These things are not incompatible. And you'd be incorrect to think that I doubt the value delivered by the DoD.
My point is a very simple one: the DoD is as large as it is because the US has a cultural aversion to accepting welfare. We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.
There are a few key differences. PE tries not to massively overpay, it'll put more effort into targeted layoffs, and it'll maintain enough of a "business as usual" posture to not scare away advertisers. Edit: they also put in a CEO whose full-time job is being CEO of that company.
But yes, this is very bad execution of the PE playbook.
I know most of my comment is going to be redundant, but I need to say it in order to point to it an year or two from now as an "I told you so!"
Twitter is going to be here for a long long time. It's not going to suddenly shut down, it's not going to slowly decline, there is not going to be mass abandonment.
Elon might be cocky, but at the end of the day he is a successful businessman. He didn't just sent out that loyalty pledge email out of cockyness. He really wanted to kick out everyone who doesn't believe in him and his beliefs. And he sent that email well after understanding how Twitter runs and putting his loyal people from Tesla ans SpaceX in charge of operations.
The woke crowd needs to get out of denial and start coping with the fact that Twitter is not the bastion of unopposed woke ideology anymore.
Something doesn't compute in this scenario though. Either his tricking everyone around him or is unfortunate enough to slip up publically. Not knowing what GraphQL is and talking about RPCs in HTTP is a very revealing slip up.
My guess would be that he has some knowledge but also is very good at faking it which is not necessarily a bad thing - those are good traits for a CEO. Though people should be aware of this fact when evaluating the whole persona.
All this does is point out that smart people worked at Twitter who may now no longer work there, whether on their own accord, or due to Elon’s bulldogging tactics.
Elon thinks he knows what he’s doing, but what he is going to be left with are people who are willing to work hard by his standards, but not necessarily smart.
The simple truth is Elon knows nothing about the actual work involved in tech. He knows words or elicits help from others on what to say that sounds like tech speak (RPCs!), but when it comes to being truly knowledgeable in this space, he is losing his most valuable assets because of his amazingly poor managerial and ownership style.
I know there are a lot of Elon fans on this site, and will disagree with all of this; but his abilities have not at all been proven. Yes, he knows how to spend money to claim credit for technical advances, but until he actually has his hands dirty in the muck of the hard work of tech, he will always be a glorified self-promoter with no substance.
I don’t understand how anyone here can be supportive of the idea of the richest man in the world coming in, immediately firing half the staff, trying to get another significant portion of the staff to resign by demanding they switch from the promised permanent WFH to working from the office in 2 weeks, and then encouraging them to resign by giving them a highly fishy spammy/pushing email with an external link to a form to decide whether they want to work with this company or not within 48 hrs.
This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.
Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly.
Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting tickets to teams responsible for the automation.
More often than not these tickets would be ignored and issues would persist for weeks beyond what's reasonable.
I'd actually force myself to write even trivial code on weekends to ensure my ability to develop didn't atrophy as a result of lack of use.
That, paired with the awful corporate culture and constant fear of PIP/job loss forced me to finally leave.
Generally a very unpleasant experience all around, sans the compensation and name on the resume.
Amazing to watch a guy troll his way into a corner. Men of privileged background really, really do not know how to deal with this alien to them thing called "consequence". It's just meltdown.
In that case, you might find interesting these two short explanations I posted to Reddit about Siegel zeros (the second is a continuation of the first) :)
The class number formula, mentioned in the second comment, is one of the craziest "bridge results" in all of math (meaning a result that connects two seemingly disparate areas). The class number formula connects the values of Dirichlet L-functions at s = 1 (Dirichlet L-functions are complex functions related to the distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions), to class numbers of number fields. (Remember that the value of Dirichlet L-functions at 1 is exactly what the question of Siegel zeros concerns.)
To give a crash course on what some of those words mean:
1. A number field is what you get when you take the rational numbers, and you throw in the roots of some polynomials to get a bigger object where you can still do all of the usual arithmetic operations, in the same way that we throw in the roots of x^2 + 1 (namely, i, -i) into the real numbers to get the complex numbers.
2. The ring of integers is the right notion of the "integers" in that number field. (That is, rational numbers : integers = number field : ring of integers in that number field.)
3. The class number of a number field tells you how close you are to having unique factorization into primes holding in the ring of integers of that number field*. If the class number is 1, then you have unique factorization; if the class number is 1000, then you are very far from it.
What this connections means is that you can prove things about regular old primes in arithmetic progressions (in the integers) by proving things about these exotic / abstract primes (in rings of integers of number fields), and vice-versa.
Anyway, as a result of the class number formula, there are a lot of results about class numbers that are ineffective because of Siegel's theorem too, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brauer%E2%80%93Siegel_theorem. Zhang's result (if correct) would make all of those effective, too.
*While in the integers, it is true that every number factors uniquely into a product of primes, this is unfortunately not true in more general contexts. In fact, algebraic number theory basically began with a mistaken proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which was mistaken precisely because it assumed that unique factorization always holds in this more general context, which is not true. (If unique factorization did always hold, then that proof of FLT would have been correct.)
I can't resist saying one last thing about Siegel zeros: number theorists REALLY would like for this result to be correct because the possibility of Siegel zeros is unbelievably annoying. I mean mathematicians are supposed to enjoy challenges / difficulties, but Siegel zeros are just so recurrently irritating. The possibility of Siegel zeros means that in so many theorems you want to write down, you have to write caveats like "unless a Siegel zero exists," or split into two cases based on if Siegel zeros exist or don't exist, etc.
But here is the worst (or "most mysterious," depending on your mood..) thing about Siegel zeros. Our best result about Siegel zeros (excluding for present discussion Zhang's work), namely Siegel's theorem, is ineffective. That is, it says "there exists some constant C > 0 such that..." but it can tell you nothing about that constant beyond that it is positive and finite (we say that the constant is "not effectively computable from the proof").*
So then, if you try to use Siegel's theorem to prove things about primes, this ineffectivity trickles down (think "fruit of the poisoned tree"). For example, standard texts on analytic number theory include a proof of the following theorem: any sufficiently large odd integer is the sum of three primes. However, the proof in most standard texts fundamentally cannot tell you what the threshold for "sufficiently large" is, because the proof uses Siegel's theorem! In this particular case, it turns out that one can avoid Siegel's theorem, and in fact the statement "Any odd integer larger than five is the sum of three primes" is now known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldbach%27s_weak_conjecture. But it is certainly not always possible to avoid Siegel's theorem, and Zhang's result would make so many theorems which right now involve ineffectively computable constants effective.
*Why is the constant not effectively computable? Because the proof proceeds basically like this. First: assume the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. Then the result is trivial, Siegel zeros are exceptions to GRH and don't occur if GRH is true. Next, assume GRH is false. Take a "minimal" counterexample to GRH, and use it to "repel" or "exclude" other possible counterexamples.
> Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The requests for employees to return demonstrate how rushed and chaotic the process was.
This is par for Musk corps, literally the day after my interview at Fremont they laid off 9% of total staff in 2018 [0] because of how poorly Model 3 launch had fared in the beginning.
I can't go into specifics, much of which are public now, but it was so disheartening after having been so well received and cordial and enthusiastic; everyone was completely there because how important 'the mission' was only to be told 'don't come back' in incredibly uncouth manner.
When they sent the message out the next day, which is how many found out they've been laid off, calamity struck and it was clear that this was a deliberate tactic to re-shuffle and quell not just the rumors of Model 3's shortcomings amongst the rank-and-file staff, but to sweep the poor safety record in the factory under the rug and the have intimidation creep for those who sought to Unionize--at the time I was not in favour of it, but as time went on and I got more insider information from other team members I soon realized that it was likely needed despite my initial apprehension.
In short, I want to see the demise of social media's influence on the Internet (aka Web2.0) and if this represents how the most lauded CEO in SV handles things then I think we're nearing the end sooner rather than later. I think it's a commonly held sentiment that Social Media ruined most of what was magical of the early Internet and ushered in what has been the worst eternal September phase. I just hope it's not too late to correct this as Zuck is killing his corp in an equally embarrassing and out of touch manner.
It's a fundamentally different kind of company. You can bang the desk and yell at engineers when you're building rockets, because ultimately customers only care about the tech. And there will always be engineers who don't care about abuse as long as they get to Build Cool Stuff.
With something like Twitter the tech is more or less invisible. Users care about trust and relationships, and so do many of the engineers.
Musk isn't just utterly clueless about those, he's hostile to the culture that values them.
This is not going to end well. Odds are excellent it's going to turn into another of those legendary loss-making acquisitions like AOL and MySpace.
I just really don’t understand how this whole situation has been this badly mismanaged. I fully believe his original offer to be a troll, but then he got stuck with it, but he has since so mismanaged this entire affair that I simply can’t understand how. Is the guy surrounding himself with idiotic advisers? Has he just gotten so far from reality that he can’t make reasonable predictions? Has he gone off some meds? It just makes no sense.
Atleast where I live, when you fire someone that's it. They're fired. Even if they still work for 60 days because that's the minimum notice period. The only way to reinstitute the contract is if both sides sign a new contract to overwrite the termination. And this can be used to amend the employment contract too.
So where I live, you'd be in a prime position to negotiate better paychecks because without both employee and employer agreeing, a termination has finality.
For software, the existing employees will always be cheaper. It has been argued that an engineers value is captured most in their mental model of the system. EG: Want a new feature in a system I built and maintained? Boom, here are the touch points, the gotchyas, and here is the roadmap to get if done in three days. Anyone new to that system will first say, cool, give me about 3 weeks to learn this code, and then maybe another 7 while we implement it and work through all of the trip wires we did not know about.
What did he accomplish? Like personally he himself? There is a very specific agenda/propaganda to sell this hard-working, aspiring CEO image (well predating Musk) which I could never justify. They are just megalomaniac narcissists with an extraordinary luck (that is way too downplayed) and sometimes some redeeming quality at least (in the form of some charm, or leadership). Well, I couldn’t list any such for Elon here, but even if I could, why are we worshipping these people? They ain’t working 25 hours each day, the secret to their success is not that early morning yoga whatever and sleeping 2 hours in the office. As I mentioned, luck’s role is way downplayed. It is not too hard to make much money from already much money.
It varies. I’ve been a SpaceX (and thus Elon) fan since they were unsuccessfully launching Falcon 1’s. EM’s willingness to share information with the space fan community won him a lot of admirers. I was certainly willing to overlook many of his other failings as a result.
That’s become harder in the last few years and practically impossible in 2022. At this point, I am desperately hoping for SpaceX to get Starship/Superheavy flying before Elon manages to screw that up as well.
I’m not a trained psychiatric professional but it looks to me as if his extreme wealth and success has exacerbated some pre-existing tendencies and turned him into a (danger, medical jargon ahead) full-blown mess. It’s a shame to watch.
From the moment that he started to fight off this purchase in court, it's needed a lot of mental gymnastics to defend the genius of his moves regarding the purchase of an underperforming social network.
Are these the plays of a proverbial multi-dimensional chess genius that are beyond mortal ken, or one clumsy attempt after another to salvage a bad situation that he put himself in?
In some other HN thread related to this, people worked out the math behind the layoff of half of Twitter's workforce days into taking over: assuming revenue remained the same, the company would be profitable enough to cover the loans taken to purchase (with itself as collateral!)
Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?
Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.
Of those 4M/day, 2.7M are the interest on the leveraged buyout debt that Musk had Twitter take, they weren't there before!
In comparison, assuming an everage yearly cost per fired employee of 200K, by firing 3000 of them they are saving 1.6M a day.
Musk added 2.7M/day of purely financial cost, and then tried to reduce the damage by firing half the company and it's not even nearly enough!
And this is before the lost income from advertising...
I won't pretend to know business better than the richest man in the world, but from down here this sure looks like the train wreck of the century. We'll see I guess.
I would probably take the job and proceed to do fuck all until they fired me again.
A company tried to get me to come back and do handover after terminating a contract in breach a few years back. Agreement was a month. I did nothing for the entire month because they didn’t specify a deliverable. Due to working through an agency that was larger than the company I got paid and they got told to piss off when they complained.
My point is a very simple one: the DoD is as large as it is because the US has a cultural aversion to accepting welfare. We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.