williamsmj

Read the letter again. This CEO is absolutely not forthright about taking the blame. He doesn't even speculate about root causes, much less assign blame. He describes the problem...

"While our revenue has grown by five times since the start of the pandemic, our costs have grown by even more as we geared up for a continued rate of growth that now looks unlikely. Additionally, so much of our organization was built for a paradigm of rapid growth, in terms of the roles, ratios, and structures we’ve put in place."

...but nowhere does he talk about why these things happened.

He literally uses the passive voice top avoid taking responsibility ("our organization was built" not "I built").

You come away with the feeling this is a good letter in which he takes responsibility because he distracts you by spending the rest of the letter describing the details of the severance offer, which is completely orthogonal to the issue of root causes and responsibility.

The board and investors and remaining employees don't need an apology. They need better leadership, or they need performance management of the current leadership with actual consequences, as they would rightly expect for any other failing employee.

I'm not suggesting he publicly admonish himself or take a "virtue signalling" pay cut or something. I'm suggesting the board fire him or other parts of leadership for cause, and hire people who make better decisions.

Because he's responsible for the fact they need to do this?

This email is basically:

Oh dear we're in a tight spot, no idea how we got here, it's a mystery! I guess someone (definitely not me!) ran the business in a way that demonstrated an appalling understanding of our market, our customers, and the macro climate, and a fundamental carelessness with investor money and employee livelihoods. Don't worry though, that person was definitely not me, so I'm the right person to lead us out of this.

p.s. look shiny severance packages!!!

p.p.s. Once again, that person was not me, so there shouldn't be any consequences for me, other than a bunch of easily impressed tech workers giving me praise for the severance package.

They are investing $250. The author realizes that this is not a great trade. It’s a proof of concept.

`:cq` exits vim with exit code 1.

This is useful if you're in vim to write a git commit message and you realize don't actually want to commit. Or you're in vim from `fc` to edit a shell command and you realise you don't actually want to run it.

You might enjoy Wolf's appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas....

Also voted no. Every minute he spends torching his reputation as CEO of a company he personally owns is good for the world.

> First, none of our policies have changed. Our approach to policy enforcement will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content: freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

This is bullshit on its face. The first sentence and the second sentence directly contradict each other.

It's not lockdowns. They had lockdowns all over the world. The US is almost the only countries in which roads became more dangerous during the pandemic (see second chart here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...).

Here's a statistic for you. 100% of my two (2) kids can't get to sleep until 10pm on Sunday nights because I live half a block from a south LA takeover intersection.

Thank you for posting this. About a third of the comments on this thread are people talking about 1950s-style drag racing.

Takeovers aren't races. They are groups of cars doing donuts, usually at an intersection, watched by a large crowd. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideshow_(automobile_exhibitio....

The problem is not the racial makeup of the LAPD.

I can absolutely assure you there is plenty to do in Los Angeles at 7pm. It’s not San Francisco. The problem is the seven and nine lane residential streets with no traffic lights for a mile.

This. I live in south LA and I’m a block away from a street with regular takeovers, mostly on Sunday nights. It is a residential street with seven (!) lanes of traffic. Part of the problem is admittedly that LAPD does not enforce road traffic laws because doing so would inconvenience their friends and family, and they don’t care about the (mostly black or Latino) residents of the residential neighborhoods in which these happen. But takeovers don’t happen in cities that are designed for humans because they’re physically impossible.

Yes. To provide the context necessary to understand the "this is why we can't have nice things" quote, you have to say what "this" is. That's how pronouns work.

Yes I know. They are irrelevant to the point of Gelman’s blog post, which is why he doesn’t mention them. I assume they’re being brought up here out of some kind of guilt by association thing, or to make the self-link seem more on topic.

> this article is slanted trash, its sources haters who have only one, incredibly repetitive thing to say about AI, and the author is a hater.

It doesn't "source haters". It quotes MIT Tech Review and Gary Marcus precisely in order to provide context for the subject of the “article” (blog post): LeCun's bizarre "this is why we can't have nice things" statement. This petulant remark seeks to shut down negative feedback as a class, regardless of its merits. That's what the blog post is about. The quotes are there so that the quote from LeCun makes sense, not because they're legitimate criticism.

> Emily Bender, Grady Booch...

These people are not mentioned in the linked post, which tells me you're pattern matching on "techlash" and posting a bunch of only vaguely related context (and a medium self-link).

> He should probably should stay chill.

Exactly?! That's the point of the blog post. It's in the title of the article. It seems obviously true, and I'm not sure how any of what you say adds up to a robust conclusion that "the article is slanted trash" and "the author (Andrew Gelman?!?!) is a hater" other than you don't like some of the quotes.

> and in the past he was very deferential to these folks, and even left Twitter for a while

How many times has he quit Twitter now? Three IIRC. Seems like he needs some coaching on the following through with promises.

https://twitter.com/pnikosis/status/1592823543498436611. Apparently that quote is from a (now deleted) tweet of his per https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/worl....

Yep. The story as Musk tells it, and as goes viral every couple of months, is a lie.

Correct. Like many credulously repeated stories about Musk 1) the source for this one is Musk himself 2) the description that he gave, and that gets repeated in viral posts, is an extremely easily disproven lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#In_popular_culture

"After a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to each employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. The e-mail was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new non-disclosure agreement. The plan was undermined when the company's general counsel forwarded his own unique version of the e-mail with the attached agreement. As a result, Musk's scheme was realized by employees who now had a safe copy to leak."

Agreed. This was not a good look for the movement https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1590478599844339712.

The headline is misleading. One of the five FCC commissioners said this, not “the FCC” as suggested by the headline, and in the same interview that commissioner said “as an FCC official, his own capacity to regulate TikTok is limited; CFIUS, the Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission may have greater legal authority over the company” and “he has not met with CFIUS member agencies or the White House to specifically raise the issue”. See https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/tech/fcc-commissioner-tiktok-....

It’s a guy thinking out loud. He’s an important guy, but on it’s own this changes nothing.

It’s a status symbol now. If it becomes a paid feature of privately owned Twitter then, whether they like it or not, it’s going to become a badge that says the owner supports an incredibly divisive specific person.

I wish Elon Musk all the best handling whatever this is with a skeleton crew of people who hate him on Tuesday: https://xeiaso.net/blog/openssl-3.x-secvuln-incoming.

I'm interested to see what happens to the drive to repeal Section 230 now. IIUC, a lot of the impetus for that came from the right (e.g. the Texas AG), but it provides a liability shield to the owner of the platform, which presumably Musk would like to retain.

Picking this one at random to reply to, but this goes to everyone: Thanks for all the replies.

I'm still confused. I think of inflation as a thing that devalues a present day $1. But as it applies to companies with revenue it seems like a rising tide that would lift all boats, and something that kind of divides out of the analysis of the future revenue stream of a company.

e.g. If Reddit's daily revenue is $x and inflation is 10%, then its daily revenue in a year is (approximately, caveats about their ability to raise prices, etc.) $1.1x. So Reddit can say "give us a dollar today and we'll give you $10 multiplied by ten years of 10% inflation in ten years". Is that mental model wrong?

I'm also confused why this problem particularly applies to Reddit, which seemed to the the implication of the comment I originally responded to. Is that just because Reddit makes a loss, and this challenge applies to all such companies?

"a high interest rate environment means that all that future growth has to be discounted back to a much lower net present value."

Could someone explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old (who understands what a discount rate and present value are, but not why that collection of words makes things harder for reddit)?

Are you saying that anyone should be allowed to drive whatever speed they like, based on their "discretion"? If so, is that different from getting rid of speed limits?