Musk in 2019. All of the hardware for FSD is on all Tesla cars.
Musk in 2023. Nope. Buy a new one losers.
This is certainly bound to please people that paid thousands of dollars for the FSD package.
He’ll always be ELoon to me.
< Billy Joel >
Yeah, he steals like a thief, but he’ll always be ELoon to me
Oh, he takes care of himself, he can wait if he wants
He’s run out of time
Oh, and he never puts out and he never fits in
He’s just out of his mind
…Twitter is not running fine, as I’ve been documenting throughout this thread. And none of the things I’ve talked about are fixed.
The algorithm is basically fubar now, there are people that I’ve followed for years that, no matter what I do, don’t show up in my feed any more. No more Parker Molloy. No more Imani Gandy. No Moviebob. No AOC. No Ilhan Omar. No Alexandria Erin. No Lexi Alexander. No John Scalzi. No JMS. They are all posting daily, on the regular, the same way as they used too. Just I don’t see them any more. Not without having to directly visit each person’s feed.
It pisses me off because that’s the whole reason why I’m on Twitter. They are all still posting regularly, multiple times a day, but the algorithm instead show me the same complete strangers, over and over again to the point where I think “did I follow them and forget that I had followed them?” And it turns out that I hadn’t.
The latest thing to break are the Recommended Tweets when you click search. That’s just gone now. It broke when Elon took over, and for a few weeks the featured Tweet was stuck: then it got replaced by rotating celebrity gossip, but now all of the “following recommended tweets” are just gone now.
The only thing left on the explore tab now are “trends”, and the top four “trending in New Zealand” topics are “sign the petition”, “Andrew”, “Shame” and “Scotland”. Only the first one is actually even remotely close to trending on local Twitter. We had a once in a life-time storm over the weekend, Auckland is underwater and in a state of emergency, the mayor is under pressure and apparently the algorithm has determined that the word “Scotland” is one of the things we are all talking about here.
On the news tab we have trending Jim Jordan, and NFTarts and BabyDodgeCoin and OMG NICE and Tulsi and I LOVE THIS HOODIE Free Mint and Jill Biden and absolutely no local news at all. On the sports tab we’ve got Jay Uso and Victor Osihnehn but does it have the 20/20 results from NZ vs India from last night? Nope.
So the region-specific personalisation of trending topics is just gone. Broken. No longer working.
Also on the explore tab are videos. But the videos in explore have a completely different UX to those embedded in a tweet. If I tap the screen while playing an embedded tweet it hides all the text and the buttons. But if I tap the screen while playing a video in explore it pauses the video. (There appears to be no way to hide the details on explore.) And if I wanted to read the comments on a video in the explore tab: I can’t. You can click through to the person who posted the video. But you then need to scroll down the feed to try and find the video (that may have been posted days or even weeks ago). Its frustrating.
And speaking of video: I’m still encountering videos where you just can’t play more than a few seconds before the screen just freezes. And this isn’t device specific: I’ve gone from my phone to the deskop thinking that I could watch the video there but the screen still froze in exactly the same place. All of the talk about “taking on Youtube” and uploading higher resolution and longer videos are all just talk. They aren’t going to happen.
And talking about “just talk”: “see half the ads” was one of the selling points of Twitter Blue. And that still is listed as “coming soon.” The accessibility problems I pointed out earlier in the thread still haven’t been addressed and when checking out Twitter Blue just now I just found ANOTHER one where the Twitter Blue pop-up modal hides most of the information on a scroll section behind the primary call-to-action if you make the screen bigger so that its easier to read.
As for the new features? Yeah I’ve seen plenty roll out. And then a couple of days later they roll away, never to be seen again. Twitter is essentially currently in open beta.
Twitter is breaking in multiple different ways. As I said in another thread none of it will be enough to “break” the site. We aren’t going to see a catastrophic failure. But as each thing breaks rather than fixing it, they will just quietly remove it. Or in the case of the algorithm, they will just let it keep doing its thing. The pace of “new features” has slowed right down to nothing right now from what I’ve observed.
As Linus once said, those are good reasons. Doesn’t sound like something I’d want to pay eight bucks a month for.
My spouse has used Twitter as a professional networking and outreach platform for many years.
Recently, events she has held and promotions she’s done have gotten little to no engagement, even from followers, which is really unusual.
Presumably her followers are not getting her posts in their feed.
She’s figuring out how to build a Facebook presence, as Twitter is fundamentally broken and is no longer a useful or reliable way to communicate even with people who are following you.
“Running fine”? @Sam_Stone , you have no idea what “running fine” means.
I suspect your experience might be affected negatively more than mine, because Twitter was ‘boosting’ liberal voices and shadowbanning conservatives, and if they aren’t now you may see a rightward shift in your feed as you describe. Or maybe the algo IS somewhat broken right now and actively being worked on.
I listened to the ‘All-In’ podcast from Twitter HQ, and Elon stopped to talk about what he was up to. He admitted that he knew he would make lots of mistakes when he started. He said that he fully expects to roll back many things they roll out, but he’d rather try stuff quickly than sit in analysis paralysis for years, which appears to be what was going on with old management. He has always said that if you’re not breaking things sometimes, you aren’t moving fast enough.
The reason so many features have been coming out so quickly, BTW. is that they were already written but had been torpedoed or sidelined or delayed by old Twitter management. Musk said that a bunch of engineers came to him with features they had written that prior management refused to implement, so Musk looked them over, picked the ones he thought would be good features and let those guys run with them. He’s already unwound a couple of them, but others have worked well.
By the way, giving agency to your team engineers is a great way to build morale.
This is not ‘beta testing with the public’, it’s straight-up agile development. Build constantly, ship often, be prepared to roll back and refactor when things go wrong, get feedback from customers, iterate. Musk applies that philosophy to everything from software to building rockets.
Beta testing with end users is literally a component of agile. That’s one of the key points of implementing it.
Well, that’s a nitpick. It’s not like a traditional beta test, and traditional beta tests are typically defined periods that can last a rather long time.
For example, before we switched to agile we would do long dev cyles where you’d do requirements and feasibility for three months or so, then architect the thing for another three to six months or whatever, then maybe a year long build cycle, three months for integration, two months of alpha testing, two months of beta testing, build final product, print materials, ship.
Now with agile there’s no integration phase because we’re always integrating, and rather than waiting for large, up-front designed version releases we build features that are shippable from the get-go (lots of unit testing and integration testing, which happens constantly). Then we give them to customers. It’s not a ‘beta test’ in the sense that they are testing a non-final version of the product. There IS no ‘final’ version. There’s just lots of constant incremental releases of features.
After the video of the attack on Paul Pelosi, there were loads of tweets demanding that Elmo apologize to the Pelosi family. His only response was, “I did.” Not publicly, he didn’t.
This sounds great. Is “be a genius in secret while looking like an idiot in public” also part of Musk’s management philosophy? I’m not being entirely facetious, I don’t know that much about the guy before the Twitter fiasco. Really, how do you explain his behavior? I can’t think of any other management genius who has behaved like this, so my inclination is to apply Occam’s Razor to the situation. I can still believe that he is a genius in a certain limited domain, but his public behavior certainly seems to place strict limits on the extent of that domain.
Yeah, Musk runs his mouth, and it gets him in trouble. I don’t know if he apologized or not, but someone of his influence should not be making wild speculations in public about the nefarious behaviour of others. He did the same thing with his ‘pedo’ remarks during that cave rescue. It was a stupid thing to say, but Musk doesn’t have much of a filter, like lots of highly intelligent geeks.
Calling it “Agile Development” is a an amazing method for weird nerds to hand wave away any technical criticism of Musk. Anything that happens is simply “Agile Development”.
I also enjoy weird nerds hand waving his social errors because he’s “too intelligent”.
It’s not part of his management philosopjhy, it’s just who he is. He’s an eccentric genius who is probably on the spectrum and is way more comfortable talking to engineers about engineering than anything else. He may also be in a position to be rich enough that he just doesn’t care what people think, so he doesn’t have a filter.
I just read an early story about Musk - after college he originally applied to Netscape for a job, but when they called him in for an interview he was too shy to go. He started Zip2 instead, so he could just work in his apartment. He’s not like other people.
There is plenty of history of great entrepreneurs, inventors and capitalists who were terrible in public. Tesla, Edison, Ford, Hughes, etc. I was going to add Zuckerberg, but his awfulness in public might not be accompanied by busoness genius. Musk has his own kind of charm though, which the left loved until they discovered he didn’t belong to their tribe.
Among Silicon Valley investors, Musk is almost a legend. David Sacks said the other day that one of the reasons there are suddenly so many layoffs in Silicon Valley is that ‘Musk showed that tech companies were bloated and needed to be trimmed’, against the conventional wisdom that the way to growth was constant hiring. And so everyone is following suit and looking for bloat in their own companies before the big recession that everyone thinks is coming this year.
There’s a reason Musk had no problem raising the capital he needed to buy Twitter. His track record is such that everyone wants to invest in whatever he’s doing next.
I’ve actually run agile teams. How about you?
Twitter IS an agile shop. Has been for years. But the engineers were being stymied by bloated management with their own goals. I know that feeling well - it helped kill the last company I worked for.
As I said, it gives you weird nerds an amazing magic wand.
It’s not an absolute good to release buggy software under the guise of “beta testing” to the whole or sognificant portion of the customer base.
Gotta balance user feedback against user relationships. “That’s agile” is a meaningless defense. Buggy software makes the company look bad and erodes customer confidence and brand strength.
Putting out features that don’t work is an undesired outcome of any dev process.
It gives Heinlein clutching dorks lil chubbies.
Plus we all use agile-developed software all the time. We know that buggy new features and broken old features are not an inevitable result. So it’s not a defense at all.
I understand why someone not informed about software development might see that argument as valid, but surely @Sam_Stone’s direct experience would tell him that agile development is no excuse.
What we’re seeing here is Elon Musk making amateur mistakes, and people being unwilling to accept that this is just because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He may be a genius in some areas, but he’s clearly out of his depth here.
He should hire someone else to handle it, and actually stick with acting as a CEO, setting the general direction of the company.