Copying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting
Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).
The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.
It's frustrating that anything related to X/Twitter is such a predictably-partisan tinderbox because this is really interesting technical information. Thank you for sharing it!
It's partisan/political because Musk is partisan/political. And it's not just Musk.
We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.
So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.
And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.
so strange for you to blame this on Musk. Twitter was already super partisan long before he took it over
Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and--by the looks of it--he's chosen a bad one.
(In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he's good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America's EV standard bearer. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)
I think people see Musk differently from how he actually is. Or at least how he sees himself.
He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society.
I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.
From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.
Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).
I remember when the Toyota Prius was a potent symbol of everything that was wrong with smug liberals. Lazy comedians still use the Prius as a punchline. Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage? Why don't right-wing conspiracy theorists consider Musk to be part of the "WHO/WEF globalist elite", despite the fact that he's a tech billionaire who is literally trying to plug people's brains into The Matrix and colonise space?
By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about "the woke mind virus", or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.
Weirdly Hybrids have now become a climate denial fave.
In any thread about EVs there is a typical HN commenter desperate to tell you that they drive a hybrid, not an EV like those silly virtue signalers.
For those who remember the vicious attacks on the Prius it's a wild shift in attitude.
Weird how pointing out climate change inaccuracies destroyed scientific debate.
In any thread about climate change they are desperate to tell you that you’re a climate denier when you point out inaccurate information.
For those who remember the vicious attacks on science, we called that the dark ages.
In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. This was at a time when effective drugs were already approved and saving lives.
Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…
This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.
It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
This is how science works. Being right is not "science". Science is verb. If the questioners were right we would be calling them heroes.
I said as much in my comment, pointing out that these scientists with differing takes were not the bad guys: “These scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies.”
The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.
The thing that is so maddening is that we're already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren't really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define "something else").
"Pointing out inaccurate information" in HN comments is not scientific debate, nor a science.
Funny thing is that he is poisoning his own well by making leftwing people , who are much more likely to drive an EV, abhor him and Tesla.
It’s not only happening in the US but has also started to happen in other countries like Australia.
It's in full swing here in Sweden too. Me and a close colleague bought new cars a couple of months apart. My left-leaning teammates who are usually pretty climate aware only offered congratulations to my colleagues new gasgussler, but had some criticisms for me who bought a Tesla.
I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?
Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.
Yup - the hole turned me off so much I've switched my first EV buy to Hyundai ioniq 5 (N if my wife authorises it LOL) ... not saying they're any better but it's a branding thing ... I couldn't stand to be associated with anything to do with that hole.
There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.
SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.
I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.
Yep, and I know people who have sold their Teslas because they don't want to be associated with Musk any longer.
If you want an honest answer to Prius vs Tesla, it's because Prius was seen as a slower and lamer version of existing cars for people who didn't care about cars. While Tesla's could get from 0-60 faster than hypercars of the time.
Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.
Yep. And he could have effortlessly achieved tolerability in most right wing circles that reflexively dislike "smug liberals" simply by not saying "smug liberal" stuff whilst encouraging right wingers to talk up what a great capitalist innovator he was, running red state targeted ad campaigns and making a pickup truck that people that normally drive gas-guzzlers would actually want to drive. His aspirations for colonies on Mars were already at least as appealing to much of the right as they ever were to the left.
Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.
When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
Not how partisan affiliation works--think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren't seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).
This surprises me (I believe you though!). I've read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I'd blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.
Sure. I don't think he's a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that's in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.
Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we're seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk's deteriorating influence.
What is this topic that's only in vogue in tech circles? Wokeism?
Wokeism as it pertains to social media's discussion of the woke mind virus. Everyone has an opinion on it. But it's not of practical relevance to most people, certainly not most voters. Sort of like modern art.
Considering a ton of podcasts talk about it and they're not in the tech bubble I'd say it's a pretty important topic especially in the US.
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans.
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot, especially by a particular core who gain money and influence from it. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans. It certainly doesn’t build one a national platform.
I do agree that he is hyper fixated on specific things like gender
but – I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship. I don’t think that censorship has any place in a democracy, and I do think it is a problem we need to address.
The executive branch asked Twitter to ban a NY Post story on the grounds that it was misinformation when it wasn’t. It was “malinformation”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinformation
They didn’t correct the record, and Ro Khanna emailed Twitter to cut that shit out: https://www.businessinsider.com/khanna-emailed-twitter-free-...
I really don’t like Elon, but I fear the previous Twitter censors more. Media is supposed to keep the government in check and not the other way around.
Musk’s Twitter actively censors and promotes content based on the personal whims of the billionaire owner. Is that really better for democracy?
The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.
Props to Bluesky for trying something else, at least.
The opposite was true before Musk.
Some friends have an ancap libertarian and they were targeted before.
Woke content is not censored and you can find it on X, it's just that most left-wing people left for alternatives.
I went to bluesky briefly and I was inundated by transgender explicit content. I didn't open it again.
Musk censors mentions of his own daughter on X — the same person who he claimed was dead on a recent interview, but who is very much alive and posting on Threads.
That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.
“ I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship”
Then let’s not focus on some made up boogeyman and ignore the fact that in 2020, the executive at the time was happily reaching out to Twitter and other platforms asking them to remove posts. The guy Musk is supporting was happily asking Twitter to remove posts.
But let’s be clear, they were asking Twitter to enforce its rules. And you can argue that the government asking like that is illegal, but I’ve yet to see a guilty verdict in court so, until that happens, Twitter enforcing its rules isn’t censorship. No one has been denied their first amendment rights.
More importantly, by Musks own yardstick, Twitter is no longer the bastion of Free Speech it was when he took control. So regardless of what you think, Twitter is worse off now.
The reason I don't move to the USA is because of woke people, scary numbers of mental health and crime.
The reason I moved country is because woke politics is making life worse. Crime is through the roof, kids can't go out in the cities by themselves because it's too dangerous. They started doing mandatory "gender identity" education in school, teaching crap to my kids.
I'm still in Europe and observing a progressive decline so I'm ready to move to Asia, the Caribbean, South America (Argentina maybe?) or maybe switch to the enemy and go to Russia or China, depending on how the situation evolves.
Dictatorship for dictatorship, I just want a low tax, safe place and governments to bother me as little as possible.
Some countries in Eastern Europe actively opposes gender stuff (it is banned in education). I do not know why "gender" is being asked in the first place, it should be "sex", and that is biological. Why do we ask for gender on websites, for example? What is the purpose of it, really?
He believes the woke mind virus is a threat because he has a trans kid.
Yeah so much for supporting your children in their chosen life path :'(
Imagine having to completely break contact with your own father because he hates who you are so much :'(
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61880709
Musk blames 'wokeness' for his daughter rejecting him after he didn't accept who she was. His entire conflict with the left and the 'woke' is centered around this one issue. He can't accept that he was rejected because of what he has done, so he needs someone else to blame and fight with. He bought X as his propaganda tool, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions on society—he only wants to win.
I don't think that's correct, it seems more likely that he was always driven by an inferiority complex.
The issue is that many people who feel this way (seemingly Musk included) swing to the other extreme and embrace policy positions that only serve to further support and entrench systemic racism.
I'm not always comfortable with the methods and rhetoric of some social justice advocates, but I'm not going to present that as evidence that the movement they support is dangerous and we should strive for social injustice instead.
If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.
Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.
I really effing hate the idea that competition is created not because people with entrepreneurial spirit think they can do what SpaceX does cheaper and better, but because the guy running the show is politically undesirable and untrustworthy.
But that's not the issue: the issue is that Musk alienated almost the entire core demographic who wanted to buy Tesla's, wanted to support electric cars and were more or less completely primed to freely promote the entire brand.
He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.
There's competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it's valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed - correctly - a market opening. No one I know recommends "buy a Tesla" anymore for your first electric car - they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.
People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there's a growing market for "anything but a Tesla...". And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.
Tbh, not sure what percentage of Tesla buyers are ideologically motivated, but having tried a couple electric cars, I still believe the Model 3 is the best EV outside the premium segment, period.
As for Musk, he's a weird one for sure. He made me realize that I don't know the politics of most CEOs (or even know who they are). Which is just as well, I don't want to ponder in the supermarket whether my bodywash is ideologically consistent with my shampoo.
how many other products do you ideologically affiliate with?
Just a single man representing single family in Switzerland but you are right - I'll never buy anything from Tesla, couldn't care less if they are best or not (no they are not in 2024, novelty wore off some time ago with tons of competition, at least in Europe).
He showed his true colors, there is no correction possible, people just don't rewrite their core personality. Support for puttin' and overall war in Ukraine, support for dictators, very bad stance on many societal topics, treats his employees like slaves, proper piece of shit as a parent, utterly childish reactions of an immature boy rather than Man - we haven't seen the worst yet.
Brilliance in some aspects means nothing if its dragged down into mud by rest of personality. I know some still worship him for the positives and ignore or even appreciate the rest, I can't and won't.
I dislike Musk like many others, but I think Teslas are still the best EVs out there.
I dislike Musk like many others, but I think Teslas are still the best EVs out there and it's very possible that my next one is a Tesla too.
Right. And that is?
Occasional well-thought-out, ambitious, and positive talking points combined with a whole lot of keeping his mouth shut seemed to work pretty well for him.
Who else is there to blame for Twitter refusing to designate a representative, leading to a ban?
I'm sure pre-Musk Twitter wouldn't have lost the entire market in the 7th most populous country.
There is much more story that you’re either uninformed about or willfully ignoring. The correct move was to remove people from harms way for decisions they have no control over, hence their staff exit from the country.
The threats were themselves due to failing to follow a court order.
I'm not qualified to tell if the judge giving them is a partisan hack or not, just like I can't make that distinction with the judges that Musk appears to shop for in the US with what others describe as SLAPP lawsuits.
But obeying a judge isn't optional in either case.
To the individual representatives of a company? That's very rare, and not common like you make it sound.
"The company you're representing in this legal process hasn't complied with my orders so I will have you personally arrested".
There are various accounts on Twitter which were being investigated etc. for criminal misconduct, Twitter was given a court order to block those accounts. I have no idea if that order was itself justified (IANAL and I don't speak Brazilian) but the orders were given by someone with authority to give them.
Twitter refused the order, which means that Twitter is interfering with the legal process in Brazil. This sounds like "contempt of court" to me, which is a thing which results in a judge sending people to prison — no idea what it is in Brazil, but IIRC the maximum penalty in my country of birth is 2 years' imprisonment.
Brazil's legal system requires companies like Twitter to have an office in the country in order to receive such orders, which I think means it's literally her job to make those orders happen. Regardless, by closing the office Twitter was directly violating Brazilian law.
As companies cannot themselves be imprisoned, I do not see what alternative there would be than directing obligations onto a specific human. Buck has to stop somewhere, and while I know a lot of people who would celebrate if this judge decided that the correct somewhere was "international arrest warrant/request extradition of Elon Musk personally", I suspect this judge would have to go through a few more checkboxes before that doesn't get "major diplomatic incident" written all over it.
(Perhaps less of an incident if it's concurrent with the EU saying "We're issuing Twitter with a 6% fine on their global annual turnover for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act", which seems to be another battle Musk is Leeroy-Jenkins-ing himself into).
I can't think of any country I'd consider having a strong rule of law that would start arresting employees for the actions of their companies that they themselves have no say in.
Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries. That's not something you'll find in the developed world these days.
No, on two counts.
First, Twitter is free to seek out a lawyer to represent them in court. Most people hire lawyers for contract work rather than as a permanent employee, so this remains possible even with no assets within Brazil.
Second, there was nothing to be defended until they refused to comply with the lawfully given order within the required deadline.
That they chose to fire their staff member and close the office in order to prevent compliance with the lawfully given order, was an actual offence in its own right. To my limited understanding, it is also an offence in its own right to refuse a lawfully given court order. But in both cases, Twitter was not being punished until they actually broke the law.
Courts in the UK and the USA may issue an injunction, both to prohibit and/or to compel an action:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunction (note in particular that interim injunctions may be given prior to a ruling on the case itself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Injunctions_in_English_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quia_timet
And, pertinently to Starlink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_freezing
Compare and contrast Twitter in Brazil with Lavabit in the USA: Lavabit was ordered to provide certain information in secret (with an injunction to not talk about it); they protested, they first provided that information in an obtuse form that was considered contempt, they provided it in a form which was acceptable, then they closed their business in response and took further legal action in response to what they — and, to be clear, I — consider to have been a manner incompatible with the public view of American Democracy:
"""Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an email to that effect."""
and
"""Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in."""
Musk and his people officially don’t have any control over political decisions taken in any country, be it Brazil, Germany, or even home in the US. And they shouldn’t but by virtue of a ton of money thrown towards politicians, and general US global influence, many times this happens.
So your explanation should be rewritten as “remove people from the way of legal consequences from breaking local laws they/Musk can’t control (buy) in their favor”.
It sounds like the same thing but it’s the difference between fleeing persecution and fleeing prosecution.
Better to stand strong in the principles of the 1st amendment than bend the knee to a foreign government. Free speech is the milk of the gods, the US constitution is something to be coveted...
From the Brazilian position, it's better for them not to bend to a foreign non-government organization which has been assisting people trying to overthrow the Brazilian Constitution.
But HN seems to think that Brazilians are NPCs without politics or constitution of their own.
Yes well that is their choice if they want to be authoritarians and inhibit the free speech of their citizens. Keep Twitter banned.
It's hard to believe that's what's happening, since Musk has previously agreed to censor posts for a foreign government[1], writing at the time:
One difference in that case is that Musk had close business ties to that government, so read in that whatever you want.[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...
Limiting access due to technical reasons is not censorship. That said, I have no clue that this is what is actually happening.
Twitter routinely complies with censorship demands by foreign governments, especially right-wing authoritarian ones.
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them. Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right.
This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.
For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...
So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
Free speech is all that matters. Musk is not perfect by any means here but he is better than the rest. He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms. Which is what Twitter should have been doing, instead of kowtowing to the likes of the German and Saudi govts among others...
Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term (just like we can't have pure democracy) because it would erode public confidence and destroy our democratic nations in the process.
And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).
It is sad that free speech became a dog whistle. Post WW2 up to at least 2000 free speech was a strong position of the left, Noam Chomsky being one of the most prominent examples.
Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.
I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.
Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.
It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.
In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.
Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.
No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.
Because they are old and have families now. Metoo and toxic behaviours did the rest. And, it is just not that important.
For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.
If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.
Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.
That is untrue and a very frustrating error (because it's so common). Freedom of speech is an ideal that one should be able to speak their mind without retaliation. The First Amendment is the law which guarantees freedom of speech with respect to the government. The two are not the same, and private actors can (and often do) violate freedom of speech.
The Soviet Union supported anti war, peace protests and free speech in leftist groups, but most of it was organic.
Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.
Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.
Ah yes, free speech: the final death knoll of western democracy.
But Musk doesn't care about free speech, he is actively and eagerly suppressing it as well, just for the other team.
That man will say anything, I don't know why anyone would pay attention to it.
Yes, no one is truly "unbiased" or without opinions. This is not new.
But giving the "other team" a voice (my team, in some ways) is valuable, and we aren't going to give it up easily.
And please, don't point to the fact that there are right-wing loons on Twitter, because there are crazies from all sides all over the internet.
> Musk is not perfect by any means
Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.
His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.
So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?
He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)
Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.
> So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction
> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.
Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).
----
[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.
[2] Though I strongly suspect not.
Twitter has demonstrably kowtowed more to authoritarian governments under Musk.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-censors-twitter-in...
And he regularly bans journalists who don’t lick his boots.
https://newrepublic.com/post/177936/twitter-suspends-account...
Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.
I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.
The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.
But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.
The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.
Not sure X posture against censure is to be taken seriously though. From Al Jazeera:
(https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/31/brazil-moves-to-blo...)
According to its own statistics, Musk's Twitter complied with 83% of government takedown requests compared with 50% in the year before it was taken over, and he's found plenty of novel grounds for kicking people off Twitter for things which annoy him.
Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.
As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.
It happens in multiparty systems as well. All it takes is a significant portion of the population feeling like their voices are not heard, and then one of the parties taking up their banner as one part of the overall campaign (which doesn't even have to be in their new constituents' interests).
This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.
And Europe is actually resisting better than US due to election system. Here in best case scenario they are number 2, and took them a long time to get there after Trump
In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.
Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.
The extreme right won the Dutch elections though - and they’re not the only country - so your argument that “best case (...) number 2” isn’t true. They can and do win elections.
What did winning mean, though? Is it Republican-style minority rule where they can work the system push through policies which a majority of Americans oppose, or a coalition government where half of his coalition is pledged to rein in his more extreme positions?
Are French Presidential elections so different? And the UK only has two major parties, so the outcome will be similar.
The UK system has a much less powerful Executive though.
To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn't as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system - i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they're fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it's by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen - rather then by direct vote.
The French system, with its two rounds system has a built-in protection against extremism and to encourage compromise.
The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.
[admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two]
I don't think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.
The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a "us vs them" mentality.
How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like "they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc"?
Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.
My wife is a nationally recognized expert in elections in the US. The combination of FPTP and politically controlled district geometry (gerrymandering) explicitly creates a brittle system that engenders extremism. It's well understood to be both the cause and a reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism we have now was left in place in the early 19th c. explicitly to allow a small minority to be able to control their individual states. The main change since then has been cross-state unification of the party system. To give an example: here, in Texas, the most volatile Federal district was won by a representative who received only 10% of the votes in his district. Some districts were won by reps with as few as 1% of the total votes (that's total turnout). (This is due to the primary mechanism and gerrymandering.) If you can win by harnessing just 10% of the electorate, you're shopping around for the ironclad voters, and they tend to have weird views (left or right).
No country that I know of adopted US election system. Its beyond obscure, unfair and set to be rigged for anybody looking from outside, with no normal way out. Its just not resilient enough to everchanging society. I know the historical reasons, but only fools get stuck in the past ways at all costs 'because, you know, in the past, XYZ so we are where we are so suck it up' when its clearly not beneficial to general population.
One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.
But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.
Intentional false dichotomy serves many purposes, yes
You got to be kidding me... Prospera / Honduras is nothing. It doesn't register. Libertarians, sadly I'd add, shall never ever have an ounce of success: all the powers that be in this world are out there to crush liberties, everywhere, worldwide.
Meanwhile The New York Times is titling an article: "The constitution is scared, but is it dangerous?"
There's nothing more belonging to the rich than the mainstream media, including the NYT. They were the people selling you the FTX scam and explaining you SBF was the second coming of Christ.
Now that Harris wants to "force congress to ban guns in her 100 days, or take executive orders if congress doesn't do it", of course that the NYT is publishing about the constitution being potentially dangerous.
And the problem is... Prospera in Honduras?
As long as you keep reading The NYT, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
I'm not an American but
This sounds desperately needed and like an exceptionally great idea to most people that don't live inside the US bubble.
Maybe broaden your horizons a bit?
I quite like charter cities, at least in theory, and I'm a little annoyed that everyone sees them as an attempt at world domination. They could let us A/B test legal frameworks, and I think that's neat.
Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.
> So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn't actually present.
The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy's main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.
----
[0] I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here
[1] There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren't as vocal as the others so we don't hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren't heard over the yelling of others.
To be honest with the current polarisation levels in politics it's no longer possible to be neutral. The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves. People are worried, even though we're a Europe based company where this is not a contested topic (though we do have many offices in the US). See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..
Hi! I'm neutral.
DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.
You're welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I'd hesitate to claim that these companies were "strongarmed" into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.
The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that's been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. "We need to do this because it will look bad if we don't" is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.
Well companies are by their very nature immoral. They don't care about any kind of morals, just making money. You even have to strongarm them into following the law (see Boeing, Volkswagen etc).
Yes. Which is why lasting change will never come from persuading the leadership of companies that your personal set of morals need to be followed if they want to be successful—they'll follow you for as long as you are powerful and bail as soon as you aren't.
You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
(Cue comments that the right can't be reasoned with so there's no point in trying.)
It's absolutely contested in Europe. "Why is the NHS spending so much money on diversity officials when they don't have enough doctors" is a long standing complaint by many people and politicians in the UK, for example.
True there's some exceptions. The UK has indeed fallen to American-style polarisation. As have the Netherlands where an extreme-right regime now reigns.
But most of Europe is still sane, luckily.
Ps rather than blaming transsexualism it might be smarter to blame the Tories who have been skimming (and selling off to their own companies) the NHS until there was nothing left.
Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
I'm not advocating for positive discrimination. Just no discrimination at all.
It's very important to have the proper procedures in place for when that does happen. That was part of the diversity programs. Programs against bullying, education for managers on gender identity and how to deal with the difficulties around them, how to pick up on bullying etc. It's this kind of thing that I do myself (not as a job but as a voluntary side assignment in my job). It's amazing what kind of sexism and racism you hear when you go on a company trip and have a few drinks with high-level managers. So clearly this work is still highly needed.
Don't forget these programs were started because things were going the wrong way, people who were different than the standard cishetero white male had less chance to a job and were making less money when they did get one. This is of course not acceptable.
I don't think quotas are the answer. But rather fines when a company goes too far askew. "We only hire white cristians here" just cannot be acceptable.
That was only one small part of the diversity programs, and not one I necessarily agree with.
I never said boycotts are wrong anyway. If right wingers want to boycott companies like Apple, go ahead.
Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world, we've had a lot of explicitly political tech movements over the years. Off the top of my head some of the more successful and major ones were:
- Cryptography.
- Free Software.
- Cryptocurrency.
The Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016, there have been a couple of political exoduses by various groups to alternative platforms. The non-Silicon-Valley companies have been worse and generally suspect to the point where nobody expected political apathy (is anyone going to claim that Chinese social media are not politically subordinate to the state?).
"Politically affiliated" is something very different than "political".
If you figure out what that difference is, let me know. The tech scene has been decidedly liberal (old school liberal, nowadays people maybe call that libertarian) and as political as it can be since the start. There has been a trend where other political cultures are getting involved too since ... probably the Obama campaign was when politicians really started noticing that spreading messages through the internet was more effective than going through the corporate news. But that is just a change of affiliations (maybe more accurately a broadening), tech has always been affiliated with someone.
"Political" is anything related to inter-personal power in society, and can be anything from maintaining a homeowner's association bylaws to international spy-craft and assassinations, and is so broad as to be unavoidable in human behaviour.
"Political affiliation" is much narrower and comes with a specific named politician or political party — even if they're not going to get in, such as Lord Buckethead or the Green Party of America.
That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn't concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)
Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn't outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.
I am talking about sonic the movie obviously.
I don't think dr Eggman should be able to attack in that way.
There is no proof but there was a threat and retaliation which is a terrible precedent.
It is like Eggman attacking Sonic for something that Shadow did.
As opposed to its previous owners? Don't let those shades get too dark, friend.
yup, just read the comment.
> And it's not just Musk.
You are definitely correct there. Twitter was a shit-show in this regard long before Musk came along and made it worse. They did far too little to enforce their own policies (let alone common decency) on things like bullying and hate content for far too long, for fear of losing users and therefore advertising money or being punished because some of those openly breaking those rules were in high power at the time, and this led to an “open season” feeling for all sides.
[for the avoidance of doubt: I've never had a twitter account, after the initial novelty stage it has always been far too full of the sort of people that think twitter is a good idea]
When has the rich not been more or less 1:1 with The Powers That Be(tm)?
The form changes with the sands of time, but the essence is always the same.
Does Bluesky intend to be responsive to the kind of court orders that X rejected?
Speaking entirely personally as I don't handle those questions at bsky. I couldn't even begin to comment without seeing knowing what the court orders were and what the cases are. Every social company operating internationally runs into this issue, and it's daunting to say the least. So, again, this is not something I decide.
What I can say is that the protocol is a neutral global layer for data, which can then enable multiple applications with their own moderation policies and decisions. There's always going to be moderation decisions we make that people will disagree with. The point is that something can be done about that disagreement - you can have other applications on the same network that makes their own decisions. I think one of the best things that could happen is that Brazilian developers fork the Bluesky app and build locally-owned social platforms on the atmosphere.
Context: atmosphere is like "Fediverse" but for the AT protocol and also way more schway
I had to check, and urbandictionary confirms, "schway" is
I got it from Batman Beyond.
X has just started sharing all of them in response.
https://x.com/alexandrefiles/status/1829979981130416479?s=46...
Rather someone on Twitter shared some text - these aren’t the original court orders - they are at best a paraphrase by someone with a certain agenda.
This makes it easy to send thugs to their house and 'encourage' them to comply with any political demand. Jurisdictional arbitrage, particularly sites hosted in America following the first amendment is the only thing keeping anti authoritarian speech alive in authoritarian regimes.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/audio-pakistan-global-critics
Clearly given he is excited to receive the traffic
Interestingly, the cohort moving to Bluesky isn't the same as those who were having trouble with the law.
Yes. Brazilians were censored and moved to bluesky. Elon musk has problems with the law! Absolutely no overlap whatsoever. Also very interesting in its own way.
Can you elaborate on this? I’m not clear what you mean here.
Something tells me at the least bsky will not begin a name calling primary school attack with a supreme court justice of a sovereign nation while using abusive names for the president of that country all the while using childish fake AI generated graphics.
PS. Somehow all of this feels very natural when done by Musk. It kind of makes sense. It feels like “yes yes, he’d do this”.
A supreme court judge clearly acting against the laws of their state, but somehow Musk is the bad guy.
We arrived at the point that people are celebrating censorship and authoritarianism because of their irrational hatred of one guy.
That's how it always works. "You see the problem with not dealing with XYZ is that the government/judicial/legislative doesn't have enough power to tackle XYZ."
You grant them power they asked. They don't deal with it, but ask for more power. At some point they stop asking and label you as the problem.
No, it is a game of whack a mole.
That’s interesting. Why do you use event sourcing? Is having a full history important for a website/app like bluesky?
Ahhh you know what, I should call it stream processing or something, because we don't store the data entirely as events. We store the data as a mutable K/V which emits an event stream of changes, which can then be ingested into different views. We chose not to store changes as events specifically because we don't want unbounded growth in the system. Initial syncs work by fetching the current state of the K/V store (the "data repo").
Bluesky is built on atprotocol (atproto.com) and can be thought of as an open distributed system. The event stream is for replicating throughout the various services.
hi pfraze, can u tell us a bit more about the golang event stream? does it also trigger the computation of the views periodically?
more precisely wanted to understand how do you generate the event stream from sqlite
In my previous description, I avoided talking about atproto details for clarity, but this is all part of that (atproto.com). The "kv stores" are what we call data repos[1] and they use sqlite for storage, but can produce individual event streams. Those streams flow into the golang event stream, aka the "relay". View computation happens continuously.
1. data repos are actually signed merkle trees, which gives at-rest authentication of the data as it gets shipped across organizational boundaries
Hmm, it is something I would use Elixir for.
Thanks for the details !
I wonder about:
I wonder about the factors/considerations that led to hosting a given data/services on-prem or outside. Were there purely technical considerations or were there also about "self host what can't get leaked" (think GDPR, privacy concerns, things like that) ?
I'm just trying to work out why I'm seeing so many posts in Portguese when all my settings are set to English