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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#941

Post by beaned »

tadfisher wrote: post #518
beaned wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a strong element of people here rooting for Twitter to fail because they dislike Elon's politics.

That's... a perfectly reasonable position to hold?

Is it..? All the replies to this thread just mention how he has abhorrent politics but there's no specifics. I'm not sure anyone really knows why they dislike him, and thought critically about it. A lot of it seems assumption-based, fed mostly by the media who is Twitter's biggest competitor. And on Hacker News, of all places. I'd think it the most likely place to find people who understand the rift between tech and trad media, and that character assassination is the biggest tool used by one particular side in this war. Instead the middling tech armchair specialists who partake in and promote the culture that birthed Elon and his multitude of companies have bought the other side's narrative to hate on their own.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#943

Post by x86x87 »

tasubotadas wrote: post #454
highmastdon wrote: post #424

What a toxic thread... Both here and the post on sfba.social

Lots of FAANG developers here hate Musk because he has shown that 80% of them is a waste of salary.

Lol. Right on buddy.

You know what all corporations should do to maximize short term profit? Fire everyone. It's amazing how much money we spend on people /s

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#944

Post by Eric_WVGG »

eql5 wrote: post #791

Here's a guy who understands what's REALLY going on: https://twitter.com/i/status/1675254646942896128

I was skeptical, but this was a really good watch. Pity that it’s a video.

For the to;dw crowd: he makes the case that Twitter is by far the most useful social network to government agencies, because the graph is mostly public (unlike Facebook) and all users are both consumers and creators (unlike YouTube). Thus, it is being used by “researchers” and state departments to build what he calls “the Death Star of AI censorship engines,” and these moves to rate limit will cripple those efforts.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#945

Post by wpietri »

agentofoblivion wrote: post #930
wpietri wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, good idea. People can go build something against the Twitter API! Oh wait! I'm absolutely going to keep enjoying Musk's comeuppance. In this, consider me a traditionalist. As the Greek tragedies show, people have been enjoying the just punishment of hubris for thousands of years.

I’m pretty sure those are supposed to be moral lessons, not misery porn. But hey, you seem to openly accept the idea of enjoying another’s suffering, and I admire that kind of honesty. I hope it doesn’t end up causing you misery.

I don't think you're quite getting the moral lesson in telling stories about gods punishing hubris, so let me spell it out: titanic arrogance is bad and comes with consequences, so don't do it, kids. The point is for people to see particular kinds of suffering as both appropriate and necessary.

I agree that people enjoying suffering generally is pretty bad, and I avoid it. But I make an exception for people who cause suffering receiving the just consequences of their terrible actions. If Musk were just some guy who were living a quiet life and then got cancer or something, I'd feel for him. But he's not. He's someone who's been aggressively a jerk for more than a decade.

His deciding to take on being a CEO of yet another company, one he didn't really understand except as a user, was bad enough. But as a former Twitter user and employee, I've had to watch him destroy something that a lot of people, me included, worked very hard on. I've had to watch him harm thousands of people quite directly, and many more indirectly. And all for nothing more than his arrogance and some half-baked clout-chasing notions.

So I am absolutely going to enjoy the fuck out of his serial rake-stepping. Could this be bad for me? Well that's a question I will take seriously from somebody in saffron robes that spends 10 hours a day meditating. But it's not one I'll entertain from the Volunteer Musk Defense Brigade, and especially not from one of its members who was busy performing lack of empathy recently on this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35824824

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#946

Post by thaumasiotes »

Topfi wrote: post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

> the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting

This is something I don't get. They say that Twitter is now blocking embeds and I've seen an author respond by... including a screenshot of a tweet in their piece.

Except that's obviously better than embedding a tweet in the first place. It's better in every possible way. It's easier to write your article with an included image that you provide than to hotlink content from some other website. And when the tweet vanishes into the mists of history, your captured image of it will still be around, illustrating your article the way you were hoping the embedded tweet would do. There are so many articles out there with dead embedded tweets illustrating... something.

So, all that said... what was the effect that embeddability had on reporting? Why hasn't it been screenshots the whole time? What did easy embeddability enable that wasn't just as easy anyway?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#947

Post by regularjack »

Sai_ wrote: post #771
phillipcarter wrote: post #446

All Elon had to do was leave it alone and, oh, right, the 44 billion. Hahahahaha! Man, Parag Agrawal and his team knew exactly what they were doing. A fool and his money are soon parted, indeed.

I have an alternative theory for this. Once Elon was forced by the DE court to buy Twitter, he went to autocrats and dictators with money and told them he'd burn Twitter to the ground on their behalf for 44B. No Twitter, no Arab Spring. No live updates of disasters, no need to shutdown the internet to prevent dissenting voices from spreading.

You thought Musk was playing 4D chess? Think again. He was in fact playing 29D chess, with dictators, and autocrats.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#948

Post by wpietri »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #900
wpietri wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that in a tone of contradiction, but sycophants are absolutely trying to earn their pay. They've just decided that their true job is what their context rewards.

So what though? They existed before and they'll continue to exist, they didn't magically appear 'because Musk.'

Nothing magic about it. When you fire all the people who contradict you, you create yes men and a culture of sycophancy. At that point it's self-perpetuating.

Twitter had many issues as a company, but one of its strengths was a lot of independent thinking and honest speech among staff. That's surely gone, and once gone it's very hard to get back.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#949

Post by freedomben »

midasuni wrote: post #873
ineedasername wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions. Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely…

What do you do when people decide to make the exact ama E mistake again? If you can’t refer to “last time this was disaster” (aka “I told you so”) how do you prevent it.

Avoiding the mentality isn't the same as referring to the past. With most people, It's perfectly fine to bring up the past in a matter of fact and dispassionate way, so long as it's constructive and not meant to shove "see I was right" in their faces.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#950

Post by Regic »

kybernetikos wrote: post #882
whatever1 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is never sufficient testing. If there is, then you have a formal proof for your algorithm.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. – Donald Knuth It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.

WPA2 also had an exploit (KRACK) while the handshake algorithm itself was "proven to be secure". Formal verification is a powerful tool but it does not guarantee bug-free code: it merely guarantees that the particular bugs you checked for are not possible.
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