> an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows. Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish. EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.
I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff. This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues. Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology. I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not. EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects. This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do. I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras. It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization. (Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.) I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen. I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
I work as a consultant for a small media, zero politics and very technical, and they report the same trend for X for the last 5 years or so. I was surprised that they told me they still want the "share on Twitter button" and keep the Twitter account but their activity there is nil, for the following reasons combined: 1) they have thousands of followers and thousands of impressions, but the engagement ratio (likes, comment, shares per follower) is abysmal compared with the other networks, 2) the format is different from other networks, while you can create something common for LinkedIn or Facebook, the Twitter share requires image re-crop and text rewrite (they don't use Instagram, the content doesn't fit) 3) while the main site receives a lot of clicks to read the full content (and see the ads that drive the income) from LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter doesn't send clicks (people just read the header, at most hit the like-heart, and keep scrolling). Their conclusion: Twitter doesn't work any more for them and is getting worse (that said, BlueSky is even worse for them). Even spending 30 seconds there to polish a publication are 30 seconds wasted. I don't know the numbers for EFF, but having 400K followers on X and getting between zero and five comments per post if you go back a couple of weeks (to skip today's fire), between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform. They get better numbers from Facebook, a dying platform, with half the followers. They get similar or better numbers from Instagram with less than 10% of the followers they have in Twitter.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Where does all the milk go? (dhanishsemar.com)
Feedback of someone who is used to manage large (>1500) software stack in C / C++ / Fortran / Python / Rust / etc: - (1) Provide a way to compile without internet access and specify the associated dependencies path manually. This is absolutely critical. Most 'serious' multi-language package managers and integration systems are building in a sandbox without internet access for security reasons and reproducibility reasons. If your build system does not allow to build offline and with manually specified depdemdencies, you will make life of integrator and package managers miserable and they will avoid your project. (2) Never ever build in '-03 -march=native' by default. This is always a red flag and a sign of immaturity. People expect code to be portable and shippable. Good default options should be CMake equivalent of "RelWithDebInfo" (meaning: -O2 -g -DNDEBUG ). -O3 can be argued. -march=native is always always a mistake. - (3) Allow your build tool to be built by an other build tool (e.g CMake). Anybody caring about reproducibility will want to start from sources, no binary. This also matter for cross compilation. - (4) Please offer a compatibilities with pkg-config ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config ) and if possible CPS ( https://cps-org.github.io/cps/overview.html ) for both consumption and generation. They are what will allow interoperability between your system and other build systems. - (5) last but not least: Consider seriously the cross-compilation use case. It is common in the world of embedded systems to cross compile. Any build system that does not support cross-compilation will be de facto banned from the embedded domain.
Engineer at Vercel here who worked on the plugin! We have been super heads down to the initial versions of the plugin and constantly improving it. Always super happy to hear feedback and track the changes on GitHub. I want to address the notes here: The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project, because we also want to help with greenfield projects "Help build me an AI chat app". We collect the native tool calls and bash commands. These are pipped to our plugin. However, `VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off` kills all telemetry. All data is anonymous. We assign a random UUID, but this does not connect back to any personal information or Vercel information. Prompt telemetry is opt-in and off by default. The hook asks once; if you don't answer, session-end cleanup marks it as disabled. We don't collect prompt text unless you explicitly say yes. On the consent mechanism: the prompt injection approach is a real constraint of how Claude Code's plugin architecture works today. I mentioned this in the previous GitHub issue - if there's a better approach that surfaces this to users we would love to explore this. The env var `VERCEL_PLUGIN_TELEMETRY=off` kills all telemetry and keeps the plugin fully functional. We'll make that more visible, and overall make our wording around telemetry more visible for the future. Overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything.
I’m a young adult and I’m very hopeful for AI, my partner who is a similar age is very hopeful too. A couple evenings ago, I saw a rocket launch across the sky and last night I saw images of the far side of the moon taken by orbiting astronauts. This is to say I’m very hopeful for the future! I think young people are feeling the pressures of high taxes, high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages. I think this is what causes some young people to feel cautious about AI. The company I work for is constantly hiring fresh faced new graduates who use AI tools to enable higher productivity and reduce time performing data analysis. At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share. I also see AI tools as a framework to promote equality and to uplift people, my example is that colleges and governments promoted a “learn to code” movement for people in non SWE roles, but with AI tools heavily helping with code generation there’s classes now that teach coding aided by AI because for most people coding is a means to an end (1) so there’s less pressure on people who are working and going to school to excel in these difficult courses and graduate on time. 1 - https://careertraining.smc.edu/training-programs/c-plus-plus-course-with-ai-assisted-coding/
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