Excellent! I needed a companion piece for my copy of On The Firing Line: My 500 Days At Apple by Gil Amelio, it was getting lonely.Some day, when Yaccety Sax writes her memoir complaining about she was always having to rein in Musk's leash; I will have zero sympathy and I will not buy a copy of that memoir.
I tried. He won’t respect the restraining order.Do you like being in an abusive relationship? Because when you're on X, you're in one with Elon.
Just walk away.
I haven't kept count but it feels like we've gone beyond 10 steps a long time ago. Perhaps there's enough material for a sequel: "How to ensure the damage is permanent in 10 easier steps".The eventual autopsy/biography of this debacle should be titled How to abuse your userbase and destroy a platform in 10 easy steps
Musk: "I'm a gun rights absolutist, and don't believe in restrictions on guns that go far beyond the law. Therefore, I'm totally ok with the very strict gun controls in the UK, NZ, and other similar jurisdictions because they don't go far beyond the law."So Musk equates "free speech absolutist" with being "against censorship that goes far beyond the law." He is saying that he is not against censorship unless it is far beyond the laws. This means that he will censor to the absolute limit beyond which effective legal restraints will be triggered, if there are any legal restraints.
Yes, that's his stated view. That is NOT how we have actually seen him clamp down on speech he disagrees with, however. In other words, he's a lying hypocrite, which is WORSE than being intentionally vague about where you stand.Musk is at least explicitly stating where he stands on his increasing censorship of other people's speech, and making it clear what people can expect when they use something he controls.
I think a better title would be "How to lose friends and alienate people".I haven't kept count but it feels like we've gone beyond 10 steps a long time ago. Perhaps there's enough material for a sequel: "How to ensure the damage is permanent in 10 easier steps".
My favorite is that people have started leaving the name of the brand off all together now. I've heard multiple times that so-and-so posted on social media. What social media it is isn't said, but it's twitter where it is posted. This trend is the worst possible one for a company brand, but X is now reaping what they have sown.Before the Musk simps come racing in (and they'll do this anyway), let's all agree that yes, Musk has every right to actually do this with his own company. That does not mean that it's not an asshole move made by a petulant child in a flabby man's body.
Now expect people to still come into this thread with "HE'S GOT A RIGHT TO DO THIS!" complaints every 4th page.
Yeah, various news agencies are flailing at what to actually call it. No one will ever just say X. It's entirely too non-descript. I've also seen "X social media company". Which is funny, as it's over twice as long as "Twitter". But yeah, Musk's master plan of just naming something X has run face first into the stop trying to make fetch happen conundrum.
They know exactly what they are doing.God damn it, New York Times, even when I'm on your side you have to say something to make me begrudge it.
He has a rival although his rival only pretends to have money.I have never, nor thought I ever would, see someone with so much money and power act like such an imbecile day in and day out in a massively public spectacle.
Interesting.
One of the major benefits of having money is paying people to make you look good. This is Wealth 101.
Which is probably: not to say something legally actionable based purely on speculation.They know exactly what they are doing.
No, they've been gazing into the View from Nowhere for so long that the View from Nowhere gazes also into them.They know exactly what they are doing.
New York University professor and Kara Swisher’s podcasting buddy Scott Galloway voiced his outrage at being banned from posting on Twitter in a Threads post on Tuesday. Galloway claims he’s been locked out of Twitter (aka X) two days after allegedly declining an invitation to meet with the chief Twit himself.
Galloway posted on Threads that, as of Tuesday, he had been locked out of his account for 17 days, following it up with a post saying: “A mutual friend reached out and said Elon feels ‘unfairly attacked,’ by me, and wants to meet. I declined. 2 days later I was locked out of ‘X.’” ...
I actually read that exact same book and thought it was insightful for all the Be/Gassee and Next/Return of Steve dramaExcellent! I needed a companion piece for my copy of On The Firing Line: My 500 Days At Apple by Gil Amelio, it was getting lonely.
Can't wait for Musk's tell-all book "If I Did It: How I would censor NYT if I were to engage in censorship".Which is probably: not to say something legally actionable based purely on speculation.
It sucks, but it is what it is.
Links from X to the NYT and Reuters loaded almost instantly for us today. But we still found delays of three to five seconds in links to Substack, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads today in our tests.
Would love to have been a fly on the wall for the conversation that convinced/coerced Mush to agree to that (unless Yaccarino was allowed to make that decision /s).
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-visas-cant-just-quitWhy does anyone still work for this guy?
This gets brought up all the time. The H1B programme is not meant to be a path to citizenship or permanent residency. It's a temporary work visa. Regardless of the fact that you ended up working for a human-shaped shitstain, people working under an H1B need to have a plan for when their visa will expire anyway, which it WILL do eventually. If you planned to stay in the US permanently, you should have applied for a different kind of visa.
Or use his groundbreaking AI system to train individual models on specific users' post histories, then shoot off the occasional generated xeet looking like those users wrote them, for some damage and lolz. (I actually wouldn't put it past the X "management".)Honestly, next he's gonna replace any user pictures for accounts he hates with a dunce cap, or some childish thing like the peach emoji.
X? What's that?
"Roman Ten" is how your pronounce the social media site name, and posts on it are called "Tenners".X? What's that?
It was before Trump upended everything in 2016. He proved that the more effective strategy is to simply continue to generate new, more outrageous controversies over and over.I have never, nor thought I ever would, see someone with so much money and power act like such an imbecile day in and day out in a massively public spectacle.
Interesting.
One of the major benefits of having money is paying people to make you look good. This is Wealth 101.
Is that pronounced skeet?Or use his groundbreaking AI system to train individual models on specific users' post histories, then shoot off the occasional generated xeet looking like those users wrote them, for some damage and lolz. (I actually wouldn't put it past the X "management".)
Except that they now effectively lock out anyone who does not have a login and severely limit nonpaid users. Even for those who habitually use X/Twtter Elon now excludes those who don't register. Elon thought that blocking users and limitng the number of posts viewed for nonpaid uses would get them to register or pay for a blue check. But, I just don't bother and barely use the site now.People keep using X. The problem lies there. They forgot how to vote with their feet.
Oh yeah, I'm old enough to remember. And yeah, that's the thing. You have to say "Brand X". Say something like "We tested this against X", and our brains are conditioned to think of that as a placeholder (blame algebra). Any time I see that someone has written about X without qualifying what they're talking about, I default to thinking that someone forgot to update their article before they published."Brand X" is literally the term for something generic that many of us old people grew up with. And by old people I mean people who are a few years younger than Musk like me.
It can't just be X and be meaningful. It needs to have a noun or something attached to it - like X-Windows or DrainX or the X-games. "X" by itself is just so meaningless as to kind of make you try to fill in the gaps yourself.
(Calling it X-social is actually my preferred one. Because it actually also serves as a description of how I use Twitter - I used to, but now I don't. And I'm honestly surprised he hasn't grabbed the domain name for x.social.)
Bullies always have toadies.Musk is like Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh; they are incredibly obnoxious and disgusting on the surface, just obviously utterly terrible, but millions (hundreds of thousands?) of people love them. Takes all kinds to make a world etc. but damn.
If so, then Musk has utterly failed at that.One of the major benefits of having money is paying people to make you look good. This is Wealth 101.
It's pretty safe to assume it was either Musk or another child who came up with the names:Truth be told, with Model X it actually made sense, because of the wing doors resembling an X. Then again it's safe to assume that this was the only instance in which it wasn't Musk who actually decided about the naming, but actual professionals. If Musk would have really the say at Tesla even just about names, the company would have tanked ages ago.
Oh, it was absolutely him.It's pretty safe to assume it was either Musk or another child who came up with the names:
Model S
Model 3
Model X
Model Y
"S3XY"
I actually read that exact same book and thought it was insightful for all the Be/Gassee and Next/Return of Steve drama