My point is that links to communications services that people use a lot should be blocked on Twitter, and result in account suspensions, and users should only be allowed to share info on the Twitter platform itself, and any straying from this should result in severe repercussions, just like showing any other data Elon doesn't like, such as the ElonJet account, and now Mastodon links.
Ideally, this will cause nearly everyone to flee Twitter altogether.
Someone "bought" Freenode, kicked out the existing staff, who formed Libera chat as a result. The new owner of Freenode then speedran self-destruction of the site, first banning every channel that mentioned libera in its topic, and then wiping all of chanserv and nickserv and starting from scratch.
This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
Social-media sites are organically self-organizing things. If you piss people off too much, or the site otherwise implodes (tumblr), people will reorganize without you somewhere else.
The ironic thing is the place where all the tumblr people reorganized was twitter. Twitter melting down will be like 9/11 a third time for the horny community, lol. Reddit looking pretty temperamental too (also hugely botted/inorganic).
Anyway, in the debate over Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms, and in Twitter's pre-Musk censorship of some kinds of hate speech/violent rhetoric/vaccine denialism/misinformation/etc, there was always a "but what if you get a turbo badmin who starts blocking stuff that everybody likes, what do you think about censorship then!?!?" argument, and this is the reason that's always been a stupid argument. Just like tumblr, we are now watching what happens when a turbo badmin takes power and starts banning all the weapons he doesn't like and kicking anyone who kills him. And social media is largely routing around him and reforming elsewhere.
Systems like Mastodon and Discord work well, for entirely different reasons than broadcast-style media like Twitter. Twitter is an audience of billions, you don't have any interpersonal connection with most people, and there have to be some rules about what the platform gets used for. Discord is 50 people you know from some aspect of your life, and if people violate the social norms of the group, they get ostracized or exiled. I have some groups that are casually professional, and some that are edgy, some that are groups of friends I've known a long time, and some that are just interest-specific. Some places have the horny channel and that's fine. Other places that'd get you the spray emoji at best.
If a server mod starts to be a real dick, such that it's sustainable to start a new community... people will start a new community. The "what if we get a power-tripping owner/moderator who nobody likes who starts censoring something you like!?" scenario literally cannot occur in social media (short of net-wide censorship ala china) because it just gets routed around just like tumblr or twitter or even facebook (nobody under 50 is on there anymore) etc. Social media ultimately derives its value from its users, and if the social compact drifts too far from the community values (whatever that community is), then users will leave and rebuild without you. It's not a zero threshold, but there is a point where they'll do it.
Mastodon is, ultimately, just self-hosted discord communities, with the facebook/twitter-style Personal Feed facade built on top. And O(1) moderation works really well at those scales. Still some performance/network benefits to be gained from "centralized" instances, but as long as you can have multiple accounts there's no reason you can't have multiple "identities" for different aspects of your life. The highbrow hacker pods and the horny furry/anime pods don't have to interact.
But in terms of censorship: nazis get kicked, that's good, nobody should have to host nazis on their personal instance that they pay money for. If they can't find any reputable server to take them, and they start their own pod... other pods can just block them. That's fine too, you're not guaranteed an audience. Nobody has to provide you with services, including peering/interchange. So don't get it twisted, this is already a problem that's been addressed (for spam if nothing else). Just because you have a decentralized platform - doesn't mean everyone is going to give you a platform.
The question with "edge content"/"probing-the-exact-boundaries-of-platform-bans" shit like nazi shit and kiwifarms has always been "I know it when I see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy". But everyone ...
Had a whole one planned out and prototyped for using the renewed twitter api as the in-app community so that I could avoid the insurmountable challenge of moderating UGC as a small business ʕ⁎̯͡⁎ʔ
I’m moving to a decentralized and self-published model for community UGC but discovery suffers dramatically
I want to quit but there's nothing that truly replace it. I might try Mastaodon but in the meantime, I will do my job by blocking every ads I see on the app.
I was a huge Mastodon skeptic, but I made the switch a few weeks ago and it's been pretty nice, honestly. The community feels so much less toxic, and it's growing. I only hope with growth it doesn't start to replicate the rotten aspects of Twitter.
I don't really grasp the whole instance thing. Which Mastodon instance are we meant to move for a generic experience? I typically used Twitter to @Companies.
From what I can tell your instance choice only really matters when looking at the "local" timeline. Besides that its kind of like email, you can send and receive email from anyone that uses email if they know your address. I use the Gmail instance but I can still get and send email to Hotmail users.
If you're in doubt, try mastodon.social or masto.ai. Those are pretty "generic".
Your choice does have some consequences. Each Mastodon instance has its own tailored block list, which determines which other instances are blocked in your feed. Instances also have their own codes of conduct. You can view an instance's block list and CoC by clicking the "About" link on the bottom left of the instance home page. (See https://mastodon.social/about for example.)
sure, this is pretty standard. how many apps has google shutdown? if google shuts down gmail tomorrow, you'll lose your email. theres an entire site memorializing hundreds of apps google has killed, some of them *very* popular[0]
however, the creators of mastodon have made it super easy to download backups of your follows, your blocklists, etc... and you can import them on any server. so even if that were to happen, you can easily setup another account and be running again.
unlike any of the closed social sites, with mastodon, if one server were to close, the network will be fine.
It is the worst design ever, you can pick an instance and create an account there if you could trust the owner and your timeline isn’t too busy, but YMMV. UX is somewhat close to Twitter 2015, which is an upside.
I’d suggest looking at the server list on https://joinmastodon.org, select a few servers of interest, and then peruse what shows up as local to that server to find a good fit.
Also, look for indicators of active moderation and participation in the Mastodon Server Covenant if you want to avoid toxicity.
Some popular instances have been highlighted here.
Finally, dont be afraid to use a throwaway email and hide behind vpn to create a temporary account on a server or two, just to check it out.
Be kind to the server owners by deleting your temporary accounts, though.
From what I can tell that is like asking which email host to sign up for but if every single email host had the same feature set. Some servers seem faster than others but I just picked a popular one from the mastodon homepage
No. The domain part is the instance. When you migrate, your old account is set to point to the new one, and a notification is automatically sent to your followers so they can automatically follow you on the new instance.
That's too bad, really. If your instance admin blocks you because of some spat, the functioning of the migration mechanism seems to be depending on his goodwill, right?
With email, no old mail provider can stop me from being reachable under my mail address in the future.
That's the problem with federation. It's the same thing as choosing Gmail for your email address. You pick a server and you're bound to whatever they choose to do. You then have to spend an inordinate amount of time to find one that aligns with your ideals. Or just stay on Twitter.
i would use one of the large such as mastodon.social and move on with your life. once you get a hands on understanding, you’ll probably still want to stay on a larger instance, but if you want to move to a niche, you can.
the way i did it was:
1) signed up on a large instance. found a few hundred of the people i followed on twitter.
2) found that a large percentage of them were on a specific instance (infosec.exchange)
3) i didn’t have to move to that instance, at all. i could interact with them all day everyday just the same as any other other social site. i did however ultimately end up moving there because i like the admin.
compared to every other social network on the planet, moving to a different server is easy. i didn’t lose any followers (people who follow you just automatically follow the new account), and importing the entire list of who i followed was super simple.
most people would never ever notice the difference between servers, but if you were to for some reason need a more niche environment, there are plenty of guides out there which will hold your hand and walk you through migrating to a different server.
When you read "instance", think "email provider". Does it really matter if you use gmail or yahoo or protonmail or anything else? In some ways yes, but in many ways no. You can read emails from any other email provider. And if you don't like one, you can move to another.
> Which Mastodon instance are we meant to move for a generic experience? I typically used Twitter to @Companies.
That's the problem. If you're already asking which instance to join then Mastodon is not the "replacement" you are looking for; even when discovery and moderation is worse than Twitter.
If the main instance (mastodon.social) was accepting sign-ups, then that is the obvious go to. Clearly that is not the case and only I see tech people here screaming about Twitter's imminent collapse, etc, moving to whatever instance that is accepting sign ups with the majority of the 200M+ users still sitting on Twitter as they didn't bother to move to something worse.
Federated echo-chambers isn't the answer for better content moderation as clearly seen by the issue with journa.host [0]. Unfortunately, centralization is the realistic approach to this which businesses and companies and hundreds of millions of (non-tech) users will continue to stick with and the platform for this is Twitter.
there are quite a few tools to help find people you follow on twitter.
for example, right now, when i run one called fedifinder[0], it finds 473 of the people i follow on twitter. when i import that list into mastodon, im now following all of their mastodon accounts.
The difference in user experience reflects the difference in incentives. The lack of an obsequious welcome is as much a feature as the uncurated timeline. Mastodon is infrastructure, a tool, not a skinner box duct taped to a monstrous data combine harvester, like every other site with a profit motive has become.
I think it's time to step away from social media for a while. I'll stick with Twitter as long as it delivers what I perceive as valuable insight, but in general there are better things to do, especially heading into a rough economy. Things are going to get weird anyway with these generative models capable of generating passable tweets and articles.
I agree. I'm a libertarian and was glad to see Elon exposing the subjective and left leaning prior Twitter censorship policies.
But... I also loathe Elon's sociopathic nature, and was waiting for the other shoe to drop with Twitter. It just did. He promised transparency but all these account suspensions are anything but. My idealist libertarian principles are offended, even if I don't really like the impacted journalists.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Thomas Paine
I'm not surprised. Elon might have enabled a couple cool technology companies to live and he's good at shitposting (in a good way), but he couldn't be farther away from libertarian ideals IMO. What's happening on Twitter right now is pretty much what I expected.
Is there any evidence that this is somehow a bigger/more common problem on Twitter vs on any other major platform? Reddit, Facebook, online forums, Tumblr, etc all seem equally likely to have these same problems. Seems like Snapchat was also named in a lot of these articles.
What's the deal with picking on Twitter specifically? Were they especially negligent compare to these other platforms?
Of the three articles you posted, 2 are about the same single incident, and the other is about India punishing Twitter by making CP accusations after Twitter posted a map of India that had disputed territories "wrong". Doesn't seem to be much to it.
Well it perfectly makes sense to fire the team that was unable to get rid of the CP issue which Twitter had years to do it when the executives made this less of a priority. [0]
Makes a pretty damn good car for a con man, though.
This kind of argument seems silly to me. The world is complicated. He can be both a fantastic manager able to push out successful products in markets that don't even exist and a narcissistic thin-skinned asshole. We can celebrate SpaceX and Tesla while we condemn his censorship on Twitter.
In which ways does he make a good car? Consumer Reports ranked Tesla 27th out of 28th for most reliable car.[^0] JD Power's "Initial Quality" ranking ranked Tesla LAST[^1] meaning a new Tesla car had the most problems compared to a new car of all other brands tested. They've also consistently lied and misled the public about how safe their cars are.[^2][^3] A Climate Central study also found that out of all the EVs, Tesla's are the least friendly for the environment[^4]
Yeah. My Y goes farther, (much) faster, fits more stuff, seats more people, charges faster, etc... than all the competing cars. You can find one item on one model somewhere where it falls short (c.f. Hyundai's 800V charging speeds are about 20% better and the Mach-E can keep up on range numbers, but both cars are otherwise inferior).
But really it's just the whole experience where it wins.
It's a robot that drives me around town on its own, every day! Trivial and actually-working phone-as-key implementation that lets me walk up, drive, and walk away without ever doing anything analogous to "un/locking" or "starting" the car. I can turn the climate control on over the internet and watch the exterior cameras. My kids can make the turn signals emit fart noises!
The Elon hate has always been bad, and the complete dumpster fire at Twitter has made it even worse. But... they're the best cars in the world. They really are.
It is indeed a very silly argument, even one going as far as to stopping their friends from buying a Tesla due to his handling of Twitter. [0] By that logic, everyone should stop buying a VW due to its founder being Hitler. It makes no sense.
As you said, one can give him credit for the push for electric vehicles with Tesla, but you can also critique him on the incompleteness of FSD which Musk continued to over-promise dates of robo-taxis, advertising FSD to Level 5 SAE safety when it is admittedly Level 2 [1]. Other than that, Tesla vehicles are just fine.
I have not seen this chaos with SpaceX which is another safety critical company. Perhaps we are already seeing where the line is being drawn on the unbiased enforcement of the Terms of Service which is what I am seeing here on Twitter rather than before, it was slanted and applied to a select group.
This time, it is clear that it applies and is enforced on everyone, journalist or not, celebrities and bots and as for the over coverage of the matter is of course fuelling the outrage machine that the news needs for more eyeballs. Just like how Twitter didn't immediately collapse, it isn't going anywhere either.
> This time, it is clear that it applies and is enforced on everyone, journalist or not
This is a brand new rule, announced after the fact, and applied so far only to exactly one circumstance that happens to be personally related to the CEO. Arguing that this is a fair application of a well-considered policy is just ridiculous, sorry. For that matter, if Musk's wasn't actually in the air at the time of the bannings, it's not even clear that the stated policy was even applied correctly! All the journalists did was post links that allows you to find ElonsJet on Facebook, AFAICT. That's not "real time" info, is it?
Let me know when someone else gets banned for "doxxing" that involves something as simple as this. You know it's not going to happen, right? Posting a link to Kiwifarms should result in the same treatment, right?
There was a time when he could have been as close as our mundane real world would ever have gotten to Tony Stark. It has taken a concerted effort on his part to degrade his public image to the extent he has. At any time he could have just, you know, stopped. He's been huffing way too many of his own farts.
What I hope people understand is that, while he wasn’t always outwardly like this, his core personality really wa always this deranged narcissist. He’s a tech version of Trump. He hasn’t really changed.
Clicking through to Mastodon links is a breath of fresh air. Posters can actually write a few substantive sentences straightforwardly, rather than having to break their thoughts up into sentence fragments punctuated by nn/?? and unnecessary username repetitions and reply frames.
Also the fact that it just loads quickly. There's some delay and it's not as quick as plain web pages could be, but it's lightning fast compared to Twitter.com with its "infinite scrolling" (aka never finished loading).
At least on mastodon.social, the character limit is 500 which isn't that much more than 280. (Oddly the limit on alt text is more generous at 1000.) People still break up their posts into multiple messages.
There are likely other instances with higher limits on post length, but I don't know how to search for them.
(Also, performance varies a lot, so an average would be kind of meaningless if even knew what it was.)
> Oddly the limit on alt text is more generous at 1000.
Probably because one of the use cases for this is transcribing images of text. Limiting it too much would mean people using screen readers couldn't get the full context.
The logical conclusion of this argument is to disable all links on Twitter, as any domain that resolves to a server running an HTTP server could serve up malware, and that is not the world we want to go to (I say even having left Twitter long before the Elon buyout)
This reminds me when I started some internet companies in the early days of the internet and the newspaper refused to run ads in their classifieds for internet companies, since they said they were a competitor. :)
What's particularly strange is they seem (from the thread) to only be banning "mastodon.social" links, which are by far the least likely to be suspicious.
Not that I believe the excuse anyways; it's just remarkably flabby.
There is a process there which goes by each posted links (and shortens them in tweets) and checks if there anything there.
so technically you can shutdown the instance, post a link (if it wasn't previously "banned"), wait a couple of hours and bring the instance up. But it would be probably checked some time later.
But come on, just make a simple page with 304 redirect on any platform.
"unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck" doesn't seem accurate, nor fit for a comment on HN, no matter how much you may dislike him or think his actions are deplorable.
Seems 100% accurate and fit for the situation to me.
You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged.
You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic.
You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant.
Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck.
You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit.
"unhinged": Elon Musk's actions for the past few months have been intensely erratic. He clearly meets the definition of "unhinged".
"pathetic": can either be interpreted as "pitiable" or "inadequate/disappointing". Watching his descent into madness is certainly capable of eliciting pity. As for the second definition, everyone who is now being disabused of their formerly high opinion of him could call him inadequate or disappointing.
"ignorant": this is the easiest one, Elon Musk has repeatedly (some might say incessantly) expressed beliefs that belie a complete lack of understanding of the topics at hand (made all the more frustrating by his extreme arrogance and overconfidence). Whether he is doing it deliberately for attention or whether he is truly as gormless as he appears to be, this description is accurate.
"fuck": sadly, this is one of the most flexible words in the English language, so it will be difficult to ascertain its descriptive veracity.
You can't post like this here, regardless of who you're attacking. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not feel that you owe $UnhingedPatheticIgnorantFuck better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Since this isn't just a matter of one topic—that is, since you've been breaking the rules badly in other contexts as well (e.g. attacking other users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33938700), I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Also, using multiple accounts to upvote yourself is a bannable abuse in its own right, so please don't do that*.
Since someone is now going to respond with "you're just protecting $BillionaireCeo" I suppose I need to add: no, there is plenty of criticism getting posted, as anyone who looks at any thread on the topic can see. This is about protecting HN. The rules don't stop applying just because a bunch of people are mad. Actually, these are the situations in which they matter most.
* Edit: actually, the multiple-account manipulation you've been doing is egregious, so I've banned a bunch of your accounts. Please don't do that again. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Let's set aside the reason he banned the links, there's no need to debate that. Elon Musk bought twitter because of his concerns about freedom of speech/censorship right?
This is a Tweet from him regarding freedom of speech in April of this year
"By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect..."
Each incident in which he bans an account or censors links, like this, is evidence that his concerns about freedom of speech might be disingenuous.
But you don’t know what happened in this instance. Wait for a while to see if the van stands and/or Twitter makes a statement regarding this. As of now, it just seems that everybody on HN are taking part in a collective confirmation bias session.
One of the saddest parts of this affair is that he has kicked a hornet's nest. Twitter is one of the homes of the OSINT movement and these moves, including the lawsuit against Sweeney, have pissed off enough people in the OSINT movement that they stopped tracking Russian war crimes and the FSB to find where the stalker video was taken.
It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate.
The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads.
I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find.
It took them just a few hours.
I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs.
we don't know anything about the "stalker" other than what Musk said. Musk has been caught lying about his children in the past [1] to justify his Twitter policy swings. I'd like to think he wouldn't stoop so low as to use his kid like that, but the truth is we don't know.
Now journalists are being banned for copying word-for-word the police response stating that "no police report was filed" over the stalker incident.
That would be a loss for twitter IMO. I know it's being remade into ground zero for culture war discourse, but there's nowhere else online like Twitter when it comes to breaking news and developing situations. Journalists and reporters sharing information as it's verified real time.
When something was going down, you went to twitter.
Well this should be a good lesson in why not to trust something that supposedly is in the public interest to a private company that can easily be bought up by some billionaire with emotional problems.
Twitter was lost the day Musk carried that sink into the building. I agree that it was an important cultural institution, but I don't think there's anything that can be done to save it. The faster we let it fall, the faster we can develop alternatives.
Only the tiny minority of techies screaming about the 'fediverse' care. There is little interest with the majority of non-techies 200M+ that care to use it daily, let alone sign up; hence why they still use Twitter.
Federated social networks such as Mastodon are a solution in search of a problem, and it always has been like that for years.
I hear a lot of people talking about the Fediverse of many different technical backgrounds. It's true it would take a huge event to get non-technical people interested in the Fediverse - but that's exactly what I'm seeing.
They're not a solution in search of a problem. They're a solution a small, dedicated group of people have cared deeply about, but most people have ignored. But people have been unsatisfied with the centralized aspects of social media for a long time. They're not stupid; they see the way the algorithms are designed for engagement, and the toxicity that causes. They see how fragile it is that someone like Musk can just swoop in and sabotage the platform.
Network effects have made it difficult to adopt a decentralized solution. Well - lots of communities are looking for a home they won't have to leave for the same reason they did before. That's creating network effects in the opposite direction.
If you'd said this to me a few weeks ago I'd have been inclined to believe it. But things are in flux. Maybe the Fediverse won't take off, but it has a very really shot right now.
I simply don't get the problem with the "Fediverse". Mastodon works very much like Twitter and you can follow people on your server or another one with ease. You don't need to know anything about anything to do this.
I will tell you honestly, that I believe you are the one letting your smugness cloud your view of reality, not the other commenter (indeed, I read their tone as matter of fact, not smug). No one is obligated to share their mother's personal information in order to prove a point to you. When you say you're presuming good faith and then include a string of insults in the same breathe, it's pretty unconvincing. Were you not entrenched in your position and holding other people's views in contempt, I think these observations would have been obvious to you before you hit "submit".
I hope you'll consider taking a step back and reflecting on whether this is how you want to interact with people and what it is that brought you here.
I'm not sure what troubles our flagged dead commenter more, that there are female math professors in the world, or that they have children that might comment on HN.
FWiW:
To the assertion that there exists at least one Emeritus Professor on mathstodon.xyz -
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao
To the request that "that guy" provide social media accounts of his mother, her friends, their nom de guerres, discussions, etc .. I'm altogether unsure of whom "that guy" might be.
Cheers for your response, I'd have gotten back sooner but <shrug> Timezones :-)
I am on Mastodon, and none of the people who follow me there or who I am following are techies - oh, except Cory Doctorow. All are refugees from Twitter.
Mastodon solves my problem, "How do I keep track of my friends without Twitter or Facebook" very well, and each day new friends of mine appear there.
I'm gonna be honest, you're coming off a bit delusional. No meaningful amount of people care about the issues you do to abandon twitter for an already dead network like mastodon. The idea of federation doesn't appeal to normies, it only confuses them.
This is a reflection on your perception, what you imagine to be possible, and how much respect you afford "normies", more than it is a reflection on me.
Well I was calling you delusional if you think your average person cares about Elon's shenanigans enough to jump ship to a platform no one uses. So it was solely a comment on you.
If you're perceiving it as in insult rather than taking a second to consider the possibility you may be drastically overstating the importance of certain things to the average person then, it's just you lacking self-awareness here friend.
Please explain how the car in question was found in the first place, at an airport the size of a small city. Flight-tracking data will have been of absolutely zero help in doing that, of course.
> Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.
The counter to that is if you spread and repeat your lie far more than the debunkers are wiling or able to spread the truth, then your lie will be the thing generally believed.
"A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
Oh man when I saw that and thought it was in my home town (South Pasadena), I didn't realize it was right at my gas station! It's a block or so down from my favorite Trader Joes too.
His allegation makes little sense based on my knowledge of the area. Not only is that location not near an airport but getting to one would take a hell of a long time. Painfully slow arterial roads in every which way except the 110 which goes straight through Downtown LA, usually with very heavy traffic. If you follow Orange Grove north, it enters one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in East LA with some incredible chateau sized houses, so if he wanted to find a rando to frame it makes sense he'd do it from there (assuming he owns property there).
Edit: according to [1] the child in question might have been one he had with his ex Grimes and according to [2] she bought a house in the area. Kinda checks out? Except the whole bit about someone stalking them all the way there from LAX [3]! If you were driving from LAX to Pasadena though, this is exactly the place you’d exit the freeway to gas up before heading up Orange Grove to the fancy neighborhoods
Do you have the tweet where Elon says that they were stalked all the way from LAX? The way I read it was Elon was making a tenuous connection all along. He never said his kid was near an airport.
An important distinction, I think, is that Sweeney (@elonjet) appears to use a different tracker than the publicly available one. PIA is the freely available and public flight tracker, but can be put into private mode which Musk does. Sweeney then (likely) reverts to using non-public ICAO addresses which he identifies by manually coordinating Musk's known plane location/history.
I'm not an expert here, just sharing what I've seen. Please offer corrections.
On his jet registration [1] it lists the code as A835AF and I believe this is the flight to LA in question [2]. This means that he was not using the spoofed ICAO code from PIA, broadcasting the publicly known one instead.
It's the same situation with privacy features in browsers. All it does is give trackers another data point to cross reference with the things you can't or don't think to scrub.
That's false. Musk's jet is not enrolled in PIA, which is just a programme that obfuscates the ADS-B identifier from the FAA's registry. Spotters can still find the aircraft.
However as I said it's not true in this case, the FAA registry entry for the aircraft has the accurate ADS-B hex code identifier, and the aircraft is trackable openly on sites like ADSB Exchange and even using your own ~$20 hardware radio receiver.
Sweeney is doing nothing out of the ordinary for this particular aircraft other than linking the ADSB Exchange API to a Twitter account.
As an aside, there's also nothing illegal nor morally wrong about spotters deobfuscating a jet that's in the PIA programme either. That's just a fig leaf measure, it's not actually effective.
Might’ve been one of his other aircraft, or more likely he allowed it to lapse. PIA is something you have to keep updating/requesting to remain part of.
the claim that he’s using PIA has been disproven dozens of times in the endless thread about the drama - how have you not seen any, not oookes into it yourself and still so confidently made an assertion?
Oh hackers of Hacker News, I call on you at this hour to band together, in the spirit of peace, understanding, and coffee, to join our rag tag forces so that we may materialize our own unbreakable web-of-trust network with nothing more than duct tape, GPG, LISP, and first principles.
This is our calling, and this is our time. Declare your intent with a pubkey below and we shall right this world one set of parentheses at a time:
> @danluu the regex is only matching on 'mastondon.social' and other blacklisted popular servers. I can post my link to this smallish mastodon instance, without mastodon in the name
1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share.
2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc.
My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.
So apparently the edit ban only affects mastodon.social, but links to any mastodon instance even those that don't have it in the name, are flagged as unsafe and require a clickthrough. It's very uneven.
That's fair. Mastodon seemed like a pretty mature platform, so I guess I was just surprised. Considering that 1) the majority of the modern web doesn't work properly without JS, and 2) Mastodon is designed with third-party clients in mind, it's not a big issue I admit.
47m
Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time?
Now 43%
Tomorrow 4.5%
7 days from now 14.4%
Longer 38.1%
535,233 votes
Final results
Elon Musk. @elonmusk
Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll.
8:33 PM · Dec 15, 2022
:o)
This is not a serious thing of course, but many a true word is said in jest. Given his known history, from flirting with joining the board of Twitter one day to deciding on a hostile takeover the next, and so on back into the past...would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
Not only did he restart the poll when he saw “Now” winning, the new poll still has “Now” winning by a hefty margin.
He posted these after a very brief appearance on a Space hosted by journalists. I can’t blame him to leaving —- talking to the press right now is a lose/lose for him. But what was he thinking, joining in the first place?
And the new poll has a longer time period, so his bots can come in and rescue him (or he can have more time for a Twitter employee to modify the count).
As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.
Hilariously the gap is widening, perhaps because people love a dogpile.
But on another level, I really feel like there is nobody that is willing to tell him to get off the internet for a few days. Publicly torturing yourself this way is not healthy.
I am not famous, but I have been a 'main character' in a negative national news story before, attracting ~10,000 unfriendly comments just on one website. On one level you're inoculated from them as you realize the extent of the gap between the report and reality, so there isn't as much pressure to take them personally. But on another you're turning your own stress response up by reading all that negativity (or 'posting through it' if you were to start responding to people), like how exercising and developing toughness can go too far and end up with joint damage or torn muscles. Yet this is very much the hard-driving persona and work ethos that Musk publicly seeks to cultivate.
And it's been that way all week, what with him getting booed loudly on Monday. A friend who worked the show in a technical capacity described it as being painfully awkward, as Musk stood there like a prop and essentially slow-roasted for 5 minutes. This is a thing professional comedians are inured to whereas Musk was neither prepared nor equipped for it. In a context where his wealth didn't generate the usual aura of popularity, he got a painful lesson in others' perceptions of him. That's not the sort thing you can just buy a fix for.
Is it possible that we are all suffering from a form of psychological illness due to social networks, with symptoms ranging from mild to meltdown?
> a thing professional comedians are inured to
This. I think generally cultural guard rails (of various local flavor) developed over centuries prior to mass communication that addressed the needs of the super ego (our 'my place in the world' bit of self) and now our super egos are confronted by (sometimes an imaginal) 'society & public stage' that far exceeds the scope of what generation after generation of humans have confronted.
I offer as evidence the (effectiveness of) immaturity of discourse on social media. This is symptomatic of 'regression'. A sort of collective Lord of the Flies moment for humanity.
Recall how a major theme of The Great Gatsby is that even if you can't just buy a fix for a particular thing, it's always possible to retreat into one's wealth in general.
(HN'ers will recognise Jay Gatz' earnest self-improvement program in the appendix to that book in many front-page posts here. The Americans of 2025 will share a lot, culturewise, with those of 1925.)
> would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
It's actually somewhat kind of him to rewrite the terms - no, I'm not being sarcastic. He could simply ban anyone he wanted to without any consistency, it's his company after all. Creating rules at least allows some kind of consistency, for what little it might be worth.
If a given rule can be unilaterally rewritten at the instantaneous whim of the person in charge of enforcing the rule, then that rule does not exist to guide others or provide consistency, it merely exists to justify authoritarian caprice.
Basically, yes. But I suppose if you have to pick between an authoritarian who just goes with instantaneous whims, or one who puts a token effort into making rules even though he breaks them often, the latter seems better, even though both choices suck.
What a brilliant new social network that has nothing to do with Mastodon at all. Full of social discourse about the singer, actress, and director Barbra Streisand entirely unrelated to current events.
I posted a tweet today that mentioned Mastodon and linked to my profile in the tweet and it was "caught" by Twitter as "sensitive content."
They said: "We put a warning message on these Tweets because they might have sensitive content — like nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols."
After the shock wore off, I actually laughed out loud. Then just sat there and stared at the screen. It's completely absurd.
Everybody here seems to be jumping to conclusions immediately, which frankly seems intellectually dishonest.
Take a breath, wait for a while, see if the ban stands (or if it was some technical fluke), see if Twitter/Elon Musk comes with an official statement regarding this matter. Right now, it just seems like all of HN are having a gigantic confirmation bias session together.
Most people writing in this comment section at the time of writing didn't have all the facts. It would have been much better if they held off commenting until today when we know much, much more. That was my only request. Was that unreasonable?
People react to things as they happen, I don't think that's unreasonable either. Some doubt is warranted but by the time you posted your comment it had already been confirmed, so I think it's ok to comment at that point.
Sometimes time gives you more context, but in this case it just confirmed what was already known.
That's great that it was clearified. _Now_ we can actually have a discussion about it rather than reacting based on assumptions and guesses, which was taking place when I wrote my comment. That was all that I asked for.
Did I express an opition on Elon Musik? I was just urging people to wait for the facts before getting all hyped up. Is that too much to ask for? If all the news here would be posted with a one week lag or so, we would all have a much more fruitful discussion than what we have now where people are reacting instinctively with their own guesses of what happened.
374 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadMy point is that links to communications services that people use a lot should be blocked on Twitter, and result in account suspensions, and users should only be allowed to share info on the Twitter platform itself, and any straying from this should result in severe repercussions, just like showing any other data Elon doesn't like, such as the ElonJet account, and now Mastodon links.
Ideally, this will cause nearly everyone to flee Twitter altogether.
This is very reminiscent of the "ban everyone who mentioned libera in its topic" phase of the self-immolation, which prompted a lot of people who had previously been hesitant or only considering whether to move to libera basically having the choice made for them.
I was part time staff + channel admin on various language channels ( #C etc.) until 7+ years back and avoided drama politics as much as possible.
Seems like a shame and a reason to drop into Libre.
I'd followed the saga in realtime up until just before this point. I had no idea that homeboy went scorched earth. Jfc lol.
The ironic thing is the place where all the tumblr people reorganized was twitter. Twitter melting down will be like 9/11 a third time for the horny community, lol. Reddit looking pretty temperamental too (also hugely botted/inorganic).
Anyway, in the debate over Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms, and in Twitter's pre-Musk censorship of some kinds of hate speech/violent rhetoric/vaccine denialism/misinformation/etc, there was always a "but what if you get a turbo badmin who starts blocking stuff that everybody likes, what do you think about censorship then!?!?" argument, and this is the reason that's always been a stupid argument. Just like tumblr, we are now watching what happens when a turbo badmin takes power and starts banning all the weapons he doesn't like and kicking anyone who kills him. And social media is largely routing around him and reforming elsewhere.
Systems like Mastodon and Discord work well, for entirely different reasons than broadcast-style media like Twitter. Twitter is an audience of billions, you don't have any interpersonal connection with most people, and there have to be some rules about what the platform gets used for. Discord is 50 people you know from some aspect of your life, and if people violate the social norms of the group, they get ostracized or exiled. I have some groups that are casually professional, and some that are edgy, some that are groups of friends I've known a long time, and some that are just interest-specific. Some places have the horny channel and that's fine. Other places that'd get you the spray emoji at best.
If a server mod starts to be a real dick, such that it's sustainable to start a new community... people will start a new community. The "what if we get a power-tripping owner/moderator who nobody likes who starts censoring something you like!?" scenario literally cannot occur in social media (short of net-wide censorship ala china) because it just gets routed around just like tumblr or twitter or even facebook (nobody under 50 is on there anymore) etc. Social media ultimately derives its value from its users, and if the social compact drifts too far from the community values (whatever that community is), then users will leave and rebuild without you. It's not a zero threshold, but there is a point where they'll do it.
Mastodon is, ultimately, just self-hosted discord communities, with the facebook/twitter-style Personal Feed facade built on top. And O(1) moderation works really well at those scales. Still some performance/network benefits to be gained from "centralized" instances, but as long as you can have multiple accounts there's no reason you can't have multiple "identities" for different aspects of your life. The highbrow hacker pods and the horny furry/anime pods don't have to interact.
But in terms of censorship: nazis get kicked, that's good, nobody should have to host nazis on their personal instance that they pay money for. If they can't find any reputable server to take them, and they start their own pod... other pods can just block them. That's fine too, you're not guaranteed an audience. Nobody has to provide you with services, including peering/interchange. So don't get it twisted, this is already a problem that's been addressed (for spam if nothing else). Just because you have a decentralized platform - doesn't mean everyone is going to give you a platform.
The question with "edge content"/"probing-the-exact-boundaries-of-platform-bans" shit like nazi shit and kiwifarms has always been "I know it when I see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy". But everyone ...
I feel sorry for everyone who built a community or business around Twitter.
I’m moving to a decentralized and self-published model for community UGC but discovery suffers dramatically
Your choice does have some consequences. Each Mastodon instance has its own tailored block list, which determines which other instances are blocked in your feed. Instances also have their own codes of conduct. You can view an instance's block list and CoC by clicking the "About" link on the bottom left of the instance home page. (See https://mastodon.social/about for example.)
however, the creators of mastodon have made it super easy to download backups of your follows, your blocklists, etc... and you can import them on any server. so even if that were to happen, you can easily setup another account and be running again.
unlike any of the closed social sites, with mastodon, if one server were to close, the network will be fine.
[0]https://killedbygoogle.com/
Yes you do.
Also, look for indicators of active moderation and participation in the Mastodon Server Covenant if you want to avoid toxicity.
Some popular instances have been highlighted here.
Finally, dont be afraid to use a throwaway email and hide behind vpn to create a temporary account on a server or two, just to check it out.
Be kind to the server owners by deleting your temporary accounts, though.
Can I have a handle like @tomte@owndomain.example at the usual Mastodon providers? (I honestly don't know)
That's too bad, really. If your instance admin blocks you because of some spat, the functioning of the migration mechanism seems to be depending on his goodwill, right?
With email, no old mail provider can stop me from being reachable under my mail address in the future.
the way i did it was:
1) signed up on a large instance. found a few hundred of the people i followed on twitter.
2) found that a large percentage of them were on a specific instance (infosec.exchange)
3) i didn’t have to move to that instance, at all. i could interact with them all day everyday just the same as any other other social site. i did however ultimately end up moving there because i like the admin.
compared to every other social network on the planet, moving to a different server is easy. i didn’t lose any followers (people who follow you just automatically follow the new account), and importing the entire list of who i followed was super simple.
most people would never ever notice the difference between servers, but if you were to for some reason need a more niche environment, there are plenty of guides out there which will hold your hand and walk you through migrating to a different server.
That's the problem. If you're already asking which instance to join then Mastodon is not the "replacement" you are looking for; even when discovery and moderation is worse than Twitter.
If the main instance (mastodon.social) was accepting sign-ups, then that is the obvious go to. Clearly that is not the case and only I see tech people here screaming about Twitter's imminent collapse, etc, moving to whatever instance that is accepting sign ups with the majority of the 200M+ users still sitting on Twitter as they didn't bother to move to something worse.
Federated echo-chambers isn't the answer for better content moderation as clearly seen by the issue with journa.host [0]. Unfortunately, centralization is the realistic approach to this which businesses and companies and hundreds of millions of (non-tech) users will continue to stick with and the platform for this is Twitter.
[0] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
for example, right now, when i run one called fedifinder[0], it finds 473 of the people i follow on twitter. when i import that list into mastodon, im now following all of their mastodon accounts.
[0] https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
But... I also loathe Elon's sociopathic nature, and was waiting for the other shoe to drop with Twitter. It just did. He promised transparency but all these account suspensions are anything but. My idealist libertarian principles are offended, even if I don't really like the impacted journalists.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Thomas Paine
What's the deal with picking on Twitter specifically? Were they especially negligent compare to these other platforms?
Of the three articles you posted, 2 are about the same single incident, and the other is about India punishing Twitter by making CP accusations after Twitter posted a map of India that had disputed territories "wrong". Doesn't seem to be much to it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-29/musk-s-cu...
https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-child-sexual-abuse-mater...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex...
This kind of argument seems silly to me. The world is complicated. He can be both a fantastic manager able to push out successful products in markets that don't even exist and a narcissistic thin-skinned asshole. We can celebrate SpaceX and Tesla while we condemn his censorship on Twitter.
In 2018, yes. By today's standards, almost everything his car does, the competition does better.
[1]: https://insideevs.com/news/595828/tesla-model-y-build-qualit...
2018: feds ask Tesla to stop misleading the public about safety ratings – NHTSA
2020: Tesla ranks lowest on Initial Quality – JD Power
2021: Tesla ranked 27th of 28th in reliability ranking – Consumer Reports
2022: Tesla least reliable of EVs[0]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-least-reliable-ev-bran...
In what world is Tesla a "damn good car"?
[^0]: https://insideevs.com/news/549130/consumerreports-tesla-reli...
[^1]: https://electrek.co/2020/06/24/tesla-ranks-lowest-on-j-d-pow...
[^2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20758349/tesla-model-3-saf...
[^3]: https://electrek.co/2019/08/07/tesla-misleading-safety-claim...
[^4]: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/08/24/is-teslas-...
But really it's just the whole experience where it wins. It's a robot that drives me around town on its own, every day! Trivial and actually-working phone-as-key implementation that lets me walk up, drive, and walk away without ever doing anything analogous to "un/locking" or "starting" the car. I can turn the climate control on over the internet and watch the exterior cameras. My kids can make the turn signals emit fart noises!
The Elon hate has always been bad, and the complete dumpster fire at Twitter has made it even worse. But... they're the best cars in the world. They really are.
As you said, one can give him credit for the push for electric vehicles with Tesla, but you can also critique him on the incompleteness of FSD which Musk continued to over-promise dates of robo-taxis, advertising FSD to Level 5 SAE safety when it is admittedly Level 2 [1]. Other than that, Tesla vehicles are just fine.
I have not seen this chaos with SpaceX which is another safety critical company. Perhaps we are already seeing where the line is being drawn on the unbiased enforcement of the Terms of Service which is what I am seeing here on Twitter rather than before, it was slanted and applied to a select group.
This time, it is clear that it applies and is enforced on everyone, journalist or not, celebrities and bots and as for the over coverage of the matter is of course fuelling the outrage machine that the news needs for more eyeballs. Just like how Twitter didn't immediately collapse, it isn't going anywhere either.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33987899
[1] https://www.news18.com/news/auto/teslas-full-self-driving-cl...
This is a brand new rule, announced after the fact, and applied so far only to exactly one circumstance that happens to be personally related to the CEO. Arguing that this is a fair application of a well-considered policy is just ridiculous, sorry. For that matter, if Musk's wasn't actually in the air at the time of the bannings, it's not even clear that the stated policy was even applied correctly! All the journalists did was post links that allows you to find ElonsJet on Facebook, AFAICT. That's not "real time" info, is it?
Let me know when someone else gets banned for "doxxing" that involves something as simple as this. You know it's not going to happen, right? Posting a link to Kiwifarms should result in the same treatment, right?
Also the fact that it just loads quickly. There's some delay and it's not as quick as plain web pages could be, but it's lightning fast compared to Twitter.com with its "infinite scrolling" (aka never finished loading).
Or you can go to dolphin.town where you're only allowed to use the letter e.
There are likely other instances with higher limits on post length, but I don't know how to search for them.
(Also, performance varies a lot, so an average would be kind of meaningless if even knew what it was.)
Probably because one of the use cases for this is transcribing images of text. Limiting it too much would mean people using screen readers couldn't get the full context.
Not that I believe the excuse anyways; it's just remarkably flabby.
I also tried with my personal domain (which isn't hosting Mastodon, but has a WebFinger alias for a Mastodon instance), and it also worked.
See links in https://mobile.twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/16035552528...
Or https://mobile.twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/16035018862...
https://hachyderm.io/@steveyackey/109521492988061127
There is a process there which goes by each posted links (and shortens them in tweets) and checks if there anything there.
so technically you can shutdown the instance, post a link (if it wasn't previously "banned"), wait a couple of hours and bring the instance up. But it would be probably checked some time later.
But come on, just make a simple page with 304 redirect on any platform.
You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged.
You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic.
You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant.
Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck.
Unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck it is.
Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They've been largely the same for many years.
You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1603555493238435840
"unhinged": Elon Musk's actions for the past few months have been intensely erratic. He clearly meets the definition of "unhinged".
"pathetic": can either be interpreted as "pitiable" or "inadequate/disappointing". Watching his descent into madness is certainly capable of eliciting pity. As for the second definition, everyone who is now being disabused of their formerly high opinion of him could call him inadequate or disappointing.
"ignorant": this is the easiest one, Elon Musk has repeatedly (some might say incessantly) expressed beliefs that belie a complete lack of understanding of the topics at hand (made all the more frustrating by his extreme arrogance and overconfidence). Whether he is doing it deliberately for attention or whether he is truly as gormless as he appears to be, this description is accurate.
"fuck": sadly, this is one of the most flexible words in the English language, so it will be difficult to ascertain its descriptive veracity.
Since this isn't just a matter of one topic—that is, since you've been breaking the rules badly in other contexts as well (e.g. attacking other users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33938700), I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Also, using multiple accounts to upvote yourself is a bannable abuse in its own right, so please don't do that*.
Since someone is now going to respond with "you're just protecting $BillionaireCeo" I suppose I need to add: no, there is plenty of criticism getting posted, as anyone who looks at any thread on the topic can see. This is about protecting HN. The rules don't stop applying just because a bunch of people are mad. Actually, these are the situations in which they matter most.
* Edit: actually, the multiple-account manipulation you've been doing is egregious, so I've banned a bunch of your accounts. Please don't do that again. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
This is a Tweet from him regarding freedom of speech in April of this year
"By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect..."
Each incident in which he bans an account or censors links, like this, is evidence that his concerns about freedom of speech might be disingenuous.
It was nowhere close to an airport. Of course, the person could have followed the car from an airport, but we currently don't have any third-party evidence for that. I don't wish anyone harm. But the response and rage directed at someone merely reposting publicly available information from an API seems to be disproportionate.
The excuse used to purge elonjet was being held together by a fairly thin rope that seems to be down to a few threads.
From the founder of Bellingcat, https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1603454821700452365
I looked at the discord on how they did it, and they went frame-by-frame, found a very specific curb, then they looked for that specific curb in the area. After they found the curb, they then cross-referenced it against a building that was visible in a reflection of the car window that they then used to confirm their find.
It took them just a few hours.
I expect that the more this hornet's nest gets kicked, the closer they'll look. I, personally, wouldn't want to be in their crosshairs.
edit — a link to the images,
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1...
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1036758130761158677/1...
the building itself,
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1036758130761158677...
This was done by https://twitter.com/Sepulco1
Persecution? :-)
Now journalists are being banned for copying word-for-word the police response stating that "no police report was filed" over the stalker incident.
[1] https://twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595506087570333696
When something was going down, you went to twitter.
Twitter is dead. Long live the Fediverse.
Federated social networks such as Mastodon are a solution in search of a problem, and it always has been like that for years.
They're not a solution in search of a problem. They're a solution a small, dedicated group of people have cared deeply about, but most people have ignored. But people have been unsatisfied with the centralized aspects of social media for a long time. They're not stupid; they see the way the algorithms are designed for engagement, and the toxicity that causes. They see how fragile it is that someone like Musk can just swoop in and sabotage the platform.
Network effects have made it difficult to adopt a decentralized solution. Well - lots of communities are looking for a home they won't have to leave for the same reason they did before. That's creating network effects in the opposite direction.
If you'd said this to me a few weeks ago I'd have been inclined to believe it. But things are in flux. Maybe the Fediverse won't take off, but it has a very really shot right now.
How about your mom?
If you're unwilling to be surprised then you're not going to be able to take in new information. Cynicism causes blindness.
I hope you'll consider taking a step back and reflecting on whether this is how you want to interact with people and what it is that brought you here.
I'm not sure what troubles our flagged dead commenter more, that there are female math professors in the world, or that they have children that might comment on HN.
FWiW:
To the assertion that there exists at least one Emeritus Professor on mathstodon.xyz - https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao
To the assertion that there exists at least one female Emeritus Professor of Mathematics - https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/persons/cheryl-pra...
To the request that "that guy" provide social media accounts of his mother, her friends, their nom de guerres, discussions, etc .. I'm altogether unsure of whom "that guy" might be.
Cheers for your response, I'd have gotten back sooner but <shrug> Timezones :-)
What's with the strawman? I never once alluded to this. My assertion is that you're full of shit because your mother is not on mastodon.
The account you did post, has an average of less than 1 response per post, which just goes to prove my point that nobody uses mastodon.
I don't know why you're implying I'm sexist for calling you out on an obvious lie.
Given your attitude why would I drop a pin on an instance that many can follow the crumbs to?
Mastodon solves my problem, "How do I keep track of my friends without Twitter or Facebook" very well, and each day new friends of mine appear there.
If you'd like me to be entirely explicit; in trying to insult me, you're telegraphing your own lack of awareness.
We know too little about this incident to say that that is obvious at this point.
Gabe Newell, 2013
"A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."
--various
His allegation makes little sense based on my knowledge of the area. Not only is that location not near an airport but getting to one would take a hell of a long time. Painfully slow arterial roads in every which way except the 110 which goes straight through Downtown LA, usually with very heavy traffic. If you follow Orange Grove north, it enters one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in East LA with some incredible chateau sized houses, so if he wanted to find a rando to frame it makes sense he'd do it from there (assuming he owns property there).
Edit: according to [1] the child in question might have been one he had with his ex Grimes and according to [2] she bought a house in the area. Kinda checks out? Except the whole bit about someone stalking them all the way there from LAX [3]! If you were driving from LAX to Pasadena though, this is exactly the place you’d exit the freeway to gas up before heading up Orange Grove to the fancy neighborhoods
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010663
[2] https://observer.com/2018/06/grimes-buys-house-pasadena-los-...
[3] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=37.359&lon=-...
I'm not an expert here, just sharing what I've seen. Please offer corrections.
https://twitter.com/scottwww/status/1490553502640140288/phot...
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1603533380150181888
[1] https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Search/NNumberResul...
[2] https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a835af&lat=37.359&lon=-...
However as I said it's not true in this case, the FAA registry entry for the aircraft has the accurate ADS-B hex code identifier, and the aircraft is trackable openly on sites like ADSB Exchange and even using your own ~$20 hardware radio receiver.
Sweeney is doing nothing out of the ordinary for this particular aircraft other than linking the ADSB Exchange API to a Twitter account.
As an aside, there's also nothing illegal nor morally wrong about spotters deobfuscating a jet that's in the PIA programme either. That's just a fig leaf measure, it's not actually effective.
Its less than 10 miles from the nearest airport (San Gabriel Valley Airport).
Oh hackers of Hacker News, I call on you at this hour to band together, in the spirit of peace, understanding, and coffee, to join our rag tag forces so that we may materialize our own unbreakable web-of-trust network with nothing more than duct tape, GPG, LISP, and first principles.
This is our calling, and this is our time. Declare your intent with a pubkey below and we shall right this world one set of parentheses at a time:
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY----- b3BlbnNzaC1rZXktdjEAAAAABG5vbmUAAAAEbm9uZQAAAAAAAAABAAAAMwAAAAtzc2gtZW QyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQAAAJCf8rIWn/Ky FgAAAAtzc2gtZWQyNTUxOQAAACC3giiTOw09X630i9AKbXyKH8YanG0HMzraJ2dqj5oYjQ AAAECffuXm53adFaReqHBx/D+L1mtOx4uGqszp3ABBUenOYreCKJM7DT1frfSL0AptfIof xhqcbQczOtonZ2qPmhiNAAAADWdsZWJAcmV5cy5uZXQ= -----END OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
> > -----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
Probably a mistake :)
Or at least put some honeypot server in your bio so I can keep playing your game.
Also you posted your private key. Peak HN. :^)
1) Twitter/Elon has made the conscious decision to censor all references to Mastodon in an attempt to retain market share.
2) Somebody shared something bad with a mastodon.social link, and Twitter's always-creaky moderation systems, now nerfed and defunded by Elon, completely failed to realize the implications and added mastodon.social to the same global domain ban list as viruses4u.ru and freeviagra.xxx etc.
My money is actually on #2, because the ban only appears to impact mastodon.social and not any other Mastodon instance, but I guess we'll find out once this hits mainstream news and Twitter has to make a public decision on this.
Edit: Seems like they don't plan to change it either: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/6186
Not sure if that helps
No, an uncompensated developer doing something that's easier for them is not hostility.
https://ibb.co/kx0cdFK
Toot is a small, high-quality Amsterdam server with a very civilized userbase.
This turns out not to be the case. It's looking like nearly all, if not actually all, Mastodon instances, including mine.
This is not a serious thing of course, but many a true word is said in jest. Given his known history, from flirting with joining the board of Twitter one day to deciding on a hostile takeover the next, and so on back into the past...would you went to actively or passively do business with someone who just rewrites the terms whenever an unwelcome outcome results?
He posted these after a very brief appearance on a Space hosted by journalists. I can’t blame him to leaving —- talking to the press right now is a lose/lose for him. But what was he thinking, joining in the first place?
As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603600001057185792
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603609466301059073
But on another level, I really feel like there is nobody that is willing to tell him to get off the internet for a few days. Publicly torturing yourself this way is not healthy.
I am not famous, but I have been a 'main character' in a negative national news story before, attracting ~10,000 unfriendly comments just on one website. On one level you're inoculated from them as you realize the extent of the gap between the report and reality, so there isn't as much pressure to take them personally. But on another you're turning your own stress response up by reading all that negativity (or 'posting through it' if you were to start responding to people), like how exercising and developing toughness can go too far and end up with joint damage or torn muscles. Yet this is very much the hard-driving persona and work ethos that Musk publicly seeks to cultivate.
And it's been that way all week, what with him getting booed loudly on Monday. A friend who worked the show in a technical capacity described it as being painfully awkward, as Musk stood there like a prop and essentially slow-roasted for 5 minutes. This is a thing professional comedians are inured to whereas Musk was neither prepared nor equipped for it. In a context where his wealth didn't generate the usual aura of popularity, he got a painful lesson in others' perceptions of him. That's not the sort thing you can just buy a fix for.
This isn't very nice of me, but realizing that this is what Elmo is doing to himself makes me gleeful. Cry, billionaire baby, cry..!
Is it possible that we are all suffering from a form of psychological illness due to social networks, with symptoms ranging from mild to meltdown?
> a thing professional comedians are inured to
This. I think generally cultural guard rails (of various local flavor) developed over centuries prior to mass communication that addressed the needs of the super ego (our 'my place in the world' bit of self) and now our super egos are confronted by (sometimes an imaginal) 'society & public stage' that far exceeds the scope of what generation after generation of humans have confronted.
I offer as evidence the (effectiveness of) immaturity of discourse on social media. This is symptomatic of 'regression'. A sort of collective Lord of the Flies moment for humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego#Super-eg...
(HN'ers will recognise Jay Gatz' earnest self-improvement program in the appendix to that book in many front-page posts here. The Americans of 2025 will share a lot, culturewise, with those of 1925.)
It's actually somewhat kind of him to rewrite the terms - no, I'm not being sarcastic. He could simply ban anyone he wanted to without any consistency, it's his company after all. Creating rules at least allows some kind of consistency, for what little it might be worth.
I posted a tweet today that mentioned Mastodon and linked to my profile in the tweet and it was "caught" by Twitter as "sensitive content."
They said: "We put a warning message on these Tweets because they might have sensitive content — like nudity, sexual content, violence, gore, or hateful symbols."
After the shock wore off, I actually laughed out loud. Then just sat there and stared at the screen. It's completely absurd.
Take a breath, wait for a while, see if the ban stands (or if it was some technical fluke), see if Twitter/Elon Musk comes with an official statement regarding this matter. Right now, it just seems like all of HN are having a gigantic confirmation bias session together.
Sometimes time gives you more context, but in this case it just confirmed what was already known.