I know, that’s what I don’t get, why would Musk participate?
2 Likes
20 Likes
I saw Elon Musk give a town hall thing at a Tesla party that coincided with an AI conference I was attending. I can confirm: this guy has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. He just likes to proselytize his “big ideas” on people without any accountability.
Haven’t heard him talk about level 5 fsd in a while…
13 Likes
As a former leader of some large tech driven business: one must be able to demonstrate an understanding of the system the company uses at an “ability to describe it through analogy” level even if they can not operate on it directly. Regardless how not a “caching distribution network engineer” I may be, I could explain to investors what my teams were doing in a way they could understand AND I could talk to my engineering teams without driving them insane. Same thing in Ad Tech.
I also didn’t humiliate the people who supported me, I tried to make them look good so they would, in return, do the same.
32 Likes
Ted talks can be great. The audience usually on average isn’t very familiar with the subject and they rarely feel like you’re being talked to by someone who thinks they’re the smartest person in the universe. Elon seems to have a habit of talking thus to experts who know better.
3 Likes
The Trump to Elon rube pipeline is really something to behold. Wealth is a poor indicator of intelligence, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to his fans wax poetic.
13 Likes
From what I remember, “velocity” is the rate at which an agile software development team can turn user stories into working features, while the “stack” is a technical term for a logical area (of RAM) in a computer where data is stored short term.
I think Musk is mistaking the “stack” for the “backlog” of features, meaning the things people want to build in code to improve the system. However Twitter already has a lot of the features users want. The things people are worried about are moderation and governance, which happen in the human world not in code.
I mean, the idea to restrict voting in polls to accounts with a blue tick which can be bought for $8 (or whatever) without a proven track record, is clearly nothing to do with code, though it would be implemented through coding.
If that makes sense.
4 Likes
AIUI they were talking about something else, something much more “high level” than that
8 Likes
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that stack is the latest designer street drug that is fueling Silicon Valley.
8 Likes
Money is the only drug the Valley needs
2 Likes
Velocity is correct. “Stack” is probably the application architecture, generally the database + business logic + web server + user interface that all cooperates to form the “app”.
So yeah, rewriting the stack would definitely result in high velocity. Not a useful velocity, since they’d be coding things that are already done, but at least the metrics would look good.
23 Likes
Yep. Also, Twitter was already in a ‘high velocity’ stack - it was coded in Ruby on Rails, against a database cluster. But the underlying architecture didn’t have the structure/complexity to scale to meet even earlier traffic numbers, hence the ‘fail whale’ of yesteryear.
Twitter helped build a lot of the tools that tech companies now use to meet their reliability and performance needs. He actually started with the right people, then either laid off or convinced most of them to leave.
27 Likes
Thanks for the insight, and welcome to the community!
11 Likes
Rewriting the stack is definitely a low velocity operation… generally requires a lot of development effort for effectively no new features for the end user aside from improved performance and reliability. Don’t get me wrong, this is a big deal, but when your org is rebuilding the stack, very few other stories are getting done and it takes a long time, which implies lower velocity. Also, rearchitecting from a RAD stack like rails or flask to some scala-based architecture tends to make rollout of new features more fraught, so you need more engineers to keep up your prior velocity. At least this has been my experience with web apps and is almost certainly the case with twitter… feature rollout and integration with new acquisitions has definitely taken a back seat to performance, reliability and backend tooling (mostly in the realm of moderation to keep their advertisers happy).
4 Likes
A total rewrite would break down into tons of tasks, which would be worth tons of points. Points are assigned for all tasks, not just user-facing.
4 Likes
Lord Acton would rephrase his old chestnut today as: “Wealth corrupts. Absolute wealth corrupts absolutely.”
Anyone who paid attention knew Musk was this incompetent. That he “won” his wealth via his company being acquired and his software being quietly shunted into the void because it wasn’t as good as the Paypal software it competed with. His programming knowledge is late 90’s level database and web driven.
Since then, he’s created NOTHING himself. He’s bought a lot of shit and hired people to keep it going. He has been the “CEO” and/or the “former CEO because he was ousted for incompetence” of a number of places. But like many super wealthy gits, he drank his own cool-aid and thinks he’s God’s gift to humanity.
These are the people in the world I despise the most. The Musks and Trumps and other super wealthy assholes who thinks their wealth proves their greatness, and not that they are simply greedy asswipes who got lucky in life’s little lottery. They make the world a demonstrably worse place for everyone else.
30 Likes
Although, finding myself in agreement with Thiel on anything gives me the feeling that someone has just walked over my grave. 
22 Likes
Being a narcissist doesn’t have to be a barrier to that – they can say “I’m the best at hiring good engineers” – but Musk already staked his ego on the claim that Twitter’s engineers suck and he knows better than them. He’s reduced his options down to “proving it” or “shutting up”, and he’s not capable of either.
You can watch how a competent narcissist handles a very similar situation:
Steve Jobs wasn’t any more technical or less vain than Musk, but he grasped the need to convince people to give him validation. He doesn’t just say “how dare you I’m a genius”, he thinks carefully about how to frame a self-serving reply. All Musk knows how to do is order people to admire him.
26 Likes
My external completely uninformed impression of Twitter, from their inability to maintain an uptime of more than 2 weeks without regressions on their APIs, is that it is an abode of incompetent bro-grammers. Musk’s diagnostic is probably correct, but that doesn’t mean he knows how to fix it.
