Most banks will print a sheet of 3 on demand at a branch. I think they're called counter checks? I haven't used a checkbook in probably about a decade, so when they've been needed for some reason, I just get those.
It's quite possible that the founders cashed equity out of the funding round, and that could possibly be why it was such a large round. During the FinTech/Web3 boom back around 2019-2020, a ton of founders did this and it caused huge misalignments between them and their employees. Their thinking could be, "who cares if you didn't make anything from the acquisition when you've already taken $40MM off the table?"
Notability isn't the same as credibility. Blue checks used to be useful so that you knew whether or not the person you were interacting with was who they said they were and had some cultural importance.
The section that Spiro included about robots.txt belies just how amateurish this attempt is. That file has become the effective standard for instructing web scraping utilities, but is nothing more than a strong recommendation and is absolutely not legally binding in any way.
It's bizarre that Spiro wouldn't already understand this, but even weirder that it appears he didn't even research the topic or have an associate/junior partner with more applicable tech knowledge give it the once over. Possibly, Spiro and Musk were provided that feedback and purposely ignored it due to their outsized egos.
What's most obnoxious though is that Musk fired the employees in question while avoiding paying their agreed severance, and then has the gall to invoke the specter of non-compete agreements. I would hope that Spiro, or his firm, would at least be aware that non-competes are unenforceable in California and many other states.
Fair enough. I don't think it's that unsafe now either. It just felt like it had a lot more rough edges when I was younger, but that could've been due to differences in experiences as I got older.
I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
If he was in any way trying to save his stake in Twitter and Tesla, he wouldn't be acting out the way he is. Dude's completely divorced from reality at this point.
My wife's tinfoil-hat theory is that, after reading about the amphetamine problem at FTX, that many of the Effective Altruism cultists (Elon included) are hooked on speed and making some really horrible decisions.
Sorry, but how can you possibly see his behavior and think the simpler explanation is that Musk knows anything about what he's talking about at this point as it concerns Twitter? Just because he owns it means nothing in this case - especially since he's avoided even discussing his misguided opinions with his employees?
The simpler explanation here is that he's embarrassed for making a stupid impulse purchase and now he's lashing out.
As an ex-tweep, there are plenty of architectural decisions that I didn't agree with or that didn't go as well as had hoped. On the other hand, there were some amazing feats of engineering going on as well and a lot of super-talented folks. Just like any other high-visibility, high-scale system.
As much as I'd like to blame Musk's tantrums on his obvious lack of technical chops, I think it's far more likely that they're due to a combination of his piss-poor emotional intelligence and realizing that he was wrong about so many of his pre-purchase criticisms.
Now that he can actually tell that right-wing provocateurs were actually being algorithmically boosted and not suppressed, that there was no concerted "censorship" efforts (moderation is not censorship), and that the people he's been championing are full-on toxic to Twitter's viability and any chance at monetization, he'd rather burn Twitter (the service, it's most devoted users, and it's employees) down than admit he's wrong.
20% of the services might be necessary to support home timeline rendering, but I guarantee that at least 60-75% of the remaining services are indirect dependencies.
When I worked there, margins on the cables were something like 85-95% so employee discounts were huge. On other items, TVs and such, the margins are much much lower so at most you got $25-50 off of the sale price.
That's not exactly how that worked - configuration files and build artifacts were delivered by either puppet/ansible or via Murder (bt-style p2p). If there was cron involved, it was to schedule starting the puppet client on the node. The puppet manifests and every project's source was in git, but nothing went directly from git to a machine (unless internal tooling regressed dramatically after 2013).
I think the concern there is that these different failure modes are all given the same error/exception messaging? The caller could make different decisions based on these different potential outcomes, but only if the caller receives specific errors. It's been a while since I've used Cassandra, so if the error handling has improved along those lines then I apologize.
I worked for Netopia for a short time back in the 90s. Really fun company! Working next to the hardware guys was seriously informative. Lots of interesting kit to play with for sure.
There's definitely an existing product market fit with drugs, but commissions are extremely low for entry level salespeople. Since there's a very low bar to entry, the business isn't defensible though if you are able to build up a consistent client list, you can look for more efficient arbitrage situations. Supply chain logistics can be hit and miss, especially if you're importing internationally. Also, manufacturers have wildly varying levels of quality control and the customers are quite fickle so one bad shipment can tank your customer satisfaction index.
You can avoid some of the supply chain and quality control issues by manufacturing certain products yourself - just like Jobs and Woz in their garage!
Payment terms are tough as well - your suppliers will demand Net-right-this-effin-second, while your customers will often be Net-I-don't-have-it-right-now-will-you-take-a-broken-VCR-instead.