It is a bummer when you buy a car as part of your virtue signaling routine only to find the founder of the company doesn’t agree with you on every political position. If only this guy could find a car designed and built in the Ukraine, all would be right in the world again.
The ebbs and flows of virtue signaling can be hard on a guy. One really needs to stay on top of the “current thing”.
And the current thing keeps changing so fast! Transmogrifying!
X v. Bonta over AB 587:
Allegedly one of the reasons behind the bandwidth issues during the DeSantis “spaces”:
As noted in comment #389, 𝕏 has filed a lawsuit against California’s Assembly Bill 587 (AB 587), which requires social media companies to disclose their content management policies and report on their enforcement.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-sues-california-over-content-moderation-law
Musk claims the law violates the First Amendment and the California Constitution by encouraging the company to remove posts from users making politically charged statements.
The law compels companies like Twitter, recently rebranded as X, "to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with the constitutionally protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp., has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech,” the company said in the complaint.
This is the entire complaint posted by CourtListener.
Here is an unroll of a long 𝕏 thread by Tracy Beanz annotating the complaint and discussing how it interacts with Section 230 protection for social media companies.
As noted in comment #389, 𝕏 has filed a lawsuit against California’s Assembly Bill 587 (AB 587), which requires social media companies to disclose their content management policies and report on their enforcement.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/elon-musk-sues-california-over-content-moderation-law
Musk claims the law violates the First Amendment and the California Constitution by encouraging the company to remove posts from users making politically charged statements.
The law compels companies like Twitter, recently rebranded as X, "to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with the constitutionally protected editorial judgments of companies such as X Corp., has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech,” the company said in the complaint.
This is the entire complaint posted by CourtListener.
Here is an unroll of a long 𝕏 thread by Tracy Beanz annotating the complaint and discussing how it interacts with Section 230 protection for social media companies.
I admire this get it done attitude. This is how Elon accomplishes more in less time than his competitors. Also by tackling a difficult task with members from other divisions it builds teamwork and camaraderie. If i were younger i would like ti work with Elon.
From the article:
Musk later admitted the “whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” after the lack of servers caused a whole host of issues. This included Ron Desantis’ presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces being spoiled by delays and glitches as the app repeatedly crashed.
Isaacson wrote that Musk’s Sacramento incident was “an example of his recklessness, his impatience with pushback, and the way he intimidated people.”
As far as “get it done attitude” and “teamwork and camaraderie”, here is the ultimate authority: Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria
Beria has proved more prescient than Orwell or Huxley!
This Business Insider story, quoting from Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson, reads like the mainstream media hit piece I expect the biography to be. From its its description on Amazon.com:
When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.
His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.
Now consider the timing of the server move. The servers were moved from Sacramento to Portland at the end of December 2022, and the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter Spaces which ran into problems was at the end of May 2023, a full five months later. Now, Musk is quoted by Isaacson as saying the “whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake”. OK, let’s assume the quote is correct, in context, and the shutdown was indeed a mistake. But were the problems encountered five months later due to the decision to move the servers, or with the way Musk and team accomplished the move, transferring the servers during Christmas week and completing the integration in January? Nowhere is that asserted in the hit piece, you’ll note. Nor is there any description of how the problems were due to the 700 server racks being in Portland rather than Sacramento.
Isaacson wrote that Musk’s Sacramento incident was “an example of his recklessness, his impatience with pushback, and the way he intimidated people.”
He added that the billionaire has “a good track record of knowing when to ignore naysayers. But not a perfect one.”
Perhaps in some fantasy world which Isaacson conjures in his office in the History department of Tulane University, self-made African-American billionaires who have single-handedly reinvented two technologically moribund manufacturing industries should have a “perfect record” knowing when to ignore naysayers, rather than an instinct for risk-taking and willingness to correct course based upon results in the real world.
Prior to Autodesk’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock in June 1985, we had a crisis getting AutoCAD Version 2.1 shipped before the end of of the last quarter to be reported in the prospectus, which closed at the end of April 1985 (due to Autodesk’s small business style January fiscal year, this is designated “1986Q1” in the financial results). When the product was finally cleared by Quality Assurance, we needed all hands on board to get the backed-up orders for the product shipped before the end of the quarter so we could book the revenue into that quarter. (Orders would pile up until shipment of a new version because dealers would defer waiting for its release.)
In a crazy all-nighter before the last day of the quarter, we had as many people as could fit in the manufacturing operation copying discs, packing boxes, printing shipping and billing documents, and stacking them for pick-up. This included three members of the board of directors (Dan Drake, Greg Lutz, and me), with Greg dashing off to fix a bug which QA, who were also working overnight, had found at the last minute. We pulled it off, and the next day the UPS truck pulled out packed with boxes of AutoCAD 2.1. This is the kind of thing start-up companies that still think like start-up companies do, and nobody thought of it as exceptional at the time—you just do what you have to do when you need to do it.
And like Elon Musk, in retrospect, we regretted that crazy night. AutoCAD 2.1 was one of the buggiest releases we ever shipped, and was followed by 2.11, 2.12, and 2.13, until it finally settled down until we shipped 2.5 in June 1986. But if we hadn’t shipped 2.1 before the end of the quarter, we’d have had a “disappointing” quarter (not a loss, or down compared to the same quarter the previous year, but just down from the previous quarter), and that could have blown up the IPO or whacked the price we and the underwriters were hoping to get for it. So, at further distance, I consider we did the right thing.
For contrast, here’s the Chinese approach, very detailed and operational:
The xAI developers have posted a 1500 word document, “Announcing Grok” on their Web site. The paper goes into detail on how the model was built…
After announcing xAI, we trained a prototype LLM (Grok-0) with 33 billion parameters. This early model approaches LLaMA 2 (70B) capabilities on standard LM benchmarks but uses only half of its training resources. In the last two months, we have made significant improvements in reasoning and coding capabilities leading up to Grok-1, a state-of-the-art language model that is significantly more powerful, achieving 63.2% on the HumanEval coding task and 73% on MMLU.
…and its performance.
On these benchmarks, Grok-1 displayed strong results, surpassing all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1. It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4. This showcases the rapid progress we are making at xAI in training LLMs with exceptional efficiency.
The main implementation language is Rust:
Rust has proven to be an ideal choice for building scalable, reliable, and maintainable infrastructure. It offers high performance, a rich ecosystem, and prevents the majority of bugs one would typically find in a distributed system. Given our small team size, infrastructure reliability is crucial, otherwise, maintenance starves innovation. Rust provides us with confidence that any code modification or refactor is likely to produce working programs that will run for months with minimal supervision.
You can sign up for early access to Grok at https://grok.x.ai/. It’s easiest if you’re logged into a verified 𝕏 account when you sign up, as you must grant Grok permission to read your interactions on 𝕏.
