Remember that while Bill Gates was worrying about downloading a video editor, he was ceding search to Google
4,260 karma · joined July 3, 2010
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkMcLaren6
Lex: "It just feels like we are in the same room. This is really the most incredible thing I've ever seen".
This change of attention is also affecting movie studios like Disney
After a year see which group has the safest record. Simple.
> If advertisers were getting results from their X ads, or possibly If you posted data that showed that ads on this platform were effective and produced results, you would be in an entirely different position.
> If your ads produce results, businesses would tell you they understand how difficult it is to completely eliminate hate on the platform.
> If they don't produce results, there is no reason for a big company to fuck around and find out that their ads showed up next to a hateful post.
> I can't tell you how many times I get Cheech ,(or is it Chong?) ads for CBD gummies. Shit I would never buy. ..
> On other platforms ads sometimes are eerily relevant to my interests.
> That never occurs on this platform
When asked if he ever advertised on X:
> Multiple of my portfolio companies have. And I always ask them to check. Without exception, all have said it doesn't give the same returns as other platforms
Step 2: Announce a credible space mission to mine a gold asteroid
Step 3: After the price of gold tanks, sell the put options
Step 4: Cancel the space mission
Step 5: Profit!
How long until this business plan works and millions of people’s life savings are wiped out?
Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.
Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?
Two weeks? That’s a pretty slow response to an existential threat
— Arnold Schwarzenegger
I'm not so sure.
For millennia people tried and failed to fly through the air like birds. In the late nineteenth century so many people had tried and failed, it seemed like a law of nature that humans were destined to remain earth-bound. Then suddenly, miraculously, we figured it out.
I think it will be the same with the 'usual human lifespan limit' of 120 years. At some point we will figure it out, and a group of humans will have a longevity distribution whose right tail extends to 150 years. Bryan Johnson may already be in that group.
So 2 single people sharing a 2-bedroom apartment in Manhattan are not earning a "living wage"? I don't think that's how most people would define the term
[0] https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/36061
[1] https://www.zillow.com/manhattan-new-york-ny/cheap-apartment...
Advertisers will come back and Twitter will be hugely profitable.
Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.
This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon
1. When I go on vacation I see ads in a language I don't understand
2. When I sign up for a service like Disney Plus I still see ads for that service
3. When I sign into a real estate website and mark some houses as 'favourite', that website doesn't show me ads on Twitter for similar houses
4. When I put an item in an online shopping cart and leave it there for a few days, I don't see any Twitter ads suggesting I complete the purchase
5. I live in an inner-city area, but for some reason Twitter shows me ads for combine harvesters and Starlink
> A machine-learning model would be fed historical admissions data, including candidates’ family background and academic achievement, and noncognitive skills such as grit and resilience, along with outcomes of past admission decisions. It would use these data to predict new applicants’ performance — as defined by each institution, such as college grade-point average or income 10 years after graduation. The model could figure out which characteristics best predict performance for various subgroups — for example, how salient SAT scores are for public-school Black students raised in the South by single mothers vs. private-school White kids from the Northeast. If we use only unadjusted test scores, all that context is lost.
I love the idea of using an algorithm to rate candidates [1] and having a feedback loop to rate the performance of the algorithm [2] but I think Fryer has too much faith in machine learning. I suspect a machine may simply learn that nothing beats a middle-class kid who did well at high school.
[1] The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al has a fascinating description about how algorithms are superior to human judgement: "Meehl reviewed twenty studies in which a clinical judgment was pitted against a mechanical prediction for such outcomes as academic success and psychiatric prognosis. He reached the strong conclusion that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment...You can surely imagine the response of clinical psychologists to Meehl’s finding that trivial formulas, consistently applied, outdo clinical judgment. The reaction combined shock, disbelief, and contempt for the shallow research that pretended to study the marvels of clinical intuition"
[2] This would fix the problem Paul Graham describes here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1585890585621168128
By firing General Counsel Sean Edgett it seems Elon's pride is clouding his judgement.
Edgett demonstrated great skill by drafting a watertight legal agreement at very short notice, then expertly using litigation to prevent Musk from wriggling out of the deal.
When Twitter shares are publicly traded again in a few years, Musk's purchase price of $44 billion will look like a bargain.
My prediction: In 5 years Twitter's market cap will exceed $150 billion.