Saturday Morning Coffee
What a week! That dude that took over Twitter is driving it in the ground with a gigantor hammer all while we watch from the cheap seats sipping our soda and eating popcorn. What a spectacle.
This week was a busy week at work, promotion time. Lots of meetings. I’m all Zoom’ed out.
Enjoy that morning elixir of life. I certainly am. ☕️
Eugen Rochko looks exhausted. The 29-year-old German programmer is the founder of Mastodon, a distributed alternative to Twitter that has exploded in popularity in recent weeks as Elon Musk’s ownership of the platform has rained chaos on its users.
I’ve heard some folks doubt the survivability of Mastodon and doubt hate can be squashed there. In my experience on the platform it’s quite the opposite. If you’re running a server full of racist white nationalists, Nazis, or other hate groups it’s extremely easy for the admin of your server to block federation of that entire server.
I’ve found Mastodon to be so much better for conversation with folks outside my little friend bubble on Twitter.
For writers, artists, podcasters, journalists, and people who make things in public, Twitter was the one social networking site we all had to use.
Brent is a long time blogger, Mac programmer, creator and leader of the NetNewsWire team, and all around great guy. If you’re a consumer of RSS point your feed reader to his site. It’s a great read.
Musk went on to say that “Twitter will be much more engineering-driven,” and that while design and product “will still be very important,” engineers “will have the greatest sway.” And then Musk presented employees with an ultimatum: click “yes” on a Google form affirming your desire to “be part of the new Twitter,” or leave in exchange for three months’ pay.
I’ve heard from a friend that most of the US Engineering staff left. That’s just wild.
Last week, I made the decision to leave my role leading Trust & Safety at Twitter.
— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 18, 2022
Today, I'm sharing a few thoughts about what comes next for the site. https://t.co/QPAQR6zpqU
I don’t have a NY Times subscription but I’ll bet this piece by Mr. Roth is quite good.
If you had told me three weeks ago that Twitter, as a company, would today be embroiled in turmoil — perhaps outright existential crisis — over a company-wide email from Elon Musk centered around the phrase “extremely hardcore”, v-1 is not the scenario I’d have imagined.
In my career I’ve worked for some hardcore companies, like the old Microsoft, it’s not fun. Don’t do it.
NEW: Email from Elon to the engineering team: "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months" 1/
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 18, 2022
I don’t understand why he continues to ask for snippets of code from his employees. It’s just some random metric he’s using to what what end? What about the devs who made Twitter better by removing code?
Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.
It’s been a rough couple weeks in the tech sector. I’m sorry to see so many folks having to deal with this. Here’s hoping they land on their feet quickly.
While Central Valley agricultural leaders warn of jobs loss during California’s ongoing drought, some local leaders say it’s time for less water-dependent economic opportunities.
California is in deep trouble so the United States food supply is in deep trouble. You’ll see it at the grocery store.
When I tweeted my way into the iOS community so many years ago, I felt the same energy and excitement, if not necessarily the same level of closeness. You all gave me the confidence I needed to keep going with programming when I felt like giving up. We’ve person. Like her I lament the loss of the Twitter we knew but all good things come to an end, right?
I’m not anywhere close to assuming redemption for Rupert Murdoch or his publication for their role in empowering the dangerous desecration of the last six years, particularly since Fox News showed reluctance in quitting the man by airing nearly all of his sour announcement. (For me, the announcement at Mar-a-Lago had more of the air of a man running from the law than running for the presidency.)
How TFG avoids jail time at this point is beyond me.
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has had it with C and C++, time-tested programming languages commonly used for native applications that require high performance.
Russinovich is a legendary software engineer. It’s gonna be interesting to see how many new products come out of Microsoft and other companies written in 100% Rust.
In this second edition of our October 2021 report, we review the investigation and its basis. We assess the publicly known facts and relevant law and analyze the extent to which the former president may be held criminally responsible for his conduct in Georgia. We conclude that Trump is at substantial risk of criminal prosecution in Fulton County.
At substantial risk? How is he not already in handcuffs? If any of us “regular” people had done this we’d be thrown in a dungeon.
Haas’ Kevin Magnussen just scored his first-ever pole position in Formula 1 during the Brazilian Grand Prix. Yes, I intended to write that sentence. It’s not April Fool’s Day. Kevin Magnussen is polesitter for Saturday’s sprint race.
I support Haas. It’s an American F1 team and I’m happy for Kevin Magnussen and Haas. Now, get some podiums! 😂
Between the Church Militant and Nick Fuentes, it’s pretty clear what the theocratic Right wants to do: they want to kill you or force you to be as mad as they are.
Nick Fuentes is a piece of work but at least he’s not hiding his White Christian Nationalism behind dog whistles, no sir, he’s just saying it out loud.
From: @twittereng
— DM of Engineering 🎲 (@dmofengineering) November 17, 2022
To: @elonmusk
Subject: pic.twitter.com/EiDADFtMCN
Go check out that tweet thread. It’s full of Twitter Employees saying goodbye after the hardcore time limit expired.
It’s a sad day for the social network. How long will it stay up?
If you’re a recruiter from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Facebook please save yourself some time and don’t pursue me as a candidate.