Tesla Engineers Visit Twitter Office to Review Code for Musk
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
""" Earlier Thursday in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, product leaders showed Tesla engineers the company’s code, so they could assess and explain to Musk what the company needs, according to one of the people. """
>It added another degree of uncertainty to whether Mr. Musk would complete the deal, even though he had waived his rights to do due diligence on Twitter when he bought it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/technology/elon-musk-twit...
As Matt Levine said, “Musk did not become the world’s richest person by always honoring the letter and spirit of his commitments.”
Asking people whose work you trust to evaluate something you can't evaluate yourself is ridiculous now?
EDIT: however, it does leave a bit of a bad taste in Twitter employees mouths, in that it basically indicates that Musk doesn't trust them. Hmm, that's not optimal.
Being “nice” is not a goal.
I don't read it like that. The most anti-Musk people have likely already left. But with Peiter Zatko alleging serious security breaches, dysfunction, and cultural issues at Twitter, it's likely a good idea to get a few independent eyeballs on whatever problems there may be.
You can support Twitters past actions and disagree w/ Musk but does anyone dispute that he bought the platform because he thought their practices were unethical, and the internal culture has been openly hostile to his purchase.
Wow! You went from a 10 word tweet to "a flawed as fuck human"! I guess you've never said or written anything bad about another person given the angel that you are.
Oh btw, did you hear Musk won the case because the diver was trying to make some bucks off of an angry response, claiming it was "defamation"? Maybe not a "pedo-guy", whatever that means, but certainly a petty opportunist who received a nice basket of egg on his face.
I'm quite curious about the
- Structure: Deployment freeze VS full-on halt of development on feature branches
- Enforcement: Mere policy VS technical block via permission revocation (what happens if an urgent hotfix is required?)
- Communication: Did anyone see this coming? Was it communicated in a respectful manner?
Any Twitter engineers here who are able to talk about any of this?
Communication: yes, this is the obvious cautious first step. There seem to be many ideologically driven people at Twitter and those kind of people can become dangerous very quickly. The big first task will be to find them and remove them from their positions, so that the rest of the employees can continue with their jobs.
https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1585808070466076673 (screenshots of racial slurs and calls for mass murder)
The engineers work for Tesla, but Tesla isn’t buying Twitter?
I was assuming Elon was, perhaps it’s a favour?
Of course, these are the engineers that can't even program a car to drive by itself.
But, even if it is moonlighting - all employment contracts allow moonlighting with approval. Many firms are rather sparing in granting that approval - but it is a lot easier to say “yes” to an employee request if you know that’s what the CEO wants you to say.
Last P/E was -160. Which is really bad.
Legally, Tesla isn't allowed to do "favours" for Musk's other businesses. From what I understand, SpaceX/etc pay Tesla the fair market value of all assistance received (both goods and services). And the cooperation has to (at a high level) be approved by the respective boards (both Tesla's and SpaceX's) while Musk is not in the room. Whatever assistance Tesla may have given Musk regarding Twitter would be subject to the same legal requirements.
Isn’t that obvious?
Whether they come from Tesla or are hired, Musk doesn't care. He just wants some DD
just need to fix the code and then twitter will be all set.
A Tesla programmer wants the car to minimize interactions with the world, and avoid collisions.
A Twitter programmer wants the feed to maximize interactions with the world, and avoid misses (aka boring content)
It was interesting in covid times that a lot of the newspapers had headlines "University x finds so and so about covid" but you could go on Twitter and read the tweets from the Prof of Virology at said university and get a much more accurate version released about 12 hours earlier. It put me off the MSM a bit to see how much they span things. It can be a superior source of info as long as you are careful to follow the real experts and not the cranks.
Musk's technical team was an easy choice for an internal fraud bounty program to split the difference from any fraudulent misrepresentation by the original twitter management.
Nobody knows how Twitter under Musk will turn out. Some critics predict it will soon be a far right swamp no advertiser will want to have anything to do with. If they are right, Tesla’s association with Twitter stands to do it great harm. But if they are wrong, Tesla could benefit from its association with Twitter, much as it does from SpaceX. Musk is (surely) telling Tesla’s board and execs that having just paid billions for a firm, he isn’t about to alienate all its customers (the advertisers) - and the Tesla team is going to take his word for it.
It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it.
Conservative Moderate LiberalFrom an outside perspective both Biden and Obama have felt extremely moderate for instance.
Reminded me of the statement that “the U.S. wouldn’t intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait” 30 years ago. Again only weeks before the invasion that then gave the reason for the first invasion of Iraq by the U.S.
Amazing how often these same tactics work and reliably lead to big sales for the military industrial complex.
Biden is just a puppet these days. Saying whatever’s he’s told to by handlers. That’s been his entire career. How he makes his money.
To give a troll response:
In the current context, I guess it means someone who doesn't live on the internet complaining about issues they do nothing about as if it does something tangible to change the real world.
Edit: Didn't mean to downplay the tremendous effort that goes into Tesla's driver assistance features. Just that the architecture, codebases, and problems addressed are so wildly different between the companies.
Also - Let's not act like Twitter is absurdly complex. Handling that amount of traffic was hard in 2008, yes. It's not hard in 2022. The app itself is what? CRUD with stream processing? Some complexity with scaling that, but it's not self-driving... that's for damn sure. Even if they haven't reached L5 yet, L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
It is but it's a different problem. Solving Fermat's last theorem is an infinitely harder problem than, say, speedrunning Minecraft in under 13 minutes but you won't see Sir Andrew Wiles doing the latter - because they are different skillsets.
edit: No idea why I typed Simon Wiles, I know full well his name is Sir Andrew!
VERY few developers are at this level, though. Most (>99%) are stuck in some paradigm associated with their typical tasks.
Tesla engineers working on AI have their own domain specific knowledge they likely spent many years to get a PhD for. The same goes for Twitter engineers working on natural language understanding AI to detect certain types of posts. By your logic there is just one broad category of AI researcher and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Scratch that.. there's just one broad category of computer engineer and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Twitter or Tesla engineers could easily do a code review of Space X's code base right?
All the codebases will look like they were created by an undergrad CS major and then have accumulated 16 years of edge conditions. And if you pull it all down and try to rewrite it because it is all overly complicated and everyone who built it was wrong: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
So basically, there is not difference between "hi im having a pizza with friends at this new restaurant at the corner of my street" and "hi im item #12314 and i just turn left at 50mph speed on a busy road"
Telsa and Twitter are both very mainstream business at acquiring huge amount of data, So intuitively they would share the same similar issue and challenge...
These might seem on the face of it similar problems, but really they're not at all. Ingesting lots of data is ~trivial; dealing with lots of data in realtime somewhat less so.
I remember back on 2015, there was an AMA on reddit from a former engineer from Telsa.
I remember clearly how he explained how Telsa struggled to update thousand of car's firmware with legacy RH5 vm running on amazon and openssl 0.98 incompatibility with upper version.
I found it very amusing, cause at the same time, i was working at one of the leader of payment industry and POS maker. And we where exactly struggling with the same issue updating firmware of hundred thousand POS terminal in the wild (except that our servers where on premise and not at aws)and dealing with this openssl issue.
And i didnt claim workload are identicals, but i just claims that workload are very similar, leading to the fact that 90% of the solution might be common.
Opinions can be given but should not be taken as gospel over the opinions of the existing developers. But a lot of the time a new owner will take the opinions of their trusted sources (whose paycheck depends upon validating their boss' opinion) versus established experts. Good solutions come from discussion between these two opinions.