I grew up in the 80s and it’s hard to overstate how dominant Arnold was back then. Every little boy wanted to be Commando or Conan.
I also remember when he was governor (I live in cali). Those years I remember less fondly. He was not very good imo but it’s impressive nonetheless that he achieved that milestone.
Once in a lifetime phenomenon. I’m really enjoying this new more thoughtful and reflective era he’s having.
My recollection was that he was a good governor but tied up with political red tape. Also, compare him to other California governors since then and he doesn’t seem so bad.
I don't live there, but my perception was that he was a Republican so hated by the left, but he was a fairly moderate Republican, so not liked all that well by the right either. This left him without many powerful allies on either side.
One of the things I love about his autobiography is that he talks with the same sense of wonder about the people he wanted to be growing up, and reflects on meeting his heroes. In one of my favorite passages in the book, he talks about growing up on on Joe Weider's bodybuilding magazines:
> “Other pictures in the magazine showed scientists and technicians in white lab coats developing nutritional supplements in the Weider Research Clinic. “Weider Research Clinic,” I would say to myself, “this is unbelievable!” And there were pictures of airplanes with “Weider” painted on the side in big letters. I’d imagined an outfit the size of General Motors, with a fleet of planes flying around the globe delivering Weider equipment and food supplements. The writing in the magazine sounded fabulous too when my friends translated it for me. The stories talked about “blasting the muscles” and building “deltoids like cannonballs” and “a chest like a fortress.”
> And now here I was, six years later, on Venice Beach! Just like Dave Draper, only now it was me with the dune buggy and the surfboard and the adoring girls. Of course, by this time I was aware enough to see that Weider was creating a whole fantasy world, with a foundation in reality but skyscrapers of hype. Yes, there were surfboards, but the bodybuilders didn’t really surf. Yes, there were pretty girls, but they were models who got paid for the photo session. (Actually, one of the girls was Joe’s wife, Betty, a beautiful model whom he didn’t have to pay.) Yes, there were Weider supplements and, yes, some research took place, but there was no big building in Los Angeles called the Weider Research Clinic. Yes, Weider products were distributed around the world, but there were no Weider planes. Discovering the hype didn’t bother me, though. Enough of it was true.”
Schwarzenegger was a perfectly fine governor of California. He actually created a mobile pandemic response capability for the state (instant hospital beds), but it was dismantled before the pandemic happened. Would have been handy when hospital beds became scarce.
It makes me sad seeing the narrative on forums like this and elsewhere shift to "Tech companies are all bloated and Elon is right". Anyone saying that is missing the point entirely IMO. Even if if it were 100% true and everything Elon has done up to now is correct, it's still a complete travesty the way it's been executed. You want to come in and make big sweeping changes? Cut dead weight? Fine. But have some god damn empathy and also take a minute to figure out why everything is the way that it is before you start throwing your weight around. All the rest of the dialog is beside the point in my mind.
When people say "defund the police" this is the kind of shit they are talking about. There is no reason for a police force to have access to lethal robots. None.
As the article mentions, they are bomb disposal robots. There is absolutely reason to have a tool capable of firing a shotgun shell attached, and an arm capable of placing a charge. You could hobble the bomb squad with legislation, make their job more deadly--or you could ban this particular use.
It’s crazy how defunding the SFPD involves raising their budget every single year. It’s almost as if “the police have been defunded” is a bit of rhetoric to justify more spending and more draconian violence.
Police didn't go inside because they were scared of dying.
Were they cowards? Yes. Does calling them cowards solve the problem? No.
Robots would actually solve the problem.
In tech we have a culture of blaming the process, not people. Now, we should definitely blame the Uvalde officers for their cowardice. But we should also think about how we could improve the process around dealing with active shooters and officers who simply aren't brave enough when push comes to shove. This was not the first time, and nor will it be the last time, when innocent lives die because of afraid law enforcement officers. Let's solve this problem at the process layer.
All you need is something to grab the shooter's attention. If he is distracted by the robot then human officers have a better opportunity to take him down.
Train citizens to drive robot non-lethal surveillance drones, do paperwork, cut funding for rage prone meat bag policing.
Maintain minimum required force of trigger happies for all the shooting scenarios.
Our secular society isn’t anymore sacrosanct than religious based choices. It should be readily reorganize-able as logistics demand.
Optimizing for 24/7 status quo politics, profit margin optimizing and rent extraction “or else the world ends” is not so different from forcing unfalsifiable magic down our throats.
What I am trying to describe is a very different kind of organization of policing agency and your response is to repeat old semantics, and conclude then it’s not that new?
You posted five sentences. Three of them are mostly just vague conglomerations of charged symbology. Did you expect an entire treatise in response...?
Anyways, the point remains: the difference between a police officer and a civilian is a small amount of training and a whole lot of in-group politics. Not sure how hiring different people solves either problem.
I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:
1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.
3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.
Disagree on #3. Social & collaborative features are the bane of my existence. No I don't want to share all my scraps of information, no I don't want to let my friends know what I'm listening to, no, I don't want to publish product purchases I make to twitter.
I think a better #3 would be: decide whether your audience is individuals or businesses, then build for that.
"Collaborative editing" is table stakes for a modern note editor because even in a single user scenario you will have the same user editing the same note from multiple devices with different levels of connectivity. The product needs a reputation that it will not lose its user's edits, nor will it make annoying branch-style merge conflicts. To do this right you have to treat the other device as an almost-adversarial actor. Unless you want "glitchy" to be in the first sentence people use to describe you.
To note, Figma use something inspired by but not quite CRDTs:
> Figma isn't using true CRDTs though. CRDTs are designed for decentralized systems where there is no single central authority to decide what the final state should be. There is some unavoidable performance and memory overhead with doing this. Since Figma is centralized (our server is the central authority), we can simplify our system by removing this extra overhead and benefit from a faster and leaner implementation.
> It’s also worth noting that Figma's data structure isn't a single CRDT. Instead it's inspired by multiple separate CRDTs and uses them in combination to create the final data structure that represents a Figma document.
If you don’t want collaborative editing, don’t use it. I’m saying most users wanted it and started looking elsewhere when EN couldn’t deliver. It’s easier to add a lock on collaboration than to backfill later.
The problem is that the effort to do collaborative editing creates a lot of other problems.
I want to be able to just start typing, on my phone. Instead, I have to wait for it to sync. If I am in a place with bad reception, that will take a while. It lags and freezes, all in order to support collaboration that I do not want.
I want to add pictures. I want to add links to other notes. I pay for a subscription to get bullet proof cloud backup. Sometimes I want to share notes. I don’t want to collaboratively edit my personal notes with my private thoughts and journal entries.
Evernote stopped focusing on that.
I might switch over to Muse. It was designed to be local first and uses cdrt for sync.
Most EVERNOTE users wanted it? I sincerely doubt that even 20% of Evernote users want that.
People that want a collaborative Docs app already have Google Docs. Evernote is mostly a "digital cabinet". It's where notes and documents go to die (in a good way).
I've used the collaborative feature in google docs only a few times even tho i write google docs like daily. most docs are authored by 1 person. the side comments, however, are invaluable
I think collaborative editing was a mistake. According to Libin circa 2010, Evernote was supposed to be your second brain. Letting other people edit my notes doesn't fit the second brain model (IMHO). I wish Evernote had stayed small and tightly focused on a personal product.
Unfortunately, it's hard to sell to individuals compared to businesses, and so that's where their focus went once they had VC money driving the ship.
In addition to what other posters said, there are opportunity and maintenance costs. Building features for use-cases other than mine puts me in the position of wondering whether my use-case is part of the long term vision for the product. I want a note taking app that strives to improve at capturing quick notes. A document collaboration tool that happens to work pretty well for capturing quick notes is less likely to satisfy me long term.
I agree and disagree. I agree with you because I think they ruined a perfectly good product by trying to turn it into a "collaboration tool" that they could sell big corporate contracts for. On the other hand, I think collaborative editing could have been integrated seamlessly into the product without ruining or even changing the single-player experience.
I agree about the general anti social feature sentiment.
Collaborative editing makes sense for business users (taking meeting notes) and not much for individuals. That said, the tech that enables collaborative editing is kinda the same that allows solid sync and picking up your note taking session on a different device seconds after you put down another, which is something individuals do benefit from.
I like being able to go between my laptop and desktop very fast. Currently with Obsidian and using git for sync it kinda sucks a bit as if I am not careful I get merge conflicts.
I disagree. It even makes sense in a personal environment where I want to collaborate with my wife for example: shared to do lists, shopping lists we edit concurrently, shared ideas for vacations, packing lists, ideas for date nights, important phone numbers in regards to our kids, places and bars we've been to and would recommend to friends and visitors, etc etc.
We regularly collaborate on this stuff and for our intents and purposes, apple notes provides all we need
I have this minset too, but I have one use case for sharing EN notes: when I write articles or short posts which needed to be approved or get an editor touch. I may use Google Docs for it, but there are too many downsides with them compared to EN.
> 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.
I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this.
"Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently".
After many years of seeing both play out (rewrites and decided-not-to-rewrites) I'd edit this adage to: "there is almost never a case to rewrite yourself" (for the individual) or "there is almost never a case to get the same team to rewrite" (for management).
I'm not saying that engineers can't learn from their own mistakes but if you wrote the software & you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
The other reason for failure outside of the original architect repeating their same mistakes 2nd time around is outsourcing the rewrite. Wholesale outsourcing is an unbelievably inefficient & failure-prone way to build in-house software.
> you think it needs a scratch rewrite rather than a refactor, you're unlikely to have learnt enough within that gap of time to make the rewrite significantly better than a refactor.
Relentless Refactoring replaces the ship piece by piece while it's under way. If you are effective at it, you can effectively (both definitions) rewrite the entire app with few people being any the wiser.
If you are not good at decomposing a problem into digestible, coherent steps, then you are also lousy at Relentless Refactoring. If you can't decompose the problem, your top-down rewrite is statistically guaranteed to fail. Someone somewhere will get lucky, accidentally beating 1:4 odds over and over for 50 failure points, but that person will probably not be you.
The people who can Relentlessly Refactor don't need to ask for a top-down rewrite. They just get down to doing it. Therefore most of the people who ask for one are incapable of taking advantage of such permission.
Ultimately, the only people who ask for a top-down rewrite are the people who don't deserve it. They believe in do-overs instead of doing the hard work of removing obstacles. They believe in the Second System (without the attendant Syndrome), not in observing and adapting to new information as it becomes available. They have, in essence, trained themselves to continue to misbehave in the face of new wisdom. They will repeat that behavior during the rewrite.
I enjoy Relentess Refactoring as much as the next guy, but one dimension here is that it is much easier to do in a headless app (or in the backend) than in an app with a major UI. At some point there must be a complete switch from the old UI to the new UI, and that step is extremely complex. It also invites a big rewrite, in an almost irresistible way - "since we'll change the UI, let's just do it from the ground up".
The main lesson of the CI/CD era is that pain is information and ignoring it until later just makes things worse.
"Let's replace the whole UI at once" and "Let's replace the whole app at once" are bandaid-ripping activities, and the point of ripping off a bandaid is to get it over with before your pain receptors have a chance to tell you what an asshole you are right now. I'm sure most people have at least one experience, of their own or of someone they know, where ripping off the bandaid took a chunk of skin with it, possibly creating a bigger wound than the bandage originally covered.
There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.
My moderated version: you are almost never going to do better at meeting the same goals with a full rewrite. Even when there is a good case for it, it is unlikely to work out.
A successful rewrite of a core product requires a mix of peers: Old blood, who know the wins and sins of the past, and new blood who'll bring a fresh perspective.
Regarding #1, this is now an often touted recommendation, even by folks like Joel Spolsky whom I greatly admire, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. For example, I know that Google (at least in the 00s) rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully. While I agree that broadcasting out a message of "We're going to stop the world and add no new features until we do a ground-up rewrite" is a bad idea, perhaps other lessons could be:
1. Don't write code that's such a spaghetti mess in the first place that you feel the need to throw your hands up and say "nothing can be done except a rewrite".
2. If you do need to do a major rewrite, make sure you have the ability to staff two teams - one doing the rewrite and another maintaining and adding new features to the existing product.
3. Kinda related to number one, but if you have well-organized code to begin with I find it's much easier to do a major rewrite in "sections" (though there are obviously difficulties with this approach).
> rewrote huge, major pieces of their infrastructure multiple times and did so successfully
I think that's different from a user facing rewrite. I suspect while Google did its infrastructure rewrites, users didn't notice a difference. Additionally, Google probably had the resources to continue delivering features to users while the infrastructure was being developed.
The problem with a front end rewrite is (a) things might break and users will notice, and (b) it's hard to deliver new features to users while the front end app itself is being rewritten.
Google isn't the only example here. Heck, just look at the transition from Classic MacOS to OS X. I definitely think Apple would have been dead long ago if they said "A rewrite is too expensive/risky, let's just incrementally improve Classic MacOS".
I guess my point is that there are right ways and wrong ways to do ground-up rewrites, and the fact that a lot of people do them the wrong way shouldn't mean the lesson should be to never do them.
Replacing one mature operating system with another, which itself was based on one even more mature, and adding stuff is not quite a rewrite. That was more like how Microsoft moved NT into its consumer OS. It was a bit of a mess but had a clear payoff once everything was updated or obsoleted. NT and BSD were both battle-hardened long before anyone thought to put them in consumer systems.
Apple actually tried to rewrite the classic OS from scratch with the Copland project and it failed (at enormous cost). OS X was not a rewrite-from-scratch since they acquired an already working OS from Next. The had to add compatibility layers (which was in itself a major undertaking) but they didn't write the OS from scratch.
Spolskys point back then was that you couldn't stop the world, do nothing for two years and then come back with your rewritten product.
It was not that you couldn't rewrite part of the product here and there over time, and end up with something that is only the same as the original product in the way the greek ship was.
4. If you're going to do the rewrite, don't take many years working on it, just to release a broken product missing lots of core features.
5. If you're releasing a broken product missing core features, don't take many YEARS after release to un-brake your product and build some of the missing features again.
Agreed on point 3 for modern editors in 2022, as real-time collaboration and collaborative editing are table stakes today if you want to compete. But to give EN credit, when they launched (web 2008?) this was not the case, and a complete rewrite on point 1 could very well be necessary when the new CEO took over recently.
We started with OT [1] in mind for V1 of Taskade [2] with the intention to make our editor collaborative, but it was still a bumpy road before we were able to iterate on the product and speed up our dev cycle,. It continues to be a challenge to support the various use cases and customers, as improvements for offline editing, cross-device syncing, and recovery never ends.
This problem isn't fully solved and there are no perfect out of box solutions.
The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or service can just be a small successful app or service and not have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business and not making a better product.
I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did.
It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body.
3 years!
I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple native apps).
And they STILL don't have reliable note-synching.
It took them too long, and their app is too crappy. But a GOOD rewrite would have worked just fine.
It is much harder to rewrite an existing product since you have to retain compatibility. If the old version of the app was crap then presumably the persistent data structures are also crap, but you can't discard them. So you end up building a compatibility layer or migration process, but in the end you have to support the same general data model as the old version.
A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from scratch.
You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.
Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
I adopted Evernote for its ability to synchronize my checklists and notes across all devices. Collaborating with others was not an initial feature IIRC (?)
The way this entire thing has been run is a f*cking disgrace. Yes they have a business to run. Yes they need to do what they need to do to keep things healthy on that end, but these are PEOPLE we are talking about here. They have lives and families. The amount of contempt I have for Musk over the way he is treating them is unbounded. We used to think this guy was Bruce Wayne. Turns out he's Lex Luthor.
Layoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.
I've slept at work plenty of times. It's fun! Except one time I went outside for a spliff break at 2am and dropped my wallet w/ key badge right as the door shut. I had to hunt down a taxi and promise him I had money at my house! I also didn't have shoes on for some reason.
Your original comment made it sound like businesses shouldn't layoff people because they were people who had real lives. After reading this follow-up, I realized you have no issues with layoffs, but you actually just had an issue with how they were laid off. Basically, same outcome, but with more grace.
It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.
I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.
Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.
Lex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).
He hasn’t communicated with the employees. He has left them twisting in the wind. They’re finding things out from his tweets instead of through proper company channels. It’s unprofessional and disrespectful.
I don't think you should diminish the great work of Lex Luther by associating Musk with him. Musk is not a genius, he just got rich with first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal) and disrupting a lazy industry (Cars but electric!).
The real measure of Musk will be seeing how well this all goes. If he's really is smart, this may work. But by all accounts we're seeing what taking 44 billion dollars and setting it on fire looks like.
Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds and pushes progress further than imagine, is just completely randomly involved in all these events, as CEO but that's just a detail. And obviously he's a fraud, there's someone else all this time really running the show, probably a lizard.
Elon is brash, tough to work with and doesn't behave in upstanding ways, and I don't think I'd want to work for him; he's a jerk. But all this doesn't make wishful denial become true.
> Turns out this guy who consistently beat all odds
Where is the Hyperloop? Since he announced it China has build 3 thousand miles of high speed rail.
How many cars travelled through boring company tonnels?
How many years ago was Full Self Driving meant to be released?
> doesn't behave in upstanding ways
He was sued for sexual harrasment, unfair dismissal, dangerous working conditions, defamation, reneging on signed contract, by SEC for lying to investors, and countless others.
If an average person broke this many laws, their life would be ruined.
Yes, isn't that all proof that he's clearly not just a mere average joe? Everyone fails, he fails less than most all of us, and he does really daring things.
We can dislike him all we want for all his flaws, he's going to be in history books. If he wasn't so ruthless about achieving his goals, the moonshots he did achieve would have been failures as well.
We can dislike someone and still recognize their impact, people aren't black or white. Nuanced opinions are possible.
He fails less because he got lucky at some time and made his money, and then after that he acts like a bully and tries to beat down any opposition. Selling company at 420, what was he penalized? Other allegations, what did he lose? If there was a genuine fear of him losing something substantial, I am pretty sure his attitude will change.
No one is questioning his impact, but the people do question and have the right to question the methods. But we live in a corrupt system, we can point fingers in many directions, and rightly so. He is just one of a breed.
Why do you think the hyperloop should be anywhere? It was just an idea Elon threw out there for someone else to build, not a project he tried to build. (Don't confuse Boring Co Loop in vegas with an attempt to build high speed partial vacuum tunnel at human scale)
Yeah, but buying twitter isn't smart. It shows a glaring lack of critical thinking and foresight. So like most rich people. He got lucky in the past and the past may not be a measure of the future.
The mental gymnastics people on HN perform to diminish Musk's real achievements deserves 10s across the board.
I mean if you hate the guy just say so (for extra credit, explain why). Don't lie about his achievements and intelligence. They are so obviously real. Yes, luck is involved too, but it's not the only thing by far. He fucken self-learned rocket science in 6 years.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Musk is a good project manager if you think that crash or crash through is a good project management methodology. And Telsa and SpaceX (Which is supported by defence industry) are very different in their offerings than twitter.....
So he lead first new major US car company in a century and started the first viable private rocket company in 50 years, but you’re concerned that he won’t be able to figure out how to make Twitter profitable?
People want cars, defence wants rockets. People use twitter, but in the list of things that are required in the future. A terse environment for people to shitpost each other may not be essential.
The skills to run SpaceX and Tesla transfer to running Twitter a lot more than basketball to cooking. For one thing, they all (leading SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter) have running a large business in common.
Does it need to be a good financial outcome for it to be smart?
I view the whole thing as Elon getting bored and wanting a new toy to play with. When you have as much wealth as he does, a loss hardly really matters. If he can make it profitable somehow, that's just a bonus.
Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives.
From his perspective, the way to salvage this mess is layoffs. Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo, and should face consequences. They won't though.
Lot's of twitter employees will suffer. To varying degrees, many of them played a role in the house of cards that is twitter.
Musk did not get trapped into a deal. He thought he was being cute and it blew up in his face.
First he was on the board, then he wasn't. Then he thought it would be funny to agree to buy Twitter for a price that had "420" in it, then the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Either something changed recently in Musk, he has been hiding the fact that he has had a few screws loose for years, or both.
I guess most people just get depressed when they hit middle age. When you are wealthy, you can knock up one of your employees and buy a company on a whim.
> the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Small correction: he wrote an open "I declare" letter to Twitter 'canceling' the deal: Twitter got to Delaware court first (within days of his letter), and it took Musk's lawyers 2 weeks to file.
This is the only part of this I am speaking to because the rest is exactly what is happening. Musk messed up and now a whole lot of people are put in a terrible situation going right into the holiday season. It's unconscionable for one of the richest people in the world to behave this way.
Can you point out where in the report it is claimed that the number of spam accounts is outright fabricated? The closest I can find is that Mudge accuses Twitter leadership of not knowing and/or not being interested in the total number of spam bots, but that is a very different accusation than fabricating the number of spam bots.
In addition, the number of spam bots is more or less a red herring - the only representation regarding bots that Twitter made during the acquisition was the false/spam/etc. rate among its mDAU. There was no representation made as to the total number of bots on Twitter, nor the percentage of all Twitter accounts which are bots.
That Musk focused on a different number is more or less entirely on him, and is a significant reason his lawsuit never really went anywhere.
It's also important to note that data scientists Musk hired failed to find evidence that supported his "wildly higher" claim - one firm found an 11% "fake user number" at an 80% confidence interval, while the other found a 5.3% spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU at a 90% confidence interval. Hardly the kind of evidence one would want to have when accusing Twitter of lying, let alone fraud.
Page 8 there’s an entire section dedicated to discussing bot accounts.
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Yes, that's the section I read. None of it supports a claim that bot numbers were fabricated.
The first and biggest problem is that the paragraph is talking about the total number of spam bots on Twitter, while the number that Twitter represented to Musk was the percentage of false/spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU. These are two different metrics and cannot be directly compared. Even if the paragraph directly accused Twitter of falsifying and/or fabricating the total number of spam bots on Twitter, it would have no relevance towards the merger since Twitter made no representations of the total number of spam bots on Twitter to Musk.
The second problem is that nothing in that paragraph implies fabrication - it's basically complaining that Twitter isn't paying attention to a metric Mudge thinks should be measured. "We don't know the answer and aren't interested in finding out" is not the same thing as "We don't know the answer and made something up instead".
The third problem is that Musk's own analysis failed to hint at fabrication as well - even if Mudge directly accused Twitter of fabrication, his claim was contradicted by other evidence.
> None of it supports a claim that bot numbers were fabricated
'In fact, Mudge learned deliberate ignorance was the norm amongst the executive leadership team. In early 2021, as a new executive, Mudge asked the Head of Site Integrity (responsible for addressing platform manipulation including spam and botnets), what the underlying spam bot numbers were. Their response was “we don't really know."'
If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
I already quoted this part but this is also relevant:
"The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform."
They aren't able to provide an upper bound on the total number of spam accounts.
None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
> If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
Again, that is 5% of mDAU, not 5% of accounts. Mudge is complaining about the latter, Twitter only represented the former.
In any case, Twitter's methodology to get the 5% figure, based on what was stated in court, appears to be:
1. Every day, have someone(s) randomly sample 100 users from the mDAU pool and use various pieces of data to try to determine which of those sampled accounts are spam/false accounts
2. At the end of the quarter, use the 90 samples to estimate the proportion of spam/false accounts among all mDAU users
This allows one to get a relatively tight estimate of the proportion of spam/false accounts among mDAU users without knowing the precise number of spam accounts among mDAU or the upper bound on the total number of spam accounts among all users on the platform. The former isn't known because of the statistical nature of the method, and the latter isn't known because the pool the samples are drawn from isn't the one needed to determine the total number of bots.
> None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
Non-mDAU users consist of more than just spam accounts, though - for example, inactive users and users using non-monetizable clients are excluded. If the precise makeup of the pool of non-mDAU users is not known, then that would easily explain not knowing the upper bound on spam accounts.
Strictly speaking, one can trivially provide an upper bound on the number of spam accounts - just give the total number of accounts - but that's hardly a useful answer. Presumably Mudge wanted something with more precision, and if that information is not tracked than Twitter obviously wouldn't be able to give a useful answer, no deception needed.
> These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
But it doesn't state that Twitter fabricated the total number of spam accounts, does it?
And once again, the total number of spam bots is irrelevant to Musk's purchase. Twitter made no representations regarding such a statistic in its SEC filings or in the merger agreement, so there can be no fraud or falsification regarding that statistic. The only statistic Twitter provided regarding bots was the 5% number, and that was bots as a percentage of mDAU, which is different from the statistic Mudge was complaining about.
Actually, from what I recall of Mudge's claims, it basically validates Twitter's mDAU metric. Mudge's complaint boils down to he thinks the mDAU metric is the wrong thing to measure in large part because it focuses too much on measuring value for advertisers rather than the health of the platform.
Those paragraphs are discussing that there are a number of KNOWN fake accounts that are not included in mDAU.
The very next paragraphs state that they have no idea just how many total fake accounts there are. That is, there is a number of fake accounts that they don't know about (and don't make any effort to count), and they are concerned that counting them will affect stock price.
Said another way, they are admitting they aren't counting all the fake accounts. That's in paragraphs 17 & 18
The relevant financial representations have always been about the mDAU numbers. It's Musk who is trying to pretend that the "5% of mDAU may be spam account" really meant "5% of all accounts are spam accounts."
Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong; he's saying that he thinks it's a bad metric, because mDAU ignores the effect of fake accounts. Even if Mudge is correct in his assessment that mDAU is a bad metric, it does not sustain any allegations of fraud.
> Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong;
He literally did say that. I get the sense you're not reading the whistleblower docs... Or just arguing for the sake of arguing. I've quoted Mudge. Whereas you are inferring things based on what Musk said.
I've already linked the docs so I won't again. I've pointed out where this information can be found. Those documents are in no uncertain terms stating that Twitter does not have a grasp of how many fake accounts there are. Therefore, any number they give is wrong.
> On May 13, Mr. Musk expressed doubts about the accuracy of Twitter's claim in legal filings that <5% of accounts are “bots,” or automated spam accounts that spread propaganda and hurt the experience of real users:'
He's repeating Musk's claim here. Recall that Twitter says that 5% of mDAU are potentially spam. That's not the same as accounts.
P16:
> However there are many millions of active accounts that are not considered “mDAU,” either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it «can monetize them.
So when Twitter is saying "mDAU generally excludes spam bots", he's indirectly saying that it's correct.
P26:
> A more meaningful and honest answer to Mr. Musk’s question would be trivial for Twitter to calculate, given that Twitter is already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mDAU. But this number is likely to be meaningfully higher than 5%:
Quite literally saying here that "<5% of mDAU is spam" is correct!
So, yes I have read the whistleblower docs. The disconnect here is that I believe you have not read Twitter's filings, which do not in fact claim that "<5% of accounts are spam" but "<5% of mDAU are spam" (see, e.g., https://sec.report/Document/0001418091-22-000075/).
This is an incorrect conclusion to draw. Twitter states that they estimate that a certain percentage of a subset of users is spam/false accounts. That they don't know the percentage of spam/false accounts outside of that subset of users has no bearing on the accuracy of their statement regarding their chosen subset.
As a greatly reduced example, I can say that neither the @elonmusk nor the @chancery_daily accounts are spam accounts. I have no idea how many accounts Twitter has, let alone how many of those are spam accounts, but that lack of knowledge does not affect the accuracy of my first statement.
Internal chats (some screenshots floating around) that show the publicly cited bot % was known to be flawed and they have no idea how many active users are on the platform.
Trapped into a deal? Are you serious? No one held a gun to Elon Musk’s head and told him to buy Twitter. He did that on his own accord.
He should have just left them alone. If the executives were so incompetent, he’d have gotten a better deal by waiting for them to fail. Or shorting the stock like a normal investor.
Facts such as: a) he voluntarily waived due dilligence b) he explicitly claimed he was buying twitter to fix the bot problem c) no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number.
> no-one has ever shown that twitter were lying about bot numbers, and the only way you can pretend they were is if you pretend they were claiming their mDAU number was their user account number
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Did it? At least based on what was shown in court, that seems hard to believe, especially given data scientists he hired failed to produce mDAU spam numbers significantly off from what Twitter had, let alone off to the point where fabrication becomes a likely explanation.
> Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.
IIRC it's kind of true. Section 7(b)(i) of the merger agreement [0], which is part of the section describing the conditions under which the merger will take place, states:
> each of the representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement (except for the representations and warranties contained in Section 4.2(a) and Section 4.2(b)), without giving effect to any materiality or “Company Material Adverse Effect” qualifications therein, shall be true and correct as of the Closing Date..., except for such failures to be true and correct as would not have a Company Material Adverse Effect
And Section 4.6 of the agreement describes Twitter's representations regarding its SEC documents and financial statements. Among other things, it states:
> As of their respective dates... none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed... contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.
At least by my reading (and the general sense I got from more knowledgeable commentators), this basically means that Twitter represents that its SEC filings contain no material inaccuracies, and that the merger shall take place unless those filings contain inaccuracies significant enough to cause a Company Material Adverse Effect.
So in one sense, the deal depends on Twitter's numbers being not too inaccurate - if Musk could prove that Twitter's numbers were wrong and that that inaccuracy was enough to cause a MAE, then he would be able to back out of the deal.
What is incorrect, though, is the implication that the deal could not go forward until Musk checked Twitter's numbers. The deal basically assumes Twitter's numbers are correct, with the default action being that the merger will happen. The onus was on Musk to prove Twitter's numbers incorrect to the point that it will cause a MAE; otherwise, he must go through with the deal. Proving a MAE is an incredibly high bar - from what I've seen from other commentators, a MAE has been found once in the entirety of Delaware's corporate legal history, and given how Musk's evidence was turning out during trial it seemed extremely unlikely he would have been able to successfully argue that claim.
If that's even remotely true, he could have continued the court case. Presumably he would have won. Facts matter in a court case, and I think Elon's legal team told him that the facts weren't on his side.
Because it’s exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain accurate bot account metrics without data that is exclusive to the company.
Factor in that Twitter did not have processes in place to accurately count the spam accounts themselves. The truth is that there is not currently an accurate count of Twitter’s fake users.
The only thing that deal was contingent on was his financing, and the contingency that would trigger if he failed to come up with it was him owing Twitter a billion dollars.
I read through it, can you please quote the part where Mudge says Twitter lied about their mDAU count, or lied about their count of bots on the platform?
Mudge says Parag is lying about not being incentivized to remove spam, and then tries to do a sleight of hand thing by saying Musk is right because Musk is confused by what he sees in his own replies on the site vs what Twitter is actually reporting in their SEC filings. Those are two separate numbers, and Twitter only reported one.
Elon's takeover began 6 months ago, and he's never hidden his disdain for how the company is run. All those PEOPLE with lives and families would have been smart to take the hint and start interviewing instead of waiting to see if Elon would spare them.
I bought a System 76 laptop a few years ago and stuff like this is why I went back to Apple. I was always dealing with one weird thing or another. One day it decides it wont wake from sleep if I have it in clamshell mode, another it decides it can't find my bluetooth peripherals. I finally rage quit when my webcam went down for no reason. I spent 2500 bucks on that thing and gave up on it in less than a year. Meanwhile, I have a 2015 MBP that runs like a champ. My new M1 air goes 2 days without a charge and I never have to think about dumb shit like waking from sleep.
Oh and theres the resale value. I can't give away my S76 but I bet you if I put that 2015 MBP up on craigslist, it'll still fetch me a few hundred bucks...
When I was a younger man with more free time I would have fought the good fight but these days? I just want my shit to work.
Interesting. That's the polar opposite of my own experience. And I usually put Gentoo on them instead of Pop. They've been rock solid for me since 2013 or so, when I first started with them. And their support has been top notch.
This is why I tell every senior or “muggle” I know to just get an iPad for their computing needs. Sandboxed. Cheap. Backs everything up for you. Totally managed experience. I’ve switched numerous folks in that demographic over and have never once heard anything but rave reviews. F*ck PC’s and the entire race to the bottom market they represent.
That was the right move for my mom, mostly. Not perfect and she’s completely unable to remember passwords so I’m concerned she will brick it one of these days.
Personally I have one of these Lenovo’s and a default install of windows helped tremendously. I also went with linux mint on it to just completely get out of that s** show. So much lighter weight, fast. Not completely stable though, Vivaldi and firefox have some crashing and high CPU issues on it.
> Of those Gen-Xers who have done something with their lives—Elon Musk, Dave Chapelle, J. K. Rowling, Kanye West, and Jack Dorsey
I am GenX and I'd like to think I've done a lot of interesting things with my life. The folks listed by the author are rich and famous. That is not the measure of a life well lived. This entire piece is trash.
I made the switch to vim a few years ago. You'll want to start with learning the keybindings. Every major IDE and editor out there has a "vim mode" and an "emacs mode" so pick one you like and enable it. Whenever you need to move more quickly just switch back to your usual keybindings and get it done. Once you have the keybindings memorized, try to use them everywhere. There are browser plugins like vimium that let you navigate with vim keybindings for example.
It gets a bit weirder from there. If you pick vim for example theres a whole lot of customization rabbit holes you can go down. My advice is to find some sensible defaults and layer in stuff as you need it from there. vim-sensible[0] is a good start.
I also remember when he was governor (I live in cali). Those years I remember less fondly. He was not very good imo but it’s impressive nonetheless that he achieved that milestone.
Once in a lifetime phenomenon. I’m really enjoying this new more thoughtful and reflective era he’s having.
EDIT: moved some words around for clarity.