Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could On February 21, Twitter god-king Elon Musk proclaimed "our algorithm is made open source next week." He added it wouldn't work well at first, "but it will improve rapidly!" That hasn't happened. twitter Twitter algorithm to be open sourced 'next week,' says Musk READ MORE Musk has been claiming he wanted to open source …
The car still has a steering wheel. It's just not connected to the steering anymore, thereby preventing the fault prone human driver from interfering with electronics. This is a major technical improvement. Do you have any idea how hard it is to hit an emergency vehicle if the dude in the "driver's seat" is allowed to continually interfere with the autopilot?
Key difference Sun wanted to continue trading after releasing the source code, things aren’t so clear cut with Twitter.
However, what is perhaps a little surprising is how some bored hacker like kernelware, hasn’t decided to “humiliate” Musk and simply liberate the code. This would avoid the redistribution restriction…
I find it hard to believe there aren’t tens of Twitter developers - both current and former, who haven’t got personal repositories, which could be released by dumping an old HDD in a dumpster that some public spirited electronics recycler “finds” ….
"Oh he could easily open source Twitter just by posting some developer's log-in credentials!"
Well, he did close. He had Tesla software developers review Twitter's code, much to the amusement of the former Twitter developers, as he expected them to fully comprehend the code in a few days.
As for Musk understanding marketing and hardware development management, that's not actually established, as he hired such managers. He just hawks for them like a circus ringmaster, but unlike the ringmaster, he's no clue how to even raise the tent.
Well, the other talent beyond showmanship is actually a good one, knowing how to hire good and competent people.
I may loathe the man, but I will give credit where it's due.
that his promises have not meant much.
Wasn't in in 2017 that Mr Tesla announced the Model 3, Roadster and Semi. Now, some 5 years later, a few of the Semi's are out in the wild and as for the roadster (with or without rocket booster(wtf?)) deathly silence.
Then there is FSD. He promised it would be ready in 2018. Now... two massive hardware upgraded later and multiple price rises, it is still a work in progress.
IMHO, he should just let twitter be the domain of the crazies until after the 2024 election. After that, god help us all
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No, it's not just a case of a sed script to insert the GPL. Many company's codebases include third party code which they don't have the rights to redistribute. And many company's codebases include stuff that they obtained via acquisitions of companies who were not anything like sufficiently diligent in tracking the authorship of their code. Been there multiple times, got the box of t-shirts.
This is exactly why Musk needed the people who he's fired, if he wanted to Open Source Twitter code. But of course the GodKingGenius is much smarter than anyone else and doesn't have to concern himself with piffling details like that.
And, of course, he didn't say he'd open-source all the Twitter code; he said he'd open-source "the algorithm", by which he presumably meant the ranking-and-propagating algorithm for individual tweets. Twitter has a large codebase (just look at that page of bits they have open-sourced to get an idea of how large), so presumably even most Twitter developers would have needed to do quite a bit of exploring around the repositories to find that particular chunk of code, even if it's properly isolated and abstracted away.
So it was a dumb thing to promise, and likely quite difficult to deliver.
Watch, as I magically make all the proprietary code that my code relies on open source as well!
If ol' Musky didn't think spaffing all those billions on buying Twitter was money badly spent, just wait until he has to acquire all those other companies to stop them suing him out of existence!
Yeah, OK. So, Microsoft got caught stealing full code bases from multiple companies, Remember DoubleSpace, renamed after being sued by Stac to DriveSpace and the infringing code removed (and a massive settlement)? Oddly, no smoking hole in the ground were Microsoft HQ is.
Just cost them man hours in software writing, rather than stealing and a fairly large check to Stac.
Slight difference in size and stability of companies here isn't there?
You've got Microsoft, who now make $130bn in profit in a year, to whom Twitter would be a fun little side project, vs Twitter, which Musk had to borrow to buy and is being run into the ground, has no stability at all etc...
I'd personally like to know how many open source programmers are chomping at the bit of working on Twitter's open source code, knowing that their "open source" (read: little to no compensation) work is to benefit a company that is not only owned by one of the wealthiest people in the world, it is also the same wealthy person that fired the for-pay programmers...to just line up the for-gratis programmers as a replacement.
Personally, I'd say "Stuff off" in a 10m neon sign, but is it only me??
In a project I once worked on we had the full lyrics/script in a comment at the start of a file that contained our log generating class. It became a tradition that every time someone changed that file they had to add something like a copyright or a credit. The log file generator didn't change all that often but still it became a handy repository of anything you might like to know about that particular sketch.
"We believe we should not be limited to the Parrot Sketch. Cheese Shop, Fish Slapping Dance, Tobacconists, Argument etc are all acceptable forms of devotion."
Pah. In my day we had to sit in a hole and imagine those sketches. Tell that to kids today and they won't believe you.
It feels more and more like Elon is the Snake Oil Salesman whose forgotten that you need to leave town before people start cottoning on to your bullsh&t.
It started well, he got out of Paypal before he brought it down (or was kicked out depending on your point of view). He handed over SpaceX to Mrs Shotwell at the right time, he dumped Hyperloop on the world and ran away, started the Boring company and then left it alone.
But with Tesla it feels like he's out stayed his welcome, and with Twitter, wow. Here come the villages with the tar and feathers.
The problem with making bigger and bigger promises, is that eventually people are going to want to see some of them delivered. He should have ran away when he had the chance...
Monorail, monorail, monorail... (*ahem*)
"Here come the villages with the tar and feathers."
Hey guys! Tar and feather is so outdated! Flaming torches and pitchforks are in this year. I just happen to have a stock of both I can sell at a low low price! Just queue right here! All branded CMT Dibbler Enterprises Plc as a sign of exquisite quality. They even come with the added benefit of burning both Musk and Twtter at the same time. I guarantee it!
"The problem with making bigger and bigger promises, is that eventually people are going to want to see some of them delivered. He should have ran away when he had the chance..."
Yeah, like they expected delivery on promises from Trump?
All we got was an insurrection that did more damage to our Capitol Building than the British Army did in 1812.
When our leaders bravely turned and ran away...
I'm intrigued by your dictionary [1] which has many words I don't recognise. What is a tift, for instance?
jonathan@Odin:~$ grep -E "^t[a-z]{2}t$" /usr/share/dict/words | xargs echo
tact tart taut teat tent test text that tilt tint toot tort tost tout trot tuft twit
Hmm. Odin's dictionary doesn't have 'twat' either.
[1] Insert bishop+actress joke ad lib.
"But the truth is, this is an initial of four letter word starting with T and ending with T."
There is no I in TEAM[*], but there is a T on the front of the car, a T on the back of the car, and I in the middle.
* A saying that always annoyed me but more so the person spouting it when I pointed out there is a ME in TEAM :-)
Terry Pratchett wrote a good commentary on the whole god/religion theme in "Small Gods". It's technically a fantasy novel, but when you compare it to the real world, he is pretty much spot on from my point of view.
Basically, it boils down to "A god can't be smarter than the people who believe in it. The most devout followers aren't necessarily the smartest and most learned ones. Resulting in gods that are very powerful but might need help reading words with more than four letters."
"Now, Musk does know a thing or two about marketing and engineering management. You don't build Tesla and SpaceX without some genius. But when it comes to software, he's proven clueless."
Bullshit! Elon Musk is enterpeneur and nothing more, he's not a tech genius of any sort. He buys companies, fires the owners and then hires people to make the new purchase sing and dance while he then discusses how to rebrand the enterprise as his own and take all the glory.
That's all he ever does, he did it with Tesla ( that was a company before Musk ) and SpaceX, he tried it with Twitter but his luck and "magic touch" ran out.
Got news for you he didnt build either.
Tesla was around for a long time before Musk invested his lucky money from PayPal, and secondly believe it or not, there are 100s or 1000s of rocket scientists and others working at SpaceX. Maybe im mad but im pretty sure they do 99.9999% of the work.
He may have renamed Tesla's connector to try and encourage it to become default for USA - though it isn't the standard yet - but he didn't do it out of the goodness of his heart.
I note EU has already specified CCS in a directive and all charging stations in EU have to support that coupling.
Indeed, I came around to say much the same, i.e. there's already a wide-agree upon standard.
In Elon's case, I suspect it's much more a case of the tail wagging the dog. If he can make his standard the official North American one, he doesn't have to update his entire charging network to become compliant. Electrify America, the charging network built by Volkswagen as penance for #dieselgate, already support the ISO "Plug and Charge" standard. It seems Tesla's network has a proprietary version thereof.
Forking the standard much?
It's also why there's a bag full of adapters and converters sitting in any decent tech's kit
Ah - you've seen the bubblewrap bag that lives in my work bag then. Straddling (as I am) the Mac and PC worlds, I need all sorts of cables/converters/adaptors because, inevitably, at a critical point someone will have 'forgotten their adaptor'.
I do make sure that I either get it back or that work buys another one for me.
However to give Tesla (not Musk) their due, J-1772 was only one of several standards back then, and CCS didn't really exist, being piggybacked on J-1772.
The "smart" money was on ChaDeMo (which was complete and utter shite) and another one that I can't remember the name of.
You've got to remember this was the dinosaur age of EVs and it was the usual battle of standards. So going it alone was not that big a step.
I'm still gobsmacked to see EU people HAVE TO BRING THEIR OWN DAMN CHARGING CABLES. WTF is up with that idiocy? Here in the US, the cable is part of the charge station.
"I'm still gobsmacked to see EU people HAVE TO BRING THEIR OWN DAMN CHARGING CABLES. WTF is up with that idiocy? Here in the US, the cable is part of the charge station."
Only on slow chargers. It means for those walking down the street don't have to constantly avoid tripping up cables coming out of posts.
I've seen some in the US where the cable is left strewn around ready for other cars to drive over.
The fact that they have stopped paying everyone is a sure sign of a company about to file for bankruptcy. There are many stories of landlords, suppliers, vendors, etc. not getting paid, and they are filing suit against Twitter. Bankruptcy lawyers often advise clients to stop paying bills, just prior to filing.
It looks like Twitter will be profitable soon
I think you've missed out a minus sign somewhere. The company still has a ferocious burn rate (even despite not paying its dues anywhere), it has pretty much lost all its advertising income thanks to the antics of the fool at the top and it has to service a massive debt, also down to the same fool.
There is no way that equation is even near of being back into the black unless you're very, very colour blind.
I think it's about $25B in total, including the £4B of twitter shares he already owned. That's about 10% of his total worth, most of which is tied up Tesla and SpaceX shares. Not to mention the effect a massive pubic fail on such a scale would have on his business reputation, making it harder to raise funds in the future and likely knock-on effects on the share prices of his other ventures. I suspect a Twitter bankruptcy would end up costing him more than the total sale price in the short to medium term, 20% or more of his current wealth but he'll still be worth $billions.
That Twitter is losing users has nothing to do with software or technology of any kind. So open sourcing the algorithm will in no way help stem the steady outflow of users.
The cause of the loss of users is Musk's management of the platform. That's a problem that won't be fixed any time soon.
The cause of the loss of users is Musk's management of the platform.
That and the endless partial breakages. I've didn't have any items from my interests for months, then they reappeared a couple of weeks ago, now they've vanished again. I got no adverts for months (hurray!), now my timeline is being carpet bombed with them - mostly utterly irrelevant to me like ads for local services half a planet away, but only on my Android phone, not on the web interface on my desktop. Links break, replies vanish and reappear days later, images don't always display, etc …
The only thing Elon was right about here was that Twitter had too many staff. He then fired the wrong people. Twitter is not that complicated a concept, they need to keep what is a reasonably simple but enormous-scale system going. But treating your employees like crap and randomly firing people without taking time to understand the business first is hilariously incompetent. You start acting like that and the first thing that happens is all your most competent and qualified employees find other jobs, because they can do so easily.
Then you're left with all the dead wood and visa-bound waqe slaves (at least until they can get out). And you're a company powered by indentured servitude presided over by moronic deadwood. This is not a recipe for success and Twitter only had 2 things. Their employees and name recognition. Nothing is stopping everyone from moving on to the next platform.
Hit the nail on the head there.
Even when a company announces planned redundancies properly (with employee consultation and all the rest) there will always be people who look for a new job. I've spoken to managers who sad that this is a good outcome because they want to cut headcount and if people leave voluntarily then that saves them having to make severance payments to as many people. It also cuts the risk of legal action. This may well be true but the unintended consequence of this is that the people most likely to leave are the most talented and hard working employees for the simple reason that they are the most employable.
There is, however another unintended consequence. Most of the time you don't find a new job in under a month. So what often happens is this. Management announce an intention to cut a certain number of staff, let's say ten to make it easy. During the one month consultation period lets say two people hand in their notice. The management think this is great because they now only need to make 8 people redundant and only have to pay 8 severance packages. We get to the end of the consultation period and the eight redundancies are anounced. Then during the notice period lets say another three people find new jobs and hand in their notice, none of these people are in the 8 redundancies. Suddenly the management have themselves a new problem. They have three vacancies to fill. They think this isn't a problem at first because they think they can just offer 3 of the 8 their jobs back. Except that doesn't work does it? Why would you want your job back. If I were in that position I'd be looking at a couple of months salary for severance - tax free! Why would I want to stay to dig a manager out of a hole he's dug for himself. Spend the next couple of months looking for a job and recreating with enough money to do so or back to the grind for the same money? Which would you choose.
And it gets worse for the managers. Because when people see the jobs and salaries that their ex-colleagues have gone into then they start looking for alternative employment too. In our hypothetical scenario I wouldn't be surprised to see another two or three people leave in the following couple of months. Leaving the company understaffed even by normal standards, but even more understaffed because all the best and most experienced staff have gone and taken their knowledge with them.
That's a normal redundancy scenario. In Twitter's chaotic multiple redundancy scenario I suspect the fallout will be much worse. Musk is unlikely to ever let on how many staff have jumped rather than taking the chance of being pushed, but it won't be an insignificant number.
And there are other problems. It's likely in the coming months that twitter will be fighting multiple lawsuits for wrongful dismissal etc in multiple territories. Even in the unlikely event that twitter were to prevail in every case they would still be facing massive legal bills (it's rare in most territories that a tribunal would award costs in favour of the employer). They would also be facing even more bad publicity.
Now Musk is clearly one of those people who thinks his employers are interchangeable meat machines, but I'm sure he will find out they are not. And when he does he's going to want to hire some new staff. Experienced engineers at the top of their game don't come cheap at the best of times, but when you've got yourself a reputation for firing staff at random and you have also made a big deal out of how much financial difficulty your company is in then you're going to have to offer a long way above market rate to get those engineers. And the worst think about this is that I'm sure Musk is going to end up rehiring people he has sacked on salaries much higher than they were on before.
I think it's pretty clear that so far in his career Musk has been very lucky. It's looking more and more as if his luck is running out.
I think Elon bought Twitter for "control" over the narrative - on the basis that it is/was the preferred platform of journos & talking heads, so now he gets to decide what they can and can't say. He hasn't exactly been subtle about his censorship, and he is banking (rightly I suspect) on the fact that it's hard for a content 'creator' to move their entire community to another platform in one go. Sure the Twitter user base will fragment and may migrate - but breaking up communities that he perceives as a threat could be a win in Elon's mind. At the end of the day the only thing he's lost is cash - which he has a lot of already - and most of it was borrowed anyway, it's not as if he has to work hard for a living.
His "genius" is he surrounds himself with people who have more money than sense. These are super criminals. The worlds worst. He uses that leverage to buy up prospective companies full of actual "geniuses", then fires them. He believes he can hand everything over to automated processes, which goes about as well as ordering hamburgers from a robot does.
However, if you criticize Musk on Twitter, strange things happen. In my case, I've gone from average posts having hundreds to thousands of retweets to dozens. In the meantime, Musk has put a big thumb on the algorithm to make sure you see his tweets.
It appears that your wrecking of Twitter has not gone unnoticed by Zuck and his goons over at Fatbook.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64917397
It seems that Zuck is planning a rival to Twitter.
I hate to say this but Zuck... go for it and rub Elon's nose in it big time not that I'll sign up for it.
Just don't buy 'Truth Social'. If you do then Trumpy will get gazillions.
Fred Brooks said - not says.
But Twitter isn't a project; it's a going concern doing something not enormously difficult - because the machinery is automated. You don't need employees to watch the Tweets coming in, decide whether they're terribly important, and use a mouse to move each tweet into its rightful place in the queue; and nor do you need an individual to take the things on the queue and give them to the Twitter servers. Its software. Once you've got that up and running, you need server monkeys to keep the machinery working - but apparently they've increasing offloaded that to Google and then AWS.
After you've got the small kernel of folk who are needed to keep it all going, all you need is a means to stop people who this week's glitterati detest from having a voice. And the best way of doing that is of course to use the algorithm approved by the federal government. If they have the authority, then they must most certainly be able to describe what should not be said and to offer a reference algorithm which performs as they wish, then all social meeja would be required to run the same algorithm and you don't even need the Karens to stop hurty things that hadn't previously been recognised as hurty from being said.
Of course, then you've got the Feds controlling speech, a situation far too many people think would be just fine. But governments are political, so what's hurty will change with government...
Fred Brooks said - not says.
Disagree, "says" is fine, as the concept, the philosophy, is extant. Much in the same way that religious people say "<Insert dead person> says we should live like this!".
But Twitter isn't a project
Correct. But the proposition to release as open source would require a project, and that's the subject in hand.
Making software open source is only difficult if you want to keep some of the code closed source. The more code you want to keep secret the more difficult it is, but simplistically, making code open source is no more than putting the code in a public repository and adding an opensource license agreement.
I suspect the problem with making the "algorithm" that twitter uses to promote tweets open source is that it is not centralized into any sort of module, it is just little bits of spaghetti code mixed in everywhere. That would mean that a) Twitter would need to make most of its code open source, b) open itself up to criticism of writing crap code. That said, it is unlikely that anyone would take the code and create another Twitter with it.
Yes, it is hard. If you use dependencies, you have to deal with their licenses. Others have already posted the problem of what you do when the dependencies are proprietary and you don't have the rights to redistribute and relicense them from whoever you bought the rights from. There's another restriction though: if you have parts under licenses that have conditions about how they affect other licenses, you can have collisions. For example, Apache and GPL don't play too well together. This is fine if you're just using them internally (AGPL does not apply), but if you open source the lot, you may be required to make license changes that you are not allowed to make. Conservative legal departments won't let you combine such things in the first place, but since it is legal under the licenses to build the thing that combines them with the restrictions coming when you distribute the code, a company only intending to run them internally may not have been affected.
It's not just figuring out what to do with each license clash. It's also finding where all the clashes are. Not every piece of code clearly indicates its dependencies. They all should. Not all do. Even when they're pretty clear about it, it still doesn't mean that every repository uses the same, easily parsed document telling you such things. You can't send one person to just give me a tree of projects with their dependencies and license requirements, and now that you've fired most of the people who knew the projects, you can't send a message to every owning team and make them do it for their part of the project. It's a bigger task than it would seem.
Theres no value in the code, the value is the users.
Nobody actually believes Twitter has the best code of all other social media platforms. THey jsust got lucky and got the numbers.
There is no value in the source, it could be stolen tomorrow and would be of no value to anyone.
First, it's disappointing to read such rude negativity against an individual.
Second, it's bizarre that so many people seem so well-acquainted with the insides of Twitter's engineering that they **know** that there's no engineering staff left who could open-source Twitter's "algorithm".
Third, it's very strange indeed that the commentaries here are unable to distinguish between "open sourcing the code that Twitter thinks it uses to implement its algorithm" and "open-sourcing the algorithm"
The algorithm is presumably representable in many ways with many implementations in many languages.
"First, it's disappointing to read such rude negativity against an individual."
Sorry to disappoint you. I don't think I've been too responsible for it, but I am kind of negative on him, so probably still disappointing you. I'm not sure why you're so disappointed by it, and I question whether you would be disappointed by similar levels of negativity directed against someone you don't like.
"Second, it's bizarre that so many people seem so well-acquainted with the insides of Twitter's engineering that they **know** that there's no engineering staff left who could open-source Twitter's "algorithm"."
Did people say that? I didn't. I said that, with the numbers of people fired, it will be harder to quickly do the work. They still have engineers and if this was the highest priority, they would be able to do the difficult parts and get it done. I don't think it will be done, not because they can't, but because it's hard and they're understaffed as it is. When there aren't enough people, a lot of things that can be done aren't done because there's a lot of prioritization. Sometimes a task slips around that if it's fast enough, but this would not be fast.
"Third, it's very strange indeed that the commentaries here are unable to distinguish between 'open sourcing the code that Twitter thinks it uses to implement its algorithm' and 'open-sourcing the algorithm'"
This is related to the facts of life as a developer. The algorithm could, in fact, be represented in many forms, but it's certainly not written in a lot of different forms. There's a chance that it exists in two forms: a specification and code that implements the specification. You could release the specification. I don't think that's what they've got. I'm basing this from years of experience writing code for companies, and you never get a specification. You get general ideas, and you figure out what's wanted. When something needs to be changed, someone makes a summary of the change they want and the code is modified to do it. Unless it's a rigorous standard (this isn't), the specification if there ever was one is not updated. This makes the code the single point of truth on what the algorithm does, and sometimes it becomes complex enough that you may not always know what it is doing at every point.
If I'm correct, they don't have any form of the algorithm other than the code. They could have someone read it and write a spec that should do the same things, but that would take a long time and be likely inaccurate. Also, that's the kind of thing that would be done if someone wanted to fake what the algorithm does because a vague spec can be nondeterministic and more difficult to compare against actual system behavior.
Rumor right now is that Twtter has lost access to its certs.
"...fired everyone with access to the private key to their internal root CA( which generates all certs used between the client browser and SSL Manager) Puppet master's CA cert expired and they can't get a new one because no one has access. ..."
Take it with a grain of salt. No confirmation yet.
How much of his engineering management is really him doing the management? The man is a fraud. He has a track record of producing largely badly made an unreliable cars. He pisses everyone off who goes near him. He's arrogant.
One thing he is good at is spin and marketing.
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Correct if I'm wrong, but isn't "algorithm" one thing and "code" another? Let me explain.
The "algorithm" (to me) would be the rules to be followed. Something like my rules for email filtering.
The "code" would be the software that executes these rules. Something like (say) Thunderbird.
So.
Wouldn't "opensourcing the algorithm" be just publishing the set of rules followed by some program? Sure, they must be quite convoluted, with a huge amount of rules. I have no idea what they use, so can't say if publishing the rules would be enough to someone else run them - let alone understand/audit. But it's beside the point, isn't it?
It's no excuse to not follow on the promises, mind. It even diminishes it - as I don't think there would be patents risk, in this case. It would be quite simple to publish them: dump the lot and upload to somewhere.
Or am I missing something?
This was covered well by "doublelayer" above, but in brief:
* the algorithm is probably only completely described by the code
* if just an English text description is published without the source code, it is very likely not to be believed - it certainly won't be demonstrably "the" algorithm the way that code could be (and that is assuming the code is runnable)
Yes, the algorithm can be published just as a natural-language description. The problem is that I'm confident they don't have that. I wrote another post above which explains why I think that so I won't repeat all the background here, but for big, complex systems that are used by only one company, specifications of the algorithms rarely exist. They would have to read the code and write up a description of what rules they think it's doing, with the possibility that they don't understand some part of it and can't ask the original developer to explain it because that developer has been fired. I can't count the number of times I've been looking at some code and started asking my colleagues questions like "Why is this in here? It looks like it will break things and there's no explanation", and nobody remembers who put it there or why. I can, with time, analyze what the chunk of code is doing, but I can't always tell why it was there because sometimes the answer is that it was a mistake back then and the correct course of action now is to take it out (and sometimes it was important and my taking it out will bring a bunch of users down around my head, which at least sometimes helps explain why it was there).
The other problem is that, if they release the code, we can probably check what it does, but if they release a text description, it can be vague enough that we can't verify it. If I wanted to lie to you about what my code does, it's much easier if I give you a description and skip or obfuscate a key point than if I give you the code. Maybe I've written the code to look like it does something else, but if you run it, you'll see what it really does. With a company that has incentives to hide what's going on and lost most of its credibility already, I would be less likely to trust a description they quickly wrote up. I'm not that interested in testing their algorithm in any case, but the same things would apply to people who will intensely analyze every line as soon as it's published.
The way things are written up it sounds as if there's some kind of production system -- a set of rules -- that dictate how a particular post is ranked. If that information is embedded in source code then that's just asking for trouble -- the code should be implementing the rules, not defining them. This is the sort of subtlety that might get lost on a non-programmer -- to them its all 'code' -- but if you want to open source 'it' then you first have to find 'it'.
(This is the point where a casual glance at the code indicates that, actually, the rules are embedded in code and, yes, the rules have been changed many times by many different programmers so nobody's quite sure where they are, much less what they do. This is the point where an irritable overachiever might impulsively fire the people responsible.)(Don't laugh -- I've seen this happen. They're a slippery bunch to nail down as well -- its always too complicated for mortals to understand.)
Incidentally, there's a need to remind everyone about the Golden Rule -- the person who has the Gold makes the Rules.
“I find it nothing short of amazing that, despite firing so many people – from 7,500 to a little under 2,000 in months – Twitter continues to run as well as it does. That speaks of a platform that's remarkably stable”
In my experience, if you don’t change anything, nothing breaks by itself.
So I’m not very surprised.
what happened is exactly the opposite of what you wrote! you wrote a fake article!! The truth is that on Twitter (before the Musk era) millions of tweets were banned that did not respect the dominant thought imposed by the radical-chic elites (Gates, Rockefeller, Fauci, Biden, etc). Dozens of famous writers in Italy who posted protests against the Covid19 health regime were banned and suspended from the portal. Layoffs are welcome if they are all lying employees who "forced" the suspensions of protesting accounts!
The truth is a bit more complex than that. It appears that Twitter -- and probably other social media platforms -- had an active liaison with "the powers that be" to help nudge the culture in a particular direction. That can be a good or a bad thing -- I, personally, prefer the "let 'er rip" approach to censorship (i.e. none) but the amount of "Covid is a fiction/invention/conspiracy" stuff floating around the 'net is a bit tiresome. (Partly because it really is nonsense but also because its rather cleverly clouding some very real issues lurking behind it.)
For anyone who is interested I'd recommend going to the offguardian website -- https://off-guardian.org/ -- which doesn't censor articles and comments (provided they're not the dumb flame wars "You're a Pedo" type stuff)(AFAIK). You'll see a whole set of well written and even quite researched articles about "Covid, the conspiracy theory". We probably don't need this sort of thing in ElReg, its a technical website after all. The bit that should give us pause here is that "Musk dumped a whole lot of programmers and everything still seems to work". This mirrors my own work experience over the years (decades) -- its not just possible but common practice for programmers to make work, lots of work, but because what they're doing is so arcane to outsiders management just swallows the KoolAid and leaves them to it. (IMHO its how Microsoft has been able to get away with it for 40 years -- although in their case I suspect its actually deliberate policy to make their products as big and wobbly as possible since nobody can just wade in and deal with it!)(The perfect business model!)
Because, whatever you can say about "Full Self Driving" (the less the better, as far as I'm concerned) the fact is that both Tesla and SpaceX run on software, a whole lot of it, and that software just has to work. And it does.
"The bit that should give us pause here is that "Musk dumped a whole lot of programmers and everything still seems to work". This mirrors my own work experience over the years (decades) -- its not just possible but common practice for programmers to make work, lots of work, but because what they're doing is so arcane to outsiders management just swallows the KoolAid and leaves them to it."
You may call me biased as I'm a programmer as well, but I think this is missing the point of what programmers do. If I get fired tomorrow, the code I've just written should keep working for a long time. That's the point of my making it. What it doesn't do is get updated, changed, or fixed. That Twitter continues to work* isn't that surprising. The problem will come when they want to change stuff and they lack the knowledge of what the systems did. That problem is already here because they are changing stuff and adding features that Musk has requested, which at some point will modify a condition that existing stable code relies on. Programmers don't write code for its own sake; we write it because management, far from staying out of the way, is frequently coming to us and identifying something they want changed or added and we have to do that without damaging the rest of the code that's currently working.
* I say it works because you say it works. I don't use it so I have no idea how it has changed. However, I have seen a lot more articles about stuff breaking. I don't know how much of that is due to more things breaking and how much is due to it being more interesting for journalists to cover the new Twitter than the old one. Still, there's at least some reason to believe that some of the system isn't in the best health and does need someone to improve it.
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