cuwurious_strag_CA
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User ID: 190
Okay, just saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721
"A huge problem with spam and bots and trolls"
"Verified users will pretty much always be at the top of comments and search ... You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users"
that would really suck! Compare that to the 4chan or rdrama ethos, right? Baby, bathwater
full 1hr conversation - https://youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA
the early part is about tesla and is a great read (although not a great listen, really hate the talk/podcast format vs reading)
Other transcript excerpts (heavily edited for brevity, a solid 1/2 to 2/3 of words removed per excerpt, the voice format just sucks)
now on Twitter you'll see many links to YouTube and and TikTok - Twitter isn't giving content creators enough video length, and has no means of monetizing video - we're going to change that rapidly at Twitter"
That might work
On the verified change -
The point is to make crime not to pay - right now to create a bot on Twitter costs less than a penny - that's part of why crime and hateful conduct pays but if somebody risks losing eight bucks it's too expensive to have 100k fake accounts at $800k a month
Can't tell if 'hateful conduct' was just thrown in there to sound good (the guy he was talking to asked about antisemitism) because there aren't "100k hate speech bots" but if not, the 8/mo thing reducing 'hateful conduct' is not great
difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to drop us ... despite doing everything possible to appease them and clarify that moderation and hateful conduct rules haven't changed ... we've made no change in our operations at all
successful in in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue ... nothing working at appeasing them ... frankly an attack on the First Amendment
I think this is a sign that content rules won't loosen too much, not sure though.
[my] workload went up from about I don't know 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120 . um so yeah I go to sleep I wake up I work go to sleep wake up work do that seven days a week ... I think once Twitter is set on the right path I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla
[...] I'm aware of [...] how to make a way better PayPal [...] I there's there's a product plan [later: x.com game plan] I wrote I wish I'd kept a copy of in July 2000 to make the most valuable financial institution in the world and we're going to execute that, which amazingly no one has done, I think that's what part of why Twitter will be ultimately extremely valuable
the comment about x.com vision clashing with the twitter vision?
how do we get 80% of America - not like the far left and far right - to join a digital Town Square and voice their opinion and exchange ideas and once in a while change their minds
[...] decide what kind of experience you want to have on Twitter [...] pick your preference and and decide if you want full contact battle or to look at puppies
when asked why invest in tesla vs much cheaper p/e car companies making EVs: "many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and I've said our stock is too high but when people just ignore me and keep buying the stock some reason [...] at a very high level I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough and and no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving Vehicles"
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Well ... yeah, I have no clue how to respond to "I don't buy that you're placing good will in [outgroup]" and "you dont know other peoples' motivations".
I'm saying that from my perspective as a professional in the field
Alright in that case - sorry for the accusation!
Feel free to specify a mechanism for verifying people at scale without charging.
I don't mean identity verification, I mean - for replies to tweets from people like musk or vitalik, specifically, or other tweets that are 'high risk of spamming', heavily downweight replies that 'might be spam' using heuristics that you allow to have a much higher false positive spam-detection rate than your normal anti-spam heuristics to decrease the false negative rate. The problem with weighting comments by verification (aside from people buying verified accounts), to crowd out the spam, is that - if, as you say, you put verified comments at the top to crowd out the spam, that's like (for those top comments) using a spam-filter with a false positive rate of 95% (from my browing, the ratio of good replies by bluechecks : good replies by non bluechecks). You're going to filter out almost all of the good / funny comments in favor of whatever bluechecks like. But if you just 'crank up your spam filter' for specifically that sorting, or use more effective but also error-prone metrics, I think that'd be better at filtering out that specific kind of spam, and with a 'false positive' rate plausibly lower than 30% - also, with much less effort than reworking twitter blue.
I don't have anything for or against musk, > ...
I'm actually a big fan of technical competence and leadership, and musk is great at that, I just like the technical details of whether things will work or not as much!
I would guess that it looks like musk mishandled some things, most confidently the whole 'rushing the team to release twitter blue quickly, and as a result the twitter UI offering people the ability to purchase blue checkmarks, and telling existing blue subscribers they have checkmarks, without actually displaying the checkmarks' thing seems like a clear error, and some of the other publicized actions seem like mistakes too, but idk.
I'm sorry but this just reads like you're just trusting musk or something? I don't have anything for or against musk, but these arguments don't really make sense.
These aren't cracked
True, my typo
Best case, you're now verified for spamming as Herman Lopez, a 90 year old guy in Florida currently in assisted living
That is fine, it's just as good as the currently stolen verified accounts - journos, authors, random musicians, none of whose names are distinguishable from 90yo floridians. If we look at the above example of using verified accounts to spam - they just want the blue checkmark next to a random name. I'm not entirely sure why, honestly, who clicks a 'i will trade nudes with you. i am a hot 18 year old' posts because they're posted by a author bluecheck named 'Armistead Maupin'? If you click the post, the spam shows up as a top reply despite having fewer likes, comments than the replies beneath it. Maybe it's the verified that's boosting it - which would be incredibly ironic given this entire argument - but even then there are verified posts 10 replies down with more likes, comments. This is how people are using verified accounts to spam. (Also, you're assuming they'd disable 8/mo blue check accounts' ability to rename. I'm not sure they would do that - maybe they do not currently, see the recent examples of famous people changing name and pfp to 'elon musk' (many now [are]https://twitter.com/zoo_bear/status/1588834121308307456) apparently suspended, but that happens to spam accounts anyway so lol), but that is orthogonal to the utility of paying 8/mo for them. Almost all of the security improvements you're positing will either not actually happen, or come from changes that could be easily made without adding paid bluechecks!)
Anyway, you don't seem to disagree that the cost of spamming has gone up.
I disagree that the appreciable cost of spamming will be increased in by the blue checkmark change. Non-verified account spamming, which is afaict the dominant kind, won't be affected at all. (unless they implement your 'blue checkmark replies get massive priority boosts over non bluecheck replies' theory - which would only hurt it a bit - a 20% or 50% boost or something would not make a difference here, - they probably will not do that, even if they did it would seriously harm the twitter product experience) Spamming with verified accounts would become, probably, easier, or maybe stay the same.
edit: just saw here they will be removing bluechecks on name changes. Also says "will suspend accounts that impersonate without clearly specifying parody", which i assume refers to all accounts? That kinda sucks tbh, and is not very free speech.
Here's a simple way Musk can use the $8 payment process to verify the account in a manner that is hard for hackers to exploit directly, and also incentivizes them to bother someone else: no CC, you pay via bank transfer authorized by Plaid.
I highly, highly doubt that. Musk and twitter seem to be approaching this as a generic way to make money, slapped on top of Twitter Blue, and any friction there will significantly hurt revenue. I'll follow it, and if he does, that'd be my mistake. But I'm pretty sure you'll be able to pay for blue with a credit card.
Even then though, a cracked bank account (via cracking.com) seems to be around $100, which is still much cheaper than $1500, so ... it's not helping! (note: prices seem to vary a lot - some sell verification for $60/$150, others sell for $800-$1500, maybe the former is scamming i dunno)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
How does it degrade the experience? Musk has explicitly described bluechecks getting to the top of replies, search and mentions. Assuming the typical screen holds 6 replies, and the typical @kanyewest tweet gets >1000 replies, you need 0.6% of people who reply to be verified to push spammers and cheapskates 1-2 screens down where most people will never see.
Yeah, and that means the top replies will be 'by people who paid' and not 'the funniest tweets as selected by likes'. It degrades the experience by destroying the 'like' mechanism sorting good tweets to the top! It's better to have the top reply be <funny joke that got 500 likes> as opposed to <tweet from verified user @JoeRealtor saying "Wow, great job!".
Color me shocked that people angry about a hostile takeover don't like anything about the new guy.
I'm specifically referring to the bluecheck thing here.
I also can't tell if the checkmark will involve identity verification? As it stands I don't think it will, it'll just be a nice checkmark that's part of blue?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Here's an example of how 8/mo verified accounts won't stop spam replies to people like Musk: https://twitter.com/ArmisteadMaupin/status/1589022522175111170 this is currently the top reply to a 6h old elon musk tweet. It's a sexy girl spam link (link to archive, nsfw), and is posted by a hacked verified account. Note that this is an account that was verified before musk's takeover (can they just pay someone to watch elon and vitalik's tweets?). Verified accounts currently appear to sell for $1.5k on some website I didn't look too hard at. So ... in that sense, $8 is clearly a win for spammers! (the scammer probably pays less than the $1.5k upfront per account, if they even do at all vs hacking, so who knows how hard it is to actually get an account ofc).
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Huey long was, I'd bet, a fiery and - though it's not the right term at all - angry speaker himself! https://youtube.com/watch?v=z-5UGXJcNwQ
Look at those facial expressions, listen to that voice - it hardly passes OP's friendliness tests!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Likewise, if you think Obama's recent speeches represent an exemplar of persuasiveness and virtue
My other example of persuasive anger was "hitler and goebbels" (and I didn't mention virtue)?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
My bad, I meant $100/year.
And the answer is yes, that's pocket change for @marietherealtor - she regularly spends 10x that on things like donuts + paper fliers + balloons for an open house
She certainly can afford it, but that's different from finding it valuable enough to purchase.
Assuming the average person reading replies scrolls down a full screen, you need between 3 and 7 people who replied to ElonMusk/ye/etc to be verified and spam is pushed down.
If it's implemented as you describe, where verified posts crowd out nonverified no matter what, wouldn't that that'd severely degrade the twitter experience, because unverified people often post better replies than verified people? not sure what you mean precisely
But hey, probably you have a better grasp on stopping scams than Elon Musk (early Paypal) and David Sacks (early Paypal)
They've spent a lot of time as VC/executives, and even smart people who are experts can make mistakes. I know someone who works in a related area IRL who agrees, and the people I follow on twitter who work at twitter seem to agree too.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I'm not sure how entirely true the former is, my details on christianity are hazy, but 'jesus righteous anger' gets a lot of results, like this. Righteous anger on behalf of the poor or something
Jesus is just one example, you can look elsewhere - political speeches. There's a lot of forceful speech against bad people, and a lot of strong expressions along with it. It varies in intensity - hitler and goebbels was angrier than obama, but obama's recent speeches aren't exactly placid happiness either.
There's a reason some of the most moving parts of the bible are jesus's suffering and death and resurrection, not jesus smiling, kumbaya, and doing a happy PR piece about mental health. The passionate and tortured struggle is moving! Someone you're not a fan of doing a forceful protest may be unpleasant, but someone you support shouting for justice, they're upset because they care that much, because the republicans are taking away the bright futures of black children, is more moving than smiling for justice. (not saying anything about the correctness of said causes, this 'struggle' isn't that much of one). (not to give the idea there's some simple dichotomy here - both 'passionate struggle against oppression' and 'happy PR speak' are just a few of many different affects / approaches, and they aren't necessarily wholes, and you can take some parts of one without other parts, you can have a struggle against something that isn't oppression that's also moving, etc)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I think you'd get more useful engagement and replies if, instead of saying 'phenotypic null hypothesis' a lot and explaining the theory of what it means, you tried to explain in a 'teaching' type way how and why it matters - like, laid out a few toy examples of populations that seem to be HBD-ish if you don't account for PNH but PNH means that heritability is explained by underlying mechanisms that are less HBD-ish.
It's not perfect that interlocutors aren't doing that work themselves, but - I spent an hour yesterday diving deep into something I disagreed with, made a long post here, came out understanding it a bit better but nothing really conclusive, and got zero replies. I could do that again, sure, but I have other stuff to do, so maybe later! People do that a lot here, but it takes enough time they won't do it every time.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
It's probably a modification of a moldbug neologism, "Human neurological uniformnity", from a gentle introduction p. 3. It just means - 'human intelligence and psychological traits are evenly distributed across races, no significant inter-race differences'.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
even the median twitter user with 50k followers
Is someone really going to impersonate @joespizzastamfordct? Is that enough for joe to pay 100/month? And a lot of accounts with 10k+ followers are people like crypto or music 'influencers', or just guys who like shitposting. There's no way >20% of twitter accounts with 10k+ followers will buy the blue checkmark - which means that it'll not be effective in reducing spam.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Many progressives like others in history are capable of doing evil deeds in the name of helping people or society.
... yeah? it is certainly possible to do evil things "in the name of helping people or society". Isn't that literally "doing bad things with good motivations"?
The fact is you don't know other people's motivations
Whether I know them or not, the examples of self-sacrificing revolutionaries and philanthropists are two particularly clear examples of a general trend towards 'helping people motivations'.
What if 'helping the poor and oppressed' is just worse than growing the strongest and power? check out https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/ or nietszche for writing on that.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Kind of what I expected, I'll throw a few into google translate
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
but if we take all things caused by genetics, and all things caused by society, which group do you think would tend to be easier to change?
"Having albumin in your blood" is caused by genetics. "Blood type" is caused by genetics. "Being gay" plausibly has some genetic cause. "Hair color" also has a genetic cause. These are not at all similar in modifiability. Hair color - hair dye. Being gay - opinions vary, but it's maybe in principle possible to meditate and stick with women if you're bisexual but lean gay, or something. Blood type can't really be changed short of gene editing, but blood transfusions exist. Having albumin in your blood is not changeable at all without killing you or some severe and all-encompassing rework of human biology.
Just picking a class and saying 'most of class A are more X than most of class B' doesn't tell you anything about how X a particular thing is if it's in A or B if you already know more about the thing than just the class.
That seems like a tangent but - in order to understand what to do about trans, we should look directly at the actions, tendencies, etc that make up the trans experience and evaluate those, instead of just flinging it against existing ways of discussing things ("is there a gay gene?") ("does it hurt children?")
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
If it's genetic you're stuck with dysphoria
This doesn't follow - at all. A condition being entirely genetic in the current environment doesn't mean it couldn't be changed in a different environment. And 'trans' isn't a medical condition, it's a complex set of desires and actions on the part of a person. "Being trans" may be a complex outcome of many decisions, social factors, and other things. Type 1 diabetes is genetic, but we can treat it.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
If the trans identity is sociogenic, then a social intervention to help people come to terms with their bodies is at least worth a try, since it will spare them a life of medicalization
Even if it isn't sociogenic, that's still true though? One could have a genetically-caused desire to be trans, and it'd still be better to say some one shouldn't do that.
Anyway, my argument is just - the actual contents of 'being trans' are, individually, dumb - the aesthetics of being a woman are signals of various traits improving ability to bear and raise children. Mimicking that if you can't raise children is dumb!
It's hard to tell if 'embalmers in the network' in that quote means 'one in five members' or 'five members total', so it's hard to tell what that means. But even correct conclusions can be supported by poor evidence, and it's entirely possible the clots in OP are noise (especially if he started noticing them now, as opposed to 2 years ago - will skim the video to check). Also, steven crowder is a good get for 'exclusive content' on rumble, and 871,071 Views is quite a few!
[at this point, i just watch the video, then decide to comment on the article instead]
The video links this article. (the guest in the video is named "John O'Looney!") It's probably more informative and takes less time to go through than the video (I'm listening to the video, and they put spooky music over their 'calls with local morticians'...). It's a ... very strange article! Between the hint hinting that it's the vaccine, a few clearly false claims provided by experts interspersed with a bunch of other believable but weird claims by experts, and the generally big if true nature of the claims. Point by point, I guess ...
He found that the clots are lacking key elements present in healthy human blood, such as iron, potassium, and magnesium, suggesting that they are formed from something other than blood.
... what? a blood clot that isn't formed from blood? I'm not sure how to evaluate the claim (they give 'evidence' based on mineral content later), but that doesn't seem that plausible? Maybe someone said something sensible and then the article writer interpreted it one way and decided to make a darkly foreboding paragraph? idk. (They imply many times later the clots are spike protein. If that was true, it'd be very easy to prove in a lab)
“Prior to 2020, 2021, we probably would see somewhere between 5 to 10 percent of the bodies that we would embalm [having] blood clots,” Hirschman told The Epoch Times. “We are familiar with what blood clots are, and we’ve had to deal with them over time,” he said. He says that now, 50 percent to 70 percent of the bodies he sees have clots.
Obviously, big if true (i.e., if the frequency claim is true of the significance claim - if 75% of bodies have one 1mmx1mmx1mm clot and .2% of bodies have "as long as a human leg or as a pinky finger" ones, and that was the status quo, that is different).
“They are not normal post-mortem clots but rather the long tiny strings may have been etiologic in the deaths, preventing circulation to those regions. Others have shown that the spike protein can and does unfold and form a different configuration, contributing to tight string-like bonded structures with longitudinal twisting as well as cross binding, visible by microscopy, each one measuring angstroms in diameter—it takes 254,000,000 angstroms to make an inch—a typical capillary is around 5 microns, so many strings are needed to occlude a vessel.”
Is this trying to imply that the spike protein is causing the clots? It's not actually saying that, and nothing about 'the spike protein makes structures' indicates that the clots are made of spike protein (lots of proteins have "cross binding" and "structures"), so the two sentences don't really connect
As the summer [of 2021] went on, COVID deaths were on the decline, but these clots were increasing in number. My suspicion is that the vaccine may be the cause of these strange clots. I realize that I am not a doctor nor am I a scientist, but I do know what blood looks like and I am very familiar with the embalming process that I have been doing for two decades
Hirschman sent the clots to a few pathologists and claims that some of them have “overlooked” them, probably due to fear of retaliation.
Even if the clots are real, trends in the rate over time are harder to detect than just a change from 'absent' to 'present', because the thresholds you're discriminating are lower, both in quantity and time, so each 'bin' has less 'data', and noise is magnified.
[different person] Hooker sees about 300 bodies a year, and has seen numerous clots of the same kind Hirschman has. He told The Epoch Times that “people are seeing these [clots], it’s just not Richard and me and Anna [Foster],” another embalmer. “I have people sending me photos almost every week of what they’re seeing,” Hooker said.
... alright
Hooker lives in a conservative, rural area, and from his observation, fewer of the people there have been vaccinated compared to those in big cities.
“At least 25 percent of what I was embalming would display a significant amount of clotting,” Hooker said.
Of course, everything is correlated with everything else when you change geographic reasons, so 'if the overall effect is real' that could have a number of causes. Another way to interpret this (correct or not) is that Hirschmann was the biggest noise blip, and as we get farther away from him the magnitude of the effect will decrease (25% vs 75%).
He also noted that some embalmers with lesser skill might not find the clots after draining and that pathologists who do autopsies on the bodies might not do a full check on the vascular system.
“The very large blood clots that are being removed before and after death are unlike anything we have ever seen in medicine,” Dr. James Thorp, a maternal-fetal medicine expert who has been observing anomalies in pregnant women and fetuses, told The Epoch Times. “The COVID-19 vaccine diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein,” Thorp said. “This directs energy away from the normal process of internal digestion also known as autophagy. This results in protein misfolding and propagation of large intravascular blood clots and also a variety of related diseases including prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, amyloidosis, and dementias including Alzheimer’s and others. While it is possible that COVID-19 illness in itself could potentially contribute to these diseases, it is unlikely and if so the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease.”
Even if Thorp did have a coherent argument, the 1-paragraph blurb for the Epoch Times would still sound like this - but this doesn't make sense as is, COVID itself also "diverts energy away from the physiologic processes in the body towards the production of the toxic spike protein", probably moreso than the vaccine, the connection to the randomly named diseases is just not present, and the "the effect of the vaccine would be 100- to 1,000-fold greater than that of COVID-19 disease" is also just not justified at all
Thorp also (this is linked in the article) spoke about vaccine hurting pregnant woman earlier. IIRC data didn't bear that out, but i've already pressed a lot of keys writing this, so someone else can search that. (And - is there's somewhere I can just put in a few variations of 'miscarriage rate by week' and get an updated time series? Statistia has a few things but they're all old)
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades, also thinks the clots have to do with amyloid proteins.
“It appears the answer is coming directly through that needle. Spike protein disease, leading to the deposition of amyloid in organs and filling up arteries and veins,” Tenpenny told The Epoch Times.
"who has been analyzing vaccine adverse reactions for about three decades" was strangely phrased, and - "Sherri J. Tenpenny is an American anti-vaccination activist who supports the disproven hypothesis that vaccines cause autism.[1] An osteopathic physician, she is the author of four books opposing vaccination" yeah.
It was a very interesting article in the sense that 'this is the kind of thing hundreds of thousands of conservatives are reading', but not a very interesting article in the sense of actually understanding if these clots are happening and how that matters.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Are ICE tire slashings common though? I don't think that specifically is a factor because the slashing/ICE vehicle ratio is very low and that, depending on how it plays out, could just make some people dislike the 'green activists' and the cars. Similarly for car traffic disruption - blocking traffic has been a very common protest tactic for a century (just this week in brazil over elections), and compared to everyone using a car it isn't enough to encourage large-scale car use reduction i think
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Even if that's true, you can't stop analysis there - why are they doing that, as opposed to more fruitful activity, how did the movement develop, how are they different from the clear successes (the sky isn't gray anymore, the rivers don't burn, lots of wildland protection, the pesticides are less poisonous) of the past environmental movement (and how did protests contribute to that?)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
they aren't mental illnesses
Which is my point, the "sociogenic" part plays no role in a judgement that trans is bad or should be discouraged. Claiming it is a "mental illness" is what that relies on, which is honestly an uninformative term itself - "doing X" is only a mental illness if X is bad, and you still need to determine that.
On your second point, I got halfway through a literature review before being distracted and losing progress, but there wasn't really convincing evidence the desistance rate was 80% - it just seemed all over the place.
Trump going to jail seems unlikely, but investigating and prosecuting can take a long time, so if he were to be it taking this long isn't that much evidence against
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