Linda Yaccarino is leaving X

Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.

Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.

Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years

The problem is ranking and relevance

Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.

Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.

Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.

> Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking.

That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.

Thinking more, I imagine each post has limited value for ranking. You need the context of the thread, re-posts, even other threads nearby in time (with the same people).

> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else

I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.

Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.

After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.

If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.

They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).

They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.

It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.

A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?

"Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities.

It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.

It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.

Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.

> It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.

> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"

I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.

The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.

I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".

Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.

I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".

Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker -- almost certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.

You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone relies on language to think together, so when the meaning of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at thinking together.

What, pray, is your reason?

There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else following suit

Hi, sadly, I removed my description the first time I heard "politically correct" (on KUSF during the Reagan admin or maybe a year or 2 later) because I did not need it.

Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).

Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]

I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.

BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.

> I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".

I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and pointless…

> Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

I don't think they care about the experience or functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the various "apps" in the "super app".

Then it's not a solved problem in any meaningful way.

"my description of the first time I heard"

There are no followers on HN, unless I've totally missed something about the platform.

The dopamine hook on HN is karma.

sidenote: Twitter search isnt that bad when you compare it to the shit show that is reddit search. its basically never worked.

Reddit search is just Google, is it not?