It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.

I know. I’m old enough that I worked through the Y2K problem. Not me literally - I was working on a different class of systems - but I literally sat next to COBOL devs who were paid to work on green screens on an IBM midframe for more than half their time to get rid of the two digit date representations on systems operating cellular communications as well as the ones that ran sales and services for a large telecom company. It was my first real job in the industry, and I remember the Gateway type computers sold at Sears with the “Y2K Compatible!” stickers on the front.

My phrasing was both tongue in cheek and a callback to another problem that similarly had some people dreading the end of the world with nuclear reactors running amok and planes crashing from the sky.

In any case, he had a bigger impact on the world than most humans ever will, and going out peacefully at 85 really doesn’t sound all that bad.

It would have just been really funny if his gravestone could have listed his dates as Born June 6 1936 - Died December 13 1901.

TFW when all of your bugs are like cockroaches that run away from the light but hide in the dark where you can’t see them.

This is an actual OMG moment.

The next Y2K style problem will happen on this date, January 19, at pi o’clock in 2038. I was really hoping he’d get to see that.

He was ironically taken too soon.

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

What I’m saying is that their pre-IPO valuation dropped by 2/3 before the additional user drop post-Spez closing everything down because he literally said he’s trying to do what Elon is doing to Twitter.

To be even more clear, what Elon is doing to Twitter has cratered them from the $44B that he paid for it (which was at the time probably overvaluing them by about 10-15%) to what was in April (as I recall) a $15B company as per the write down from their major bank investor. It is now widely considered a $4B company post the X transition and I think they’re still somehow bleeding valuation. Even that might be generous, since it has come out that Dorsey only kept his $1B stake in the company under the agreement that they’d buy his shares from him at the original $54.20 offer, so you can count that as yet more debt - this time for a quarter of the worth of the company. The Saudis also agreed not to sell and hold another $1.5B iirc, so if they have a similar deal Twitter is a $4B company with an additional outstanding and not on the books debt of $2.5-3B.

Spez did what he did because they crashed from a massively overvalued IPO estimate - what the bank that will be writing their IPO expects the company is worth - to about a third of what they thought. That’s why Reddit freaked out - Spez was watching his (hypothetical) money being set on fire. He really thought he was going to be the next Silicon Valley multimillionaire based on that site. His attempt at Eloning has not, based on anything I’ve read, increased the value of the site.

I think most of the cratering is because, as we all know, the money went away. That’s the same cause of the 500k layoffs in the tech field or whatever we’re up to. Literally everyone but Apple has cut tens of thousands of people because the covid boom and the free money went away. He’s still chasing the dragon and lashing out in a panic.

Spez thought he was going to be the next Elon. He’s going to be the next Tom MySpace if he’s lucky at all, and even that is more than he deserves.

On social media sites, the users are the ones who create the value. The company provides the structure to expose that through developing the software and the algorithms, and obviously paying to host everything. But unlike, say, a newspaper, everything that makes the site worth visiting at all is the community.

The moderation is the product. That’s it, 100%. When they get confused about that - that is, when they lose sight of the fact that 100% of their real value is being created for free, and their job is to just get it to people - their community starts to fall apart. A fall in KPIs, pre-IPO, is deadly. I would be shocked if they go through with it at this point, because they’re going to get killed. spez needs to show ballooning numbers to justify anyone institutional investors staying involved.

They should sell themselves to anyone willing to write a check at this point.

Just as a note, losing 2% (and there’s a lot of different and more meaningful KPIs) is a really big deal if you’re supposed to be growing double digits. The ridiculous valuations built into tech companies is based on massive growth, not current numbers. If you’re expected to grow at 30% and instead you lose 2%, that’s a massive loss. Reddit, last I checked (before the rexit) had come down something like 66% in the estimated IPO valuation. That’s why they freaked out and basically banned third party apps in favor of controlling advertising and subscriptions. They said they want to emulate what Twitter is doing.

If they do go through with their going public, the short side is going to kill them. I think the appeal of Reddit is different than Facebook and that they’re going to do a slow run of Digg and MySpace.

I’d guess there’s a few reasons.

Threads was able to be pushed through other large commercial platforms, and onboarding was trivial for anyone coming through the portal.

Mastodon lacks that kind of exposure and the onboarding process of choosing an instance makes it feel more confusing.

As a result, Threads starts off with a network effect that is quite a bit more advanced than Mastodon’s. It has more high profile users that maintain an active account. It also claims to want to join the fediverse, which makes users think that they can easily onboard with Mastodon in the near future.

It really sounds like you’re looking for an LLM text generator. I prefer using direct NLP for many NLP related tasks, but I think what you’re describing is directly related to what LLMs do.

Of course, neither the NLP approach nor the LLM ones will benefit from a feedback loop of successful versus unsuccessful resumes. Advertisers and spammers can generate a thousand variations of the same message and throw them all out onto the internet, then just reinforce the successful ones and drop the others. That works because there’s a single ad shop and hundreds of millions of users who don’t get together to compare their Temu ads. You, on the other hand, are dealing with a handful of employers, and each of them may have different criteria. A resume that gets you a job coding at a bank is t the same as one that will get you in the door at Apple or Google. You’ll have to reinforce with mostly gut feeling or the help of friends.

Yeah, my client crashed when I was trying to edit it. Thanks for the reminder!

There should be a full write up from a lawyer - or, better yet, an organization like the EFF. Because lemmy.world is such a prominent instance, it would probably garner some attention if the people who run it were to approach them.

People would still have to decide what their own risk tolerances are. Some might think that even if safe harbor applies, getting swatted or doxxed just isn’t worth the risk.

Others might look at it, weigh their rights under the current laws, and decide it’s important to be part of the project. A solid communication on the specific application of S230 to a host of a federated service would go a long way.

I worked as a sys admin for a while in college in the mid-90s, and it was a time when ISPs were trying to get considered common carriers. Common carrier covers phone companies from liability if people use their service to commit crimes. The key provision of common carrier status was that the company exercised no control whatsoever over what went across their wires.

In order to make the same argument, the systems I helped manage had a policy of no policing. You could remove a newsgroup from usenet, but you couldn’t any other kind of content oriented filtering. The argument went that as soon as you start moderating, you’re now responsible for moderating it all. True or not, that’s the argument made and policy adopted on multiple university networks and private ISPs. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a company like facebook or reddit which have full control over their content. We’re talking things like the web in general, such as it was, and usenet.

Usenet is probably the best example, and I knew some BBS operators who hosted usenet content. The only BBS owners that got arrested (as far as I know) were arrested for being the primary host of illegal material.

S230 or otherwise, someone should try to get a pro bono from a lawyer (or lawyers) who know the subject.

Edit: Looks like EFF already did a write up. With the amount of concerned people posting on this optic, this link should be in every official reply and as a post in the topic.

I understand how that might be a justification, but I’m really not sure about that. I can’t imagine using LinkedIn so many times per hour that caching would make any improvement in my experience, and I suspect that fixed asset caching in the browser would take care of a chunk of that anyway. Even if there were some headhunters using the phone version 8 hours+ per day, the amount of time wasted and the number of annoyed customers dealing with the app harassment would still have a negative overall cost. I’ve done these kinds of KPIs.

It’s about

1. Control over data mining at a much higher level than can be done from a browser including location tracking
2. Monetization of the data via “third party partners”
3. Making sure the app team is justified as an ongoing cost, because that’s just the way corporate organizations work

You can’t trademark a letter and you can’t copyright a font - I believe the courts have ruled so due to first amendment concerns.

I think you can, however, trademark a logo that consists of a letter. I’m thinking specifically of the McDonald’s M logo. I might be wrong, but I have seen Coming to America multiple times.

TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.

I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.

He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.

Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.

I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.

I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.

It’s probably between $15-20B right now.

I think it comes with a salvage title though.

I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.

With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.

He’s just setting money on fire at this point.