103: Birdsite Go Boom

30 November, 2022

Back in April, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 Billion. He then spent months talking about how terrible Twitter was before finally taking control in October. Everyone knew it was going to be a landmark moment; but, no one quite knew how things were going to play out. With mass lay-offs, a voluntary exodus of talent, threats of "extreme" work hours, and a series of fraudulent accounts that created a swing in the stock market, it's safe to say that it's been a poop show. It's also pulled-back the curtain, revealing Elon Musk to be more "toxic boss" and less "technology genius".

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With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

Transcript

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[00:00:00] Tim: That's kind of how technology goes, but you know, Elon, he's, he's a disruptor. That's, uh, and he's, you know, he's very,

[00:00:09] Adam: he certainly disrupted Twitter.

[00:00:11] Tim: he certainly disrupted Twitter. And you know, it's weird. It's hard to see how it's gonna go. I mean, right now it seems awful, but I mean, you know, Twitter really wasn't a money making model anyway, you know, before he bought it.

[00:00:22] Tim: And now he seems like he's trying to make it profitable.

[00:00:44] Intro

[00:00:44] Adam: okay, here we go. It is show number 1 0 3. In on today's show, we're gonna talk about the bird site, talk about Twitter,

[00:00:51] Tim: It go boom.

[00:00:51] Adam: I'm sure there's plenty to unpack there, but, first as usual, we'll start with our tramon fails. As you can probably tell, Carol and Ben are not here with us tonight.

[00:00:59] Adam: It's just myself and Tim.

[00:01:00] Tim: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:01] Adam: And, so Tim, why don't you go first?

[00:01:03] Tim's Fail

[00:01:03] Tim: All right. Well, I'll call it a failure, you know, it's, one more day. We're, this is a Tuesday, so tomorrow is like the last day before Thanksgiving. I'm off Thursday, Friday. Just every gets kind of quiet at work, you know, right before a holiday and even like the whole Christmas kind of time period, it gets.

[00:01:21] Tim: It's pretty quiet. Customers are quiet. Everyone's quiet. I'm pretty sure people are working maybe. I don't know. No, I dunno. But yeah, it's just got those pre-holiday blues. It's like I'm waiting for stuff to happen and it's like, nothing's happening as fast as I wish it would cuz, you know? But anyway,

[00:01:38] Adam: it's not like a depression thing, it's just you're, you're frustrated with everybody else being on vacation

[00:01:43] Tim: Yeah, it's like, yeah, we got a bunch of people off, you know, off the whole week and it's like, it's just, it's just too quiet. Makes me nervous when things get too quiet. So, but we did have a good, we had a company dinner, Friday night at a little local, like a dinner theater kind of thing, although we didn't really have theater, we just had a DJ and gave way prizes and gave way awards to people who made, you know, had like two different. Two people, like 20 year, 20 year, you know, service awards, you know, working at the company for 20 years, so got to hand some of those out. So it was real fun. But, yeah, just, yeah, just, just waiting for stuff to get exciting again. So

[00:02:22] Adam: Class clown most likely to succeed

[00:02:25] Tim: right? Yeah, they, we had a bunch of door prizes. We had a raffle. I won. I won like a gardening kit and a $50 Lowe's gift certificate, you know, home improvement store. So that was nice. So, and, and free drinks. So how about you?

[00:02:40] Adam's Triumph

[00:02:40] Adam: I'm gonna go with the triumph, to, like you mentioned, it's the week of Thanksgiving and tomorrow morning, bright and early, the crew is showing up to install our new fence in our backyard. We've had a, you know, you, you've been able to like run a circle around our house if you wanted to since we moved in like nine years ago, something like that.

[00:02:57] Adam: and, so we've always just used what we call a tie out for the dogs, right? We have a, a leash sort of thing, or like a rope tied to the bottom of the stairs of the back door. and so the, the dogs can reach from there up to the back door and. you know, whatever radius from the bottom of the stairs when we let 'em out.

[00:03:14] Adam: And that's actually kind of nice to have all the dog poop in that little circle. But, that's about to change cuz we're gonna be able to, to just let the dogs out in the yard. I think they're really gonna enjoy it. They're gonna be able to run around more, let 'em both out at the same time. my wife won't have to worry so much about the, the leashes getting like wrapped around her blueberry bushes and ripping 'em up, that sort of thing. that's, exciting. I'm, I'm not excited about having to get up at, they're gonna be here at 6 45 in the morning to get

[00:03:39] Tim: Oh, wow.

[00:03:39] Adam: and my kids off have off of school tomorrow, which is nice, except I still have to get up at 5 45 so that I can shower and we can go on a dog walk before the people get here to, install a fence.

[00:03:50] Adam: So it's like I, exact same alarm that I'll be using, you know, during school days. Just kids be in bed.

[00:03:58] Tim: I tell you, I tell you, I wish, wish, wish I had a fence. It's, I plant a vegetable garden every year. And this year was like, the deer here is so bad right now. The deer pressure is just for real. They, they've eaten everything. They ate all my, all my, tomatoes. I maybe got like, 15 tomatoes just, they just eat everything and I need a, and I need a fence.

[00:04:19] Tim: But I mean, those suckers can jump like six feet high, so you need a really tall fence in order to keep 'em out. So, and I got four acres, so that's not gonna be cheap. So

[00:04:29] Adam: Wow. Well, you could, you could always just fence in the garden. That's what my mother-in-law does. She has like a pretty large garden, I would say. It's like, I dunno, 30 feet by 10 feet or something like that. And she has like, you know, big holes in, in the corners and every five or 10 feet along the edges.

[00:04:45] Adam: And then it's just like entirely encased in netting. So it keeps the deer out, but,

[00:04:49] Tim: Yeah, I had, I had some netting, but they made, they figured out how to trample it down and I know what the deer, it's like this, there's three deer. It's a mama and two, two young ones, and they're just, every time you go out in the backyard, they're standing there looking at you

[00:05:02] Adam: Hmm.

[00:05:03] Tim: So,

[00:05:04] Adam: you should, uh, like buy some bear poop and like spread it around your garden.

[00:05:08] Tim: Well, honey, I need an actual hunting rifle. I'll just , just get some venison. They eat my food, I'll eat them.

[00:05:16] Adam: Right.

[00:05:17] Tim: So,

[00:05:17] Merch Update

[00:05:17] Adam: Right. Well, I guess before we move on to our main topic of the day, this is gonna be a little awkward. So last week I told you about our merch now available at, workingcode.dev/merch, but maybe don't go there so fast right now. our account got suspended, which is crappy. you know, I, there's no reason it should have gotten suspended.

[00:05:34] Adam: Right. Our, our stuff wasn't, violating any of the guidelines. It was all original artwork that we paid. And, no copyright things like, you know, yes there was something breaking, bad inspired, but it was very clearly original art. so there should be no copyright claims. No,

[00:05:48] Tim: we didn't use the word breaking bad either. It was just breaking, breaking bin.

[00:05:51] Adam: Yeah. And, and oh, I mean, and then like, you know, when I was trying to find our stuff before I realized that we were suspended, I was like searching around on site and I searched for Breaking Ben.

[00:06:00] Adam: And of course that brought up a bunch of breaking. Stuff and I saw like t-shirts with Walter White's face on it and stuff, and I'm like, well, but okay, so if it is that like, you know, they're considering our stuff, a copyright violations, like how is original artwork inspired by something copyrighted? A violation, but something with a picture of the actual person from the show is, is not, I dunno, whatever.

[00:06:24] Adam: And then the other possibility, Is like a, there's a stock image. So like one of 'em was a, a cursing duck, right? And so maybe the artist used a stock image that had of the duck and like added the cursing. I don't know. But, you know, we paid her and, and it's kind of her responsibility to secure the licensing for that stuff.

[00:06:43] Adam: And the frustrating thing is there's no recourse, right? So Red bubble, you know, we just found out that we were suspended. They sent us an email and then they took all our stuff offline. Sent me email, said, you're suspended for one of these reasons, right? There's like four or five different reasons on the thing.

[00:06:57] Adam: This is actually just like your Google Voice thing you were talking about last week or the week before. you know, one of these reasons is the reason you're suspended. They're not gonna tell us which one. and the appeal process is like upload a photo of your face with, and you have to be holding up a piece of paper with today's date and your user.

[00:07:14] Adam: And your real name and that's it. And, and they may or may not get back to me within two weeks. If, if I don't hear from them within two weeks, I'm supposed to assume that they're just not going to answer. And, you know, they, they say right in the thing, we, we can't, they claim we can't, review all appeals.

[00:07:32] Adam: So they may just choose not to bother with. So I don't know what we're gonna do. I mean, it's not like we were sticker moguls or something, but we did have like $40 in profit that we were waiting to, to cash out, which stinks that we may never get that. People bought merch and I'm glad that they were able to get the merch, but it would've been nice to get our cut of that.

[00:07:52] Adam: They paid a little extra for us to have that and you know, that.

[00:07:58] Tim: Yeah.

[00:07:59] Adam: In the meantime, if anybody wants stickers, a guest email us or can go pod gmail.com. and I can hook something up with my, my niece who can print stickers. I guess I'll try to get our sticker designs on our website workingcode.dev.

[00:08:12] Adam: and that way you can see what you, what you wanna get.

[00:08:16] Adam: Um, yeah, so that's it for merch right now. you know, it could be, it was literally this morning that I found this out, so, It could be in two weeks that we have a positive update. It could be that in two weeks they've just ignored me, so we'll see.

[00:08:31] Adam: They're not on blast yet, but , in two weeks we might be canceling red bubble.

[00:08:36] Tim: Yeah, I hope we can get it sorted out. Cause there was some pretty cool merch.

[00:08:40] Adam: yeah.

[00:08:40] Tim: Unfortunately some of, some of our international users actually got to our non United States listeners got some, that's one of the reasons we pick red. Cause they had pretty good, uh, international shipping. So glad some of 'em managed to get it before it got shut down.

[00:08:53] Tim: So,

[00:08:53] Elon Musk's Background

[00:08:53] Adam: Yes. All right, well, with that outta the way, guess let's talk about the bird site. Bird site. Go. Boom. So, if you haven't heard by now or if you're just far enough in the future, to not know what we're talking about, Elon Musk of PayPal and SpaceX fame,

[00:09:09] Tim: And boring company.

[00:09:10] Adam: and the Boring Company, bought Twitter for 44 billion. and then, oh man, I don't even, how do you describe what happened next?

[00:09:19] Tim: It just immediately like fires, like huge amounts of people, like I think half the company was it that he

[00:09:25] Adam: at least. Yeah. I mean, I dunno if it was half the company or half the engineering

[00:09:28] Tim: half an injury.

[00:09:29] Adam: it was ridiculous number of people.

[00:09:31] Tim: And then he starts, shutting down microservices, saying how they're not needed and, and,

[00:09:36] Adam: And he's like putting, he's putting the developers on blast on Twitter, right? He goes on and says like, oh, sorry, the things are slow. There's 2000 RPC calls that aren't needed to load the home stream. And then somebody like replied to him and said, actually, I work on that. And no, there's not. And the ones that are there, this is why they're necessary.

[00:09:55] Adam: There's a little bit of back and forth and the guy was like, you know, if you wanna, if you wanna understand, you know, what's really going on and why, I'd be happy to talk with you about it. And there was a little bit of back and forth and basically he fired him over Twitter.

[00:10:08] Tim: and then telling the people that are there, like, if you work here, you gotta be ready to put in 80 hour weeks. And if you don't reply, you know, to this email saying that you're willing to do that, consider yourself, you know, terminated and taking three months, three months severance.

[00:10:22] Adam: Yeah. Which take the severance, by God, take the severance and run. if that's how they're gonna treat their employees, that's that's awful.

[00:10:29] Tim: I tell you, it's really this whole thing is. Really soured me. I, I mean, a couple years ago I was like, you know, when he was doing Tesla and doing that with cars and trying to go to the go to Mars and stuff. I'm like, you know, watching those, those rockets, I think he's a really good engineer. He, he, I mean he, he, on Saturday Night Live said that he has, what is it?

[00:10:50] Tim: He has Asperger's.

[00:10:52] Adam: Okay.

[00:10:53] Tim: Yeah, I believe it was Asperger's. so he's, he's on the spectrum, so he, he has a problem with, with, with social connection. So he's an excellent engineer. I mean, when he was, you know, Tesla, you know, sleeping on the engineering floor and just working, you know, long hours, he, there's no doubt the man works hard,

[00:11:09] Adam: Yeah. I don't dedicate his dedication, but I don't think that makes him a good engineer. I think I, I'm gonna debate you on the, he's a good engineer point, but go ahead,

[00:11:16] Tim: But, but I mean, he's obviously not a very. Person manager, so

[00:11:22] Adam: I mean, it's funny, the, I'm sure that there were people all along, right? Back in his PayPal days, there were probably people going, okay. You know, he was able to turn, turn PayPal into something great. but he didn't start it right. He bought it from somebody and he made it better or whatever. or helped to become success. And there were people, that I only just recently learned. He, he came from money. He was, his parents were diamond mine owners or something like that, and in South Africa. And, so, you know, he, you know, he's like one of those people, you know, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps with a million dollar loan from my dad and

[00:12:00] Tim: Hold on. That was Trump

[00:12:02] Adam: Well, you know, I think Trump's was more than a million, but yeah. But he's, you know, of that ilk, believes he's self-made, but, doesn't understand. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And I don't know, like with, I think certain things, you know, you can, you can will them into existence, right? Like SpaceX, I'm sorry, not SpaceX. Tesla is the one I was thinking of. the electric cars was a concept that had already been proven, right?

[00:12:28] Adam: Like, yes, he has done a lot to bring electric, electric cars to the mainstream. And, and I think. Especially all the other ones that we see now, the, you've got the F150 has an electric version right now and that's, you can go to the store and buy it today. And that is almost entirely attributable to Tesla and Elon Musk.

[00:12:49] Adam: And actually, did I hear this? I'm almost certain I've seen this, that he didn't start test. Yeah, he didn't start Tesla. He bought it. And again, you know, like made it.

[00:12:59] Tim: I, I think they were doing like their electric scooters and motorcycles. It was very small scale. He, he really, he really liked the name is the reason I've, I've heard that. He, he, he bought the name, bought it for the name.

[00:13:10] Adam: And, and you know, I don't think that his original business plan was bad for Tesla. I think it was actually really smart. You know, start with a car for the ultra rich people and use the profit that you make on that to make a slightly downscaled, you know, a luxury car.

[00:13:25] Adam: The Model X. So he started with the Roadster, right? take the profit from that and invest it into whatever you need to do to make the Model X take the profit from that, which is Model X is, you know, the roughly a hundred thousand dollars car. Take the profit from that and turn it into the Model S, which is like the $70,000, 70, 80,000 car.

[00:13:45] Adam: I think that's probably base price and. Take the profit from that and move it down and move it down. Move it down. So eventually at the end of this line, you get, you know, the car, the electric car that your every man can, can afford, which I think is, you know, a really smart way to get there at a profitable way.

[00:14:03] Adam: And, what was the

[00:14:04] Tim: And how technology tends to go right when something's new. You think about how when flat screen TVs first came out, you know, they were super expensive. I mean really super expensive. And now you can get a nice big, you know, high re TV flat, you know, for, I mean, I saw a Black Friday sale coming up, you know, $98 for a 40 inch, you know, plasma TV or whatever the.

[00:14:29] Adam: So I, my son will be 14, in less than a week now. We just had his birthday party, when we got together with my wife's side of the family for Thanksgiving. last weekend One of the things that my wife and I got him was a TV for his.

[00:14:42] Adam: And, I feel like his birthday is, so he, the year he was born, he was born on Thanksgiving. but of course the, the date changes for Thanksgiving and the day for his birthday change, stays the same. So his but his birthday always hovers around Thanksgiving and it's unfortunate for us because we have to buy birthday presents right before than go on sale

[00:15:02] Tim: Yeah.

[00:15:02] Adam: so it is what it is. But I did just buy 'em a 43 inch tv. It's 10 adp. It's not a smart tv. I was one of the things that I was like, okay, if I get one that's not smart, you know, then the money goes more toward the tv. You can get a slightly better tv, right? Like instead of being edge lit, it's fully back lit and maybe a little bigger or something.

[00:15:20] Adam: So I got him a TV and like a Fire stick and I figure, you know, when the Fire Stick starts to show its age and it's crappy, then you just get a new $25 Smart TV plugin thing and upgrade your stuff and the TV's still fine anyway. And so he got him a 43 inch for just under 200 bucks. So

[00:15:38] Tim: That's crazy. That's kind of how technology goes, but you know, Elon, he's, he's a disruptor. That's, uh, and he's, you know, he's very,

[00:15:49] Adam: he certainly disrupted Twitter.

[00:15:50] Tim: he certainly disrupted Twitter. And you know, it's weird. It's hard to see how it's gonna go. I mean, right now it seems awful, but I mean, you know, Twitter really wasn't a money making model anyway, you know, before he bought it.

[00:16:02] Tim: And now he seems like he's trying to make it profitable. and he is also trying to act like he's some sort of white knight coming in, saving free speech, although I don't really know about that, known if I buy that. But It . It's getting to almost like with, with our former president, like, I'm just tired of hearing about him at this point

[00:16:20] Adam: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:21] Tim: because it's all about his, his, his, ego and his, you know, his, his shenanigans.

[00:16:26] Tim: And I think he does that on purpose. He likes people talking about him. So,

[00:16:30] Adam: So you're barish on Elon Musk. Now

[00:16:33] Tim: yeah, I'm bear, I'm selling,

[00:16:35] Adam: have, do you, do you do any like day trading or,

[00:16:39] Adam: you know, like buying, have you gotten rid of all of your Tesla and

[00:16:42] Tim: I I did have some Tesla. I, I did get rid of, I did get rid of Tesla. more for just, right now, I just think, you know, we're headed into a recession, so I've kind of moved stuff in more toward, corporate bonds and, and government bonds and things that are a little more, somewhat more recession proof. So,

[00:16:58] Adam: Yeah. I don't do any of that. I just use the, the target retirement type of funds.

[00:17:02] Tim: yeah.

[00:17:03] Adam: Let the pros handle it for me. yeah, actually it's funny. I have a, a friend and, and one of the patrons of our show, My friend Chuck, has himself a, a Model S and he basically paid for it with Tesla stock. He said that, you know, he bought some stock kind of early on and, the, the profits on it covered what he spent on his model S, and then he kind took it all out.

[00:17:21] Adam: He was like, okay, thanks for the freak car.

[00:17:23] Tim: Tesla, bottom of car. That's funny. That's pretty funny. I, I think he just sort of illustrates there is, I forget there's a term for it, you probably remember, but there's, you know, when a person is successful or very smart in a certain area, they think that translates into all areas of their life. You know, so, you know, he, he was very, Successful and lucky with, with PayPal and, and Tesla.

[00:17:49] Tim: I guess if you do it several times, maybe it's a little more than luck, so let's give him that. But does that necessarily mean that he should be running a social media company and like doing code reviews on everyone's code? You know, having them bring code reviews up? I mean, I don't know. I don't, I don't think those necessarily translate. He's obviously not doing himself. He's not by, he brought a big crew of Tesla engineers and software people, to, to Twitter. So obviously there's some smarter people than him in the room, that are contributing.

[00:18:18] Adam: you know, God, I, there's like 30 different little rabbit holes that we could go down here. I tried to write down a few of 'em,I guess let's start with this. one of the things that seems pretty obvious now in hindsight, I think that he had said somewhere to somebody along the lines that, like in China, that you, the most popular, like social media slash you know, communication app is called WeChat.

[00:18:39] Adam: And you know, they have everything right. It's. Kind of a Twitter thing. It's like a, it's like WhatsApp. It's got games, and payments

[00:18:47] Tim: people. Yeah. Payments.

[00:18:48] Adam: like Venmo sort of thing. and, and he wants to do that for I guess at least America, if not, you know, try to make it a global thing. And he, I guess he had said, you know, he kind of wanted to turn Twitter into that to somebody along the line.

[00:19:01] Tim: I'm sure I've read, I don't know, a dozen or two articles about this whole fiasco, so it's hard to keep it all straight, but, Apparently he wanted to turn Twitter into that and I mean, I don't think he's on the right path. Yeah, I saw he filed with the F D I C, which controls, you know, United States banks, that he wants to launch payments. So, so having, Twitter to be a payment, which I mean, he's got success, you know, he's had success with that, with PayPal. So, I mean, that sort of makes sense, but at this point, people are leaving in droves. And I think a lot of it's activism and kind of, virtue signaling that they don't agree with his politics,

[00:19:38] Adam: Which is fine. I mean,

[00:19:39] Tim: which is fair for them to do. I mean, that's, there's a right to do, but

[00:19:42] Adam: and, and it's not like he doesn't deserve it, right? Coming in and saying, oh, by the way, now you all have to work 80 hours a week and sleep on the floor of your office and

[00:19:49] Tim: Yeah.

[00:19:50] Adam: like, suffer public abuse by me. Like, no, even without severance, I'd quit.

[00:19:56] Tim: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I would. I would too. I would be like, Nope, that's not the lifestyle I want. I'd only work an 80 hour day so you can justify your bad purchase.

[00:20:06] Adam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna take a, I'm gonna prop up a guy who spent 44 billion and, and I'm gonna work hard so that what, he can get richer, like no

[00:20:18] Tim: sucker. I'm not working in your diamond Mine.

[00:20:21] Free Speech

[00:20:21] Adam: For real. So, the free speech thing, I thought this was hilarious. I guess if, for anybody who didn't hear, you know, he was always like, oh, I, I guess that was one of his first tweets after he took over, was that,comedy is once again allowed on Twitter, right? And so a bunch of people changed their name, just their display name, not like their username or anything to Elon Musk.

[00:20:40] Adam: And then they started tweeting all kinds of stupid. I didn't even see really any of 'em, but I just, you know, a couple of news things and then he suspended their accounts and was like, okay, wait a minute. don't free speech that way.

[00:20:54] Tim: Yeah, don't free speech, things that make me look bad.

[00:20:59] Adam: And of course, the Oh God. Okay, so then there's like, you know, Twitter blue? No. Was it Twitter blue? I don't know. You could pay $8 a month to get your verified check mark, right? And, and then somebody registered an account called Eli or whatever. Eli

[00:21:13] Tim: Eli Lilly. Yep. The pharmaceutical.

[00:21:15] Adam: yeah. And, and tweeted, insulin is now free after they got their blue check mark for $8.

[00:21:19] Adam: And Eli Lilly's stock just like fell through the floor crater. Which, I mean, I, I guess I don't have a whole lot of, sympathy for them. I mean, insulin should be free, first of all,

[00:21:33] Tim: Yeah,

[00:21:34] Adam: But, it, it does show the problem here, right? Like anybody could go, you know, register,an account that looks like it's a Tesla thing, and, and, you know, short, they could short the stock post stuff that's, gonna make their stock tank and then profit off of that.

[00:21:49] Adam: And, Pretty messed up.

[00:21:51] Tim: Yeah. Yeah, he, I think he's, they've since suspended the $8 check mark thing, but I mean, damage is

[00:21:59] Adam: I think it was like, you know, two, three days at the most.

[00:22:01] Tim: Yeah.

[00:22:04] Code Review

[00:22:04] Adam: Well, so speaking of bringing the Tesla engineers over and having them review Twitter code like that, to me, just that reeks of. Not getting it right. Like if you have people who their job is to program, autonomous driving cars or features for very, tech forward cars, right? If it's, even if they're working on like the H V A C controls, right?

[00:22:28] Adam: That are not autonomous driving, but very, new age, I guess. Having them come over and look at, you know, web code and, and like code review, the microservices that you're using at Twitter. Like, just how, to me, it's, it, it just, I, I, hmm. I can't even talk. I'm so just like ruffled by how bad he is at this, the, the hubris, right.

[00:22:55] Tim: I, I feel like it's becoming clearer and clear. He has this mindset that he can just throw enough money at any problem and fix it. Like I believe that if he wanted to, he would choose to just throw money at cancer and try to solve it, right? Like, oh my God. Can you imagine if he had just said like said, here's $44 billion, go try and fix cancer. Even if we didn't get there, if we had that kind of money to spend to get closer, that would've been awesome. What I'm afraid of is, is if he actually does wind up making Twitter profitable, he's gonna be even more insufferable,

[00:23:36] Adam: yeah,

[00:23:37] Tim: because, hey, you ca, you know what? Throwing money at a problem trying to fix it, that is a viable option. If you got enough money.

[00:23:43] Adam: you have enough money and people are willing to suffer you.

[00:23:47] Tim: Right. Yep. So,

[00:23:50] Adam: So, I don't know. Like I said before, there was a lot of different things that we could talk about with Elon Musk. So I guess one of the other things, you know, like I feel like I've just had that curtain pulled back. And I can now see all the stuff that's going on. So with Tesla, when you buy a Tesla, part of the, the incentive there is that he gets a, a credit for, you know, reducing emissions basically from the government.

[00:24:16] Adam: Well, he turns around and sells that as a, an offset, And that's where I think Tesla makes most of their. I think that they're relatively break even on the cars, and then they make money by selling those credits, which is like the exact opposite of progress, right? So he's just enabling companies to continue pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because he is making electric cars.

[00:24:40] Tim: Yeah. And that's, you know, you bring that, you saying that kind of trigger. A memory that I had. So, you know, having hung out with, you know, a few millionaires and a couple of billionaires actually, be amazed the way that rich people make money. It's, it's just like, so I was talking to one guy, he's, he's a multi-millionaire and he was, they're doing a lot of, um, historic area development and.

[00:25:09] Tim: Paying a whole bunch of money to like, restore areas of a historic district seems like that's a complete, like, maybe that's just like a philanthropic thing that that's a complete money suck. And it is. But what they get out of it is they get, tax credits.

[00:25:23] Adam: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:24] Tim: And they can, what they do is they don't use those tax credits.

[00:25:27] Tim: They resell the tax credits to, to even richer millionaires and billionaires. And so they can buy, they can buy these tax credits at like pennies on the dollar and hugely reduce their tax burden. And that's, I mean, that's how they're making money, in doing these kind of, you know, And, and they look like they're phila philanthropic.

[00:25:45] Tim: Oh, look, we, we, you know, we fixed up downtown and made downtown, you know, and made downtown beautiful and restored it to its former glory of, you know, 1945 or whatever. No, they're selling tax credits and that's a huge, huge business for them. I'm like, I hear about how like, really, really, really rich people make money.

[00:26:01] Tim: I'm like, It's just ridiculous. It's like, I guess when you like control the game, you can put all those pieces in place and normal people, they'll never get a cut of that. You know? You're never gonna get a cut of that. You're not being invited into the room. I was just, I was just surprised to even hear the story

[00:26:16] Adam: Right.

[00:26:16] Tim: I was the room.

[00:26:17] Tim: So,

[00:26:18] Adam: Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain.

[00:26:22] Tim: Exactly. But yeah, I, I think he, this whole thing is, is, like I said, soured soured me on hand. Cause I really thought he was, Smart guy trying to do things for, for the, the greater good of the world. But nowadays he's just a toxic boss. He's a complete toxic boss.

[00:26:39] Adam: Yeah. And, and he clearly has been doing this. I, I, I never heard any stories about him doing it at PayPal, but I know we've heard stories about that happening at SpaceX and at Tesla where he is like demanding people work ridiculous hours. And like you were talking about, you know, he's, he's there on the factory floors helping out whatever at, at Tesla, which I think is a good. for a boss to do Right. You know, be in the trenches with the people that you're asking to, to work, but at the same time, like

[00:27:08] Tim: Who has the most to gain

[00:27:10] Adam: Yeah, exactly. And

[00:27:12] Tim: his 54 billion compensation package

[00:27:15] Adam: mm-hmm.

[00:27:16] Tim: That, that the shareholders are suing him over for Tesla.

[00:27:19] Working At Scale

[00:27:19] Adam: I mean, I don't want to. In any way diminish the work that people in those factories are doing or the work that people at SpaceX are doing, but, well, I mean, I guess SpaceX, I would more equate with Twitter in that it's knowledge work, right? Building a car when you're, when you're just trying to meet a quota, right?

[00:27:37] Adam: That's, if I remember correctly, that's what they were mostly struggled with at Tesla is like making cars that meet the quality need and making enough of them fast enough. Right. And. It's a manufacturing problem. It's not a, it's a physical labor sort of thing, and quality of work. It's not a knowledge work problem, whereas self landing rockets and, and keeping a website that, supports millions and millions, probably billions, I'm guessing users.

[00:28:07] Adam: Man. So we, this is the week after, I did that big MySQL upgrade that we talked about last week, and we're still feeling sort of aftershocks from that. We are, you know, every now and then something will just kind of feel off and then all of a sudden, you know, alarm belts start going off. Queries tend to pile up and, and you know, services that have historically been fine all of a sudden start breaking and it's like, what is going on? And it turns out, you know, like sometimes it's,

[00:28:39] Tim: Your query plans are being rebuilt

[00:28:40] Adam: well, you know, the thing that, the thing today was just like, I think kind of a naive original design.

[00:28:46] Adam: You know, we're storing a bunch of data in a table. And it's properly indexed and it's, you knows, whatever. But then, you know, when you're trying to iJoin, a sub-select from one table that's got, you know, what 30 million rows in it, against, a sub-select of another table that has 89 million rows in it, and you know, and it's just like, okay, yeah, I can see why that would not be performant.

[00:29:08] Adam: We need to do something about, you know, the pile up of data in those tables and it. How, how, like when you think about the, the humongous scale of something like Twitter, of something like aws, like clearly it's possible to do this, in a, in a cost effective and time efficient way. And I have a lot to learn there.

[00:29:29] Adam: And, and we're, we're starting to hit that level of scale where like the amount of data that's piling up that we can't just choose to delete, right? Like there's stuff that we can archive. There's stuff that we need to, there's stuff that we can delete, right? Certain logs. Okay. We don't need anything more than 12 year, 12 months old for this log and that log, and we don't need any of this data after two years or whatever.

[00:29:51] Adam: But there's only so much you can do, right? That in some cases you're just gonna generate way too much data, even if you're only looking at like six months, you know, you could still have a hundred million rows of something in six months. So it's, we're, we're starting to get there, and I, I'm starting to.

[00:30:09] Adam: Reach the limit of my abilities, and I'm going, now what? So I think that we're approaching like a, you know, maybe like a hiring situation or something like that. I don't know. I don't even know what to look for, right? I need to find somebody who has dealt with this.

[00:30:24] Tim: Yeah, but I mean it was work working before All you did was move the data to another instance of my right.

[00:30:32] Adam: Well, that's the thing is yes, that is something that has changed, but we don't know. That's a correlation. It's not a causation necessarily. Right. It could be the cause

[00:30:42] Adam: or could

[00:30:43] Tim: a strong, it's a strong

[00:30:44] Adam: It's a strong correlation for sure. I mean, and one of the other changes was we, the instance type that we selected, we went from just like a general MySEQ. Instance, no, not Perona, but just like a, it was a M five dot large or something like that. And we, we moved to, I think it's a R six G, I think. I don't know. I think we moved to an R six G, which is a, a memory optimized version of MySQL. So it has more working memory to, and our thought was like, okay, well sometimes we have these gigantic querie.

[00:31:19] Adam: That, you know, has to hold a lot of, of me of data in memory to, to do these joints or whatever. And, and we never really had to deal with too much, cpu, you know, constant. Any time that we would have like constant. CPU hovering around, you know, 98, 90 or a hundred percent CPU usage, it would be because there was something going wrong, right?

[00:31:43] Adam: Not because that was just how it operated. And so we figured, okay, well by switching to memory optimized, maybe we can get some extra performance out of it or something. So that was one change. But honestly, I think that the, the problems are just that data continues to pile up and we have to continue working in the, the code.

[00:32:01] Adam: And the architecture didn't necessarily have that scale, within its reach. So, and then, and then, so I see, you know, Twitter and, and these other sites that have like clearly easily one or two orders of magnitude more data than us.

[00:32:18] Tim: For sure.

[00:32:18] Adam: And it's like, how?

[00:32:21] Tim: It's all those microservices,

[00:32:23] Adam: right?

[00:32:24] Tim: just turn 'em off.

[00:32:26] Adam: Who needs to.

[00:32:30] Tim: Well, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I mean, there are other tons of social media sites. I, you know, I did, I did. You know, I got on Twitter in 2010 strictly because I was going in my very first Sea of United, the first and the last. and, I was like, okay, Twitter. Twitter was, it was pretty, at least to me it was pretty new.

[00:32:47] Tim: I don't know how, when they actually got started, but, uh, I was really super heavy on it for many years because it felt like a community, right? It was like a tech community and then, you know, followed you and you followed Ben and just all these different folks. And then just like the past, like four or five years, it's like, I barely on it.

[00:33:06] Adam: Mm.

[00:33:06] Tim: Barely on it. In fact, a few years back I went and deleted all my historic tweets, just when deleted 'em it's just like, you know, it's, it's, it's an interesting site. It's like, it's not that important to me, but I do think it is important. I think it's who it's most important for is so people that are in poorer countries, you know, that, you know, it doesn't take a lot of resources to do a tweet and it's hard to, it's hard to censor.

[00:33:32] Tim: So I think a lot of, you know, people that are in, in fascist countries will tend to use it as a organizing tool and things like that. I think that that's great. But for me in my life, it's like if it goes away, it doesn't matter to me honestly.

[00:33:46] Adam: Yeah.

[00:33:46] What Comes Next?

[00:33:46] Adam: well, I'm, I'm really glad that you kind of pivoted around to tech community that, like you said, there, there's some real. Social good that can come from it. I don't think that is, that angle of it is as important to us personally. It's not the way that we use it. I think it's good for society, like a global society and, and I, I think if Twitter were to go away, it will definitely leave a vacuum there if nowhere else, right?

[00:34:11] Adam: There has to be something that's like low bandwidth, low power, easy to use, hard to censor, like all those things that you were. and, and if it's not Twitter, then it will be something else. And hopefully, you know, somebody provides that for me, Twitter has mostly been, a tech community thing. I, I know there are a lot of, a lot of my friends that I met through the Cfml community are very active on Facebook.

[00:34:37] Adam: I see them like posting stuff and, and you know, commenting on each other's stuff. It's whatever. I'm very. bearish, I guess on Facebook in general. I think the only reason that I keep my Facebook account at all, for, well, two reasons. There's a couple of Facebook groups that I just, I need to have access to, for skydiving stuff.

[00:34:54] Adam: and for like, for my, the club that I belong to, the skydiving club, and then also I guess to a lesser. My memories. So like when I would post funny things that my kids would say, or pictures of my kids, it's nice to have those brought up for me on a yearly basis. I would miss those. but like I, I've really gotten outta the habit of posting on Facebook and I like that.

[00:35:14] Adam: And now, you know, because of all this I've, I'm trying real hard to push away from Twitter. I still post their, occasionally, I've mostly moved over to Macon. And I think that most of the people that I talk to in the tech community kind of have as well. which I think is. I like that it's decentralized, meaning like no one person could take it down.

[00:35:31] Adam: You can always move over anywhere else. I like that. so because it's decentralized, the server that you're on can just choose to block certain accounts or certain other servers. So like if all the Nazis decide to hang out on some Nazi Mastodon server, you can just block 'em at the server level and you'll never see any of 'em.

[00:35:48] Adam: which. I don't know, like the, what is it? Truth social? Is that what it is? Trump's like social network. It's built on Macon, so that's,

[00:35:56] Tim: Was it

[00:35:57] Adam: yeah.

[00:35:57] Tim:

[00:35:57] Adam: but you know, okay, so block that server, right? So, but

[00:36:01] Tim: or don't? Whatever. Whatever

[00:36:03] Adam: their own. but.

[00:36:05] Adam: Again, I think that the tech, just like anything else, the tech community is gonna go somewhere else. I like Macon in the little bit that I've used it over the last couple of weeks. I like that it's very thoughtfully built. So like for example, on Macon, the guy who created it, is against quote tweeting, right?

[00:36:20] Adam: So there's retweet and then there's quote tweet, which is where. It embeds somebody else's tweet in your tweet and then you can dunk on them in, in the part that you write or whatever. And, or I mean, that's the reason that he doesn't want it, is because it tends to be, I dunno if it's tends to, or whatever, because people would use it in a negative way, like in a, in a way that impacts society negatively.

[00:36:44] Tim: It, it makes it look like you're actually having a conversation with that person, and that person may not have even read that tweet makes it look like point, counterpoint, in a, in a narrative that's, that's not necessarily the way it happened.

[00:36:55] Adam: So I like that. I like that there's thought being put into that, right? Like it's not just, I don't like it, it's, I don't think it's good for society and here's why. And, and that's why it's, it is the way it is. No, I, in a little bit of, or in, in some way you're kind of losing the baby with the bath water there cuz.

[00:37:15] Adam: There was positive ways to use tweets too. and, and there's ways around it, right? You can just reply and then promote your own, like re what do they call it? It's not retu, it's Boost. Boost your own, reply. And so it kind of works out that way if somebody's willing to click through and see what it was that you were replying to.

[00:37:33] Adam: I don't know. yeah, I, I just like that it's being thoughtfully done and I feel like the tech community's gonna end up somewhere. I don't, what I, one thing I don't like is that there's like four or five different things that people are, are kind of gravitating toward, and it's unclear where everybody's gonna land,

[00:37:48] Tim: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:49] Adam: time to, to join all five and see what happens, right?

[00:37:52] Adam: Like I'm, I already kind of had a master down account, so I was like, okay, well I'll go over there. The people from our Discord, I, I think most of them that were on Twitter have kind of moved over to, Mastodon and it's working out okay.

[00:38:07] Tim: Yeah.

[00:38:08] Adam: I, I don't think I will be that sad in terms of my daily life when Twitter goes away if, if and when Twitter goes away,

[00:38:15] Tim: Yeah. Yep. All right. Bird side. Go. Boom.

[00:38:20] Adam: hopefully, and, and you know what, uh, well, I said hopefully, maybe, maybe not. I, I don't wanna hope for it. I know that there are people who get paid by that company and, and that's their livelihood. And certainly they don't need, especially after there's been so many layoffs recently, we don't need, you know, another company to, to just shut down because they got bought by an idiot, okay.

[00:38:41] Adam: So, we're getting ready to go do our, our after show. And, think today on the after show, Tim and I are gonna talk about what we're thankful for since it is Thanksgiving week. We'll see. And, you know, if you want to, if you wanna hear that, you're just gonna have to become a patron. And you can do that by going to patreon.com/WorkingCodePod.

[00:38:59] Patreon

[00:38:59] Adam: Of course, as always, this episode of Working Code is brought to you by, our lovely patrons. Let's just do that. We're gonna be sincere this week. It's Thanksgiving week. and listeners like you, if you're enjoying the show and you wanna make sure that we can keep putting more of whatever this is out into the universe, then you should consider supporting us on Patreon.

[00:39:13] Adam: patrons cover or recording and editing costs. And we couldn't do this every week without them. Special thanks of course to our top patrons, Monte, Sean and Giancarlo. You can help us out by going to patreon.com/working code Pod, becoming a.

[00:39:26] Thanks For Listening!

[00:39:26] Adam: again, this is sincere week, so I'm gonna go with, this for your homework.

[00:39:30] Adam: Join our Discord. Come be a part of our tech community. Go to workingcode.dev/discord. Come hang out with us. Chat with us during the day. We share triumphs and fails. We share fun and gifts and we talk about what's going on in the news. we were chatting about. The potential war in Ukraine, like the, the days leading up to it happening, right?

[00:39:51] Adam: So we're, we are, it's an active little community and we are spread across the globe and there's lots of stuff going on. and it's fun, good place to hang out. Send us your topics and questions at Working Good Pod on Twitter or Instagram if those things still exist. When you hear this, and send us an email at WorkingCodePod@gmail.com.

[00:40:09] Adam: That's gonna do it for us this week. We'll catch you next week and until,

[00:40:14] Tim: Remember, your heart matters, and I mean this sincerely except you. Elon Musk, your toxic boss, you.

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