Friday Open Thread // Nov 18, 2022

a free for all

Mike Solana

Nov 18, 2022

Welcome back to the greatest Friday open thread on Earth. This is typically something I reserve for paid subscribers, but every now and then I like to open things up to my homeless readers. It’s the giving season, after all. However, if you haven’t at least signed up for a FREE subscription? Come on, guys. We’re trying to do something here.

Per the Pirate Wires standard, I’ve highlighted a few topics for discussion below, but feel free to drop anything interesting in the comments. I’ll be in and out all day.

-Solana

Winter is here. A couple days ago, amidst industry-wide layoffs, and the shocking collapse of FTX, I wrote about tech’s new era of austerity. I think somewhere along the way these last ten years of glut we forgot what we were doing, and why. My hope is the industry gets back to the garage, and remembers its potential.

Mike Solana @micsolana

from mass layoffs and the overnight evaporation of FTX to twitter's very public fight to not go bankrupt, winter has come to tech. my hope is, briefly free of the gluttonous perks, we take some time to reconnect with technology's incredible potential.

piratewires.comSurviving and Thriving in Tech’s New Winterpirate wires #83 // mass layoffs, vanishing cash cathedrals, how tech lost touch with reality, and back to america’s garage of myth for cover

Mike Solana @micsolana

amidst mass industry layoffs, twitter's reorg has somehow been framed as a chaotic outlier. in fact, the company is fighting to adjust to a new macro reality every high-growth company in tech is now facing. summer camp is over.

The bird app is dead, long live the bird app. Last night, in what seemed the final, pathetic thrashings of a literal meth encampment, journalists, activists, and influencers absolutely lost their minds at the entirely made-up notion Twitter was shutting down.

The background: Elon Musk set a deadline for Twitter employees to either affirmatively consent to working hard, or to leave with three months severance. It seems many have left, and many have stayed. Professional tech reporters somehow seemed to believe this meant the site was permanently shutting down. As of this morning, nothing on the platform has yet changed, and journalists are already walking back their apocalyptic predictions.

How many people does Twitter really need? Hotz — legendary hacker / kind-hearted fellow Jersey boy — had a few thoughts:

George Hotz 🐀 @realGeorgeHotz

This only works because of how much open source you can leverage.

Ashlee Vance @ashleevance

"I think Twitter could be built and maintained by 20 good engineers," says @realGeorgeHotz

So what is it? Annihilation? Or do the left-wing activists at Twitter and the propagandists in the press just have, for some reason I can’t quite grasp, a very strong interest in the failure of a major speech platform now run by a man who has plainly stated he is not super into political censorship?

Related, the world is demanding Twitter bring back Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson, the shitposting trolls who faked their Twitter employment, and firing, and captured the heart of a nation.

Incredibly, some professional media personalities still believe these men really once worked at Twitter. Bless.