#dumbass
βSo itβs over for you, Elon Musk. You are a public failure of a man. Youβll still be rich, but you no longer matter. Thatβs all you really wanted out of this, wasnβt it? You bought Twitter because you thought that owning it would make you the most special person in the whole wide world, only to reveal yourself as an unremarkable shithead with no good ideas β¦ Go fuck yourself, Elon. Go. Fuck. Yourself. Is that clear?β
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/elon-musk-nyt-interview-18524602.php
Boris Johnson "wanted to be injected with Covid-19 on television" to calm public fears, an ex-aide has said.
The claim - by Lord Lister - came in a witness statement to the Covid inquiry.
He said Mr Johnson "suggested to senior civil servants and advisers that he wanted to be injected with Covid-19 on television to demonstrate to the public that it did not pose a threat."
It was "at a time when Covid was not seen as being the serious disease it subsequently became," he added.
He said it was an "unfortunate comment" that had been "made in the heat of the moment."
He also confirmed his former boss had said letting "the bodies pile high" was preferable to another lockdown.
The remark was made in September 2020 but first reported in April 2021,
Elon Musk Offers to Also Ruin Wikipedia
Behind the X ownerβs trolling is a years long obsession with the internetβs favorite encyclopedia,
"IN THE MIDDLE of a wave of rampant misinformation, excessive hate speech, and endless harassment, X owner Elon Musk set his sights on Wikipedia. On Sunday, Musk aimed a series of tweets at Wikipedia and its co-founder Jimmy Wales, mocking a call for more funding before immediately implying that the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation was mismanaging its funds. Not to be outdone by his own tweet, Musk immediately followed it up with a challenge: βI will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia.β "
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-wikipedia-twitter-x-encyclopedia-1234861220/
#Elon #shitforbrains #dumbass
Itβs as bad as you thought.
Or worse. Much worse.
"Super interesting code breakdown for the dumpster fire that is Twitter:
Elon Musk released the Twitter feed algorithm on Git yesterday as open-source. I know how to read code and know Git, so I had a brief looksy.
First of all, holy hell, I can't believe he let this algorithm see the light of day. It reveals some INSANE biases which are the REAL "Twitter Files", if anyone besides engineers gets interested. My only thought as to why he publicized the code is that Twitter is a wreck and he fired most of his engineering team, the remainder of whom now can't keep up, so he's hoping that by open-sourcing the code, engineers like me will fix it for free. And indeed, you can make pull requests on his repository if you have a Git account (and I do.) I'm not about to help.
(For laymen, a pull request is when you pull the code to your local machine, alter it, and then make a request that your changes get integrated into the repository, which the owner of the repository must approve.) I use Git for version control. Meaning every change is documented and approved. Undoubtedly, Musk will task a remaining engineer with reviewing these Git pushes, and potentially approving them.
Remember when people started complaining that all they saw were tweets from Elon Musk, even though they didn't follow him? Or all they see are right-wing lunatics, even though they didn't choose to see that? There's a literal carve-out in the code to artificially boost Musk and right-wing lunatics. Narcissist much? The code also arbitrarily dumps you into "categories" like Democrat, Republican, Power User, etc. He's also artificially restricting tweets about The Ukraine and bolstering Russia. I wonder who's paying him! Not a mystery.
Every interaction with your tweets gets ranked. Every like is worth a lot. Replies and retweets are worth less. This is opposite of normal (I used to write algorithms for search engines), where a like is passive interaction, retweets and comments are active interaction, which should be weighted more heavily. Negative interactions are also weighted. If you've been blocked or reported, you're punished for that. Your tweets get seen less.
The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)
Including a video or an image in your tweet artificially boosts you. Including a link to an external website (like a news site) hurts you. Misinformation gets downgraded for normal people. Blue checks boost you insanely. This effectively results in blue-checked people being able to spread misinformation with impunity. As you know, now anybody can pay Elon $8 for that sweet sweet blue checkmark, including bots and foreign actors.
Y'all. Twitter is a DISASTER. If you've used it since Musk took over, you at least suspected it. Musk is a foreign actor and at best, a narcissist. At worst, he's deliberately bolstering the right-wing looniverse (as evidenced by my personal observations, and now confirmed by inspection of his algorithm.)
All of this is not to say, drop Twitter, or to espouse an opinion of what you should do. I'm going to hang out and see what happens. I'm just telling you, as a person who writes these kinds of algorithms professionaly, what the code Elon Musk provided publicly, indicates.
β Emily Parker"
