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If anyone knows how important Twitter is to Donald Trump, it's the president.
“Without the tweets, I wouldn't be here,” he told the Financial Times last month.
To which Twitter's co-founder says: Sorry about that, world.
Evan Williams, who still sits on the company's board of directors, recently told The New York Times that he wants to repair the damage he thinks Twitter and the broader Internet have wrought on society in the form of trolls, cyberbullies, live-streamed violence, fake news and — yes — Trump.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Williams told the Times. “I was wrong about that.”
“If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry,” he said.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:43PM (6 children)
Maybe it's time to stop giving huge amounts of VC funding to kids. Kids don't have any sense of proportion...unless they've already been through the total perspective vortex. And even then, some of them have egos like Zaphod that don't learn anything from seeing yourself in perspective against the whole universe.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:54PM (1 child)
There's a reason Tweeter didn't appear in Europe - they invented a tool better suited to the purpose of terse communication, namely IRC [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:46PM
Oh, noes, my xterm (running under tmux over ssh on my home server) is unable to display a black-face pile of poo, what a disaster! (I presume such clipart is specifiable, as the colour modifiers are now standardised, and as pile of poo has a face, he should have a specifiable face colour. (Don't give me "but it's not a person" - neither is the vampire clipart, and you can specify Blackula if you so desire. https://emojipedia.org/vampire-dark-skin-tone/ )
It was my pleasure many years later to work with Jarkko Oikarinen not once, but twice (once he was a customer I was supporting on-site, and once as a near-team-mate when I worked for that client). He was always very modest about what he'd created, it was just a thing that he did in the past, and had nearly forgotten about it. To me, it's a important part of my interactions with most other human beings I interact with.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:20PM (2 children)
Nerd alert:
I guess you didn't make it far enough in to the books... turns out Zaphod went into the total perspective vortex machine while he was stuck inside a simulation created specifically to trap him. So in the false simulation universe was created for him, thus he was the most important thing. However, if it was reality he would've been just as fucked as the rest of us. He massive ego basically guarantees it would have killed him, or possibly brought him to enlightenment, hard to say with the extremes of any curve.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:35PM (1 child)
Interesting interpretation. Not sure how you can extrapolate to "...if it was reality..." from DNA's text, given that the whole series is fiction?
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:44PM
Inside the continuity of the books, he was in an artificial universe specifically created for the purpose of, when he went into the Vortex it wouldn't kill him because he *was* the most important person in *that* universe.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday May 23 2017, @04:52PM
Hey, is that a piece of fairy cake?