the evil of Twitter

[ericbarbour]

Which reminds me: badmachine mentioned that Brandon "Jorm" Harris had apparently sold off the domain he used to own, gaijin.com. (Ten years ago Gaijin Entertainment made a legal threat to him to seize the domain. Jorm, being a WMF employee, simply had Mike Godwin send them a threatening letter. They backed down. The site is currently blanked out and "parked". I'll laugh my ass off if it turns out Jorm ended up selling the domain to them anyway.)

Jorm loved the hell out of his Twitter account. Where he posted many stupid and thoughtless things over the years. Well, in November of last year he went to a Mastodon account....and specifically said he left because Musk unbanned Trump. (Who never returned, because he's got his own bullhorn now. Which he can control completely.)

And now: I predict that Jorm will return. Because a Mastodon account has no "pull" to speak of. Twitter/x/whatever is easy and stupid, and Mastodon is complicated and weird.

[ericbarbour]

From a private mailing list I'm a member of:

"Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet"
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/07/politics ... index.html

Of course I had to make a comment.

He is a very paranoid man, and probably for good reason

https://fortune.com/2023/03/07/elon-mus ... -restroom/

Security like this costs him tens of millions every year. Zuckerberg spent $15 million on security in 2021--the Meta company footed the bill. They didn't put Lord Elon on the list because he's the most secretive of them all.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-muc ... ook-2023-3

Corporations are feudal autocracies. Simple as that. Spending that much on protecting a CEO, who is just another "cog" that can ultimately be replaced anyway, is basically wasted money. And they'll never admit it. So, these mean little boys are phony "capitalists".

[ericbarbour]

Blah blah blah, blah blah blah

https://www.theverge.com/23871530/elon- ... cquisition

Blah blah blah

Basically, he bought an opium poppy field in digital form, and paid too much for it, and lied to the sellers. The opium attracts crazy people who don't like him whiney whiney.

Now he knows that running it is "no fun". Too late. Even Isaacson, notorious for catering to arrogant billionaires and smoothing out rough edges in order to get them to talk, realizes the Elon Musk Show is a little TOO far off the hook.

[ericbarbour]

RIDE EM COWBOY YEE-HAW

They were somewhere over Las Vegas when James made his suggestion that they could move them now. It was the type of impulsive, impractical, surge-into-the-breach idea that Musk loved. It was already late evening, but he told his pilot to divert, and they made a loop back up to Sacramento.

The only rental car they could find when they landed was a Toyota Corolla. They were not sure how they would even get inside the data center at night, but one very surprised X staffer, a guy named Alex from Uzbekistan, was still there. He merrily let them in and showed them around.

The facility, which housed rooms of servers for many other companies as well, was very secure, with a retinal scan required for entry into each of the vaults. Alex the Uzbek was able to get them into the X vault, which contained about 5,200 refrigerator-size racks of 30 computers each.

“These things do not look that hard to move,” Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion, since each rack weighed about 2,500 pounds and was eight feet tall.

“You’ll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,” Alex said. “They need to be lifted with suction cups.” Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods.

Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/12/the ... ta-center/