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If you have a twitter account with a significant amount of data in it, run—don’t walk—away from that platform.

Elon appears to be rapidly turning twitter into an unmitigated disaster, from its social media and technical aspects to its fundamental business model.

Barely a week in, Elon has caused immense internal chaos by immediately firing twitter’s leadership without a transition plan; telling workers to drop everything they’re doing to do an aborted ink-and-paper code review; telling engineers to launch a pointless blue-checkmark subscription service within a week or lose their jobs; telling remote workers to show up in an office or get fired; and threatening to fire half the crew anyway.

Read more…

• #opinion
• #technology

I suppose all good things must come to an end. This is my last week at Apple. I’m looking forward to working on a new set of challenges in the near future.

My tenure at Apple has lasted 13 years and 8 months—by far the longest I’ve stayed at any one company. During those years I worked on countless iPhones and iPads, created Mobile Device Management and Photo Stream/Shared Photos for iCloud, worked on a ton of plumbing for iOS in UIKit, Mac Catalyst, and the ability to run iOS apps natively on M1 Macs.

I’m thankful for the life-long friendships I’ve made along the way. I’m grateful for the chance to work with brilliant, opinionated, hardworking people, even those with whom I commiserate occasionally on the state of the industry.

I hope I leave with no hard feelings on either side—I certainly leave with gratitude and humility. Life is different after two years of the pandemic, and I think it’s the right time for us to go our separate ways.

I sincerely wish everyone at Apple the best of luck in the days ahead. It’s been fun. Stay in touch.

• #personal
• #apple

A few days ago, I came across this license plate. I had no idea what it meant, so I took a snapshot and posted it to a license plate group. In that group, someone suggested that it meant “Cup of Joe”, as in coffee.

But what does Pepe have to do with Joe? After a bit of reading, I discovered that Pepe is a nickname for Josep (José) in Spanish, and Josep is the Spanish version of Joseph, which in turn gives us Joe, the nickname for coffee.

Okay, but how is Pepe a nickname for Josep? Those names don’t sound anything alike! Turns out, in Catholic literature, the name of Saint Joseph, Mary’s husband, was customarily followed by the letters P.P., an abbreviation of the Latin pater putativus, i.e. the “putative father” of Jesus. If you read the letters P.P. out loud in Spanish, it sounds like “pe pe”, and that’s how Pepe became a nickname for Josep.

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• #personal
• #opinion

Novice programmer: I’m sure this codebase was written by people who know more than me. Better involve the maintainers when I change things because I have a lot to learn.

Experienced programmer: I now understand this codebase and I make changes to it with confidence, because I know I won’t break anything.

Expert programmer: I’m sure this codebase was written by people who know more than me. Better involve the maintainers when I change things because I have a lot to learn.

• #humor
• #FridayDevAdvice

elon

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/09/twitter-elon-musk-deal/

As Musk moves to abandon deal, Twitter faces ‘worst case scenario’

Analysts and employees warned Musk set the stage for a turbulent period, which could carry financial risks and leave workers more frustrated.

www.washingtonpost.com

Any opinion piece on Elon’s now-botched attempt to buy Twitter needs to present the very plausible idea that Elon was never serious about buying Twitter in the first place, and that he just got bored of the deal; and that his complaints about bots are just an excuse for his petulance.

Remember when Elon tweeted about taking Tesla private (“funding secured”!), and it turned out to be just another spontaneous, narcissistic prank? Yeah, this is like that.

I’m no legal expert, but I think Elon is going to just end up paying the $1B breakup fee (0.5% of his wealth, so no big whoop) and just walk away, leaving a wake of chaos behind him for someone else to clean up.

I suspect he never had any interest in running Twitter. He just wanted to be the center of attention on the platform for a while, and flex the fact that he was so rich that he could—if he actually wanted to—control the medium.

Remember that the next time he threatens to buy yet another company on a whim.

Funding secured.

• #opinion