the_last_pigeon
shiggy
it's look who it is
User ID: 62
(1) Yes, there are a steady stream of problems addressable by automation, but those have never been a problem. SREs exist for the other problems.
Shit just falls over and you won't know why. That's just how these systems are. You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.
To put meat on the bones, see this list of common things SREs deal with, or this log of the SRE chatroom for Wikipedia & friends.
(2) Change is unavoidable and constant. There are security patches for your dependencies released continuously and you will update your system or face the consequences. Often times your dependency is an underfunded open-source thingy, despite your best efforts to avoid those, and thus the only way to get the new code is to use the newest version of the thingy, which means you might have to upgrade all of your code that uses the thingy.
(3) Regarding "pushing the systems back into a stable state" - then you're gonna have the same problem again unless you fix the root cause, which, again, requires code changes.
Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.
Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).
Supporting Stalin, Mao, or Che would be a ban on sight from any site I moderate, and a lot of my local (one-hop federating) Mastodon instances also ban tankies on sight. Unfortunately there are a lot of idiots that support that stuff out there. But, like, fair example.
I wrote a response to this idea as a top-level post above: https://www.themotte.org/post/181/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/32443?context=8#context. To summarize, I disagree that he has a chance at turning around Twitter.
Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
OK, so what's your solution to Jews being overrepresented in these institutions, assuming you think it's a problem? Actually, why do you think it's a problem? I would make this comment more high-effort by guessing answers to those questions but I don't think I have a good enough mental model to be using it for that yet.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?
Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Hey, I can't complete sentences in a stressful environment either. :)
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Some fella blames candidate quality:
To me, the most interesting dimension of the poll: Dems running an avg of 8 points ahead of Senate control preference (R+4 on average). Illustrates key dynamic of the race -- a favorable environment for Rs v. bad candidates -- and helps square with the national picture
The poll results in question (Oct. 2022 Times/Siena): percentage-wise, "which party should control the senate" is more Republican, but "which candidate am I voting for in my election" is more Democratic.
Not saying that's the explanation, but it's an explanation.
Can you substantiate that claim about Fetterman's mental health? I think it's more likely that his mental capacity will be fine by next January and it's just his speech and hearing that look bad.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Right, there had already been a considerable amount of circus.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Not sure that Jan 6 impacted the Jan 5 runoffs too much, although I like the rest of your analysis.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Desire to vote and political knowledge are spectrums and, I'd assume, correlated. Everyone above a certain level of desire to vote does so. Get-out-the-vote efforts lower the level. Thus I'd figure the resulting voters are not going to vote at random, because their level of political knowledge is better than that; you'd have to reach pretty amazing levels of turnout before you hit people with little enough knowledge to vote randomly or otherwise in a hideously misinformed fashion.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Anyone got sources that present GamerGate from the "it was about ethics in video game journalism" angle?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this (it's all just elite shunning and op-eds right now)
I would find it obvious that the median person agrees with the "elite shunning and op-eds". Can you explain the thought process that would lead a "median person" to a different conclusion?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I must admit I'm not seeing the distinction, if you're intending any, between market response, market forces, market cost, etc.
What I mean to say is if someone says "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE", this will piss people off, and they'll stop doing business with that person. Which part of that do you think should not be happening?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Economically: There's a lot of money based on his personal brand, and he just dramatically reduced the value of the latter. I find it reasonable that the market would react accordingly.
Practically: "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" (henceforth, "his words") aren't acceptable to - rough approximation - anyone, and he hasn't issued retractions or showed signs of backing down in any way (which would have been nice, I do like his music). The straightforward conclusion is thus that anyone would stop associating with him. Which includes people with a lot of money and power. Hence the reaction.
Morally: To misquote an old guy, his words lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, so I don't know what he was expecting.
Regarding your "old 4chan trick": as a preamble, the fact that it's called an "old 4chan trick" tells me all I need to know about whether the people behind it were genuinely interested in collaboratively discovering truth through discussion (hint: hahaha; and to follow the rule on speaking plainly: not at all). Anyway:
-
if white people had been persecuted since before the first Crusades in 1096, yes, I think the reaction might be similar
-
if you go through Wikipedia on "Racism against Black Americans" and switch "black" and "white", and if the resulting text were historical fact, yes, if we lived in that world then again the reaction might be similar.
But we don't live in either of those two alternate realities.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Would you not agree that "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" merits a stronger noun than "criticism"? Perhaps "hatred"?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to stick around and post about "non-CW CW" topics here more in the future.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Context matters tremendously when determining the reliability of sources, and their appropriate use on Wikipedia. Sources which are generally unreliable may still be useful in some situations. For example, even extremely low-quality sources, such as social media, may sometimes be used as self-published sources for routine information about the subjects themselves. Conversely, some otherwise high-quality sources may not be reliable for highly technical subjects that fall well outside their normal areas of expertise, and even very high-quality sources may occasionally make errors, or retract pieces they have published in their entirety. Even considering content published by a single source, some may represent high-quality professional journalism, while other content may be merely opinion pieces, which mainly represent the personal views of the author, and depend on the author's personal reliability as a source. Be especially careful with sponsored content, because while it is usually unreliable as a source, it is designed to appear otherwise.
Consider also the weight of the claims you are supporting, which should be evaluated alongside the reliability of the sources cited. Mundane, uncontroversial details have the lowest burden of proof, while information related to biomedicine and living persons have the highest.
Like you, I wish the average Wikipedia editor cared more about those rules.
Even the existence of the list itself is controversial in the community, precisely for the reason you articulate: that it tempts people towards a simpler system that does damage when applied in the real world.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Any chance we could get "custom JS" in addition to the "custom CSS" tab on the site? Would be useful for doing personal interface improvements and such.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I would be happy to specifically nix CNN talk shows in the same way that we already nix Fox talk shows and all opinion content in any medium (see WP:NEWSOPED, WP:NOROPED - parse, respectively as "NEWS section on OP-EDs" and "No Original Research section on OP-EDs").
For the other two, headlines have been banned for a while (WP:HEADLINE), and I'd imagine the bodies are more careful with their claims.
I would, in fact, love to see a list of claims for your preferred left-wing source (assuming the left-wing source is marked "generally reliable" on the big list). I'm sure one has been compiled somewhere already, but not in any of the few discussions on left-wing sources I spot-checked.
Yes. As a troll, your goal is others' reactions, which there are simply more of on English twitter.
I don't browse non-English twitter, but I think Elon's gonna cut non-English moderation staff even faster than he cuts English staff. Only a matter of time.
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