Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has tested out an old Twitter feature in front of his nearly 140 million followers.
Musk began a Twitter livestream from what appears to be Twitter HQ in San Francisco, and the Tesla CEO can be seen laughing at the quality of the livestream, the fact that people are able to see him, and that "hearts" kept appearing on the screen, presumably people liking the livestream. Musk can also be heard explaining to the viewers that they are simply testing out Twitter's livestreaming feature and identifying areas of improvement, such as the resolution.
Musk goes on to say that despite the resolution, the feature "works," which is quickly followed up by a Twitter staff member saying the livestream is using code from Periscope. Notably, Twitter acquired Periscope in 2015, and much of the popular apps' video/streaming code was integrated into Twitter. According to Musk's fellow Twitter engineers, this code has never been updated, and given the quality of the livestream, that seems to be true.
"It's pretty low res, we definitely need to improve resolution," said Musk. "That's exactly right. That's why we wanted to take it out because we haven't fixed it in like 8 years," said a Twitter employee.
As you can probably imagine, Musk's botched livestream, with him mostly laughing at the camera, quickly gained traction, and thousands of his followers joined. Musk can be seen reading the livestream chat and laughing at people calling him "8-Bit Elon". Musk is then informed that 27,000 people are watching him live, to which the Twitter CEO smiles at the camera and says, "hello, everyone!", followed by laughter.
The 27,000 viewers quickly jumped to 120,000 people, then to 150,000, and then the livestream crashed. Notably, the aforementioned viewers weren't concurrent viewers, or viewers watching Musk in real-time, these were total views. At the livestream's peak of concurrent viewers, there were around 40,000 people watching, which was promptly followed by it crashing.
Musk explains to the viewers before the livestream is abruptly ended that he is just testing out Twitter's live video feature so "we can modify it accordingly". Judging by this, we can expect Twitter to be rolling out new updates to Twitter's livestream capabilities. Whether or not those updates will make the feature more popular remains to be seen.
In other news, a modder has combined ChatGPT with Skyrim NPCs, which enables iconic characters such as Ulfberth War-Bear, the shop owner of Warmaiden's in Whiterun, to creatively speak to players, identify weapons, and much more. While the creative responses from NPCs definitely have room for improvement, the demonstration of the combined technology has given a glimpse into the future of what RPG games, such as Skyrim, The Witcher, or Grand Theft Auto, will become.