Musk rolling up his sleeves and getting dirty in new Twitter role.
October 30, 2022 9:34 AM Subscribe
Get your code personally reviewed by Elon Musk! On paper! This service is sure to massively disrupt software development, bro. Multiple pricing tiers appropriate to whatever level you're on. Meet Elon Musk personally, and get your code shot into space! But the video explains it better than I could.
I'm guessing there's some antecedent to this joke that I'm unaware of. A little help please?
posted by adamrice at 10:17 AM on October 30, 2022
posted by adamrice at 10:17 AM on October 30, 2022
I feel like we already lived through this particular hellscape and only barely got a brief reprieve from it. End all billionaires.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:45 AM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:45 AM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
It's not exactly a surprise to learn that Elon is an incredibly stupid person, but the last couple of days have been an impressive demonstration of that just the same.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:50 AM on October 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:50 AM on October 30, 2022 [16 favorites]
I have some questions about what awful things Zefram Cochrane did to get listed with this loser.
posted by Artw at 11:05 AM on October 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by Artw at 11:05 AM on October 30, 2022 [7 favorites]
A couple of days ago I joked with a friend that I thought that Musk would last a shorter time as Twitter CEO than Truss lasted as the British PM, but after the last couple of days I’m not sure he’ll last as long as the original Truss lettuce.
posted by Kattullus at 11:08 AM on October 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Kattullus at 11:08 AM on October 30, 2022 [6 favorites]
Mod note: let's stick to the spoof and code review stupidity in this thread, Twitter takeover in the other one.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 11:10 AM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 11:10 AM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Oh my god, I know what’s happening here.
Our Elongated Muskrat friend is trying to demonstrate that he’s a a technical person who’s competent to helm a tech company by cosplaying his own performance of Joel Spolsky’s BillG Review story for Twitter engineers so they take him seriously.
Holy shit, this is sad.
posted by mhoye at 11:58 AM on October 30, 2022 [30 favorites]
Our Elongated Muskrat friend is trying to demonstrate that he’s a a technical person who’s competent to helm a tech company by cosplaying his own performance of Joel Spolsky’s BillG Review story for Twitter engineers so they take him seriously.
Holy shit, this is sad.
posted by mhoye at 11:58 AM on October 30, 2022 [30 favorites]
Only $15 billion for the starter pack, do they take dogecoin?
posted by sammyo at 12:05 PM on October 30, 2022
posted by sammyo at 12:05 PM on October 30, 2022
If Elon had developed that pricing himself at least one of the tiers would have cost 420-something.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 12:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
trying to demonstrate that he’s a a technical person who’s competent to helm a tech company by cosplaying his own performance of Joel Spolsky’s BillG Review story
Even in that story (about 1992...) Gates was reviewing specs from PMs, not code from developers!
posted by trig at 12:18 PM on October 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
Even in that story (about 1992...) Gates was reviewing specs from PMs, not code from developers!
posted by trig at 12:18 PM on October 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
I wish I could enjoy this joke, but after that Pelosi tweet, I just can't. I haven't been an active fan of Elon for some time, but I've always recognized the importance of Tesla in jump starting the transition of transportation off fossil fuels. But actively spreading a ridiculous conspiracy theory about an assassination attempt? I'm just livid. Fuck that guy forever.
posted by gwint at 12:36 PM on October 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by gwint at 12:36 PM on October 30, 2022 [14 favorites]
The funny thing is that Twitter isn’t even really a tech company. The real work at Twitter is to find ways to monetize their service. That’s biz-dev. The only remotely interesting technical problems they have are data analytics and operating a scale.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:55 PM on October 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 12:55 PM on October 30, 2022 [10 favorites]
I said it on the orange and I'll say it here. It has nothing to do with the actual code.
It's a weed-out process. Are you willing to actually show your work for the last month? Did you do any work at all? Or are you going to be a pain in the ass about doing what I asked you to do?
Are you going to be a problem?
Sure, maybe someone will look at the code briefly and see if it's sane or if it's spaghetti code. But the point is that Musk needs a list of heads to cut and he needs it yesterday. And if you're not going to play along... then you're done.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's a weed-out process. Are you willing to actually show your work for the last month? Did you do any work at all? Or are you going to be a pain in the ass about doing what I asked you to do?
Are you going to be a problem?
Sure, maybe someone will look at the code briefly and see if it's sane or if it's spaghetti code. But the point is that Musk needs a list of heads to cut and he needs it yesterday. And if you're not going to play along... then you're done.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:16 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
I imagine "somehow make it blockchain" is in there somewhere and they THINK it's a technical problem not a business one.
Telsa is exclusively staffed by weirdo libertarian techbro Musk cultists so I am sure the engineers they invited over are making all kinds of valuable and incredibly useful suggestions in this direction right now, to the delight of everyone.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Telsa is exclusively staffed by weirdo libertarian techbro Musk cultists so I am sure the engineers they invited over are making all kinds of valuable and incredibly useful suggestions in this direction right now, to the delight of everyone.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
Honestly, all the code I've ever written could be shot into space and nobody would mind.
But I'm not planning to pay for the privilege.
posted by humbug at 1:23 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
But I'm not planning to pay for the privilege.
posted by humbug at 1:23 PM on October 30, 2022 [2 favorites]
I agree it's a test to see who can be the best yes-man... A nonsensical test bc, quote my friend, "If you are doing your job right your code is also subtractive... You'd need to print 50 pages of GitHub diffs for it to have any meaning".
posted by subdee at 2:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by subdee at 2:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
I just assumed that getting people to print out code -and then shred it unread was just a diversion tactic to keep everyone unbalanced?
Musk is a chaos Monkey. He thrives on seeding it.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:08 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Musk is a chaos Monkey. He thrives on seeding it.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:08 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm all in for this, but I would like to propose that we assemble a crowdfunded team to accomplish a hostile takeover of Neuralink, and then undertake an emergency "moon landing" grade effort to translate Elon Musk to pure code that's smart enough for him to review his own code, force him to debug himself for a conceptual and accelerated eternity - and then we can shoot that into space aimed at the nearest black hole.
We can think of it like the Ellison SF story of "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." but instead it's "I bought Twitter but I Can't Post."
posted by loquacious at 2:11 PM on October 30, 2022 [18 favorites]
We can think of it like the Ellison SF story of "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." but instead it's "I bought Twitter but I Can't Post."
posted by loquacious at 2:11 PM on October 30, 2022 [18 favorites]
I would buy "it was a diversionary tactic" more if stupidity wasn't a better explanation for why Elon Musk made this request and then walked it back. "Never attribute to malice" etc even though Musk is both malicious and stupid.
posted by subdee at 2:13 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by subdee at 2:13 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
It's stupidity. He made the request and then someone with a bit more maturity said "hey, do you really want the source code of your $44,000,000,000 acquisition floating around the valley? Because that's how you get the source code out of your control."
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:05 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:05 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
i'd like to live in the timeline where the subject of this post is just some up-punching japery, but unfortunately i think this is more like whistling-past-the-graveyard semi-comedy in the face of another shaped charge being prepped in the semi-controlled implosion-detonation of civilization.
posted by glonous keming at 3:08 PM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 3:08 PM on October 30, 2022 [5 favorites]
hey, do you really want the source code of your $44,000,000,000 acquisition floating around the valley?
they have some interesting scale related problems but i don’t think there’s going to be much besides that that is novel or interesting. however it would be fun to get my hands on the algorithm that determines what shows up in my feed. if anyone wants to fax me that i’m an experienced senior software engineer and i would love to give it the lgtm. i also accept certified mail
posted by dis_integration at 3:23 PM on October 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
they have some interesting scale related problems but i don’t think there’s going to be much besides that that is novel or interesting. however it would be fun to get my hands on the algorithm that determines what shows up in my feed. if anyone wants to fax me that i’m an experienced senior software engineer and i would love to give it the lgtm. i also accept certified mail
posted by dis_integration at 3:23 PM on October 30, 2022 [9 favorites]
Only $15 billion for the starter pack, do they take dogecoin?
One starter pack costs roughly a year's subscription to the metaverse for Zuckerberg.
posted by srboisvert at 4:22 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
One starter pack costs roughly a year's subscription to the metaverse for Zuckerberg.
posted by srboisvert at 4:22 PM on October 30, 2022 [1 favorite]
Oh, don’t worry, the recommendations algorithm is going to be open source any day now. /s
posted by sjswitzer at 4:48 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 4:48 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Snippets of source code are of approximately zero value out of context except in very specific contexts. Most of those would be attack vectors.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:56 PM on October 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 4:56 PM on October 30, 2022 [8 favorites]
whistling-past-the-graveyard semi-comedy in the face of another shaped charge
The Jack Paar effect.
posted by clavdivs at 5:33 PM on October 30, 2022
The Jack Paar effect.
posted by clavdivs at 5:33 PM on October 30, 2022
Oh man, some of these enumerations are really long in our code, gonna need some more reams of paper.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:06 PM on October 30, 2022 [3 favorites]
Some people have speculated that the printing thing was some kind of hazing. The thing is even if it were, the logical target of the hazing isn't Twitter's software developers, it'd be Elon himself. Like, you know how sometimes when a new, greenhorn mechanic joins a shop, the existing employees will send them on these wild goose chases to find blinker fluid or prop wash or whatever? Now, imagine instead of a new greenhorn mechanic you've got a new billionaire CEO in the middle of history's most expensive mid-life crisis. And instead of asking him to fetch the blinker fluid, you tell him that he ought to review the code of the company he just bought and what better way than to read printed out hard copies of it. And then instead of wasting half an afternoon running around to different departments asking for blinker fluid, he just blasted out a requisition order for blinker fluid a demand for printouts of 50 pages of code from each developer to a Slack channel where everyone can see it.
Anyways, people keep trying to come up with logical or reasonable explanations for why Musk asked for printouts. Like, "oooh it's an intimidation tactic" or "he's just so old school" or "it's actually a loyalty test" or whatever. I would like to suggest that sometimes when something seems stupid and/or bad, it's not actually secretly clever or good, it can sometimes just be stupid and/or bad.
posted by mhum at 11:56 AM on October 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
Anyways, people keep trying to come up with logical or reasonable explanations for why Musk asked for printouts. Like, "oooh it's an intimidation tactic" or "he's just so old school" or "it's actually a loyalty test" or whatever. I would like to suggest that sometimes when something seems stupid and/or bad, it's not actually secretly clever or good, it can sometimes just be stupid and/or bad.
posted by mhum at 11:56 AM on October 31, 2022 [8 favorites]
It’s a stupid and bad loyalty test and intimidation tactic. He wants to play big duck swinging CEO by lording it over some developers that have unwilling kingly fallen under his power and he thinks it laura him look good, which it probably does, to assholes.
posted by Artw at 12:07 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 12:07 PM on October 31, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm surprised that he didn't include a provision in the take over that he be called a Twitter founder!
posted by Carillon at 12:49 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Carillon at 12:49 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have some questions about what awful things Zefram Cochrane did to get listed with this loser.
Zefram's biggest mistake was being fictional. Just like Elon Musk, who is an elaborate 4chan prank.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:14 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
Zefram's biggest mistake was being fictional. Just like Elon Musk, who is an elaborate 4chan prank.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:14 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
It sucks that autocrats don't have to be smart to be effective (per Misha Gessen's observations about Putin and Trump).
posted by subdee at 3:39 PM on October 31, 2022
posted by subdee at 3:39 PM on October 31, 2022
> Artw: "He wants to play big duck swinging CEO by lording it over some developers"
This is undoubtedly true. However, I would propose that his request that Twitter developers implement his $20/month (or maybe $5/month, who knows) fee for blue-check verification by next week or be fired is the power move where he's trying to pull that off. But, I would also propose that he's doing this -- at least the totally unreasonable one week deadline part -- to make up for immediately embarrassed himself in front of the entire company.
I am well aware, however, that this particular narrative of Elon basically emperor-has-no-clothes-ing himself in front of all of Twitter is very attractive to me and hence, in the absence of countervailing evidence, I will be clinging to it quite tightly. It provides me just the tiniest spark of joy in this dim situation to imagine that Elon asked for printouts not out of malice or cunning or Machiavellian manipulation games or whatnot but rather just straight-up ignorance of modern software development.
posted by mhum at 4:08 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is undoubtedly true. However, I would propose that his request that Twitter developers implement his $20/month (or maybe $5/month, who knows) fee for blue-check verification by next week or be fired is the power move where he's trying to pull that off. But, I would also propose that he's doing this -- at least the totally unreasonable one week deadline part -- to make up for immediately embarrassed himself in front of the entire company.
I am well aware, however, that this particular narrative of Elon basically emperor-has-no-clothes-ing himself in front of all of Twitter is very attractive to me and hence, in the absence of countervailing evidence, I will be clinging to it quite tightly. It provides me just the tiniest spark of joy in this dim situation to imagine that Elon asked for printouts not out of malice or cunning or Machiavellian manipulation games or whatnot but rather just straight-up ignorance of modern software development.
posted by mhum at 4:08 PM on October 31, 2022 [2 favorites]
From CNBC, "Elon Musk has pulled more than 50 Tesla employees into his Twitter takeover" (emph. added):
posted by mhum at 6:07 PM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Several Twitter employees told CNBC over the weekend that Tesla employees now at Twitter have been involved in code review at the social network, even though their skills from working on Autopilot and other Tesla software and hardware do not directly overlap with the languages and systems used to build and maintain the social network. These employees asked not to be named because they’re not authorized to talk to the press about internal matters, and feared retaliation.Lol. The grand code review continues apace, it seems.
For example, most engineers in automotive companies, even the tech-forward Tesla, do not have experience designing and operating search engines and platforms that are broadly accessible to the public.
Twitter has multiple code bases with millions of lines of code in each, and myriad 10- or even 100-query per second (QPS) systems underpinning it. At Tesla, Python is one of the preferred scripting languages, and at Twitter programmers have used Scala extensively.
posted by mhum at 6:07 PM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]
Great. This is how we end up with talking cars and self-driving messaging apps.
posted by loquacious at 6:43 PM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by loquacious at 6:43 PM on October 31, 2022 [5 favorites]
Maybe they can make Teslas send a tweet whenever they catch on fire or kill people while on autopilot.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:49 PM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 1:49 PM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Twitter shuts offices for day as it cuts 50% of workforce; staff already suing
In his rush to cut staff, Musk and his legal team seemingly overlooked or disregarded a federal and California law—the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act—which requires 60 days’ notice to staff in advance of mass layoffs.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
In his rush to cut staff, Musk and his legal team seemingly overlooked or disregarded a federal and California law—the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act—which requires 60 days’ notice to staff in advance of mass layoffs.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:24 AM on November 4, 2022 [2 favorites]
This was nothing but inevitable, but I didn’t expect it to be this consequential, this soon:
Eli Lilly Loses Billions After Parody Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin
I really don’t see how Twitter could fail to be directly liable for this. Musk can probably hide behind the corporate shield, but section 230 might not be enough for the company itself given that an abrupt change in policy clearly caused this vulnerability.
posted by jamjam at 4:43 PM on November 11, 2022
Eli Lilly Loses Billions After Parody Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin
I really don’t see how Twitter could fail to be directly liable for this. Musk can probably hide behind the corporate shield, but section 230 might not be enough for the company itself given that an abrupt change in policy clearly caused this vulnerability.
posted by jamjam at 4:43 PM on November 11, 2022
Sounds like things are going pretty well over there.
Eli Lilly Loses Billions After Parody Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin yt
I gather a similar promise from a verified Lockheed Martin account ("We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States, until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses.") also caused some consternation.
Say what you will about America, but eight bucks still buys you a hell of a lot of crashing of late stage capitalism.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:34 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
Eli Lilly Loses Billions After Parody Twitter Account Promises Free Insulin yt
I gather a similar promise from a verified Lockheed Martin account ("We will begin halting all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States, until further investigation into their record of human rights abuses.") also caused some consternation.
Say what you will about America, but eight bucks still buys you a hell of a lot of crashing of late stage capitalism.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:34 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
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Or code review stories. At Google in the early 2000s I spent many hours debating the 80 column code limit in the code style guidelines. This was a practical problem with Java and its WordyClassNameConventionFactoryInterfaces. (It's 100 columns now). I argued with the guy who wrote that rule, a fruitless argument since he was employee number 11 or something and could not be overridden. But his primary argument was "people like to review code and review it with a pencil, so we need to keep it printable." Yikes.
posted by Nelson at 10:15 AM on October 30, 2022 [14 favorites]