Meanwhile, he’s banned Chad Loder a second time, right after he reported on a massive data breach at Twitter which exposed the entire population of France.
https://twitter.com/MadBastard_v2/status/1595937950155825152
Elon’s new plan: fix it with rainbows!
Stranger
JFC. This man is broken somehow.
Musk, the visionary ultra super genius, has solved the authentication checkmark. Colors.
What a dumb ass.
(apparently I should have scrolled up)
There is so much wrong with this that I wouldn’t believe it’s real if it wasn’t being attributed to Musk. With him, any idiocy is possible.
I don’t know how you’d judge “quality” just from looking at a snippet of code. What, the guy used a “Go to” statement? Not enough comments? Comments not snarky enough?
As long as minimum basic standards of reliability, maintainability, and reasonable efficiency are met, the “quality” of the code in some random module isn’t even particularly important, compared to the importance of a well-structured and extensible system architecture. And you don’t determine that by scrutinizing lines of code. If I had concerns about the quality of a software team, I’d want to review their design documents and development methodologies, not goddam lines of code. And in a completely different dimension, software quality also comes from well-motivated software teams who have a sense of ownership of their work and take pride in it.
As usual, Musk is doing all the wrong things and creating a work environment so toxic that he may as well be actively trying to sink the company. Whether or not that’s his intent is pretty much irrelevant at this point.
@BeepKillBeep
Since color codes don’t meet public usability guidelines I wonder what sort of different shapes or sounds they’ll provide along with the colors? Or is that another regulatory & IT best practices regime they simply intend to ignore?
After all, in his view people with vision deficits are simply Untermensch to be crushed by the forces of Muskly mightliness-makes-righteousness. So why bother catering for the likes of Them?
It reminds me of the scene in so many movies and TV shows where someone has gotten entangled in a net. The more they thrash trying to escape, the more entangled they get. And the more entangled they get the more panicky their thrashing becomes.
Eventually they completely subdue themselves, rendered helpless until someone or something shows up to rescue them, eat them, torture them, etc.
I think I’ll call it: The Torment of the Musk.
Watch 'em be red and green.
Anyone thinking about this logically (i.e., not Musk) would realize that a checkmark only makes sense for some sort of verification process. Someone who is just a pro user could have some sort of star.
Or, if you want to copy from an extension I use, you can have the paid user just show a dollar sign.
So instead of “Let that sink in”, what he really meant when he was carrying the sink was “I’m gonna sink this bird!”
Now I get it.
I’m thinking of it as the reverse of “everything but the kitchen sink”. He brought nothing to Twitter, except a broken sink.
You only got half of it. First, anyone who has ever been involved in a code review knows it take time. Even if the entire resources of Musk’s flunkies were devoted to reviewing one poor schmuck’s code there wouldn’t have been enough time since the reign of terror has begun. Especially since the developer was obviously not there to explain decisions that might not be obvious.
Plus, it is standard practice that managers be excluded from reviews so that they can be ways of improving code, not ways of firing the coder. This was not a review, it was the Spanish Inquisition.
Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter:
He’s lost half his advertisers:
That’s why it was so unexpected! Musk’s chief weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…his two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…his three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Trump!
It’s all part of his strategy. He’s going to winnow down advertisers until he only has the “hardcore” ones that will stick with Twitter regardless of the rates or whether the ads appear alongside tweets with violent, misogynistic, or racist rhetoric.
Stranger
I tried the link, and get a ‘this page does not exist’ from Twitter. Can you check it?
There are a lot of pretty fundamental errors you can spot in a code review - which is why code reviews are a thing. Do you also think the practice of giving a coding test to potential hires is a useless thing? Ater all, what can you learn from a few lines of code, right?
As someone who has literally done hundreds of code reviews, let me give you a very short list of examples of red flags you can find in a review:
Not handling exceptions properly. If a method throws an exception, you need to handle that exception when you call that method. Unhandled exceptions can cause all kinds of problems down the road.
Also, it’s a no-no to just handle the generic exception:
catch (Exception e) {}.Some functions can throw multiple exception types, and you should handle them specifically. Your job as a pro is to make sure you understand what exceptions a library call can throw (by reading the docs) and make sure you handle each one, and document the shit out of it.
:
//Make sure the rocket doesn't explode when it passes through the vertical and the cosine of the angle returns 0.
catch (DivideByZeroException e) {}Magic constants. It’s not uncommon to find lines like,
If (var == 3.1415)
{
}Instead of creating a constant called PI, setting it to the value, then testing:
#define PI 3.1415926;
function CheckForSpecialValue(var)
{
if(var == PI)
{
}
}PI is obvious, but you’d be shocked how many times you find ‘magic numbers’ that aren’t clear at all. Some number that means something, cut and pasted a hundred times through the code instead of setting a constant.
Useless comments. Comments are not needed for obvious things, but are needed when code does something that’s not common, or is opaque enough to warrant a description. Weak programmers won’t comment, and when told to will often comment like this:
A = B / C; // Divide B by C and set to AOr a function with a comment like this:
//Gets port address
function getPortAddress()
{
}In the meantime, a crazy test goes undocumented or has a lame comment
//Do the test
if ((A && B || C) && (!C && D) || (A && D))
{
// Do something
}
else if (!A && !D) || C)
{
// Do something else
}For that matter, long chains of complex booleans can almost always be written differently and more understandably, and the boolean logic can usually be reduced through algabraic reduction (de Morgan’s theorem, etc).
I did a code review just like that once. The developer wrote a boolean expression about three lines long. I told him he needed to reduce it, and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I mentioned a couple of ways, and he lookd blank and said he’d never heard of any of it. I know for a fact that this stuff is taught in any CS faculty worthy of the title, so I assumed he got a low mark in that class and didn’t absorb the material.
I once did a code review for a developer who was writing a handler for a couple of variables. His code looked like this:
If (var1 == 1)
{
if (b == 1)
callfunction(var1);
if (b == 2)
callfunction(b);
if (b == 3)
callfunc2(b);
}
else if (var1 == 2)
{
if (b == 1)
callfunction2(var1);
if (b == 2)
callfunction2(b);
if (b == 3)
callfunc3(b);
}
else if (var1 == 3)
{
...etc
}Lots more like that. These aren’t ‘formatting’ errors. They aren’t trivial. They speak to a lack of clear thinking, or laziness, or failure to adhere to standards, or poor education. Youy’ll never see a really good programmer making errors like this.
Code can read almost like an IQ test. Convoluted spaghetti code vs elegant code that is clear, readable and performant often means, in my experience, that the guy writing the spaghetti code either isn’t that smart, or doesn’t care, or had a lousy education.
If I were Musk and was looking to sort out devs by code review, the things above (and many more) would be red flags. I would then ask the developer to defend the way the code was written, and if they can’t… sayanora.
In a normal time for a normal employee review that wouldn’t be the case, because you’d want to try to educate them and get them doing things the right way first. But in the context of having to lay off half the coding work force in a fairly quick manner, this would be a reasonable way to go, given the difficulty of any method you chose.
If Pareto is to be believed, the 100 top advertisers represent(ed) ~90% of Twitter’s ad revenue. The top 50 probably represent 75% of the pre-buyout ad revenue. These are statistical WAGs, but not crazy WAGs.
Whether he intended it or not, Twitter is now assuredly a non-profit organization and will remain so indefinitely. UNless he thinks he can charge e.g. Trump for the privilege of Trump’s tweets appearing between Alex Jones-like ads.
Infowars & MyPillow FTW!!
No. From the article:
Half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers appear to no longer be advertising on the website. A report from Media Matters for America states that these 50 advertisers have spent almost $2 billion on Twitter ads since 2020 and more than $750 million just in 2022.
Seven additional advertisers have slowed their advertising to almost nothing, according to the report, which was published on Tuesday. These companies have paid Twitter more than $255 million since 2020.
And:
“In 2021, Twitter had $5.1 billion in total revenue, including $4.5 billion from advertising”
So it looks like the lost advertisers represent about 20% or so of total advertising.
Elmo says if Twitter gets kicked off the app store, he’ll make his own smartphone. With blackjack! And hookers!
I mean, how hard could it be? He can shift a production line at Tesla to start spitting them out next week! Plus, they’ll come with Full Self Tweeting (FST) which is going to roll out next month next quarter end of 2023 real soon now!
I just looked up Liz Wheeler because I couldn’t figure out if it was a deliberate parody of Megyn Kelly or if the resemblance was incidental. And now that I’ve researched her…I still can’t tell.
Stranger