4 ms·

Yes, X as a brand lacks uniqueness. Xbox X factor X-men Xvideos Etc etc Seems to me musk just loves the domain. Domain: $10,000,000 Users: $44,000,000,0

Yes, X as a brand lacks uniqueness. Xbox X factor X-men Xvideos Etc etc Seems to me musk just loves the domain. Domain: $10,000,000 Users: $44,000,000,000

giancarlostoro 3y ago
Was it not called Xbox because of DirectX?
astrange 3y ago
The Xbox brand is very unique because they think numbers go from 0 to 360 to 1.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  Tough to overflow when bound to a loop, I guess
- opportune 3y ago
  They do over the domain 360*Z_719
  - astrange 3y ago
    If it's supposed to be degrees, then since 360==0 doesn't that mean the range is [0,360) so 360 degrees is actually an out of range value for an angle? I've always wondered this but never enough to ask it.
    - opportune 3y ago
      Z_719 is the shorthand for integers in [0, 718], with Z_n typically connotating the algebraic group or ring of integers up to n. In this case 360(Z_719) is an ideal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory)) over that domain. While the ordered sequence of Z_719 is just {0, 1, 2... 718} then wrapping back around to 0, for the ideal 360(Z_719) you get {0, 360, 360*2 % 719 = 1, ...} which is the basis of my joke :)
- ant6n 3y ago
  It’s kind of how angles work, tho.
- nashashmi 3y ago
  correction: it's not 0. It's null. Null to 360 to One. I think Zero comes after One.
- jkestner 3y ago
  Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. I guess that would make more sense if they were rebranding the 360. To be pedantic, there's no need for "very" in front of "unique", as my spouse is happy to pounce on despite my protests that English is a living language.
  - avmich 3y ago
    > Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. From days in the year to years, but since Microsoft isn't very good with calendar, they stuck in pre-Julian epoch and have incorrect values. Wonder if I should explicitly put an emoji here?
  - accoil 3y ago
    Dropping the "very" would lose some of the sarcasm though.
- failuser 3y ago
  And after one there is “series”. The “X Box Series X” name is so tacky it’s kind of genius.
- umeshunni 3y ago
  0 to 360 to 1 to S to X
amelius 3y ago
X-server
Joker_vD 3y ago
Well, of course he does: his first start-up he managed sold (well, not exactly sold) to Confinity was called X.com [0]. And yes, it had image problems because people thought it was a porn site judging by its name. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
- MBCook 3y ago
  Yep, he was forced out of PayPal for trying to make them rename themselves X.com after the acquisition almost 25 years ago. So here he is again, pushing the name X. My understanding is he’s done it before. And he wants Twitter to be a huge financial payments player. Claims half the global market will want to use it. Seems to me he can’t stop fighting past battles to try to prove he was right, when he clearly wasn’t, to assuage his ego. I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I learned it from someone else years ago, it just happens to fit perfectly again.
  - Joker_vD 3y ago
    Well, Max Levchin (the actual creator of PayPal) also had some problem with the guy's, uh, technical (mis)contributions as well, as he recalls in one of his interviews (excerpt from "Founders at Work", Livingston is the interviewer): Levchin: [...] For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. By summer 2000, it seemed like the Windows thing was going to happen because Peter was gone. He took a sabbatical to make sure there were no clashes between the CEOs. So, this other guy was pushing me toward accepting that Windows was going to be the platform. I said, "Well, if this is really going to happen, I'm not going to be able to provide much value, because I don't really know anything about Windows. I went to a school that was all Unix all the time, and I spent all my life coding for Unix." I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, "We built all these cool Unix projects, but it's kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else." So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. "Do you really want to do that?" It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going. Part of having a CEO is that you can respectfully disagree, but you can resign if you don't like it that much. But then eventually I became interested in the economics of PayPal and trying to see what's going on in the back end, because I was getting distracted from code and technology. I realized that we were losing a lot more money in fraud than I thought we were. It was still early 2001. If you looked at the actual loss rates, they were fairly low. You could see that we were losing money, but, given the growth of the system and the growth of the fraud, fraud was not that big of a problem. It was less than 1 percent — it was really low. But then, if you looked at the rate of growth of fraud, you could see that, if you don't stop it, it would become 5 percent, 10 percent of the system, which would have been prohibitive. So I started freaking out over it, and this intern and I wrote all sorts of packages — very statistical stuff — to analyze "How did it happen; how do we lose money?" By the end of the summer, we thought, "The world is going to end any minute now." It was obvious that we were really losing tons of money. By mid-summer, it was already on a $10 million range per month and just very scary. Livingston: Did the rest of the company know you were right? Levchin: Through the summer, I think various people were slowly coming to understand that this thing was really serious. It was pretty obvious at a certain point. I didn't have to really convince anyone. In the beginning some people said, "Yes, it's a lot of money, but we're really growing, too. As an absolute amount, $5 million is a lot of losses, but, if you are processing $300 million, whatever." There was actually a bit of an altercation at the very top management level, which caused the CEO to leave. Peter came back as the CEO. The first decision that he and I took was that my new job — in addition to technology — was going to be this fraud thing, because I already spent so much time looking at it. This guy Bob, the intern, and I — I convinced him to drop out of Stanford for a year and work with me more on it — for the next year, we just worked nonstop on trying to understand and fix these problems. Livingston: So the CEO left and Peter came back? Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, "You gotta go, man." My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major — you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud. Notice how he doesn't even refers to him by the name.
b3n 3y ago
This is a Google company, it has nothing to do with Musk.
marricks 3y ago
I’m no Xbox fan but I always felt the appeal was it was almost a palindrome and it’s a box to play games on. X has a cool sound and mystery so I think it works when paired with someone that fits. X-men is one for me at least. Brand-less unpaired “X” is the epitome of bland. I have no doubt Twitter will be around in the next ten years. But just like AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace no one will really care except a fragment of their original demographic. Which I’m going to assume with Musk at the helm will be aging genx'ers. Which is kinda fitting.
miohtama 3y ago
You forgot Xhamster

Yes, X as a brand lacks uniqueness. Xbox X factor X-men Xvideos Etc etc Seems to me musk just loves the domain. Domain: $10,000,000 Users: $44,000,000,000

giancarlostoro 3y ago

Was it not called Xbox because of DirectX?

astrange 3y ago

The Xbox brand is very unique because they think numbers go from 0 to 360 to 1.

bravetraveler 3y ago
Tough to overflow when bound to a loop, I guess
opportune 3y ago
They do over the domain 360*Z_719
- astrange 3y ago
  If it's supposed to be degrees, then since 360==0 doesn't that mean the range is [0,360) so 360 degrees is actually an out of range value for an angle? I've always wondered this but never enough to ask it.
  - opportune 3y ago
    Z_719 is the shorthand for integers in [0, 718], with Z_n typically connotating the algebraic group or ring of integers up to n. In this case 360(Z_719) is an ideal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory)) over that domain. While the ordered sequence of Z_719 is just {0, 1, 2... 718} then wrapping back around to 0, for the ideal 360(Z_719) you get {0, 360, 360*2 % 719 = 1, ...} which is the basis of my joke :)
ant6n 3y ago
It’s kind of how angles work, tho.
nashashmi 3y ago
correction: it's not 0. It's null. Null to 360 to One. I think Zero comes after One.
jkestner 3y ago
Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. I guess that would make more sense if they were rebranding the 360. To be pedantic, there's no need for "very" in front of "unique", as my spouse is happy to pounce on despite my protests that English is a living language.
- avmich 3y ago
  > Microsoft just switched the unit from degrees to turns. From days in the year to years, but since Microsoft isn't very good with calendar, they stuck in pre-Julian epoch and have incorrect values. Wonder if I should explicitly put an emoji here?
- accoil 3y ago
  Dropping the "very" would lose some of the sarcasm though.
failuser 3y ago
And after one there is “series”. The “X Box Series X” name is so tacky it’s kind of genius.
umeshunni 3y ago
0 to 360 to 1 to S to X

amelius 3y ago

X-server

Joker_vD 3y ago

Well, of course he does: his first start-up he managed sold (well, not exactly sold) to Confinity was called X.com [0]. And yes, it had image problems because people thought it was a porn site judging by its name. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

MBCook 3y ago
Yep, he was forced out of PayPal for trying to make them rename themselves X.com after the acquisition almost 25 years ago. So here he is again, pushing the name X. My understanding is he’s done it before. And he wants Twitter to be a huge financial payments player. Claims half the global market will want to use it. Seems to me he can’t stop fighting past battles to try to prove he was right, when he clearly wasn’t, to assuage his ego. I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I learned it from someone else years ago, it just happens to fit perfectly again.
- Joker_vD 3y ago
  Well, Max Levchin (the actual creator of PayPal) also had some problem with the guy's, uh, technical (mis)contributions as well, as he recalls in one of his interviews (excerpt from "Founders at Work", Livingston is the interviewer): Levchin: [...] For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix. By summer 2000, it seemed like the Windows thing was going to happen because Peter was gone. He took a sabbatical to make sure there were no clashes between the CEOs. So, this other guy was pushing me toward accepting that Windows was going to be the platform. I said, "Well, if this is really going to happen, I'm not going to be able to provide much value, because I don't really know anything about Windows. I went to a school that was all Unix all the time, and I spent all my life coding for Unix." I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, "We built all these cool Unix projects, but it's kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else." So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. "Do you really want to do that?" It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going. Part of having a CEO is that you can respectfully disagree, but you can resign if you don't like it that much. But then eventually I became interested in the economics of PayPal and trying to see what's going on in the back end, because I was getting distracted from code and technology. I realized that we were losing a lot more money in fraud than I thought we were. It was still early 2001. If you looked at the actual loss rates, they were fairly low. You could see that we were losing money, but, given the growth of the system and the growth of the fraud, fraud was not that big of a problem. It was less than 1 percent — it was really low. But then, if you looked at the rate of growth of fraud, you could see that, if you don't stop it, it would become 5 percent, 10 percent of the system, which would have been prohibitive. So I started freaking out over it, and this intern and I wrote all sorts of packages — very statistical stuff — to analyze "How did it happen; how do we lose money?" By the end of the summer, we thought, "The world is going to end any minute now." It was obvious that we were really losing tons of money. By mid-summer, it was already on a $10 million range per month and just very scary. Livingston: Did the rest of the company know you were right? Levchin: Through the summer, I think various people were slowly coming to understand that this thing was really serious. It was pretty obvious at a certain point. I didn't have to really convince anyone. In the beginning some people said, "Yes, it's a lot of money, but we're really growing, too. As an absolute amount, $5 million is a lot of losses, but, if you are processing $300 million, whatever." There was actually a bit of an altercation at the very top management level, which caused the CEO to leave. Peter came back as the CEO. The first decision that he and I took was that my new job — in addition to technology — was going to be this fraud thing, because I already spent so much time looking at it. This guy Bob, the intern, and I — I convinced him to drop out of Stanford for a year and work with me more on it — for the next year, we just worked nonstop on trying to understand and fix these problems. Livingston: So the CEO left and Peter came back? Levchin: The three of us are pretty good friends now. At the time, already I had hated the guy's guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, "You gotta go, man." My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major — you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud. Notice how he doesn't even refers to him by the name.

b3n 3y ago

This is a Google company, it has nothing to do with Musk.

marricks 3y ago

I’m no Xbox fan but I always felt the appeal was it was almost a palindrome and it’s a box to play games on. X has a cool sound and mystery so I think it works when paired with someone that fits. X-men is one for me at least. Brand-less unpaired “X” is the epitome of bland. I have no doubt Twitter will be around in the next ten years. But just like AOL, Yahoo, and MySpace no one will really care except a fragment of their original demographic. Which I’m going to assume with Musk at the helm will be aging genx'ers. Which is kinda fitting.

miohtama 3y ago

You forgot Xhamster