My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.
Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.
Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.
I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.
The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.
Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.
Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.
As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.
It was not a Jenner joke: "The Babylon Bee's Man of the Year Is Rachel Levine" was the tweet that got them banned. Cringey but not remotely ban-worthy imho.
The context being that USA Today had celebrated Levine as one of its "Women of the Year".
Or as the Babylon Bee put it:
"Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Far too blasphemous for Twitter's censors at the time.
It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, outright said that it was important for this deal to go through and that is part of the "eighth front" in their war.
Larry Ellison is a vocal Zionist, leaked emails show that he vetted Marco Rubio for "fealty to Israel". In one email he outright said "Great meeting with Marco Rubio. I set him up to meet with Tony Blair. Marco will be a great friend for Israel".
Mac and iOS have something that is almost exactly the same as this called sandboxing. When a daemon or app starts one of the first things it does (usually right inside of “main”) is enable the sandbox and declare which resources to whitelist, everything else is denied.
It is only useful for guarding your own process against someone using malicious inputs to get your process to do something you don’t intend. It is not a guard against programs written by malicious actors (malware), there exist other mechanisms to guard against malware.
SELinux and Apparmor are typically configured by admins. They require root privileges and are designed with human interfaces. It is certainly atypical for a program to say "hey kernel, apply this apparmor profile to me" and they're not designed for incrementally dropping rights either.
On Windows and MacOS programs are free to sandbox themselves programmatically and without privileges. Linux is the odd one out, basically every way of reducing your privileges programmatically requires already being root or at least having an admin preconfigure the system in a way that would allow it.
The ACLU only writes these articles when the system is being used to take down something they like politically.
They never had a problem with the App Store removing Gab, Parler, or Infowars. It’s hard to take institutions like the ACLU seriously when they have such obvious bias. If the ACLU had taken a principled stance when the system was being used to take down things that they didn’t like, they would have been able to keep their legitimacy.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
We know that Grok, like other LLMs, is trained on data that is not held to any rigorous standard of knowledge like exists in the fields of journalism or academia.
There is no reason to think that such a system is even capable of determining truth. At best, we might be able to say that it reflects a consensus of opinion, but even that is a stretch given the nature of these systems.
And that ignores the fact that we know that these products are designed to be sycophantic to their users/operators. That is not a recipe for objective knowledge. Especially given what we know about Grok (meddling by Musk).
And to cap it all off, for all of Wikipedia's real or perceived flaws, all of the decision making is done in public view. This is very much not the case with Grok.
It's dystopian and obviously so. Your comment about "Luddite mentality" is farcical on its face. Of you, I might say something like... "techbro mentality", or maybe even something less flattering.
Your point about Wikipedia being out in the open is correct and fair. Grokipedia should do the same. Grokipedia is at version .1 and they have stated the intention is to open source it, so it seems obvious that it will be similarly open.
Just because it’s done in the open doesn’t mean it can’t have some pretty bad biases though. Just looking at the set of allowable sources shows pretty extreme bias to begin with. The type of people who self select to become Wikipedia editors (just like Reddit mods) skew heavily on many topics, and there isn’t much effort to correct for it.
Again though, you are not pointing out anything wrong with the information presented itself, only the fact that you don’t like the person/technology compiling the information.
And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with.
And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should be obvious if he even glanced at the code he was posting. I'd hate to see the kind of Grok-generated buggy crap he unwittingly checks into source code control.
It's strange that timonoko is so compelled to virtue signal so often that he shares Musk's and Grok's racist views. But at least now we know what kind of person he is.
James Watson just stated that intelligence and race are related. Something that every normal person knows and experiences regularly. Calling things that you don’t like racist doesn’t work anymore, nobody cares.
There is so much anti white hatred present in media, many people yearn for a source of information to correct for it.
One example just this week the economist published this wonderful headline:
>With Trump and Vance in power, many pro-natalists believe this is the moment to jump-start baby-making. But some critics see pro-natalism as part of an insidious project to create a whiter America
There are hundreds of headlines like this present in publications that are in Wikipedia’s allowable sources list. We are happy to have a source to correct for its bias.
You did not address any of the actual information presented, only the fact that you don’t like the people/technology used to create it, which kind of makes my point.
Imagine if we sent Senagal $10M per day in tax payer money and questioning it led to your own politicians labeling you as "anti-senagalese" and being ousted from every political party.
"The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world"
"Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations."
The way I interpret this is Google, Amazon operates in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions. The security services for any of these countries(including for example Egypt where Google has offices according to....Google), can produce a legal(in Egypt) order requesting Google to produce data of another customer( for example Israeli govt) and Google has to comply or leave Egypt.
It seems to me that being under constant threat of your government sensitive data being exposed at the whims of another, potentially adversarial government is not a sustainable way of operating and Im surprised that Israel havent either found ways of storing its infrastructure locally or encrypting it five way to Sunday.
This is not a comment on the specific accusation of actions by Israel but for strange reality of being a small-country government and a customer of a multi-national cloud vendor.
Also I think the piracy experience has improved significantly. Jellyfin + Infuse makes the watching experience just as good, if not better than, the streaming apps. You get the same nice scrolling interface, trailers, automatic subtitles and it feels just as good as the Netflix app. Except it’s all the content you actually want, nothing you don’t, and there are no ads.
For all its problems, X is undisputedly the place with the most diverse range of viewpoints and interesting people.
It seems that this author wants more diversity of thought but also starts the article out decrying X for unbanning accounts that he disagrees with.
Kind of difficult to have diversity of thought if you ban diversity of thought.
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