rmatt2000

People get layed off from companies all the time. Why is it the end of the world when it happens at Twitter?

I'm a little bit confounded that Twitter's current culture is such that a large number of people contemplate sabotage as an appropriate response to changing employment conditions. I mean, maybe the company culture really is broken.

> "I promise you: We will be able to do it."

While the idea was almost certainly to warn Putin, it doesn't seem very smart to me to have said it out loud.

I suspect many countries know who did it, but think it is not in their best interests to either admit that they know, or let others know that they know. International intrigue indeed!

I always read the story as a warning against forced collectivism. Specifically, forcing people to act against what they believe are their own individual interests, and instead sacrifice those interests in order to advance the goals of the wider society.

Here is one of my favorite videos from the early days of the web. Two popular morning television hosts discuss the at-symbol and ask "what is internet, anyway?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

<ctrl>f office

0/0

> to temporarily give the government additional power to deal with emergencies.

I just want to point out that, according to the U.S. federal government, we are still in a "temporary" state of emergency, and have been for 30 months now.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/15/health/covid-public-health-em...

I'm somewhat skeptical that giving more power and discretion to federal regulators will result in increasing freedoms for the American people.

Who are you gonna believe? Two forms of government issued paperwork, or your buddy on the other end of the radio? /s

I can think of a spec for a simple application that would fix all the problems associated with "courtesy [sic] towing". However, it also seems pretty clear that any city government that would engage in "courtesy [sic] towing" probably has zero interest in fixing it.

Twitter stores the IP address associated with every Tweet. If someone posts an illegal tweet (say, criticizing the CCP, or supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong or Taiwan), the Chinese government could combine the IP information with other information that it collects to identify the individual.

Or Cake by the Ocean Blue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9VfJqHwYKs

> Forcing private entities to host speech they don't want to goes against what I define as freedom of speech.

What if the private entity is suppressing speech at the behest of the government?

You should spend some time on a college campus. Shouting down speakers and deplatforming non-progressives is more common than one might think.

If there aren't enough moderators, wouldn't the likely result be fewer rule-breaking accounts banned rather than more non-rule-breaking accounts banned?

Maybe, instead of hiring N skilled moderators for $D, they could be hiring N * \delta unskilled moderators for the same price.

You mean like when your company faces an existential crises, but the CEO can't be reached because he's on a vision quest?

In the political Twitter neighborhoods that I inhabit, there have been many cases over the years of people having their accounts yanked, with the only message being "You have been banned for violating the Twitter rules. This decision is final and cannot be appealed."

When these bannings get publicized, however, the bad publicity often leads to the "permanent ban" being reversed, with Twitter simply explaining that the original ban "was a mistake". How does this sort of thing happen so often, unless random employees have access to powerful tools that they are not authorized or trained to use?

Licensure of physicians in the U.S. is controlled by medical associations through state licensing agencies. They have an incentive to limit the number of people who receive licenses to practice medicine.

I used to own a Ford Fusion with an early version of Sync. The car itself was great. The Sync software by Microsoft, however, was not.

One of the innumerable bugs was in the voice recognition system. No matter what song I requested, about half the time it played "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John.

I was demonstrating this bug to a friend who asked "What happens when you request Tiny Dancer?" Sure enough, it played something else.

Isn't that what the old-timers call distributed systems?

If a private individual can do this, imagine how easy it is for the U.S. government to suppress content that it doesn't like on social media.

> For the people who buy one of each color and then return all but one

Amazon's "try before you buy" encourages people to do just this, so I'm guessing Amazon has figured out how to make this shopping pattern profitable.

I think the problem is that Amazon returns are not inspected by someone associated with the manufacture of the product. I suspect that return handlers have to handle thousands of products and can only give a returned product a cursory inspection.

I once bought some expensive eyeglass frames from Amazon. When they arrived, it was pretty clear that they were not factory new. I returned the product and gave the company a bad review. The CEO of the company actually sent me an email apologizing, saying that this was an on-going problem. He said people order new frames identical to ones they currently own, swap out the lenses, and return the old ones. Amazon will often accept these returns, repackage them, and ship them as new, and the company which sells the frames has not control over this.

The clothing company LL Bean dealt with this same sort of issue. It used to be that if you weren't happy with a purchase, you could return any item you bought from Bean, at any time, for a full refund.

One day, the CEO of the company donated some of his old LL Bean clothing to a charity that accepts used clothing. One of the shirts he donated had his initials embroidered on it. In less than a month, that same shirt had been returned to Bean, stating the person was unsatisfied with his purchase, and requesting a full refund of the purchase price.

It's interesting that failed communist regimes often seem to be succeeded by kleptocracies. I wonder if any political scientists have studied this and can explain why.

> I'm not talking automated testes or anything.

I'd love to see an entire thread on this topic alone.

A few years ago, I designed an incredibly fast write-only file system, but for some reason couldn't leverage it into a commercial product that anyone was willing to buy.

> ... the credibility of social science in general is damaged.

Umm, I have some news for you.

I wonder if the Univ. of Minnesota is has any potential liability here?