One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitterâs managers, who had formed âwar roomsâ to determine which employees should be asked to stay on.
Resignations and departures were already taking a toll on Twitterâs service, employees said. âBreakages are already happening slowly and accumulating,â one said. âIf you want to export your tweets, do it now.â
Hate speech and other abuse was also likely to spike, employees said. Most of Twitterâs Trust and Safety team, consisting of up to 40 people, was expected to resign.
Is it surprising that engineers are opting to leave and take a 3-month severance package, as opposed to staying where they have to work extensive hours for a mercurial owner, without the joy of working with colleagues?
Musk really doesn’t seem to understand that employment is a two-way street. These people are not indentured servants. If the deal isn’t good, they can/should/will walk.
Last one out, please switch off the lights.
What’s the bet that in a couple of months, Twitter is employing remote-work engineers working out of India?
Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Muskâs decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs.
Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts.
âLooks like i just got fired for s—posting too âïžâ one wrote in response to another person who said they had been let go.
It’s never smart to criticise your employer in public, although some of this criticism was published on an internal Slack. A mature manager would probably look at the recent unrest and seek to counsel their employees. Not Elon, who has shown not maturity to date and continues to exhibit none. He fired the complainers, and gloated about it publicly afterwards:
âI would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,â he (Musk) wrote on Twitter. âTheir immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.â
Good to see he can criticise those individuals publicly without recourse, hey?
FTX announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. Sam Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO.
I wonder how all the Diamond Hands crypto HODL bros are feeling.
There’s only one thing worse than a Ponzi scheme, and that is being the one holding the “asset” when the music stops and there is no next fool in line.
Twitter is rolling out another type of check mark to help distinguish accounts that users actually need to know are real. Although you can pay $7.99 per month for a blue check mark with the new version of Twitter Blue, select accounts for governments, companies, or public figures will get a gray âOfficialâ check mark
Twitter is on the pathway to full farce. it reminds me of this clip from The Late Show:
Last year, Twitterâs interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the companyâs operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.
That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders.
In my paid employment I often take time to explain to companies who do not benefit from the largesse of venture capital that the number one priority must be to keep revenue ahead of expenses, and avoid saddling their firm with debt.
Musk has ignored these basic tenets of business because the culture of tech bros is that the rules don’t apply to them. In a falling market, however, other people’s money becomes less accessible. At some point, the music stops, and the debtors knock on the door.
I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. đ đ
If you have kids, you and they might enjoy the wonderful Like You â A Mindfulness Podcast for Kids. I’ve been a Patreon supporter for almost as long as Noah Glenn has been producing it. My kids fall asleep listening to Noah almost every night.
Like You is a mindfulness podcast for kids. We use breathing, affirmations, music, and imagination to explore feelings, relieve anxiety, encourage self-esteem, and grow empathy, all while having fun!
Noah is basically another member of our family at this point.
…by creating a 3D model of Tokyoâs tangled subway system, one which has brightly colored tubes swooping up and down, running over and around each other like the tracks of one of the craziest roller coasters ever.
I’ve appreciated the scheduling efficiency of the Tokyo subway system in the past, but this 3D impression of how all the lines interact is something else.
Howard Oakley is doing an amazing job at diagnosing and bringing to light (pardon the pun) issues involving macOS Content Caching Server:
Over the last three months, of the nine security updates to XProtect pushed by Apple, only one has been delivered and installed correctly through my Monterey Content Caching server, that on 4 August. The other eight security updates to XProtect and its new companion XProtect âRemediatorâ all downloaded correctly from my local server, but then failed to install.
After reviewing Howard’s articles on the topic, and using his impressive apps to identify whether I had an issue, I discovered that all three of my Macs behind a Mac mini server running content caching had failed to receive critical security updates. I’ve now disabled the caching server. If it can’t be trusted to deliver security updates it doesn’t matter how much internet bandwidth I can save, nor how much faster I can update machines. Security is more important than that.
Apple needs to do better. Maybe they need to rewrite the Content Caching Server in Swift? đ„
This is all about my Rapid Log Shortcut, for use with the Agenda app ⊠and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. The basic conceit of this Shortcut is that it appends provided input to note in Agenda.
Scotty works wonders with Shortcuts. This is a new version of his Rapid Logger that ties in with his also new Daily Log shortcut.
Check them out, they’re excellent examples of the power of Shortcuts as a programming application.
Mobile games are a shit industry with shit companies making shit games that donât exist to entertain, they exist to extract as much money as possible from a few whales who will spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.
Fun is not the point.
Matt nails it. This is why I enjoy playing games on Xbox and Switch, and get nothing from mobile gaming.
Shelleyâs monster, unlike ours, has self-awareness and a reason to wreak havoc. He knows how to feel guilty and when to leave the stage. Our monsterâs malignity stems from pure narcissistic psychopathy â and he refuses to leave the stage or cease his vile mendacity.
Maureen Dowd truly is a great writer. I would love to be able to craft words in such a way.
Riccardo Mori really nailed it with his latest post, Raw power alone is not enough where he talks about how Apple has left its software to wither, while it has been busy beefing up its hardware offering. The article is full of juicy content, but I’ve pulled out the parts that resonated with me:
Without innovation in software, all weâre doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
…
So, again, we have absurdly powerful machines like the Mac Studio and soon weâll have the even more mind-boggling Apple silicon Mac Pro, and what kind of software will they run? A handful of professional apps which hopefully will take advantage of these machinesâ capabilities to make the same things professional Macs did twenty years ago, ten years ago, but better and faster.
…
This is the personal beef I have with tech innovation today, which I feel still revolving around the concept of âreinventing the wheel and making it spin fasterâ.
I’ve had a number of generations of Apple hardware pass through my hands, but I essentially work in the same way, with a few small workflow changes around the edges. I don’t do video, but I would love some revolutionary ways to leverage all the power of the M-series chips.
Software today still comes with much more friction than it should have, given the context of general technological advancement that has happened for the past 40 years or so.
…
Without innovation in software, all weâre doing with these new powerful machines is essentially the same we were doing 20 years ago on PowerPC G4 and G5 computers, but faster and more conveniently.
None of Apple’s software (or much software across the industry) has become easier. Actually, much of it has become harder as a result of either feature-bloat leading to design complexity, or fashionable UI changes making things less discernible, HIG be damned.
I would love for their to be some great workflow/project-management software that was integral with macOS. I don’t want to have to jump out to some third-party web service, or use a mishmash of Hook, OmniFocus, Finder and Devonthink to manage project files. Finder is too small-minded with the combination of apps and services and files. But Apple doesn’t seem to care about innovating in any of the hard spaces, or creating new interaction models for existing hardware.
I don’t make video, but I’m a professional user of a Mac. I’d like some thought given to my workflows too.
What I think I want is a search engine that only gave me results from small, independent weblogs.
More often than not I just want to find information from a normal person thatâs writing about something because they care deeply about it. And thatâs very difficult to find in search engines today.
I want the same thing that Mike Rockwell at Initial Charge wants: a search engine focused on nerds who blog about stuff they love. Topics could be far and wide: sport, IT, doll collecting… I don’t care about the topic, but I want to be able to find stuff only from people who are passionate about the topic - not trying to sell something.
Instead of using technology and starting to flag downright criminal behavior, the company hums, and haws. They donât need an oversight committee â they need a moral compass.
Am I being silly to suggest that Facebook and Purdue Pharma have much in common?
I also spend an inordinate amount of time scrolling tweets, clicking links, reading threads, and darting between subjects like a kitten chasing a laser.
I love this analogy.
I think the cumulative effect on my brain since 2006 has been that my ability to focus has been effected. Not that I canât focus. I can sit down and get into flow on a programming project more often than not. But when Iâm still, when Iâm idle, when I feel like I could be bored at any moment I grab my phone and scroll through Twitter which sends my mind into overdrive on a million topics, timelines, thoughts, and emotions.
I donât think this is good for the human brain. I know it isnât good for my brain.
My only social media now is Twitter, and that is curated to deliver NBL basketball and little else. I deleted Facebook and Instagram ages ago, and do not miss it.
Focus is a superpower. Best not to give it away easily.
But Facebookâs research tells a clear story, and itâs not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.
I’m a huge YNAB fan and a LaunchBar user. I often get jealous of Alfred users because the system of “workflows” in Alfred seems to have caught on better than LaunchBar’s “Actions”.
Righting that wrong has appeared @ptujec on Github. He has a number of LaunchBar Actions, notably two built for YNAB.
I found a bug in the script, raised an issue on Github and it’s already been fixed. Thanks!
I’m thinking about a transition from OmniFocus to Things. I’ve used OF since launch, so this is no trivial matter.
This line from a post by micro.blog user @40Tech resonates:
OmniFocus almost begs you to add projects and contexts.
I never seem to gain value from contexts/tags, but I add them every time, because nature abhors a vacuum.
My main area of doubt is templating. I’ve got a nice Drafts template built that populates a standardised OmniFocus project. Does Things offer any form of similar automation?
I barely scratch the surface with my use of BBEdit. I’m not a coder. I use it for a bit of Markdown text editing (when I’m not using one of the other myriad Markdown apps I own) and for doing other small pieces of text manipulation.
So when I saw that v14 was released, I figured I could skip the upgrade. Reading through the features, I was sure I could skip the upgrade.
But there are some new Markdown features, regardless! Dragging an HTML file or an image into BBEdit will now generate appropriately formatted Markdown. Markdown footnotes are now properly syntax colored, for those monsters who put footnotes in their Markdown.
Also, a new feature that I inspired makes its debut: BBEdit now lets you attach a script in order to provide control over the text generated when you drop an image file into a BBEdit editing view. In short, I have modified the AppleScript script that I use to upload images to Six Colors so that if I drag an image into my story in BBEdit, the image is automatically resized, uploaded, and the proper HTML is inserted at that point in the document. (Itâs magical.)
“From this vantage, âOffice Space,â the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. Itâs almost impossible to imagine a startup worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does: âItâs not that Iâm lazy. Itâs that I just donât care.â Workplace indifference just doesnât have a socially acceptable hashtag. "
So what is Three Things? Well, it’s a calendar that lets you schedule tasks on each day. It’s meant to be excruciatingly pragmatic and realistic about how life works. (At least my life.) It literally will not allow you to schedule more than three tasks per day.
This is a nifty little application. Pick three things. Do them. If you don’t, defer them. That’s about it. I like it.
Hemispheric Views: Did we need another three-white-guys-talk-about-Apple podcast? Probably not but the difference here is that two of the hosts are Australian. Andrew Canion, Jason Burk and Martin Feld have a great rapport and listening to a tech podcast with more of an international focus is a refreshing change.
You want more out of your employees? Radically reduce their responsibilities, then leave them alone to execute. You want your small business to grow? Focus your attention on a single target, and give yourself the space to do it better.
Does anyone know where I can get a decent icon file of a MacBook Air (Space Grey)? I want to replace the hard disk icon of Macintosh HD.
I’ve finally been able to get rid of the stupid mechanical disk icon. My Macs don’t even have those sort of hard drives. Now I have nice icons that represent the computer I’m using.
I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur.
Listeners of Hemispheric Views will be aware of my love for the macOS proxy icon.
I am overjoyed to learn that macOS-magic-man Brett Terpstra has found a way to have the proxy icon ready for action without delay. Thank you, sir, for fixing what Apple broke.
“Up to 4 players take turns drawing cards and making movements through one of four caves in an attempt to outpace their competitors on the way to the treasure room.”
This board game has been designed by my friend Jason Burk. It’s on sale today; grab it while you can!