How Twitter?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Stephenson wrote about this in Snow Crash.

What’s gone at Twitter? A data center, janitors, some toilet paper | The Seattle Times

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

lol

Pretty solid Musking™️ from Tesla here. Choking on inventory, slash the price $7,500, collect cash from buyers (juice the Dec 31 cash balance), then delay delivery, revoke the cash and SC mile incentives (might as well get the margins back up while we’re at it) and send a bill. pic.twitter.com/po5uONIXzI

— Keubiko (@Keubiko) December 30, 2022

[JoeP]

[Stephen Maturin]

lol squatters

[Sock Puppet]

We contacted Twitter about the lawsuit today and will update this article if we get a response, but the company reportedly eliminated its communications department after Musk took over.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

Reported by whom?

[Ari]

Things Musk says yes too, Q of Qanon, the son of the owner of 8chan.
Things Musk says no too, The DC metro system.

I can’t wait for the eventual merger when Musk sells Twitter to 8chan.

Gizmodo: Twitter Bans DC Bus System, Brings Back the Guy Everyone Thinks Is Q

[-FX-]

How is Twitter still even a thing? The internet experts assured us it would be broken, bankrupt and useless long before now.

[mickthinks]

The internet experts assured us it would be broken, bankrupt and useless long before now.


xx Strawman in the thread!

[erimir]

Originally Posted by -FX-

How is Twitter still even a thing? The internet experts assured us it would be broken, bankrupt and useless long before now.

Broken and useless were hypothesized to be things that could happen, because large systems require maintenance, and he got rid of a lot of the people who do it.

I will say that one of my DM conversations is inaccessible on mobile and has been for a few weeks now. It only ever shows as blank when I try to read it. This never happened before. So certainly I don't buy that it's working better than ever, or even as well as before.

But in terms of bankrupt - nobody was claiming that it would go bankrupt in a week or whatever. Musk has a lot of money, and Twitter can lose money for a while before he would take the step of declaring bankruptcy.

There is, however, no doubt that Twitter is less profitable than it was before the takeover. Musk drove off a bunch of advertisers, which were Twitter's main source of revenue. He replaced them with a small number of $8-$11 Twitter Blue subscriptions - very small as a percentage of users, and small in terms of revenue compared to the loss of advertisers. Additionally, Twitter now has massive debt to service that Musk put on its balance sheet. Twitter was never profitable for an entire year, and the debt service alone would push their few previous profitable quarters back into the red. And even firing a lot of people isn't enough to compensate for the loss in ad revenue and added debt.

So
+small gain in Twitter Blue revenue
+reduced headcount
-lots of ad revenue
-massive debt service
=
Twitter is losing a lot more money than before

Twitter hasn't declared bankruptcy, no, but Musk can always infuse it with more cash if he doesn't want to do that. But it's hardly some big win for Musk's vision of Twitter that Musk is willing to continue losing money.

And that's before getting into Musk likely going to owe money from lawsuits and government penalties. Cost-saving measures like "not paying your rent" are not long-term solutions, and may cost money in the long-run. I understand he thinks he can bully his way out of paying, but he wasn't able to bully his way out of buying Twitter. And disregarding what the FCC and EU regulators are telling you isn't likely to work out in his favor either.

[erimir]

And that's without getting into the massive losses Musk has taken from Tesla's tanking stock price.

Tesla was always overvalued. Many people thought Musk was a visionary genius, he successfully created a myth that he was an inventor and an engineer (I've never seen any evidence of him inventing squat - which specific things did Musk invent?), combined with some legitimate trailblazing in the EV space, he convinced people to think that Tesla was going to get bigger and bigger and forever dominate EVs, despite never ramping enough production to ever be a threat to be the biggest player in the auto market. But now Musk's carefully cultivated image of himself has been punctured, and Tesla is facing unprecedented competition from more established auto companies, while suffering from quality control issues, negative press about the dangerous auto-pilot feature and other issues.

All in all, trying to about how things haven't collapsed is just cope. There's no way to spin the last six months as a win for Musk, he has instead set a world record for losing money.

[-FX-]

Originally Posted by erimir

(I've never seen any evidence of him inventing squat - which specific things did Musk invent?)

Elon Musk’s portfolio has 18 patents that belong to 9 unique patent families. His patents belong to vehicle design, autonomous vehicles, location-based search, etc.

Elon Musk Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search

Now you can't say you never saw any evidence.

[-FX-]

Sorry for your butthurt

[-FX-]

For some reason online experts think I am some kind of Elon Musk fan. Which is hilarious, since I don't even know much about him. When people write bad shit about him as person, I figure there is some truth to it. You just can't know how much is true.

Unlike his actual real world accomplishments, which are fucking awesome. Including is hosting a SNL, which was one of the only funny shows of that season. In any case, not knowing much, I decided to remedy that.

So I just read the following

The Evolution of Elon Musk: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly | Adalo Blog

Which seems pretty balanced, and now I know a lot about Elon Musk.

I also know the online experts are idiots.

[Ari]

The biggest of all of this is how business genius Musk keeps offering up PTA fundraiser levels of ideas while getting into fights with other kids in the class. We’re only a few months away from Twitter entering into a singing competition that offers just the amount they need to save their building!

Although we’re in the darker timeline and Musk is trying to tap every resource so I really won’t be too surprised if Twitter’s database of information gets sold off to Russia/China/Proud-boys/etc. Anyone who’s an activist on twitter should probably worry at this point, considering how Musk seems to be courting the far-right and will happily spout propaganda.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by -FX-

Elon Musk Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search

Now you can't say you never saw any evidence.

I'm not at all surprised that Musk's name is on some patents, I would've predicted that it would be. But not all of those have been granted. None of those have Musk as the sole patent holder.

And not all of them appear to be inventions there's any reason to believe were unique or useful. Some of the descriptions sound like they would either be 1. things that shouldn't be patentable (improperly granted patents seem pretty common) or 2. things that describe something pretty commonplace now (e.g. web mapping like Google Maps, or VOIP) but for which I've never heard Musk's name come up as an innovator in the space. A mishmash of patents mostly not related to the businesses he's known for suggests, you know, that these inventions were failures.

So anyway, that's quite another matter from him actually being the inventor. I'm well aware from academia that just because someone's name is on a paper doesn't mean they contributed much of note to the research. This isn't evidence that he actually develops things such as auto-pilot or battery technology, etc.

The only recent one has so many names on it, I'd be surprised if he contributed more than "I want the car to be able to come to me" (and wouldn't be surprised if he contributed less than that). The people who actually did all the programming, machine learning, engineering and inventing to make it work are represented among the 17 other people on the patent.

I've routinely seen people describe him as an inventor in regards to things that are not represented in any of the patents listed there. There's nothing about batteries or automotive engineering, yet the way he's talked about with Tesla, you'd think he designed the battery himself.

If just holding some number of patents is proof of being a genius inventor, then Jack Dorsey is many times the inventor that Musk is, since he holds 7 pages of patents on there, and I can even tell that they're mostly related to one of the areas he's known for (Square, aka Block Inc.).

You'll have to try harder.

[erimir]

Originally Posted by -FX-

For some reason online experts think I am some kind of Elon Musk fan.

Yeah, where would anyone have gotten that impression. Other than the effusive praise.

Originally Posted by -FX-

Unlike his actual real world accomplishments, which are fucking awesome. Including is hosting a SNL, which was one of the only funny shows of that season.

Originally Posted by -FX-

He's making the everything app.
[...]
The word "huge" doesn't come close to describing this.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

At this point seeing an FX post and deciding it's a lie somehow because it's FX who said it isn't even ad hominem anymore.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by -FX-

Elon Musk Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search

lol most of these seem to be dotcom boom era filing of patents for whatever mundane idea for a web application they came up with, like "upload a fax then send email to intended recipient"

Jebus I should've filed a few patents twenty years ago.

[specious_reasons]

Originally Posted by fragment

lol most of these seem to be dotcom boom era filing of patents for whatever mundane idea for a web application they came up with, like "upload a fax then send email to intended recipient"

Jebus I should've filed a few patents twenty years ago.

In the tech industry, you file patents so you have a portfolio of patents to protect yourself against lawsuits by other tech companies who have their own patent portfolios.

I know several engineers with patents, and they mostly have them because a business person took the idea to legal and said, "We should patent this!" There are rare times when an engineer says, "This is a novel idea, I should patent this!" If Musk has one of those kinds of patents, I'd be impressed.

I didn't look at the link because -FX-, and I don't actually care if Musk has real patent or not.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by specious_reasons

In the tech industry, you file patents so you have a portfolio of patents to protect yourself against lawsuits by other tech companies who have their own patent portfolios.

Even when demonstrating prior art or obviousness would be fairly trivial?

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by fragment

Even when demonstrating prior art or obviousness would be fairly trivial?

Sometimes, at least in some industries. If there's prima facie obviousness or truly on-point prior art, there's a good chance the claims are rejected by the examiner and the patent will not issue. Patent fencing inevitably has weak points, but it can still raise the costs of entry for competitors and potentially maintain marketshare if an issued patent is invalidated during the pendency of litigation and appeals.

[fragment]

Originally Posted by ChuckF

If there's prima facie obviousness or truly on-point prior art, there's a good chance the claims are rejected by the examiner and the patent will not issue.

The bullshit tech patents issued suggest that examiners were incapable of even vaguely accurate assessment of "prima facie obviousness or truly on-point prior art" in tech during at least the late 90s and early 00s.

Patent fencing inevitably has weak points, but it can still raise the costs of entry for competitors and potentially maintain marketshare if an issued patent is invalidated during the pendency of litigation and appeals.

Is it supposed to be a good thing that companies can suppress competition by gaining patents that don't stand up to scrutiny?

I can see the incentive to abuse the patent process to protect against abuse of the patent process, but wouldn't it be better to fix the system?

[-FX-]

Originally Posted by fragment

wouldn't it be better to fix the system?

Hey lets not get crazy here

[specious_reasons]

Twitter is working better than ever!

Some third-party Twitter apps appear to be broken - The Verge

Some third-party Twitter clients such as Twitterific and Tweetbot appear to be experiencing an outage, though the cause is currently unclear. Developers haven’t received any communication from the company about whether the issue is caused by a bug or something else, according to a Mastodon post from Paul Haddad, one of Tweetbot’s creators.
[...]
Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken. [...]