musk stepped in. "Harlow, you're on board with this plan," he said. "So why don't you be in charge of it?"
Thank you.
It's exactly what I thought it was: hearsay. Walter Isaacson doesn't have insight into what happened at that "meeting" with "the team", because he can only report from people who were present, Elon Musk himself being one of them. This is precisely how Elon fabricated much of his fantastical mythology over the years, by telling stories which no one could confirm or deny. He made many claims over the years, of which plenty were proven lies. For example he lied about his transgender daughter to toot his own horn, and she was so pissed that she openly called out his lies. And that's only one of many lies he's told over the years. He's willing to harm others to boost his ego. He's untrustworthy. So where does the "majority of engineers in the room" claim stem from? Elon himself? Completely untrustworthy. Anyone else?
On January 19 2025 09:29 Magic Powers wrote: I can find info on firing 50% of coders based on lines written pretty easily. Don't know if multiple sources popping up right away counts as "well documented", but it surely doesn't require more than a quick search.
My 2 cents would be that Elon is generally vastly underestimating the abilities of other people (most recently gamers) and vastly overestimating his own. So I can certainly see this kind of overbearing layoff method happening under his thumb.
I know it's tempting to assume that the first thing you google has a source for the claim but if you read the article you've cited you'd realize it says nothing about Musk firing 50% of coders based on lines of code written.
I found several links, I just only posted the one with the most information. Other links contain the information about 50% layoffs.
You found several sources and decided to share the one that didn't support your claim? Am I supposed to trust that the other sources you found do support your claim? Because I don't.
Please put in some effort, I'm not your mom. Just asking for everything all the time makes you obnoxious, not a good person to argue with. When I said it's easy to find the links, I meant that it's easy enough that I don't feel the need to post every link I can find. It takes one minute for you to find them.
You're not a newbie to TL.net. Sourcing your claims has been standard operating procedures for some time. If you don't have a source you can just say so. Instead you're ironically offering a retort that you'd expect from an antivaxx forum "Do YouR OwN ReSearcH"
I always look up people's claims myself before I ask for a source. That's just par for the course in civil discourse. But yes you're right that I should always expect antagonistic discourse from you at this point. I haven't experienced any civil discourse from you in a very long time.
Note that I'm only posting the links and not making any attempts to confirm or deny any part of the story. I'm not the person to argue with in case you disagree with something in those links. My point is only that the information of 50% layoffs is out there and can be found without much trouble. In fact there are some reports saying it was more than 50% and up to around 80%
And I also distinctly remember you not denying this specific piece of information a few months back when the discussion was about Twitter stock value tanking, which some claimed was a consequence of the mass layoffs. You didn't say a peep back then and now you're suddenly asking for a source.
Do you need any more of the dozens of links that are popping up, son?
Don't worry I do search things myself and I only ask for a source if I can't find a source myself.
You've offered 4 links and only 1 of them support your claim that Elon used "Lines of code written" as his metric. The other 3 don't mention "lines of code" at all as far as I can tell. The one that does is an article from a blog by someone named Bennett Garner. The only evidence he offers is
“Lines of code written in the past year” was his metric.
He puts "lines of code written in the past year" in quotation marks but he doesn't even say where he got that quote from. It's not mentioned anywhere in the article. But he did include a 13 minute long youtube with his blog and because I have nothing better to do I watched the whole thing in order to help you source your own claim.
At 7:24 in the video he offers his source which is a tweet of someone retweeting another tweet by someone named "mcmillen" that says "Reportedly Elon stack-ranked Twitter engineers by "lines of code written in the last year" and fired the bottom X%."
So your source is a blogger quoting a twitter user who retweeted someone that said "reportedly Elon is doing this thing" without any mention of who exactly is "reporting" this.
The fact that you immediately followed that post by calling my excerpt of world-renowned award winning biographer Walter Isaacson "hearsay" shows you are lacking some self-awareness.
I was just browsing some forums and "reportedly" there is a baby eating cabal in the basement of some pizza restaurant. I trust I don't need to source this and you can all find this information yourself. It's just what's been reported.
On January 20 2025 08:04 BlackJack wrote: I was just browsing some forums and "reportedly" there is a baby eating cabal in the basement of some pizza restaurant. I trust I don't need to source this and you can all find this information yourself. It's just what's been reported.
Ironic to make this point because pizzagate is one of the idiotic things Elon promotes.
EPT
