Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/18 – Twitter: Not Dead At The Time Of This Posting

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, November 18th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. I'm here with you all as we wait for the end of Twitter together, unless it doesn't die, in which case, I don't know. Masasan is actually personally in Hawk to the Vision Fund now that all of their investments have gone pear-shaped. A weird end of an era for Facebook. It's not about status updates anymore. And of course, the weekend long-reys suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Quick note, there might be a few curses. again in today's episode. Remember when I said I'd do a percentage rating now and again in terms of how alive I felt like Twitter as a platform was. I guess when I imagined doing that, I was imagining

Starting point is 00:01:20 a slow draining of users, a slow death for Twitter, as it were. But hey, you know, heart attacks can happen too. Twitter as I write these words is functioning. But I'll be honest with you. A lot of people last night, myself included, thought it would maybe be 50-50 if it would even be here this morning. That was because yesterday, hundreds of Twitter employees posted farewell messages and salute emojis in Slack and tweets, announcing their resignations after Elon Musk's so-called hardcore ultimatum, quoting Alex Heath in The Verge. Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told the verge that

Starting point is 00:02:14 given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they've watched legendary engineers and others they look up to leave one by one. Multiple critical teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak with. must's permission. That includes Twitter's traffic and front-end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services, the team that maintains Twitter's core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. You cannot run Twitter without this team, a departing employee said. Several members of Twitter's command center team, a group of engineers

Starting point is 00:02:55 that is on call 24-7, and acts as the clearinghouse for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks, said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter's API for developers has also been severely gutted in a tweet Thursday evening. Musk said, quote, the best people are staying, so I'm not super worried, end quote. Now, I've also heard that HR and payroll is basically gone. It's kind of hard to keep people working for you if you can't pay them or pay out their severances. The team tasked with rolling out Twitter blue, Elon's big product push, are also rumored to have left yesterday. The lead web engineer is reportedly gone. Sources told Bloomberg that as it became clear,

Starting point is 00:03:44 way more people were resigning than anyone anticipated. Elon softened his remote work stance yesterday and called meetings to try to convince key colleagues to stay. But one of those meetings was apparently happening as the 5 p.m. deadline occurred, and silently, dozens of people merely logged out of the video call signaling that they had quit in real time. Twitter has reportedly shut down badge access and access full stop to its offices until November 21st, and all last night. Users on Twitter were basically saying their goodbyes to one another, which I'll be honest with you, was kind of moving. It was kind of one of the most amazing things I've seen in my entire life on the internet. And yes, it's not lost on some of us that we're all still tweeting that Twitter

Starting point is 00:04:32 is going down while Twitter continues to not go down. As I tweeted last night, everyone on Twitter right now is like that guy and almost famous who, when the plane is about to go down, shouts, fuck it, I'm gay. And then the plane doesn't go down. But again, how much longer can this go on? I've heard engineers say Twitter was built by smart people so it can run on autopilot for a while until, you know, you have to turn off autopilot to actually swerve to avoid something. Quoting Jack Evans on Twitter, wait until security certificates start to expire, backup devices get full, routers need security patches, invoices need to be paid, etc. Everything you take for granted that gets done by the invisible people, end quote. Speaking of, let me get personal for a second,

Starting point is 00:05:15 I mean, do you know how much of tech memes algorithms for surfacing and sorting stories each day are based on the amount of posts and tweets people make about a given story? The chatter, as the editors call it. Or how about this level of personal stuff? There's a reason why media folk especially haven't been able to live without Twitter all these years. I'll give you two examples. The comedian Moshe Kashir and I have followed each other on Twitter for years, and we've been discussing me flying out to San Francisco Sketchfest this January so I can participate in a live-timore. of his Hound Tall podcast. We've been coordinating via Twitter DMs, and then last night, simultaneously, we were both like, you know, maybe we should trade email addresses. Another example is Farhad Manjou. He and I have commiserated for years exclusively on Twitter, but the next time I want to have him on this show, do I know how to contact him? The same is true for some venture

Starting point is 00:06:09 capitalists I know, some people in the sea suites of major companies who occasionally give me background info on big tech stories. They wouldn't be able to email me those sorts of tips. Do I have to give out my signal contact info? There's a reason why for 15 years now, handing out my Twitter handle at conferences has sort of been like handing out my business card. It's like, you have permission to bug me in this specific asynchronous way that isn't quite as direct as my phone number or email address, but back to other people, specifically the tweets themselves. Why have even those who survived the layoffs earlier chosen to jump ship now? In the show notes, I've linked to a reputed Twitter engineer named Peter Klaus, who had a tweet storm on Twitter last night.

Starting point is 00:06:55 Read the whole thing because he says everyone expected the layoffs. He doesn't hate Elon. He very much wants Twitter to succeed. And as late as earlier this week, he and his wife had agreed that he'd stick it out. Give it his best shot, because what else did he have to lose? Well, quote, then Wednesday offered a clean exit, and 80% of the remaining team were gone. Three out of 75 engineers stayed. If I stayed, I would have been on call constantly with little support for an indetermined amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in. Maybe for the right vision, I could have dug deep and done mind-numbing work for a while, but that's the thing. There was no vision shared with us. No fire.

Starting point is 00:07:40 year plan like at Tesla. Nothing more than what anyone can see on Twitter. Such a plan is allegedly coming for those who stayed, but the ask was blind faith and required signing away the severance offer before seeing it. Pure loyalty test. There was no retention plan for those that stayed, no clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon, just trust us style verbal promises. But tweets overall were untrusting after the seven months of acquisition drama, recent tweets and leaks, et cetera. So my friends are gone. The vision is murky. There is a storm coming and no financial upside. What would you do? Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer, or would you take the out? To be clear,

Starting point is 00:08:25 I love hard work. I do well with chaos, but I like doing it with people I like for a mission I care about and ideally with significant upside potential, financial, or otherwise to balance downside risk. Side note, being left solely to put out fires and keep services running isn't exactly what I dream of doing as an engineer. I just want to know what I am signing up for besides pain, end quote. And quoting, not Bruno again on Twitter. Of all the big social media behemus, Twitter was the only one that truly inherited a 2000s forum culture. So it's only appropriate that it should die by the admin being incredibly divorced, having a personal meltdown, and pulling the plug on the servers for financial reasons, end quote. Word this morning that SoftBank expects to write down its entire $100 million

Starting point is 00:09:22 investment in FTX, which makes sense, though as others have said, only $100 million? That's not the Masasan we know. Maybe this is. According to the Financial Times, Masayoshi Son personally owes soft bank close to $5 billion due to its growing losses. His stake in the Vision Fund, too, is now probably worthless, down from a valuation of about $2.8 billion in 2021. Quote, the 65-year-old chief executive and founder of SoftBank last week said he would step back from running day-to-day operations at the group. His main focus, he said, would be on the company's British chip subsidiary arm after the technology conglomerate posted quarterly investment losses of $10 billion. The widening losses in SoftBank's various investment vehicles have also added billions of dollars to the tab, that Sahn owes the group in relation to its technology bets. This is because SoftBank fronted him

Starting point is 00:10:18 the money to invest in its technology-related funds, which he is under no obligation to repay for many years. SoftBank has not yet collected. $2.8 billion that San owes in relation to his stake in the fund. Previously, SoftBank netted off the value of his equity from the amount he owed the group, meaning at the end of 2021, this stood at just $4 million. Sahn also owes SoftBank's $669 million under a similar arrangement on its Latin American fund, which has backed startups across the continent, although this is reduced to $252 million when his equity value in the fund is taken into account. The total amount the Japanese executive owes his company is now at $4.7 billion when losses in the group's short-lived Internal Hedge fund, SB Northstar, are also taken into account.

Starting point is 00:11:06 Softbank confirmed to the FT, end quote. And you can weirdly read this as an end of the era. If Facebook was built first and foremost, back in its college-only days on the what are you interested in, single or in a relationship, or its complicated toggle, interesting that Facebook plans to remove religious views, political views, addresses, and interested in, which indicates sexual preference from user profiles on December 1st, quoting Gizmodo. The small but telling change, spotted by social media consultant Matt Novart, Fara indicates Facebook wants you to think differently about its platform these days. In the early days of Facebook, people would spend blissful hours filling out their profiles. It was a different time. The information on your page played a much bigger role on Facebook than profiles on newer social media platforms where a bio rarely amounts to more than a few sentences and an occasional

Starting point is 00:12:03 link. A decade of privacy problems has made it less fun and carefree to volunteer your personal information, leading some people to even enter fake details thinking they can fool the algorithms. The shift reflects meta's broader public relations efforts. As a whole, the tech industry wants the public to differentiate between sensitive data and what you might call regular data. Meta will tell you that Instagram and Facebook don't use sensitive data for advertising, for example, though that change only came after researchers uncovered serious problems. Facebook had to remove what it called sensitive ad-targeting categories such as race, religion, and sexual orientation after violating the Housing Rights Act by allowing advertisers to use its

Starting point is 00:12:42 system to use those demographics to tailor housing ads, effectively discriminating against certain viewers. Advertisers responded by zeroing in on proxies, like targeting ads based on interest in Jewish holidays, rather than the literal fact that someone is Jewish. Facebook since removed thousands of other categories that are used for similar purposes, end quote. Time for the weekend long-rease suggestions. First up, I started this show by saying Twitter isn't down yet. So why are people so certain it might go down soon. Why are they bordering on the certainty that it probably will? Let me share a tweet storm from an SRE and SIS admin who outlined the 56. Yes, 56 different ways that they see Twitter is in danger if there aren't enough folks around to keep things humming.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Starting with, number one, random hard drive fills up. You have no idea how common it is for a single hosed box to cause cascading failures across systems, even well. engineered fault-tolerant ones with active maintenance. Where's the box? What's filling it up? Who will figure that out? Or forget the World Cup. As I've mentioned, here's number 25. New Year's Eve, USA, East Coast. Every year, I remember sitting outside the office, fireworks exploding in the distance, frantically calling the video on call. Everyone post videos of their fireworks. Everyone. It will fill up disks and test your bandwidth to the very limit. Or here's number 27. physical security of your offices. Security guards told me they keep long lists of crazies.

Starting point is 00:14:23 Commit them to memory. People want to fucking kill people like Zuck, like ritual murder in the bathtub shit. They show up at the office all the time. Is your security team staffed and ready? Someone will absolutely try to plug a Raspberry Pi into your corporate network 100%. They will try to spoof the Wi-Fi. Mike's in the executive offices, 1960s spy movie shit. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. end quote. Next, I didn't do this as a segment because I thought it was maybe a bit too niche, but if you want a review of the new Nvidia RTX 4080, the verge has you covered, of course, they say the 4080 has great 4K performance. DLSS3 is genuinely transformative and 16 gigabytes of V-Ram slaps, but it's huge, it's expensive, and the dongle adapter is annoying. They gave it a

Starting point is 00:15:14 7 out of 10. Then, Fast Company gets at something that I've wondered about. Killing the password is a great idea, right? Things like those new secure pass keys on iOS. Problem is, wouldn't that effectively lock you into a given platform? You couldn't leave because you couldn't take your passwords with you? Well, one password might have a solution for this. Quote, the company's passwordless system, which replaces traditional passwords with simpler and more secure pass keys, is launching early next year, and it'll work across iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux. In OnePassword's new demo, locking into websites without a password is as simple as entering an email and clicking a button. Instead of making users fill out a password, OnePassword's browser extension generates a hidden pass key,

Starting point is 00:15:58 which in turn pairs with a separate key stored by the website. This unique pairing proves the user's identity without transmitting the pass key itself. While both Apple and Google have now built similar systems directly into iOS and Android, respectively, OnePassword's alternative doesn't give up the trappings of a traditional password manager. Users can still share logins with family members or coworkers, organize logins using tags, and more importantly, access their accounts from any device that OnePassword supports. By contrast, Apple's and Google systems are largely tied to their respective platforms.

Starting point is 00:16:31 While you can easily sync pass keys between an iPhone and a Mac, for instance, you can access those same accounts on a Windows PC only by scanning QR codes one at a time. It's early days, but OnePassword is also investigating ways to export pass keys to other password managers. Mitchell Cohen, a product lead at OnePassword noted during a demo, that it would be technically possible for users to download their pass keys to a spreadsheet, then upload them into another password manager. That's already how it works today if you want to move from one password manager to another, end quote. And finally, I keep threatening to do a bonus episode about the more out there areas of tech, areas we don't cover very often, but have actually been seeing a ton of venture investment lately. We've already covered space tech a couple times,

Starting point is 00:17:17 but I'm also thinking about investments in fusion technology and stuff like this, quoting CNET. Direct air capture, or DAC, is a technological process that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air and serves as one of a multifaceted approach to combat climate change. While the DAC industry is still in its nascent stage and has been criticized as too expensive, it's already embedding itself as an important technology, having secured support from governments around the world. There are now 19 DAC plants worldwide with Switzerland-based Climb Works, Canada's carbon engineering and the U.S. Carbon Capture, pushing innovation in the field. DAC needs to scale up quickly. Right now, all 19 plants account for 0.01 metric tons of carbon capture per year.

Starting point is 00:18:04 They need to reach 85 metric tons by 2030 and 980 metric tons by 2050 to help hit current climate targets, according to the IEA. Big Tech is also jumping on board with Google, Meta and others investing nearly $1 billion into DAC. Researchers are already imagining new ways of carbon capture. One idea from the company CO2 Rail involves putting DAC carts on trains. CO2 Rail says that its DAC train carts could remove up to 3,000. tons of carbon per year. Students at Einhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are touting Zemm, or Zero Emission Mobility, a concept car that sucks up CO2 as it drives, end

Starting point is 00:18:45 quote. As promised, we are going to have a bonus episode for you this weekend. Chris is in town, so we're going to do it in person, and the great Anil Dash is finally coming on the show. Problem is we're not actually going to record the show until 4 p.m. tomorrow. So the best case scenario is, I put the episode up right away tomorrow night, or worst case scenario, I post it Sunday afternoon. What do you think we're going to talk about? We're going to talk about Twitter, of course, who better to parse out all the events of the last two weeks than the inventor of the hashtag, Chris, and also one of the first people I ever followed on Twitter, Anil. Look, if Twitter is not around by Monday, you can always find me here, of course, but once again,

Starting point is 00:19:36 I'm at Ride Home at Toot.comunity on Mastodon. I'll put that in the show notes. And also, I'm trying out something called Post. It's founded by Nome Bardan, the founder of Ways, who you might remember we had on a bonus episode earlier this year. Kara Swisher has been touting Post as a good possible Twitter alternative. The very, very last link in today's show notes is for a signup for Post at post. But please use that link if you do plan to sign up so I can jump the signup line and then be able to report on how it all works

Starting point is 00:20:13 sooner rather than later. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/18 – Twitter: Not Dead At The Time Of This Posting

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