Social Media Discussion

[hepcat]

Self typing Twitter is next.

[Max Peck]

Spoiler:

[Smoove_B]

Did...we know all this?

Someone has to say it: Elon Musk has lied for 27 years about his credentials. He does not have a BS in Physics, or any technical field. Did not get into a PhD program. Dropped out in 1995 & was illegal. Later, investors quietly arranged a diploma - but not in science. 1/

Unrolled:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593 ... 74368.html

[malchior]

So if you haven't been keeping up - apparently Musk's 'say yes to being extremely hardcore (aka abused)' surprisingly didn't work and the entire evening has been people posting out their individual contingency plans if the site crashes. I don't know how real the possibility is but things are looking pretty shaky overall at Twitter.



Also he leveled a threat at his managers about performance management that doesn't seem all that helpful. We've had hints of his abusive management style from accounts at his other companies but either this is worse than usual or it's just more transparent here. Still the rumors are that he chased out core critical teams potentially necessary for business continuity.

Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution. It is also expected that you have in-person meetings with your colleagues on a reasonable cadence, ideally weekly, but not less than once per month.

At risk of stating the obvious, any manager who falsely claims that someone reporting to them is doing excellent work or that a given role is essential, whether remote or not, will be exited from the company.

“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”

...

Multiple “critical” engineering teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said another employee who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. For example, the team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is gone after Thursday. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” the employee said.

[Alefroth]

If you had money on Truth Social lasting longer than Twitter, you're going to do pretty well.

[LordMortis]

Did...we know all this?

The money shot

Trump should have taught us that an impulsive, insecure oligarch with dark secrets and poor judgment, who barely scraped through Wharton and talks too much with Russians, is a security risk.

[Zaxxon]

[LordMortis]

I figured he name the baby $8xy.

[hepcat]

[Skinypupy]

Seen this morning, feels like this sums it all up.

For a fraction of what Musk paid to become the butt of business school jokes for the next century, he could have done something so spectacular for humanity that he would have been hailed as a hero for the next 1000 years.

But hey, at least he owned the libs. And in the end, that's really all that matters.

[hepcat]

When your actions are primarily motivated by spite, you're the problem.

[Zaxxon]

Solid thread from someone who just took the severance offer after surviving the layoffs.

[LordMortis]

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593 ... 13025.html

[The Meal]

As someone who has worked under an extremely hardcore corporate expectation, the appeal is A) compensation, B) capability of coworker, and C) being “made” for your career. It helps if you’re a bit martyrish (like cold-weather denizens explaining why they wouldn’t relocate to somewhere without major snowstorms).

If your employment condition removes item B in that you can’t count on other internal teams capabilities, it’s an easy decision to move on.

Looking back on my “extremely hardcore” career decisions, I’d say those “appeal” items are a bit of a joke. I’m fortunate that my home lifestyle (especially based on partner choice) had remained fairly stable despite career demands, but still, there are better arcs through one’s working world than just hammering on yourself day after day, month after month, program after program with an ultimate result much like any other. At least the reminiscences among survivors are filled with most excellent stories…

[malchior]

That thread is great. I want to be surprised at how ridiculous that is but I can't be. Musk and the people who he surrounded on this deal (e.g. David Sacks) have shown little compassion or understanding about what real people consider in these situations. He is trying to be positive in his feedback but other people in the same position were also mad that they were given 24 hours to process all that. Peter touches on the tolls of the decision differently but this drama has sucked all the enthusiasm out of the place for most of this year. A lot of people were just done with the drama.

[Zaxxon]

That thread is great. I want to be surprised at how ridiculous that is but I can't be. Musk and the people who he surrounded on this deal (e.g. David Sacks) have shown little compassion or understanding about what real people consider in these situations. He is trying to be positive in his feedback but other people in the same position were also mad that they were given 24 hours to process all that. Peter touches on the tolls of the decision differently but this drama has sucked all the enthusiasm out of the place for most of this year. A lot of people were just done with the drama.

A key piece that Musk seems to have completely missed is that you can't take a culture that was developed largely from the start at Tesla and SpaceX (that is, working your ass off constantly for a shared long-term vision) and swoop in and drop it on a place that is very much not that.

Especially when you can't or won't articulate what the vision is even going to be. And you start by trashing the place for months leading up to the purchase, and by trashing many of the people at the company in the first days after purchase.

[LawBeefaroni]

Twitter will attract pure mercenaries and Musk sycophants. Can't imagine how bad it would be to work at a place like that.

Also, buried in that thread was a possible strategy pivot to more adult content. I see a Musk-run bro/incel fueled disaster if that happens.

[Carpet_pissr]

Three months severance is garbage also, unless you just started. Is the assumption that that is a generous severance?

[Zaxxon]

Three months severance is garbage also, unless you just started. Is the assumption that that is a generous severance?

I believe it's targeted to avoid a lawsuit for WARN Act non-compliance.

[Skinypupy]

So…he’s now publicly stating that he’s formally implementing the exact thing that the derp brigade have been claiming for years is the biggest problem with the platform (I.e. “shadowbanning”).

But it’s totally cool now because Mr. Edgelord Extreme now gets to be the one deciding what qualifies as “negative speech”.

Lol, fucking clownshoes

[malchior]

At least you won't be able to earn on the hate! (And we don't need content moderators anymore because we'll "automate" this like Youtube does with copyright material).

[Holman]

Long and stark thread on the dangers of running Twitter with a skeleton crew:

[LordMortis]

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593 ... 78592.html

[Isgrimnur]

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593 ... 78592.html

[Alefroth]

Long and stark thread on the dangers of running Twitter with a skeleton crew:

I imagine a lot of those could result in criminal culpability.

[malchior]

This is *nuts*

He wants to learn about the tech stack *after* he chased all the people who knew away. I'm beginning to believe that the crazier conspiracy theories about this buy are true.

Elon Musk sent a flurry of emails to Twitter employees on Friday morning with a plea.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in a two-paragraph message, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Thanks, Elon.”

About 30 minutes later, Mr. Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term used to describe a company’s software and related systems. Then in another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person.

[malchior]

Long and stark thread on the dangers of running Twitter with a skeleton crew

He touches on it but it's sysadmin focused. He doesn't even really get into some of the more immediately plausible risks in my mind. All of which revolve around the greatly diminished cybersecurity capability of Twitter. I actually expected prior to day zero they were probably pretty good - probably a B+/A- shop. That'd mean they had a full range of cybersecurity capabilities and I expect they were almost all in-house and distributed across the globe for coverage.

After day zero, I expect it probably degraded significantly quickly with the first mass layoff. And to some extent I have some insight into it; it was deep and indiscriminate. It probably degraded into C-/D territory. After the 'hardcore' cull? It is probably essentially unmanned. The problem is that cybersecurity at scale is a *process* and not a set of tools. All of the disruption very likely broke several if not all their capabilities. But most importantly all the detect and respond capability is likely almost certainly gone and it is what day-to-day keeps the bad actors out. Worse you probably have people being overprovisioned access to make up for the fact so many key people left. And no one is keeping tabs on privileged access anymore. It's a recipe for disaster.

What does that mean? It's open season for repressive regimes to get in and start cracking open DMs and such. If I had any info on Twitter I didn't want used against me - i'd be culling it. But even then you have no idea if it's really deleted or not. Nice!

[Holman]

[...]
What does that mean? It's open season for repressive regimes to get in and start cracking open DMs and such. If I had any info on Twitter I didn't want used against me - i'd be culling it. But even then you have no idea if it's really deleted or not. Nice!

Yep.

I'm sure Musk will have a funny meme to post when we start hearing about dissidents brutally executed by governments who've uncovered their messages.

[waitingtoconnect]

This is like the fall of HP in fast motion.
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/1213 ... 867f0b5ee3

It’s beyond belief that anyone would ever ask developers for their term most pertinent lines of code let alone the worlds richest man who should be managing and leading not getting down in the weeds like this.

It’s also beyond belief that they sack the guy who ran the entry system into their HQ and Musk himself calls to get this guy to let them back in. Again the richest man in the world doing this… it’s insane.

Without all these workers lots of bad actors will want to take it down. Twitter is a tool used by Iranian dissendents and Ukranians fighting Russia. With no network engineers or cyber teams how do you defend against cyber attacks or simple server failure?

I think it’s too easy to say the site will collapse in on itself. Realistically this will not happen.

Musk has countless devs at his other firms he can bring in. I worked with a number of clients over the last 2 to 3 years where whole teams resigned and moved to other companies and those organisations did not collapse.

In these situations whose who are left tend to rally round and fight to keep the lights on. Execs like Musk tend to be the winner as those left behind sacrifice their health, marriages and their psyches while they work around the clock.

However whatever crew is left or being reinforced by outsiders it takes time to learn what’s been built. This is doubly hard when everyone has gone. Twitter is a simple app but it has to run at scale which is incredibly hard to keep going. Executives tend to have an iceberg fallicy when looking at these sort of systems. The only important bit to them is the bit they can see, namely the user experience. Everything else is on many ways viewed as unnecessary or redundant.

The real realistic risk is that Twitter has a major outage and goes down for days badly damaging its reputation.

However it will get through, Musk will hail himself a genius, the right wing will fawn over him and his staff will be basically husks working 80 hour weeks.

[Max Peck]

Long and stark thread on the dangers of running Twitter with a skeleton crew

He touches on it but it's sysadmin focused. He doesn't even really get into some of the more immediately plausible risks in my mind. All of which revolve around the greatly diminished cybersecurity capability of Twitter. I actually expected prior to day zero they were probably pretty good - probably a B+/A- shop. That'd mean they had a full range of cybersecurity capabilities and I expect they were almost all in-house and distributed across the globe for coverage.

After day zero, I expect it probably degraded significantly quickly with the first mass layoff. And to some extent I have some insight into it; it was deep and indiscriminate. It probably degraded into C-/D territory. After the 'hardcore' cull? It is probably essentially unmanned. The problem is that cybersecurity at scale is a *process* and not a set of tools. All of the disruption very likely broke several if not all their capabilities. But most importantly all the detect and respond capability is likely almost certainly gone and it is what day-to-day keeps the bad actors out. Worse you probably have people being overprovisioned access to make up for the fact so many key people left. And no one is keeping tabs on privileged access anymore. It's a recipe for disaster.

What does that mean? It's open season for repressive regimes to get in and start cracking open DMs and such. If I had any info on Twitter I didn't want used against me - i'd be culling it. But even then you have no idea if it's really deleted or not. Nice!

You're not wrong. I've seen at least one report that it is trivially easy to disable 2FA on an account by spoofing the phone number and sending an SMS message to shut it off.

Twitter Two-Factor Authentication Has a Vulnerability

Update Nov. 18, 2022 1:36 UTC: Information Security Media Group has become aware that another security researcher, @BetoOnSecurity, also identified the ability to turn off Twitter SMS 2FA via a texted "STOP" command as a vulnerability, given the potential for spoofing. Our source independently identified the vulnerability. Twitter's ability to support two-factor authentication via SMS appeared to glitch the day before, generating increased interest in the mechanics of Twitter's SMS 2FA system.

[malchior]

This is a newer one. Spoofing a Caller ID is trivial so this is a pretty big problem. One way to deal with it is to have a SMS reply to the actual number for confirmation or some other means. It'd be something you could write in a week or two perhaps if your company still had developers. You have to even wonder if anyone is available to process the bounty on this.

[Skinypupy]

However it will get through, Musk will hail himself a genius, the right wing will fawn over him and his staff will be basically husks working 80 hour weeks.

This is the thought I keep coming back to when I see the usual narrative from the usual suspects of, “I don’t see the problem here. Elon is simply asking those lazy Twitter employees to actually work instead of sitting around being woke all day!”

[malchior]

However it will get through, Musk will hail himself a genius, the right wing will fawn over him and his staff will be basically husks working 80 hour weeks.

This is the thought I keep coming back to when I see the usual narrative from the usual suspects of, “I don’t see the problem here. Elon is simply asking those lazy Twitter employees to actually work instead of sitting around being woke all day!”

It's also tapping the vein of populism we are used to seeing. Though it still is weird to see populists bootlicking the world's richest man who has disrupted thousands of lives because he got bored.

[Alefroth]

The cop out rational people were expecting. You can say whatever you want on my advertiser dependent platform, I just won't let anyone see it.

[Alefroth]

At this point, I don't have a problem with Trump being reinstated. I don't think it will help him any.

[Jaymann]

"Reinstate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

[hepcat]

He’s been reinstated. Musk is desperate.

[Skinypupy]

Twitter content moderation is basically just the Colosseum at this point, with spectators giving a thumbs up and thumbs down on who lives and dies.

I’m sure that will be a great model that advertisers will want to support.

[Max Peck]

Twitter seems to think it's really important that I know that "HE'S BACK" and "#TrudeauIsTheNextHitler" for some reason. I wonder why that is...

[Rumpy]

"Free speech" and politics. Yeah, that'll end well.