Fuck the system
My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.
Miguel Covarrubias’s illustration for an article titled “Our changing tastes … in 1938,″ from the May 15, 1938, edition of American Vogue. The celebrities of the moment are, from left, Benny Goodman, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Orson Welles, Robert Taylor, Lily Pons, Dali, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Walt Disney, Dorothy Thompson, and Shirley Temple.
Photo: Posterazzi
DALI
I cannot stress enough to Tumblr staff that they do not need to change the site. Do not try to be like Twitter. Do not try to be like Reddit. Do not alter how this site works.
Tumblr will be the most popular social media site if they continue letting all these other sites implode
all cops are bastards because all cops are just doing their jobs
“I’m just doing what I’m told. If I am ordered to remove gold fillings from refugees theeth then that’s what I’ll do”, says police officer Michael Hansen.
Just thought I’d add this since not a lot of people outside of the nordic countries seem to have seen it. This is a danish police officer discussing a new danish law that says the police should seize the possesions and money of refugees to finance the integration.
He uh, skipped awful quickly to “stealing gold fillings” didn’t he?
Age-old advice which is more relevant nowadays rather than less. This is the second iteration of it though. The original version is: “Never write anything in a letter you wouldn’t want to see in print.” Advice handed down by my mother from her forbears.
From the IT department. We archive EVERYTHING. And Outlook autosaves every couple seconds.
Every day Twitter breaks more and makes this tweet funnier, and it was already unbelievably funny and wrong on November 26th, 2022
Almost all those retweets are agreeing with him. He still has this pinned. Meanwhile for the second time this week desktop Twitter completely broke and no one can log in
In response to downtime Elon has now instituted Tweet viewing limits to mitigate the bot problem HE CAUSED
600 tweets sounds like a lot, but if that includes anything, just opening the replies to one popular tweet (like this one) could take up the whole limit. Like if I hit that quote tweet button that's at least 20 tweets read instantly
i'm a bit out of the loop on this whole fiasco, how did he cause the bot problem?
(sorry for the long reply!)
So when he bought the site Twitter's bot problem was almost under control, which made him angry, because if the bot problem is fixed there's no bot problem for him to fix. Like, he was presented his own company's data on the bot problem, and rejected it even though on any rational level it was good news. He scrapped the existing "good bot" verification program they had, talked vaguely of banning all bots, and gradually made a series of bans and API changes that made running ordinary bots difficult
Meanwhile, not only did he make Twitter worse on a moderation and technical level, his bluecheck changes made the incentive for impersonation scams much higher. So, you have more people dropping $8 to boost NFT and crypto scams. Since bluchecks also are automatically boosted to the top of replies, while spam replies used to be strewn about at random or hidden, now for just $8 they can be shown immediately to everyone who clicks a tweet, which also incentivizes them. For instance, Twitter's always had scam t-shirt bots, but now a tweet's top replies will often be nothing but scam t-shirt bots. All joke tweets about the "PRIDE MONTH/DEMON" t-shirt and related parodies, for example, were inundated with "wow, buy the shirt here!" tweets to the exclusion of anything else. He created a toxic mix where bot scams & spam tweets are heavily promoted by his algorithm, and where they're inconsistently banned since the site's barely functional and has a staff of Elon plus a handful of employees who can't quit lest they lose their visas. Whether he reduced the overall number of bots or not bots are far more visible than they used to be (I doubt he reduced it though, given this change). So accounts posting a photo of a possum every hour are harshly punished, and accounts shilling NFTs or stolen t-shirt designs are heavily rewarded
Part of this is that Elon Musk thinks Twitter is doing fine? He still thinks his bluecheck changes fixed impersonation and bots somehow.
An important context here is that Elon Musk is surrounded by NFT and crypto scammers and considers them normal. The guy adjudicating Twitter scams is, himself, someone who's run crypto scams. Elon Musk seems to have genuinely thought that the "normal" users of Twitter were the real bots, and that all the people spamming his mentions with Dogecoin links were the real human beings. This likely goes hand-in-hand with how Elon is big on the idea that conservatives are the only true thinkers, and everyone else is a mindless sheeple NPC parroting "the current thing". Which is a hilarious accusation for him to make given he spams "Concerning." and "!!" underneath dozens of tweets a day
Okay for reference, when he joined Twitter he was shown Twitter's own data saying about 5% of regular users were bots or spam accounts, and so he commissioned a study by a third-party who gave him a higher number, with the third party tabulating all users, not just active users. He needed the bot problem to be as bad as possible, to the extent of not trusting his own company's data on itself
Republicans fear transgender people because they are too close minded to have empathy.
I have never felt so validated in never having given up on Tumblr.
ALTIT GETS WORSE!
"This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It's amateur hour."
So he artificially limited the number of tweets you can see per day with a "free" account.
Once you hit your limit, it stops you from loading the page. But it also doesn't know WHY it isn't loading, so it keeps TRYING.
Twitter is literally hitting itself in the face ten times per second per user.
This is so completely amateurish it's unbelievable. It's like putting your car in neutral and slamming your foot on the gas until your engine redlines and then wondering why it's making a horrible noise and a terrible smell but not going anywhere.
I do not approve of tomfoolery on my dash, everyone open a book and start reading
Sounds great! Let me just see what I’ve got on my bookshelf
Wow… Looks interesting! I wonder if I could learn anything from it.
You would have this at your disposal wouldn't you you impish clown
Yes, that Alvin Schwartz.
