Twitter C/D

Maybe ‘the Internet is not eternal’ is a shock to people too young to have lost their Geocities pages.

they are amazing places. wish i'd gone into hardware tbh. i'm not sure if it's a problem or not that building them in a way that is truly resilient is beyond the abilities of everyone (including nation states) except aws, gcp and azure.

Print out your tweets, people!

i actually do run https://github.com/dogsheep/twitter-to-sqlite as a daily cron job

Perhaps compile them into a book… about hipster puppies.

i needlepoint all my tweets

You know--if there was a printer that was continuously printing out all the tweets ever tweeted on a single piece of paper, that paper would be long enough to... (1/18)

probably belongs on our tech jobs thread but since it's topical --

one of the data science/machine learning leads that left my employer earlier this year, along with everyone else who knew it was arriving, bought some machine learning in a crate hardware stack that's full of Nvidia A100s and it has two 3000W power supplies plus redundancies, so four power supplies total

it's been sitting in the crate outside of the data center in another state for a while. right now, they're trying to figure out how to plug it in to the grid in a way that can actually power the damn thing

ha yes, one downside of the crash in gpu prices is that it makes financial sense to own them rather than rent them again, but owning them is hard.

oh, I am guessing they ordered this thing before the prices dropped. it was like $250K

but if you look at, say, AWS gpu compute bills, you can still come out ahead

tbf "hey yall, the internet isn't immaterial, it depends on physical hardware" was a significant enough academic trend in the mid-2010s for a few scholars to make their reps on it—I'm not dissing those people, that work is all pretty good—but condescendingly chiding people about it in 2022 is silly. I met a cartoonist making a book about internet (and other) infrastructure a couple years back, but his book is for younger readers.

I just mumble the "yay, cloud!" catchphrase from the Microsoft commercials of yesteryear

whoever came up with the name the cloud was a genius, its confounded millions of people who had to watch a commercial during a football game

its sounds awesome but then youre like wait what the fuck

'cloud' is still currency in provincial government but then everyone here is stupid so

the cloud is really in our hearts

not in mine

no, you clicked the agreement

did the ilxbook ever get published or not?

Promoted tweets in the replies 🤮

my favourite thing on twitter is when I disagree about someone's annoying opinion about a song, then check their timeline to see the last two things they posted were retweets of oz katerji and jk rowling

I don’t know if anyone linked it previously but oh my god this thread

okay okay OKAY i’ll list Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Albums

500. Moondance -- Van Morrison
499. Young Sheldon -- Radiohead
498. Turd Smokin’ -- The Turd Smoker Band
497. Well Whaddya Know 99 More Luftballoons How About That -- Nena
496. Songs to Fuck To -- Leonard Cohen

— blaine capatch (@blainecapatch) October 7, 2021

omg

now that is commitment to a bit

Well. This is new. pic.twitter.com/Vd1bvDiGQC

— unfriendly black hottie 🪩✨ (@battymamzelle) October 1, 2022

Shitty pro cop local news affiliate shamed into deleting a tweet by a product tweak that elevated the usual ratio to a more visible “this is a lie”.

My locked account with ~100 followers had been suspended for "hateful conduct" because I called Oz Katerji a cunt. Question is which one of the 100 dobbed me in and was it a relative?

couldve just been detected by their systems

Does that happen? It really seems to hate the word "cunt" and not really care much about the actual content of the tweet.

they def have systems that try to detect abusive speech, idk know really what theyre looking for tho

quite possible that word is tagged as misogynist hate speech (by Americans)

you can def say the bad word cunt on twitter tho it might be flagged when arranged with other words in a shape some computer program finds suspicious, id guess the flagged tweet is then sent to a human for review and they look at it for like 3 seconds before making a decision, and english is prob not their first language, which is all to say this whole set up just doesnt work very well, it would cost too much to actually moderate the site, so instead they pretend

ah ok I have not experimented with saying cunt on twitter lol. Katerji being a blue check might be part of that shape.

But you're otm about pretending: I know (roughly speaking) someone who had an ad for a documentary blocked for violating the political ads ban, and they were sent three entirely different explanations for why

yeah the whole thing is a joke you cant report someone for blatantly violating the rules and nothing happens and then you also see people get bans for doing something totally innocuous

and of course special allowances are made for big accounts

australian twitter is full of cunts, in both senses

Just saw this posted in the Elon thread. Caek if you’re comfortable talking about it, what’s your prognosis? Is it just a lost cause?

I see folks on the app talking how we’ll need to resort to alternatives…what ‘alternatives’? Wait, I’ve got it — Weibo.
(Once I finally manage to sign back into Wechat I’ll let y’all know how it looks from there.)

𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek)
Posted: October 5, 2022 at 10:55:15 AM
My last day was Monday. So sad I wasn’t around for the three hour company 2023 strategy meeting yesterday that was interrupted after 15 mins by news the stock had been suspended.

wonder if this is the last stand for social media after twitter facebook and instagram inevitably fade it seems like the next generation of apps have split into two groups neither of which are exactly social media in the sense that the older gen are, theres the video consumption apps and the talking to people apps, theres def overlap between them and each other and them and the old style socials, but as far as primary usage seems like those are the two groups that are happening now

tiktok and youtube are the two big video consumption apps, they do have social features you can follow and comment you can post your own stuff but mainly they rely on algorithmic discovery to feed you video by people who are professional or at least quasi pro video creators, its a lot like tv except with endless niches and lower production values, pretty cool in some ways tbf

then theres the talking to people apps and the shift here is from the social approach of talking to everyone at once to more of a messaging model where youre talking to just one person or a chosen group of people, this could be seen as a retrenchment in the face of the fact that talking to everyone at once ended up being kind of unpleasant and occasionally resulted in not great real life outcomes, being a public figure is not for everyone, the apps in this category are all the chat + other stuff ones, whatsapp telegram snapchat etc there are lots of them, should be noted that all or at least most of these have ways for many people to follow you if you want, but its just not the primary interface

you can see the pattern too in how instagram and facebook are trying to become more consumption based apps, but it prob wont really work its just too messy to turn one app into another app, ive thought for a while theres prob a smaller market for barebones clones of twitter facebook and instagram with just their core functionality and no algorithmic etc bs

kind of funny twitter just goes along being twitter, you cant do anything with twitter, which elon will find out soon

It's really hard to imagine something like Twitter--where media people share links and snark about stuff--not existing at all, even if it's not Twitter anymore.

its true the freaks need somewhere to go, will be interesting to see what happens if elon radically changes the app, kinda think he wont tho

turns out heat death is a media ad sewer with "heart boxes." dystopian fiction always makes the pathway seem so horrifying/interesting.

twitter has tried flexing into being a talking to people app (with communities) and also into a video consumption app (and a bunch of other things) but it does seem like comedy shitposting and news comment are what it wants to be deep down inside and they should embrace it

I'm ok with that.

You may be cool, but you’ll never be as cool as this dog in a sidecar I just met. pic.twitter.com/OJWkgOSiRZ

— Jenny Lawson (@TheBloggess) October 6, 2022

Just saw this posted in the Elon thread. Caek if you’re comfortable talking about it, what’s your prognosis? Is it just a lost cause?

i don't have any more insight into twitter.com the social network than the average user. to me it has seemed like the best of a bad bunch for several years (part of the reason i joined). obviously it's going to become a cesspool now. it is (was?) relatively stable in terms of cultural relevance compared to everyone else. facebook is dying with a speed i don't think anyone expected. tiktok has peaked (good piece on this https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/22/23365781/tiktok-youtube-bootleg-ratio-social-platforms-original-content). what else is there? bereal? reddit?!

as an engineering org, twitter miiiight survive, but they've got a bunch of problems coming their way thanks to losing a large and particularly valuable subset of employees over the past six months (not talking about me here). this thread seems otm to me.

Since I'm trying to write down more predictions, here's one: Twitter's increasing institutional knowledge debt accumulation, which was been hugely accelerated by attrition due to uncertainty about the acquisition, will cause reliability to decline to 2020/2021 Reddit levels

— Dan Luu (@altluu) October 5, 2022

It seems clear to me that he will sell Twitter asap

Not before turning into a(nother) nest of racists, Nazis, misogynists, homophobes and other assorted miscreants.

"turning into"?

Turning *it* into