"Massive" is a bit of a strong word. One year of 8-16% inflation with historic averages close to 2-3% is actually quite ok and demonstrates the European Central Bank's credibility.
> And an unchained LLM trained on reality is far more capable of finding solutions to that problem than a bunch of squabbling politicians.
Not that I disagree with this statement, I don't, but this is not a silver bullet. Technology is, ultimately, operated by humans and no amount of frontier research and development can overcome collective action problems. At some point, you do have to sit down with these stupid politicians and get everyone on board. The loom was invented hundreds of years before the industrial revolution, in fact it was nearly forgotten and the designed survived due to a few happy accidents. It was only after the English Civil War and the establishment of checks on royal power that widespread adoption was possible.
Technology is operated by humans now, but I believe it is a mistake to think that technology could not evolve to the complexity that it can operate itself.
A lot of people are quite unhappy with it, yes, but... Consciousness is still very much a philosophical problem. Think of Marr's levels, functionally, LLMs and humans are quite similar, but algorithmically? How about the implementation layer? There are still many, many mysteries to be solved in the realm of philosophy of mind and LLMs should serve as reminders that Consciousness and Intelligence are not the same.
Chronological feed was always a thing, I've used it for years. In fact, one of the first noticeable changes was that this config stopped being persistent. I had to manually switch to chronological for months and still get "For You" as the default. Community notes precedes Musk too. View count is not only unreliable (because counting things is hard) but of dubious value. What do you get from it? Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
Twitter as of 2020 was fantastic, and these features added essentially no value to it. On the other hand, the public API is now a mess, twitter circle tweets are being shown to people who were not supposed to see them, I get logged out of all my accounts at least once a week and most notifications have serious delays.
I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
Yes, that's why I wrote "pushed". Before Musk it was hidden behind a stars button. After Musk it became a huge button at the top of your feed.
> Community notes precedes Musk too.
Which is why I wrote "improved".
> Longform text is literally what twitter is not about, and a major turn-off for so many people.
People have circumvented that since the start with screenshots or 15 tweet long threads. It makes a lot of sense to offer the option that a lot of people have been asking for and using through different hacks.
> I've been using twitter since the whale days back in 2010, and it feels like we lost a decade of SRE progress.
I joined in 2008 and my experience is that the development has been nonexistent for 10+ years. Rebranding bookmarks into likes was probably the worst idea. The fact that it doesn't do video well despite being the #1 news source for breaking news surprises me the most.
There was definitely development and new features - remember tweetpic and "RT @something"? They did the huge work it takes to go from 99% to >99,99% uptime. What did rebranding bookmarks into likes did that you think was so bad? I'm indifferent to it, but I could be wrong. Chronological TL needed only a couple of button clicks - then, after the acquisition, a couple of clicks every time you opened the TL because why not - so "hidden" seems like an exaggeration. Now it's 1, so, kudos to twtr 2.0 I guess?
Let's suppose for a moment none of the objections to these "features" I raise are valid. Why are people not talking about twitter circles being flat out broken? What about the constant changes to the UI which no sane design team would approve - like removing the "RT by @account" text out of nowhere, then putting it back up a few days later. Improvisation and rollbacks to major decisions? Remember when a couple of weeks in they just let people pay to get bluechecks and major advertisers had to deal with verified accounts posing as them? The whole "remove legacy bluecheck" thing?
Twitter was afloat and since 2020Q3, posting profits every quarter, but revenue has crashed as a result of all this. I can't really get why these details like "improved community notes" are more relevant to some people than the blatant mismanagement.
It always makes me laugh how, for years, we mocked journalists because of their inflated blue check egos, and now every "free thinker" out there is eager to pay to be just like them. Verification is meaningless for most individuals since there's no real need to verify if @ronny2938742 is indeed Mr. Ron Whatever.
However, it's crucial to know if an account claiming to be a big company, government agency, journalist, politician, etc. is legitimate. Opening verification to subscribers is absolutely scammy, just a way to make a couple of bucks off the victims of culture war brainwashing.
At least in my circles blue check marks were mocked because they became a symbol of endorsement of certain viewpoints by Twitter rather than a symbol of verified identity.
And yet the process to grant bluecheck was to literally check personal id, and grant it to whoever had media presence. For years, you could request verification, send a couple of links citing you, provide a government-issued ID and that was it.
Twitter verified literally every public figure it could - regardless of politics - even those who didn't seem to need verification. However, being a niche contrarian blogger does not make you a public figure, and that's where I feel the resentment is located.
Funny. I see it differently. I pay for the blue check because it adds legitimacy. If I'm replying and having conversations with people with similar blue checks then I know I'm talking to real humans not hiding behind fake usernames. Also, any threats or anything from bad actors could otherwise be tracked based on payment method.
When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames? What do you think underlies this feeling you seem to have?
EDIT: what I do think was a tremendous success is the publicity stunt. I've never seen any platform where people felt they should pay to let people know they were who they claimed to be. Kudos to the people doing the whole "twitter is filled with bots" psyop, it worked.
> When having conversations in HN does it bother you that you have no way to know if you're talking to a real human, not hiding behind fake usernames?
On HN, I'm not bothered at all. If I see the username "dang" for example, I know it's YC moderator dang also same with "patio11". I see HN as more of a private group discourse vs Twitter where it's public and where blue makes more sense. Akin to a forum, where I frequent like home-barista, the community is smaller and more focused so I don't see why having blue makes sense.
The accounts of companies, government agencies and people linked to those two have a different color of check or a special icon. This seems like an actual improvement on everyone being blue to me.
I acknowledge they're shipping changes to the frontend - some of which are not bad at all - but it sounds surreal to me that we keep talking about UI changes as if they were major features, and pretend twitter circles aren't broken, that notifications are as in near real time as they were, etc. There were major losses of service quality in basically everything backend related, and no amount of frontend tweaking can compensate that.
What really matters is how human institutions and organizations shape each other's incentives and costs [1]. Instead of aiming for abstract, intangible goals like "small" or "big" government, how about developing a sense of institutional design and relating that to a set of moral and political values. That way, it's actually possible to debug disagreements, either reducing them down to moral values and hopefully leaving it out of the public sphere or locating actual policy questions with less room for aesthetics and more for evidence, studies and sensible debate.
It really can't be said enough how pandas is a mess. It has way too much surface area and no common thread pulling it all together. This gets obvious when you work with better dataframe libs like dplyr [1] or DataFramesMeta [2]. I've worked on production systems with all of these libs, this is not gratuitous bashing.
[1] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/res...