Musk's takeover of Twitter was in fact a net win for free speech, in large part because it encouraged large numbers of people to actually abandon the platform and post on somewhat-more-censorship-resistent platforms instead, which those people would not have done if the previous management of Twitter had continued to operate it.
You don't have to fight a C&D, you can ignore it. But they may sue you and you have to fight that. But they can also sue you without a C&D or even after you comply with one. The C&D itself has no effect, but it's the equivalent of a gangster pointing at his own eyeballs and then yours, "I'm watching you."
you've replied here several times, i understand your position on C&Ds.
a C&D is reasonably understood as an intent to sue if you continue whatever they want you to cease.
my comment can be read as "i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it (where "it" = ignoring their C&D and being sued)"
C&D has zero legal weight. They're just relying on developers being conflict-averse. At my local hacker space, at least five members are in some kinds of protracted legal battles (five different ones)
Literally every time I decide to stop ignoring X, I log in and am greeted with overt racism and religious hatred. Always a good reminder to just ignore that cesspit.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
It would be nice if URL schema was compatibile with X. In case of Nitter, I could’ve just replaced x.com with xcancel.com with a web extension and URL still works.
To this day I am still calling the website Twitter and access it every single time typing twitter.com. That rename was so dumb. So, I really love the name
The number of people who do this is the number of reasons Elon can give to the trademark judge that he is actually using the trademark Twitter and it shouldn't be invalidated for non-use.
I used Twitter for over 10 years without an account then suddenly in 2022 that was completely disrupted and no longer an option. Reddit is now this way too.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
totally agree, businesses that only have Facebook or Instagram are basically hidden from me. I can not see their opening hours, nor the menue, if it is a restaurant. I understand why the businesses use facebook, its easy, but its also a bit sad.
Increasingly access is hidden behind mobile apps too, which in turn requires succumbing to app stores and handing over the keys to 2 giant US companies. For slopware and social media, fine. Some would even argue it is a blessing in disguise. However on the government level it is totally unacceptable. E.g. why should anyone and especially non US citizens accept the Google/Apple TOS in order to file their taxes, access their health recds or schedule a gov appointment?
It's all by design to. People call for social media regulation without realizing that it is by no coincidence these companies have been able to grow so large. The security state has been outsourced to private industry.
The governments go where the people are. If they post on their own sites it’s the equivalent of “on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
Yeah, "first source" is the key here. The information should be available openly and independently of any 3rd-party platform.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.
PLC's board composition and country of residence are designed to shield from that. At best it will only ever be as effective at this as ICANN, which is roughly our target.
And you have to have a phone number to login to these sites (Authenticate). Even On-line Banking, you need a phone number to log in. And in my country Mobile contracts are hideously expensive.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
Similarly, society decided at some point that linkedin, a completely private and constantly hacked social network, is a must-have when looking for work (not any work, but for a lot of jobs it applies). Just give them all your private data and we'll have a look.
Makes one miss the days when Craigslist or Monster (and its clones) were legitimately the best places to find employment.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
It's frustrating, but we need to accept that we are not the kind of user that these platforms want. I stopped using Reddit for the same reason, and I accepted that I'm not the best user for them. For my luck, Reddit is not used as the main communication channel for government agencies
We actually don't need to accept that. When they become big enough for network effects to become inescapable they need to be treated as utilities more than random private companies.
Even worse, it's hard or impossible to even have an account with any shred of privacy.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
Just to clarify, what do you mean by "without revealing my personal phone number"?
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
It's been years since I tried making a Twitter account, I believe at the time it sometimes required a phone number to sign up but other times it was optional (some A/B test).
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
Bluesky didn't require phone numbers back when it was invite only, and then there was a period of time after they allowed everyone to create accounts where users need a phone number to verify. That requirement might have been replaced by a captcha according to:
Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.
I learned from experience at least a decade ago that you should not take anything he says seriously or as an assertion of fact. Countless examples[0] prove that this is the case.
Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when, but rational on product decisions.
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
I think buying Twitter for data was a blunder big as expecting self driving to be solved by 2015 or whenever it originally was.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
Maybe for training, but how about look up? I often use claude voice and grok voice (both on iOS) and reasonably frequently claude simply cannot find any info about a breaking topic, whereas grok always can.
I wonder if "no one says no" culture is practically the same thing as instructing LLMs to always hallucinate.
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
Hallucination is not something specific to LLM by any means.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
Yes, but LLMs are hallucination machines by design. What I mean by this is that everything the LLM generates is a hallucination, untethered from truth or reality, since the data is generated purely based on statistics around what word is most likely to come next. This type of algorithm can never model "truth" or "fact."
To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
Gees... it never occurred to me that such an obvious thing needs a proof. I used to think that it's enough to kinda... just go out of one's luxury office at Y-Combinator and try talking to a janitor or a taxi driver...
> Gees... it never occurred to me that such an obvious thing needs a proof.
I didn’t ask for a proof, I asked for a source, and it is not obvious to me. Your claim is that “humans are just as hallucinatory [as LLMs] when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids.” This is a quite an outlandish claim to make given that LLMs hallucinate literally every single thing they produce; as I said previously they have no concept of “truth,” or “fact.”
I’m not sure what you’re trying to show with this link but posting an image of an anonymous message board with people using ableist slurs is not a great look.
> Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.
You specifically said “memorizing facts,” which an LLM definitely does not do at all.
But as I said, I also disagree with your assertion. Pretty much the entire first several years of a child’s life consists of learning through testing reality, and we continue to do it in other ways as we grow. To say that 99% of people learn by any single method seems obviously false; we all learn through different methods, and a portion of the learning that every person does is via testing reality.
That isn't responsive to anything I said. I'm happy to be set straight with facts/sources if something I said was wrong. But thanks for the conversation, I guess?
LLMs are not (and ever were) expected to produce truth. Just like humans. Most of the time humans have no idea about what they are talking about, they are just repeating patterns. Just like LLMs.
LLMs are doing what they are expected to be doing -- imitating humans, and they are very good at it, because humans are essentially doing the same thing -- imitating other humans. Kids imitate their parents, students imitate their teachers, employers imitate their boss, fans imitate their popstar.
It's hard to even have this conversation, because it's so bloody obvious that it is hard to understand why this even needs an explanation.
Just remember when was the last time you actually read the manual for a program rather than tried to fit your use-case into an example.
Generating original content and understanding anything from the first principles is not just hard, it's prohibitively hard. Nobody learns arithmetic by reading a book on Peano arithmetic, people just imagine putting some apples in a pot, which is the same principle -- analogy/ imitation.
Many people believe in crackpot theories, therefore an LLM has to faithfully imitate them.
He bought twitter because he was forced to. He got it at twice any valuation (based on fake usage stats) and at least 4x what it was worth. Criticism of him was not "shut down" either off or on twitter.
You are both correct. He originally wanted to buy it because his feelings were hurt by lots of Twitter users (like the Elon Jet guy), and I can only speculate that he thought it’d fill the emotional void in his soul to own it and do what he wanted with it.
Later, when he realized that this was a stupid idea and that his amazing business acumen resulted in him drastically overpaying, he tried to back out of the sale by giving the excuse that the number of bots/spam posts/etc were more than he thought. According to the agreement that he had signed, this was not a valid reason to back out of the deal. His lawyers advised him that he’d probably lose in court, hence he was “forced to” buy the site as your article states.
> Musk is aggressively optimistic on what can be achieved and by when
That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel, etc.
I am certifiably not a fan of Musk but the yoke in the cybertruck when combined with the drive by wire steering is an absolute engineering masterpiece and a masterclass in systems calibration. The yoke itself has a relatively narrow range of motion of .94 turns lock-to-lock and at slow parking lot speeds that means you can do a 3 point turn, park, parallel park, navigate around, without making large movements of the steering input and you never have to (because you physically cannot) go hand-over-hand. Then at highway speeds the steering ratio is vastly different and the vehicle feels solid as a rock. It's absolutely effortless.
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
> Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle.
Agreed for sure. I think part of the problem is that at least for a while, he was good at selling the lie that he was an intelligent engineer, which caused a lot of people (especially tech-savvy ones) to trust him more than the average random public figure. Unfortunately it seems like some people never realized he was a fraud and still view him this way.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
I'm fine with the criticism, but what's the solution? And what makes this a uniquely Elon problem when the rest of the social media industry does the same? There was backlash when the models learned computer programming from open source repositories, so I wonder if the same applies to casual speech.
That's when the LLM labs emerged and started collecting the data en masse. Likewise, virtually all other major social media players added barriers to unfettered anonymous access. Reddit worked without an account, and with multiple alternative client apps, until spez changed it, right?
Geez, it's much better. A copy of a newspaper is usually cheaper than printing the same articles 9n paper, and you don't need to bother with printing, and you have a hard copy automatically.
And zero digital trace, which beats everything said above.
The Reddit thing is disappointing. I stopped being a user a long time ago, but their links often show up in search results. I started noticing I couldn't see the page without logging in. I ended up blocking Reddit in my search results. It's not worth it.
I just don't want to be logged in. I used to be an active user. It sucks up too much time and there's a lot of toxicity. I finally got off when they blocked third party apps. Their official app is horrible and the website has enough annoyances that I don't want to use it. I was content to click on the occasional search result though. Now that they finally took that away I'm done.
It requires email now. It used to not. And if you don't want to be shadowbanned you also need phone, and if you want to view NSFW you need government ID.
They have Amber Alert here and the other day I noticed it linked to twitter for more information...which I couldn't actually but for a split-second when a pop-up loaded. This is silly. Perhaps govt can reach more people by posting a message to twitter vs their website. But if you're sending a link out, there is no excuse not to link to your website or any number of other open, stable hosts.
Plenty of people restrict their account to require that you too have an account to see their posts. A link to Bluesky often feels like roulette on whether I can see a post or not.
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
Here in the Netherlands, WhatsApp has the defacto communication tool. Everyone is expected to have it installed, not just by friends but also municipals and companies. Same level as having an e-mail address.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I agree that I don't trust governments today to provide the necessary confidentiality guarantees but remember that both physical mail and the phone network are government backed - in the sense that they set the rules even if they are operated by private entities in some countries.
I hear this sentiment a lot from people in the USA. They deeply distrust their government and can't imagine it being different anyway else in the world.
Eurocrats could never in a million years make it happen. For starters, every country would insist on having its own ChatsApp, with roll out taking years. Then, to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks. And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists.
Mastodon instances would be a drop-in replacement, no? Federated instances and as a bonus, it solves the biggest problem of new users not knowing which server to join. Just join your local government's if you don't know of another.
Nah, Cell Broadcast has a lot less overhead since it does not have to do any routing or delivery confirmation and such. The load does not scale based on recipients which makes it far more reliable during an emergency.
Sorry, maybe I did "carrier replication" wrong - I used the word in a sense of "it is duplicated at the local cell by the towers", instead of getting "fed with 1mio receivers in region X by the telco servercentral HQ"
Cell broadcast, depending on the emergency level set by the sender, also makes your phone vibrate until you read the message, and may also cause it to play a loud siren noise. Which is the sort of thing you want in a real emergency.
Because it doesn't do the job well. It's difficult to send any media, group chats are a pain, international messages often incur fees, it doesn't work on wifi-only, and so on.
RTS is the SMS replacement and is quite old. And as evidence it works, I direct your attention to the ubiquitous iMessage, which only "couldn't" interop with Android because Apple was trying the vendor lock-in approach and actively enshittifying its own users' experience and blaming it on Android users.
Assuming you mean RCS, to which Google built a proprietary E2EE extension, remains the only client with no API to build off of and if I recall requires play attestation.
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
It's not all about profit as European SMS is now free. It is however about decentralisation stifling feature development - a trap we run into again and again, from email to IRC to SMS to Fediverse/ATProto.
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.
> please tell me ONE app for Android other than Google Messages I can use to send and receive RCS, it surely won't be problem since it's international standard same as SMS, so there must be plenty apps available...
Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.
Which is one of the many many reasons Zuckerberg needs to be investigated the hell out of for every single thing he does
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Touché. Getting stuck with an obsolete service/protocol for decades is a nightmare, even if it is just ye olde user inertia. If it is mandated by law or pushed by the government, it becomes nearly impossible to update.
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
That's the fate of all government-backed systems as well as all decentralised systems. The former can't evolve because of extreme bureaucracy and the latter can't evolve because of incompatibility trauma and fragmentation.
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
The EU should rather embrace open standards rather than building a closed competitor here. We already have XMPP and Matrix, all that's required is for public institutions to use them.
For what purpose? All this discussion about open alternatives to closed systems always leaves out what the purpose is. For broadcasting public information that is not time critical, I think they should use HTTP and HTML.
> It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
That's a false premise - scraping itself isn't illegal, and reasonable also it should not be. But having most of the traffic be scrapers that don't behave well and brute force constantly refetch pages unnecessarily and unintelligently is the issue.
So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(
The options are: install the app or register using a google or apple account. Since the former is the same as the latter it all collapses down to: register using a google or apple account.
That's why we really need some kind of non profit or maybe two "social media" sites made with the public good in mind. One could be officially government sanctioned and funded (sort of like Voice of America but internal to the US more so) and have a strict organisation verification policy for local police / government and other quasi public entities (say like transportation systems and energy companies - etc)
I think if you think that technologies which were around for decades before social media took off are equivalent to social media, then it's actually on you for missing what the difference is.
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
Yeah but you have to think about what that convenience actually is. You can't just say "twitter is convenient". Visiting someone's website is actually much easier than visiting their Twitter, so what happened?
Scrolling Twitter is a lot easier than visiting a thousand websites, and it auto suggests new content. In its case, the power of suggestion is used for bad, but it's important.
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. I've felt this way for years. It's scandalous.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
...because the overhead of even small claims is bigger than what you can possibly recover in most regular disputes. There needs to be something like a class action for small claims - government regulators where you can submit complaints with evidence to and if enough people complain about a company the government has to look into it.
Isn't small claims designed for, well, small claims and therefore low overhead? That's why you can't bring a lawyer. Which is super annoying for a company, because a company has no physical embodiment and has to send a lawyer or other representative just by virtue of being a company.
I'm sympathetic, as I also don't have an account, but honestly I don't think requiring a free account that takes 10 seconds to make and needs no personal info constitutes "completely hostile to allowing you to see it."
I agree. I run a small community organisation and we've come off all social media and created a single website. You want information about us? That's where it is - the website.
Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.
I would support a law requiring official government messages to be promulgated only via channels that do not require an account to view. It's not the most important thing to spend political capital on, but it would have the positive effect of directly interfering with government officials publishing their messages on proprietary login-only social media because it's the most expedient thing to do or it's the only thing they know how to do.
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
> get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable
The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.
My 81 year-old mother has never owned a computer. So yes it's not good to have critical government services only on apps or websites that require log in or subscriptions. Although to her it doesn't matter since she has no clue of these sites.
We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.
After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.
My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.
For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.
Re the "land lines", I think the answer to that is not "keep 100+ year old copper infrastructure running" but "make our modern infrastructure as reliable as Ma Bell made it 100 years ago".
Hmm, on the one hand Elon begs for new users with animated ads on the x.com front page, on the other hand one of his (likely) alt accounts claims that "Every $1 [of advertising on X] spent delivered an average return of $5.42":
I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.
I'm an internet user. I don't have a Twitter account. I don't operate a website. I have no idea why people that set up JSON endpoints and "Web APIs" design them the way they do
I just use them. Vercel always seems particularly fast for me and this API seems to work well, so far. For me, JSON is better than ads. I don't need graphics
And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.
You've been told for years not to use X, (twitter is now clearly the pre Musk era), but Elon knows you crave his dopamine so he can keep imposing harsher conditions.
Politics aside, Twitter/X has become a bad place to share information on and to link to. It's a bad option from a technical point of view.
We can't read a multi-part tweet or check the latest updates from an official account without an account (which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications). A public "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.
Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.
I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.
The real problem is that places like HN and Reddit allow downvotes / reports to drown people out. Someone on Twitter will post on their page. They control it. It can be slop. It can be low quality. It can be their random thoughts but all that is irrelevant while you slowly build up your audience and the stuff you wanna work on. This generally takes time and is something that grows organically. Meanwhile on HN I will regularly see posts "flagged" where the account didn't actually say anything bad or against the rules. It just goes against the group think and it doesn't even take that much. It can be 1 or 2 people flagging your post and then suddenly it's hidden. This simply does not happen on Twitter.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
I'm at the point where I think you people are just dumb. The amount of people I've worked with my in career who did things totally outside of their major in college or simply dropped out entirely. I'm literally sitting here thinking about how intellectually destitute the so called left has become and it makes me sad.
Inertia. Twitter has basically no value, it's just a bad app and bad website. It was never actually "good" for information communication, but it was tolerable.
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
Because obviously everyone who participates in a discussion has an account, so they don't feel this annoyance other than maybe when sharing a link to someone else.
Anyone know the specifics of how this works under the hood? I assumed the people over at Twitter/X would aggressively block systems like this from working. Are they doing something creative to get around that?
On most of these sites you can just copy the requests the browser makes. There's a walls and ladders game going on, but all the easy to implement walls aren't very high so most sites don't bother building the tallest one possible.
You can start by making a burner account and viewing some pages in a browser and watching the developer network tab. Either you'll see some dynamic JSON request that fetches the main page content, or it'll be in the initial page request. In either case you can copy that request and parse it. If it's in the initial page then it's in HTML so parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar. A minority of sites are using TLS fingerprinting, so try curl-impersonate if plain curl doesn't work.
At least in Firefox I suggest right click "copy as cURL [command]" and then delete parts of the command to see what's actually needed to get the data, or copy the whole exact thing if you're worried about getting fingerprinted based on the parts you deleted.
There's certainly some kind of auth cookie or token. How long does it last? Maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, forever? If it's not forever there's a way to refresh it so look through the network requests again, or maybe the network requests when you log in.
Burner accounts are dirt, dirt cheap. I have several hundred I rotate out. I’m afraid to mention the library I’m using in case it’s not in their cross hairs, but it makes scraping trivial. At least at the scale I’m scraping I don’t even need a proxy. My residential up is enough to keep the blocks away.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadHow dare someone disagree with our MSM opinions!
I would say don't burn anything, especially not an innocent neophyte without an ounce of maturity who doesn't know right from wrong yet.
I'm certainly not going to downvote them either, and surely not silently, that would be kind of chickenshit. Plus it's like their opinion, man.
OTOH who needs a "witch hunt" when it's self-described.
When you think about it lots of people around here don't even need to hunt for that missing sock any more ;)
Are you mad other users have their own opinions?
Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49437283
according to https://www.whois.com/whois/twitterwebviewer.com
Looks fine, they don't care about the notices i guess
Is the legal basis just copyright of the contents?
a C&D is reasonably understood as an intent to sue if you continue whatever they want you to cease.
my comment can be read as "i just know that i wouldnt want to have to spend the time or money fighting twitter over it (where "it" = ignoring their C&D and being sued)"
It doesn't even have good cat pictures.
I guess other people have more tolerance than I do for the constant stream of hatred that floats to the top of the algorithm like scum over there.
https://github.com/peters-lab/twitter-viewer
Repo is fake, only a README and a LICENSE. I guess we'll take what we can get now.
Where? are you just pulling cloudflare's ip info?
and ICANN should have nuked it long ago
but all that aside, wtf is anyone still on it
Musk is a mass murderer
apparently the nazis would still be in power today if they just had a web service people were too freaking lazy and addicted to ever quit
and Tesla "FSD" is still trying to murder passengers a decade later but that's also definitely a choice
Folks, you don't have to give the nazi bar your business. You will live without Twitter.
But I find it ridiculous that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. get used by government agencies and local businesses to post announcements and these sites are increasingly if not completely unusable without being logged in (and in some cases requiring an app instead of the site). Even Bluesky has this problem!
Sometimes this information is really important! And I even if I did have an account I may not have access to log in on every device (or even want to).
It’s absurd that social media can become this like critical communications platform for severe weather alerts or business hours or anything but the sites hosting it are completely hostile to allowing you to see it.
Sites like this are a bandaid on a gangrenous foot. Thanks for allowing me to see links from twitter but it isn’t a sustainable solution clearly.
To some decision-makers their idea of "disruption" is limited to enshittification more than anything else.
But government information should definitely be first source on their site with federation elsewhere.
In a broader sense, I believe that every person who publishes on the internet should have a standard way to keep their profile data (accounts, posts, etc.) in a secure, user-owned vault that is independent of any company or institution and platforms should have to pull data from that place (in a restricted, user-controlled way) instead of from their own servers. Platforms should be exchangeable, profiles should be entirely user-owned. But of course, this is just a dream and hard to realise technically and economically (incentive-wise) with our current systems. Decentralised protocols are a step in this direction, but unfortunately still too technical/complicated for most people to really "own" or host their data themselves.
> As the next step of maturing governance of the PLC identity system, Bluesky Social PBC is supporting the creation of an independent organization to operate the directory.
If the US government sanctions you, your PLC will get deleted. Only the US government will have this power.
Its all part of the plan: the Digital Control Grid.
Just wait till the Genius Act kicks in with Stable Coins. Programmable money is coming.
I've always loathed LinkedIn due to their poor security and their data mining practices, starting from day 1. I haven't used LinkedIn in over 10 years and only used it briefly to connect with old colleagues. I never had a problem getting work without it. Due to AI, scammers, and infiltration by countries like North Korea, LinkedIn seems to be the only other source outside of "networking" to get hired these days though, unfortunately.
At this point nothing would make me happier than to see Meta, X, LinkedIn, and their friends collapse. They are a cancer and only amplify the enshittification of everything.
If there is one thing I miss on the internet is indeed stackoverlow jobs. Crazy that it didn't work out.
LinkedIn is the Facebook of people who don't want to be on Facebook but want to post Facebook kind of stuff.
I've tried to create pseudoanonymous accounts on both Bluesky and Twitter and then had them be instantly banned before I ever used them. Not even doing anything real privacy like TOR or a VPN, just trying to create an account without revealing my personal phone number.
Ironically, their attempts to crack down on bots means real people like me can't access the sites, while the scammers, propagandists and shills will put in the work to register accounts.
Did you use a voip number (e.g., Google Voice/Twilio/etc.) instead? Or somehow no number at all? Or a secondary (real) phone number, and Twitter somehow determined it wasn't your primary personal phone number?
Not pushing back against what you said, just trying to understand what factually happened.
I think Bluesky didn't require a phone number to sign up, just an email. Maybe I'm misremembering though and it forced a phone number so I had to provide a fake one or a voip one.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/2762
But I didn't try to create an account recently, maybe they went back to requiring phone numbers.
Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!
Ironically AI could fix this when trivial spam detection inference becomes cheap enough to throw away on every upload.
Holy moly, don't you have any law at all to protect people's privacy ?
> we should not be prohibiting a read-only scroll
So it seems he agreed Twitter shouldn't require an account just to view the site. Wonder why the change of mind.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=50m47s
[0] https://elonmusk.today
Musk stating that read-only scroll should be allowed seems very sensible (I think we all agree on that). But he (or someone he delegated to) clearly changed their mind. Intrigued to know why. Occam's razor would probably suggest that allowing scrapers to host twitter posts elsewhere costs them ad revenue, so they make it difficult.
Grok 4.0, before it deteriorated, had a phase when it was good at writing tweets. The feature was used by Musk sycophants but it becomes boring soon.
Since Grok is closed now too and Cursor is pivoting to octocnt (GitHub clone), nobody knows where things are heading.
It is only clear with hindsight, but now everyone knows that tweets are literally detrimental for LLM style AI for whatever reason. Personally I think it's because tweets are responses without CoT or prompts, or could be also because all its meat is in the shape incompatible with en-US culture, even when it's in English, though all that matters is it's actively useless.
You know, LLM hallucination is a phenomenon where the AI would generate syntactically bulletproof chunks of text that are not grounded in reality. Lots of efforts by frontier LLM labs had been made in past few years to solve this by enabling AIs to refute premises in the prompt.
Ordinary people still need to be instructed to google stuffs. They don't go to a niche de facto non-American social media to be disappointed by its notoriously bad search to then conclude its notoriously dumb AI can be abused as a makeshift search tool. People are simply unable.
Twitter has been doing so much things backwards lately. That's reminiscent of how hallucination hurts whatever you do with AIs.
Remember when you were a kid, your teacher probably told you "At an exam, leave no question unanswered, even if you don't know what to write. Nobody is penalised for wrong answers, but even total gibberish might sometimes add a half-point to your score".
To the extent that an LLM generates something factual or realistic, it's doing so either accidentally, or because of the various band-aids that the grandparent post describes which will never fully solve the problem.
99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality.
Do you have a source for this? I vehemently disagree.
> 99% of people learn by memorising facts, not by testing reality.
I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_research...
>I disagree with this too, but whether or not it’s true, LLMs don’t learn via either of these methods, so it’s not relevant to the discussion.
Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.
I didn’t ask for a proof, I asked for a source, and it is not obvious to me. Your claim is that “humans are just as hallucinatory [as LLMs] when speaking about pretty much anything other than their flat or kids.” This is a quite an outlandish claim to make given that LLMs hallucinate literally every single thing they produce; as I said previously they have no concept of “truth,” or “fact.”
> https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/onud4u/anon_research
I’m not sure what you’re trying to show with this link but posting an image of an anonymous message board with people using ableist slurs is not a great look.
> Em... I think it is relevant. In my mental model, an LLM is basically a giant hash table, so memorizing is about 90% of what it does.
You specifically said “memorizing facts,” which an LLM definitely does not do at all.
But as I said, I also disagree with your assertion. Pretty much the entire first several years of a child’s life consists of learning through testing reality, and we continue to do it in other ways as we grow. To say that 99% of people learn by any single method seems obviously false; we all learn through different methods, and a portion of the learning that every person does is via testing reality.
LLMs are doing what they are expected to be doing -- imitating humans, and they are very good at it, because humans are essentially doing the same thing -- imitating other humans. Kids imitate their parents, students imitate their teachers, employers imitate their boss, fans imitate their popstar.
It's hard to even have this conversation, because it's so bloody obvious that it is hard to understand why this even needs an explanation.
Just remember when was the last time you actually read the manual for a program rather than tried to fit your use-case into an example.
Generating original content and understanding anything from the first principles is not just hard, it's prohibitively hard. Nobody learns arithmetic by reading a book on Peano arithmetic, people just imagine putting some apples in a pot, which is the same principle -- analogy/ imitation.
Many people believe in crackpot theories, therefore an LLM has to faithfully imitate them.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/12/elon-musk-admits-he-only-b...
Later, when he realized that this was a stupid idea and that his amazing business acumen resulted in him drastically overpaying, he tried to back out of the sale by giving the excuse that the number of bots/spam posts/etc were more than he thought. According to the agreement that he had signed, this was not a valid reason to back out of the deal. His lawyers advised him that he’d probably lose in court, hence he was “forced to” buy the site as your article states.
That’s putting it quite charitably, IMO.
> but rational on product decisions
Hard disagree. You only need to look to his entire tenure at DOGE for literally hundreds (thousands?) of counterexamples.
Or, if you don’t count that work as “product decisions,” there are other highly questionable product decisions that he is responsible for: the rear doors on the Model X; the lack of instruments/gauges of any kind in front of the driver on the Model 3 and Y; the lack of proper safety sensors/protection for the hood of the Cybertruck, leading to mangled fingers; that stupid yoke steering wheel, etc.
Now, on the flipside, the yoke also exists in the Tesla Model S Plaid, which has a traditional manual rack. In here it is the worst god-damned thing to ever curse a vehicle. The width is roughly the diameter of a school bus steering wheel and going hand over hand with it is annoying at best and the whole experience feels like utter garbage.
Yes, as I said, bad product decisions.
Which is why OpenAI formed a partnership with reddit, in exchange for access to OpenAI's models, OpenAI gets access to reddit's data, and access to reddits live feed.
The reason X and Reddit started forcing accounts is to prevent or add barrier for web scraping, and forcing companies to pay for access to the data.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-now-needs-users-s...
And zero digital trace, which beats everything said above.
Bluesky is totally accessible for me without an account. What do you see ?
It isn’t as egregious as other sites but it’s still restrictive.
It's a missed opportunity for the digital soverignty the EU says it so badly needs. The code for a government backed WhatsApp competitor is there, in multiple instances even. Launch a WhatsApp clone and put all governement communication through it so everyone has to have it installed, and you have an instant EU-wide userbase. From there, people will naturally start to use it between themselves.
I too am constantly frustrated that official communications from governments happen on Twitter or Facebook.
- the dangers of fascism are very real
- technological choices won't save you from the snatch squads, although grassroots use of tech by communities can help
- fascism is extensively promoted by some corporations and their owners
- a non-captured government that is willing to push back is much better than relying on corporations
- anything headquartered in America is potentially subject to arbitrary sanctions against non-US users
- just because we don't like the solution doesn't mean the problem isn't real (see age verification debate)
It's for the best.
Fine, let's say the Netherlands should do it for their own citizens only (but in a broad way to keep the door open for EU adoption)
> to satisfy strict security and compliance regulations it would be restricted to devices passing Google & Apple hardware attestation checks
Banking apps are already restricted to locked Android and iOS devices, and they are all but mandatory, unless you want a very difficult life.
> And once everyone is finally forced to be on board, any confidentiality guarantees can go out the window to catch pedos and terrorists
I don't see how. We all already have the Digid app?
Like Cell Broadcast just duplicates the SMS on carrier level?
Im wrong, I guess?
Hardly a complete solution, it devolved into a Google power grab, in my opinion.
For once I half agree with apple when they say its less secure, as apple-to-google comms are not E2EE like they are for google-to-google. While that is fixable with a hack its still a hack, not part of the protocol.
(how is whatsapp paid for again?)
WhatsApp is one company so if they want to enable sending images they can just do it, and they don't have to coordinate with anyone else. MMS was a failure because you couldn't be sure if your recipient would actually get it, or if your carrier would actually let you send it.
it's like when they wanna get rid of Visa/MC by switching to EU apps, which will require Google/Apple verification, what an improvement...
Don't know what EU apps are you talking about, but yes, mobile apps need Google services. Web interfaces don't.
Pretty much all banking apps for Android won't work without Google Play Services, so once again if you are using Lineage or Graphene, you are still stuck with US company to use your European banking services on the phone.
Nice red herring. The number of implementations is irrelevant here, although Wikipedia says Samsung had one too.
Here's the standard, try Ctrl+F "Google": https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...
nobody cares about standards, if they are pretty much monopolized by one comapny
I grant you 2014 is 12 years ago now and you could plausibly argue it was their doing to grow network effects but I'm pretty sure WA had that infrastructure already in place - Acton, Koum et al already did the ground work to get carriers to... whatever it is
Zuckerberg stole it like he steals everything
Whether that's 'too much' depends on your view of it
I'm tired of people calling them 'savvy acquisitions'. Not when Zuck's on record as saying 'Instagram can hurt us'
Anyone remembering the French minitel?
In this, I trust the government way less than either the open source movement or the actual Silicon Valley. Both of the latter are much better at iterating of their designs when a new idea comes along.
But in either case we do have the ability to make a new system every 10 years.
I think you have completely misjudged how much the majority of people would not want to use an EU-controlled chat app.
So it's just bad behavior requiring reduction of the openness. Like with any open things when people can't behave anymore :(
You say like this like it doesn't literally take like 10 seconds to make an account to see it.
See HN classics of "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame" and "you can replicate dropbox with webdav"; at some point you have to stop thinking that it's everyone else who is wrong and work out what they want which you're missing, which is convenience.
Also, replies and retweets.
Many companies also rely on socials as their only effective means of customer service. If you have a problem or want to provide feedback but you don't use social media then you are SOL.
You can still use https://old.reddit.com with no login. It's cleaner and snappier.
Nobody should be relying on any social media company to share information widely, and citizens shouldn't be required to sign up for Facebook, X, or anything, to get that information.
The reason these sites require login is because they also want to control the resulting conversations, whether for moderation (generous) or selling your data (more likely).
Announcements/political campaigning doesn't require feedback in the same way so no reason for them to use X, FB or anything else.
Seeing the state of most conversations on X or FB, I'm quite happy with limiting the general public's ability to broadcast to the world.
The US House of Representatives posts their live hearings exclusively on YouTube. This is information that should be ungated and freely available, yet is a pain to acquire or archive because YouTube absolutely does not want you getting to the raw video.
I don't understand how this is legal, honestly.
We went through a hurricane in 2022 and that was an eye opener too. Most "land lines" are no longer a line to anywhere it's just a phone connected to the Internet. Anyone with that type phone had no service after 24 hours without power. My 85 uncle still (even now) had an actual land line and it worked no issues.
After the hurricane no citizen had any way to communicate. Cell towers failed when generators ran out of fuel. No fuel because gas stations couldn't pump gas without power.
My dad passed away just a year earlier he had been on an oxygen generator that needed power 24/7. I don't think he would have survived. I'm not sure if I could even have reached 911.
For awareness radio is the best solution but even emergency services radio stations are being decommissioned here in Canada in favour of Internet services.
Of course, neither will happen, so there's that.
Nostr.
https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2092490213121761787
I am kind of addicted to studying propaganda and reading about baseball stadiums on the moon to drive up the SpaceX stock price. For this I need the Twitter gateways.
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/user/[username]&uid=[id...
Beware the website is jam-packed with ads and tracking
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/tweets/[username]?uid=[...
I'm an internet user. I don't have a Twitter account. I don't operate a website. I have no idea why people that set up JSON endpoints and "Web APIs" design them the way they do
I just use them. Vercel always seems particularly fast for me and this API seems to work well, so far. For me, JSON is better than ads. I don't need graphics
https://api.twitterwebviewer.com/api/search/tweets?q=[query]
Better than Nitter search IMHO, works more like original public Twitter API
These may or may not work
https://twitterwebviewer.com/api/trends?country=[capitalised...
https://twitterwebviewer.com/api/trends?country=Worldwide
Speaking of twitter, are there any posts here about the ycombinator discourse?
Given a high level member of ycombinator blocked the chairman of the FTC after an argument, I foresee issues in the future.
We can't read a multi-part tweet or check the latest updates from an official account without an account (which requires a mobile phone number and sometimes extra verifications). A public "town square" can't require an account and a phone number to read what's said there.
Same with Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Linkdin, etc.
So eventually people stop posting. I stopped posting on Reddit entirely for example even though I had dozens of very highly upvoted technical posts mainly because I would regularly see highly inaccurate information get upvoted while the real accurate information is downvoted.
HN has the same problem with Elon Musk overall and SpaceX / Twitter.
On Twitter there is a highly active community of space enthusiasts. Absolutely none of them would post slop like "Elon is not an engineer" but on HN that is what passes for discourse.
I mean at least they tell on themselves but I would prefer a technical forum have actually smart people in it. Not just larpers.
I just can't take this discourse seriously.
HUH?
When did that ever come up?
Am I a doctor because I took my temperature and found I had a fever? Am I a lawyer if I represent myself in court?
At least where I'm from, you need to be licensed to practice engineering.
why are AI researchers and everyone else on X
When it comes down to 99% of these "why are people using sucky thing?" questions, the answer is inertia. Never confuse popularity for quality, they're completely orthogonal.
PSA: I'm not interested in your shitter-specific content. Hit me up elsewhere. Thanks
You can start by making a burner account and viewing some pages in a browser and watching the developer network tab. Either you'll see some dynamic JSON request that fetches the main page content, or it'll be in the initial page request. In either case you can copy that request and parse it. If it's in the initial page then it's in HTML so parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar. A minority of sites are using TLS fingerprinting, so try curl-impersonate if plain curl doesn't work.
At least in Firefox I suggest right click "copy as cURL [command]" and then delete parts of the command to see what's actually needed to get the data, or copy the whole exact thing if you're worried about getting fingerprinted based on the parts you deleted.
There's certainly some kind of auth cookie or token. How long does it last? Maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, forever? If it's not forever there's a way to refresh it so look through the network requests again, or maybe the network requests when you log in.
Only had a handful of accounts banned.