3176

We need an “I am spartacus” moment, he can’t ban us all!!!

It really does suck that there isn’t a Twitter alternative at this moment.

But, let’s take a look back at that statement in 6 months. Especially with a lot of people with social media software development free in the wild.

Do we know if the severance/buyout came with a non-compete? I would assume so, but with how slapdash this all has been, who knows. Certainly it would basically have to at least cover the severance window of 4 months, after that who knows?

We could see a massive competitor spring up by summer of 2023.

And it AIN’T gonna be Mastodon.

3177

Non-competes are illegal and unenforceable. You can’t steal stuff from Twitter and use it at a competitor, but your own skills and technical knowledge belong to you, not your employer.

3178

We had an outage once because someone keyed in a hyphen to an id on system field, and somewhere deep in the kernel a hyphen was a hard-coded delimiter in some stupid string parser. That one was fun to figure out. The decompilers got a lot of work that day.

3179

Problem with non-competes is that they have to be enforced individually. Who exactly is going to be tracking down 6000 people and what their new jobs are?

The only time I’ve ever seen it enforced was when a Principle Architect/VP at a competitor came aboard, and their lawyers were on us in an instant. He had to work in another division for a year as a development manager, then came back to ours once it expired.

3180

Maybe he’ll just ask Twitter users for a loyalty pledge too?

Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean tweeting long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional memes will constitute a passing grade.

Twitter will also be much more meme-driven. News and opinions will still be very important, but those posting the edgiest memes will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.

At its heart, Twitter is a shitposting service, so l think this makes sense.

If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below: …

Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Saturday) will have their account terminated.

Whatever decision you make, thank you for your efforts to make Twitter successful.

3181

I have worked in multiple industries, and the only one I have ever seen a non-compete clause as part of severance was at a software development company. The non-compete was for a year, the severance… 1 month.

3182

Stop talking about non-compete agreements. They are 100% unenforceable in California.

Attorney General Bonta Reminds Employers and Workers That Noncompete Agreements Are Not Enforceable Under California Law | State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General.

Attorney General Bonta reminds both employers and employees that noncompete agreements are prohibited in the state of California, and urges individuals who are wrongfully presented with a noncompete agreement to know their rights.

3183

Dunno if you have seen this thread, but this is what it was like to be a survivor at Broderbund. 75% of your working Family gone is not conducive to productive work.

3184

I shouldn’t have said “verboten” - really what I meant was “subject to being banned without recourse of the whim of a ‘moderator’ who stans Musk.” Meaning it would be relatively easy to post criticism of Musk, so long as no one actually saw it. (So no, I won’t take your bet, since creating a Tweet no one reads isn’t hard. ;)

This cult-of-personality moderation is just what we’ve already seen in subreddits - remember thedonald? - except Reddit occasionally runs a purge of the worst offenders because they actually care about advertisers/advertising revenue.

The moderation team (I predict) is going to be “the community” - i.e. volunteer Musk sycophants, who will gladly work for nothing to punish the unbelievers.

3185

We had the same issue once with colon, so we made our delimiter two colons! Get::wrecked.

Also, this:

3186

I’m work with a small team of devs to run fairly large data processing pipelines that are integral to large NIH projects. We’re building redundancy by cross training people on all the systems, but the thing that keeps me up at night is losing institutional knowledge. There are always edge issues things that only a small subset of developers known how to fix (even if the fix is “just restart the service”), and it’s terrifying to both lose all those people you could rely on to share the load, and realize it’s now you holding the bag. I’d be really tempted to jump, just to not be the person suddenly responsible for a ton of systems that I don’t understand well.

I don’t think people who aren’t engineering complex systems understand how terrifying the dark corners of those systems can be when you’re in a production environment and something critical fails and you have to start learning that system from the ground up without help while people are bashing you because the service is down. You couldn’t pay me enough to be in that situation for any length of time.

3187

To be clear to the others, you’re (I assume) the Broderbund survivor, not Clowes. The Clowes thread is about what just happened at Twitter.

You then linked to this story in the comments on that Clowes Tweet

3188

Correct. But the walking around the work ghost town experience was not fun and I eventually left to work with a former manager (after the Manager who’s team I was being assigned to decided to leave as well).

I finished the project I was working on (a networked version of a lot of our SW/games including Carmen Sandiego for schools which could stream to a computer lab/classroom - which is still, amazingly for sale last I checked a few years back, 20 years after finishing it) and then bolted.

3189

Did you know that the extended unicode set contains specific right and left single and double quotation marks? And that there is aa straight quotation mark that is visually indistinguishable from the base UTC-8 specification? Ask me why I know these things and why I had a text to UTC/ hex converter page bookmarked :)

Also how some dashboards can insert a newline character into an excel file that, when cell copied into an other system, can lead to all sorts of mayhem?

Quoted for MFTruth

3190

Actually, yes. I have a user who writes very small bash shell scripts to run command line programs occasionally, and she pastes her text strings between (FUCKING SIGH) email, slack, and her terminal session. And sometimes, single quotes and double quotes get converted into something else. We’ve never been able to replicate her particular magic, but it’s caused her tons of consternation.

BBEdit zap gremlins is her savior for most of these weird situations.

3191

Come to think of it, I shouldn’t have said “by Christmas” either, when what I really meant was “within two weeks of Musk handing over moderation powers to ‘the community.’”

I suspect he would do that today if he could. But it’s a new feature, and it’s unclear, with the mass layoffs, when, if ever, Twitter will be able to implement a new feature.

3192

I know why you know these things. Don’t use Microsoft Word as a clipboard!

3193

This is the truth. I don’t think Twitter is going to suddenly implode but I don’t think you could pay me enough money to be the guy trying to hold the whole thing together. And I’m certainly not doing it for a billionaire manbaby who created the problem in the first place.

3194

I would gladly take $300/hr to help Elon with production outages. I’ll name my boat after him. “Highly Regarded”

3195

If you work in IT or any IT related field you pretty much have to root for Twitter to fail spectacularly. Because other CEOs are watching, and if Elmo is remotely successful, then if you work in those fields you’re fucked.

My CEO is a fool and idolizes Elmo. He announced a return to the office policy immediately after Elmo did. An asshole billionaire is having an immediate and personal effect on my quality of life.

Fuck Elmo and fuck Twitter.