What exactly are you talking about regarding the "organ harvesting thing"? It's undeniable that it happened. In 2014 China promised to stop doing it. Here's an article from Chinese state media:
> China's long-term dependence on executed prisoners as organ donors will end at the start of next year, according to a high-ranking official.
My understanding is the debates are over whether or not it still happens and to what extent political prisoners (particularly Falun Gong members) were victims.
One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
I mean you're a platform company in 2023 and you don't want an API? Idk that sounds like competence to me in failing to appreciate its value. Sure, I appreciate it follows a strategy but I worry that the strategy will not help twitter in the long term.
I think you need to rate limit and auth most free consumer-facing end points, given the maliciousness of public traffic. Limiting it is just protecting yourself from its worst excesses, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to be a platform.
it hosts a communication service for organisations and individuals to build followings and broadcast messages. I guess its about whether you see Twitter as more than its user interface or not.
That sounds like a deliberate decision to maintain backwards compatibility.
I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
The mental gymnastics of Musk haters are next level. If Twitter dies, he is dumb and incompetent. If he saves it, it was all just part of his evil plan. You got all outcomes covered, great.
Either way he is still the guy who publicly mocked his own employee for having muscular dystrophy, offered another employee a horse if they gave him a handjob, called a cave diver who saved a bunch of children a pedo, spread conspiracy theories about an elderly man who was beaten by an intruder with a hammer....
I didn't say he was a good person. But it's obvious that he's not incompetent and that he's just trying his best to salvage his investment. The idea that he is intentionally driving Twitter into the ground is beyond ridiculous.
According to himself it has fallen 50% in value since he bought it. If he just wanted to salvage his investment he'd tweet once a week about about features or metrics. As it is he spends a lot of his time shitposting and making facially absurd claims.
Right...and I'm saying that if he tweeted less and delivered more, he'd be taken more seriously than he is. Hype/salesmanship is part of business, but in the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they're delivering bespoke and high-end manufactured products. People are willing to wait for infrequent product delivery while tolerating sometimes-fanciful claims of great potential.
Twitter is different because it's a real-time mass communication platform, so the hype is received and processed differently. And outside of his fanbase, few people seem impressed with the changes as manifested so far and this is reflected in the response of advertisers.
Long tweets seem to work OK and offer a clear, obvious user benefit. I'm having difficulty thinking of any other examples.
The API's the thing that makes Twitter tolerably-usable to heavy users—the ones who draw eyeballs to the site so the ads are worth more than $0.00—right?
If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as incompetent, yes.
I'm not familiar with Twitter or its API, but are ads also returned via the API?
If not, then it would be more profitable for them to heavily restrict API access, and kill off 3rd party clients, so that more people would use the official clients where ads are actually shown.
I.e. they don't care about heavy users if they can't make a profit from them.
Heavy users are the ones who generate the content that gives the site value in the first place, though. Advertisers aren't there to sell products to the 1% of users who make most of the posts, they're there to sell to the 99% reading those posts. Making posting on twitter a bigger pain for the people who do most of the posting—and especially for celebrity and brand accounts that get tons of "engagement" they want/need to keep track of—is probably not a great move.
There clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it. They must be maintaining and building an API. The only thing that's not being maintained or updated are the public facing endpoints. That doesn't mean much.
This is how many websites work. A public api requires done right means you are spending effort maintaining it but worse, if your apps use it as well, it means you have to wait not only for your apps to update (maybe 11+ for different platforms), you have to wait for independent third parties to also update. With internal platforms, you can generally priortize changes if you need to with your coworkers, and you know the time frame for platforms like Samsung tvs and Playstations, and can plan for it.
External 3rd parties are unknown in some cases, and may try to leverage you in others.
So you have a stable 3rd party api for some very large features, and we have a internal highly fluid api for our stuff. 3rd parties can totally use that api you use, and do. But why make any representations or tie your velocity to all those 3rd parties for your main app.
You want these companies to inovate and improve while also tying them to often unmonitized ecosystems of 3rd parties you can't communicate with or priroitize well.
It's generally unsurprising to me that the api support breaks down this way. I actually think it's pretty disiungenuine to make a sold 3rd party api without it being monetized. That encourages people to build ecosystems on other peoples good will which. We've seen how that works time and again. Even worse when 3rd parties try and compete partly with the bread and butter of the api they're using.
developers who use the publicly available API can't use that
The point is that saying there's no API is wrong. There is an API. Elon has chosen not to let developers outside of Twitter use it. It's clearly a political choice rather than a technical competence problem.
That's like saying that my front door isn't shut because the doors to rooms inside are open. When people say 'API' they mean the public-facing endpoints, not the internal ones that are only accessible to Twitter's developers.
I mean ultimately it’s all semantics, but the idea that a private API is not an API proper is not exactly unusual.
It’s more a business competence than a technical competence issue, likely (unless he’s actually attempting to have a direct technical role, in which case it is Dunning-Kruger made manifest).
LLaMA is Facebook's LLM (large language model, comparable with GPT). It's publicly available (anyone can download the weights and run it themselves), so it's popular here.
LoRA, or Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models, lets people fine tune a LLM (making it perform better for a particular application) using vastly less resources. Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09685.pdf
A strong majority want to maintain the status quo or gradually move toward independence. Very few want unification. It's important to understand that China promises to invade if Taiwan declares independence (the Anti-Secession Law requires that response), which means many people would ideally prefer independence but in practice support the status quo because de facto independence (the status quo) is better than being invaded. Both sides of Taiwanese politics formally support the status quo, although the DPP has stronger pro-independence leanings.
Taiwanese identity (as opposed identifying as Chinese) has also trended up in recent decades and now most people only consider themselves to be Taiwanese and not Chinese. https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/PageDoc/Detail?fid=7800&id=6961
No it isn't according to the definition everyone else uses for "gerrymandering" (drawing specific electorate boundaries with partisan goals).
What he's complaining about (that the system of one representative from each electorate biases against candidates who could never win in one electorate but have a modest amount of support in the entire population) is worth contemplating, but isn't gerrymandering. New Zealand addresses this problem by giving everyone two votes, an electorate vote and a party vote, and members are chosen from electorates and party lists. New Zealand only has one chamber. Australia has two. Australia's Upper House is elected at a state level with multiple members from each state, so this is where minor party candidates get elected.
I think his argument is that it is "gerrymandering" in the sense that the system is maintained the way it is, because that serves the political self-interest of the major parties. The boundaries themselves aren't gerrymandered, but the system according to which they exist is.
By that definition, one might say that Australia has a single layer of gerrymandering – gerrymandered at the systemic level but not at the district level – while the US has two layers of gerrymandering – gerrymandered districts in a gerrymandered system.
> How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.
It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?
> The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.
Where the evidence for that claim? More likely is that there's no impetus for change, at the least, and quite possibly no interest in it given people's feelings about how the Senate is voted and the proliferation of smaller parties there.
The current system was adopted for clearly political reasons - due to the outcome of the 1918 Swan by-election, which the ALP won because the conservative vote was split between the Nationalist and Country parties. The Nationalists were the direct ancestors of the current Liberal Party. If the system was invented to serve the needs of (one of) the major parties, who really believes that its survival isn’t because it serves the needs of both of them (or should I say, all 2.5 of them)
What you're describing is smaller parties benefiting from PV. You haven't addressed your claim. Labor is the big party and the smaller conservative parties are benefiting.
In the Australian context, the big parties are Labor and the Coalition. The Coalition is formally an alliance of two parties, but in many situations they act like a single one–indeed, in Queensland they actually merged into one (the LNP), and effectively they are a merged party in the NT as well (the CLP), although that technically was never a "merger" as such. The Nationalists and Country party in 1918 were the historical predecessors of the current Coalition. The "small parties" are the minor parties which are neither Labor nor the Coalition, but still manage to win some seats in Parliament–nowadays primarily the Greens on the left, One Nation on the right, and a random mishmash in the middle–although as we go back through the decades, other players have risen to prominence only to subsequently fade away (most notably the Democrats and before that the DLP). And then you have the "micro parties" which run candidates but never win any seats, or one or two of them might strike it lucky on very rare occasions (like the now-defunct Motoring Enthusiasts Party did in 2013).
It also bears mentioning that in the election, the Liberals (Australian right wing for anyone watching US politics) lost Wentworth. To give an idea about how right-wing Wentworth, is, that a was the seat of a recent Liberal prime minister. Lost Kooyong, seat of a prospective candidate for Liberal leadership. Lost a bunch of other seats that broadly support right-wing policy.
There is a revolt underway on the right of Australian politics as various factions battle to decide what exactly the right wing is going to stand for. That contributed a lot more to their election defeat than the concerns this gentleman raises. There were significant swings against both major parties, although the Labor party just lost a few votes while the Liberals were eviscerated.
That isn't gerrymandering, that is losing lots of votes leading to the loss of an election.
How many pixels a stitched panorama has is not as clear cut I guess. Just because you stitch a panorama at a certain size does not mean that you actually have information for that much resolution - and it's hard to say what size you should stitch at since, for any notrivial panorama, how many source pixels contribute to an area in the output will vary greatly depending on where on the panorama you are looking at due to the nonlinear transforms involved. E.g. stiching an equirectangular projection from ~rectilinear source images will give you much more resolution at the center line compared to the top/bottom, which are just one point stretched across the whole width (for a panorama covering the whole 180 vertical angles).
Then there is also the question of what the source resoltion actually is - most commonly the quoted resolution of a camera (i.e. the "Megapixels" on the maketing material) is usually the number of sensor "pixels" but each of those is only a single color so the resulting image won't really have that many RGB pixels of information even if it is developed at that resolution - the will be quite a bit filled in by interpolation.
Then there is resolution loss from suboptimal focus due to needing to cover a large distance range, lens imperfections or just the air when things are far enough away.
So while the resulting image might have 120 000 000 000 pixels, it might not actually have more than 80 000 000 000 pixels worth of information. That's not to say it isn't impressive, just trying to point out that a simple gigapixel number might not actually say what you might think.
The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.
what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.
It's also worth noting that revealing real names and workplaces of anonymous accounts is still allowed. The doxxing that is banned is a specific class of doxxing that isn't often considered to be doxxing.
That's probably true for everything about how he runs Twitter. It's his personal platform now, and not a public town square anymore. He makes up the rules to suit himself, and he'll enforce them the way he wants.
most of what you say is spot on, but lets be clear:
twitter has never nor would it have ever been "a public town square"
anything owned by a private company is the literal opposite of a "public" anything.
and way more importantly, anything with a character limit of 280 characters is absolutely thoroughly inadequate to discuss the most complicated and nuanced subjects that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries with entire tomes and libraries worth of space.
I completely and wholeheartedly agree. These companies always love to present themselves as a public space, while simultaneously leveraging their control over it.
And I definitely prefer social media that support long form posts and contextual discussions instead of these weird loosely linked twitter threads.
While “anymore” may be out of place, I believe OP was referring to this (among other similar quotes): Musk said the reason he acquired Twitter is to have "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner."
I was thinking about this last night during the Space chat. Jason Calacanis was insisting that the level of tracking represented by ElonJet was something new and all I could think of was paparazzi. For decades, movie stars have been monitored in a far more intrusive way.
That doesn’t mean the plane tracking was or wasn’t good, it just surprised me that Calacanis was so unaware.
Yes, if (1) you had confidence Biden was on the plane at the time, and (2) if you posted it in order to cause physical harm.
Most doxxing that people worry about isn't just "oh look, biden is coming to town! cool!". It's more like "Supreme Court justice lives here with family. Go outside their house and start 'threatening' them now", followed by some sort of fake "no violence" post to CYA.
I wasn't referring to the policy, but the concept of "doxxing" at large. Twitter's specific rules can be whatever they want, but most people know doxxing when they see, no matter where or when it happens.
> Most doxxing that people worry about isn't just "oh look, biden is coming to town! cool!". It's more like "Supreme Court justice lives here with family. Go outside their house and start 'threatening' them now", followed by some sort of fake "no violence" post to CYA.
The whole debate about the killing of JFK is less about Oswald or his motives and 100% focused on the failures to protect the President.
Musk is not special, he occupies the same 10 square feet as everybody, and he has the resources to enforce a physical perimeter of security way larger than that around himself and/or whoever he might be interested in.
People have the right to know where he is and what he is up to, that comes with his position, if he doesn't like it he can start offloading his billions to the less fortunate.
Musk failed to protect his family (btw what family?) in the physical world and now wants to have his vengence in the online world. Doesn't work that way, he should start spending on security like any other billionaire to ensure safety for himself and people he cares about in the physical world and leave the online world alone, including the ability to track him (and dare I say it?) make fun of him.
But it will never happen because this guy doesn't care about common sense, he only cares about being a Techno-God among mortals , in a world where rules don't apply to him and everybody genuflects to him.
"People have the right to know where he is and what he is up to, that comes with his position, if he doesn't like it he can start offloading his billions to the less fortunate."
Total rubbish.
What right? And where is that right enumerated? I've read the federalist papers twice, the USC countless times, and know my way around the US Code. Nowhere is it defined that YOU have a fundamental right to keep track of people ...ostensibly because they are more successful than you?
Why can't we track losers, too? Make sure they are going to work or school and not just draining the retirement accounts of their parents?
You have no fundamental right to anyone's privacy. Full stop.
> Why can't we track losers, too? Make sure they are going to work or school and not just draining the retirement accounts of their parents?
Doesn't work that way, poor people have no power by definition.
The separation of powers isn't just something between a handful of elites such as Congress members who can impeach and convict the POTUS, or a bunch of judges, generals, chiefs etc.
The ultimate separation of powers is that there are ultimately 8 billion of us keeping an eye on each other and preventing an individual from going rogue and engage in selfish and anti-social behavior, and that is true whether you are a journalist, President, judge, general, chief...whatever and also billionaires.
It's pretty much an accepted concept, by everybody, except from your guy , the guy you are defending so much who'd absolutely love to be the unchallenged and undisputed dictator of the online world, and tomorrow the physical world.
Probably the carve out is because Musk doxxed that short seller guy, 'Montana Skeptic,' and tried to get his employer to fire him.
But he already made a location carve-out too: he himself posted pictures of the alleged stalker guy and a license tag. That would get someone banned under the location rule. Even if it was a day later, the incident itself happened a day later than any elonjet post I believe, so that's within his real-time timeframe.
Imagine pushing a matchbox car on a table with a ruler, where the ruler is perpendicular to the direction of movement. When the car is on an angle, the car will be moving faster than the ruler (wind). The steeper the angle, the faster the car can go relative to the wind.
> China's long-term dependence on executed prisoners as organ donors will end at the start of next year, according to a high-ranking official.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-12/05/content_190287...
My understanding is the debates are over whether or not it still happens and to what extent political prisoners (particularly Falun Gong members) were victims.