Elon Musk announces removal of Twitter bird logo, potentially by tomorrow!

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I mean, there's lots of data that was already trained from Twitter.  Especially if you choose the dataset from lets say specific accounts, or you run a filter that lets say tries targeting ones with information it could generate a decent model I'd assume.

 

If I was to train a LLM, the last thing I'd use is twitter. 

1) Low quality content.

2) Content is poorly labeled.

3) Tweet size limits produce "what grammatical crime do I need to make", especially when it was limited to 140 characters.

4) Many posts are made to outside data (twitlonger, tumblr, google drive, youtube, twitch, tiktok) and not text parseable.

 

Like a LLM should start with something like Wikipedia, which you filter to only use the article (not the talk pages or edit history), and filter data that contains no living links (eg news sites that have removed or subscription-wall'd the sources.) If an article has no living data, or only sources the first party (Eg many corporation's and politicians pay to "scrub" wikipedia of negative data about their company or products.) Then it should be reconsidered. Likewise if an article has a lot of "edit history" indicating vandalism or vanity edits, it should also be considered low quality.

 

But it should only be a starting point. Follow the living sources and search every keyword in the article in the source to determine how editorialized the wiki article is. If no keywords (eg unique nouns) in the article are found in the living source, then assume that the "source" page has changed from when it was originally added, or the article has been editorialized and rank down the data. Like there is a problem if an article mentions "cognitive bias" 42 times, but the source mentions it once.

 

Grabbing the data from other encyclopedia's (eg Britannica, old versions of Encarta) to cross-check data quality. So you ask the LLM a question, and see if it produces data that is found in Britannica (something it hasn't used as a source.)

 

But if you want your LLM to produce conversational text? 

- Don't use social media at all. Twitter and Facebook are going to produce low quality results

- Use text-transcripts of live conversations between only two people (eg twitch collaborations) or three people in a moderated environment where they will not talk over each other. (Basically talk shows, and podcasts)

 

Right now things like ChatGPT don't sound human because the text they ingested is "everything" rather than conversational data forming the basis of the the sentence structure. 

 

As they say "there is book smarts" (eg wikipedia) and experience. People speak from experience with emotional demeanor, right or wrong. So far GPT's, having ingested material from reddit and twitter, choose negative feedback echo chambers style of long-form text. Like they were having a debate on a reddit to nobody.

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 8/1/2023 at 9:57 PM, wanderingfool2 said:

It's effectively akin to someone complaining their umbrella is low quality and letting the acid rain threw, and then the employees who made the umbrella criticizing the person for saying it's acid rain when it's really just regular rain...and then having the news only reporting that employees were fired for criticizing.

what the hell is that analogy?

 

Something more similar would be Musk saying that Tesla cars are bad because their V6 engine is weak and underpowered publicly, and then firing an engineer because they told him their engines aren't V6s.

 

 

[Thaldor]

Probably everyone reading this did watch the last WAN show but I just think Luke's take on this is just so good.

 

What Elon Musk did was basicly yeet the ONLY THING really WORTH of something in Twitter. Like you can buy tech and buildings, patents and all that and they are worth what they are but one thing you cannot just walk into a store even as the world's richest man is brand recognition. There isn't an isle in "Tech mart for crazy rich emerald king sons" where they sell packages of brand recognition that you pay by carat and suddenly people think your brand is worth something. Twitter wasn't in the top 5 brands, but easily within top 500 which is still fracking recognizable and valuable, and Musk just yeeted it in over night because some genius brainfart.

 

It really sounds like a joke when you think it as Musk just threw probably half of the Twitters value out of the window. Like even Google wasn't that stupid that they would have renamed YouTube to "Google Video" because the brand recognition is that valuable, Google turned Alphabet but still kept the old brands because they are that valuable, Facebook bought Oculus and they used "Oculus by Facebook" for years because people knew Oculus Rift and so using the brand was more valuable than rebranding, while there isn't Nokia as a phone company anymore the brand is that known it is worth to use as sticker brand and it sells, is it already decades different parties have kept the Atari brand in heart-lung machine because it still holds that much value and Musk just yeeted Twitter brand for a brand that a lot of people are directly associating with porn because no one even remembers x.com as PayPal anymore.

[HenrySalayne]

10 hours ago, Thaldor said:

It really sounds like a joke when you think it as Musk just threw probably half of the Twitters value out of the window.

You mean the other half?

 

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-puts-20-bln-value-twitter-information-2023-03-26/

 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

On 8/1/2023 at 9:15 PM, 4uffin said:

He might as well train the LLM off of 4chan content.

  

11 hours ago, Thaldor said:

What Elon Musk did was basicly yeet the ONLY THING really WORTH of something in Twitter.

But he gets to retry his failed attempt to have his placeholder name "X" from the 2000s become the instrument of choice for the western police state.

I never though Musk had so little immagination and creativity... How can you look at X and think: "YES! that is a unique name, that is memorable, easy to tradeark and protect and that will become a verb in the dictionary tied to my thing."

[HenrySalayne]

New feature - you can now X your blue checkmark

To prevent shame and ridicule for their paying customers, X now allows X Blue users to hide their blue checkmark.

 

 

You can say a lot about X, but you have to give it to them that they are a constant source of entertainment.

 

 

[wanderingfool2]

18 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

what the hell is that analogy?

 

Something more similar would be Musk saying that Tesla cars are bad because their V6 engine is weak and underpowered publicly, and then firing an engineer because they told him their engines aren't V6s.

Your analogy shows you only are listening to what the news tells you and not seeing the situation.

 

The guy he fired WORKED on the Android App and he claimed he spent months optimizing it (I believe he has later deleted some of his tweets, but they were there at the time at least when all this was happening).

 

Musk was complaining about the speed of Android, with the reference the same issue didn't exist on iPhones...did he get the amount of calls wrong?  Yes, but that's what he was told, and as it turns out it was also internal calls not ones that Android was making...but that still doesn't change the fact that the guy painted a target on his back by claiming to be have worked on optimizing it (and only to have failed that task).

 

If you want to stick to your analogy then it's better to say XYZ saying corollas are feeling sluggish because they have a V6 engine and needs to get better...then the engineer responsible tuning the engines  saying they use V8 engines and everyone jumping at the fact he was "fired" for correcting XYZ instead of using some basic logic.  Would you keep around an employee who works on a product that you are criticizing, especially when the employee literally claims to have worked on the specific feature you are criticizing.

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Your analogy shows you only are listening to what the news tells you and not seeing the situation.

Yet you are the one providing all the best rationalizations for Musk's dumbfuckery, straight from the idiots with blue checkmarks. But suuuuuure, I am misinformed because I watch the "news" lmao.

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Musk was complaining about the speed of Android

No, he was making baseless claims about how the twitter codebase had been poorly written by it's employees. Addressing twitter being slow would've been something like:

Quote

Twitter for android is slow and we are taking steps to fix it.

Not:

"I'd like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing > 1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!"

But sure, a bit of wrong info and a bit of hyperbole and ill phrasing. That isn't too bad. Just strange that he could've been better versed about his company's product before making public claims about how bad it is.

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

did he get the amount of calls wrong?  Yes, but that's what he was told, and as it turns out it was also internal calls not ones that Android was making

Use your fucking brain. Why the fuck would internal server side calls reflect in such a significant load time/performance disparity between two clients?

 

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

but that still doesn't change the fact that the guy painted a target on his back by claiming to be have worked on optimizing it

So you are telling me that instead of talking to people who are working on the project and enquiring about why the issue exists, he had to really on twitter to get a specific developer and fire them?

 

Isn't it you who is putting wool over your eyes? Look at the tweets, look at the timeline and look at how musk responded. Isn't is suspicious, if not obvious that Musk fired him because of contradictory claims?

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

(and only to have failed that task).

>accuses me of listening only to the news.

>makes claims without having access to real numbers

>repeats claims made by an obviously biased party.

>chooses best case explanations for all of musk's actions

 

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Would you keep around an employee who works on a product that you are criticizing

Jfc, this raises doubts on whether you have knowledge on how companies and large projects are managed. A competent manager would reach out personally and question them before concluding their performance was dissatisfactory. And that is common sense, that people working on complex problems will have a lot of valuable expertise about the said problem.

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

especially when the employee literally claims to have worked on the specific feature you are criticizing.

there is just so much wrong with your mindset of thinking about employees that I can't even be sure where to start. Do you think that employees are fucking expendable? That one engineer with 5 years of experience in the industry will be as capable of doing some task as someone else with 5 years of working on your codebase? Have you ever worked/contributed to a large codebase or even know people who have?

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Do you think that employees are fucking expendable? That one engineer with 5 years of experience in the industry will be as capable of doing some task as someone else with 5 years of working on your codebase? Have you ever worked/contributed to a large codebase or even know people who have?

You're new to the IT industry, aren't you?

Yes, companies should value the talent and employees with institutional knowledge. Sadly, large companies make stupid decisions all the damn time; that includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, IBM, and countless others. 

Elon has an impressive track record with Tesla and SpaceX, but he's not infallible. Twitter/X and Neuralink is proof leading via a vision of unrealistic expectations. But I guess that's two sides of the same coin with risk. Trying will grant both wins and failures.

[4uffin]

19 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

 

What a fantastic idea!

[WolframaticAlpha]

7 hours ago, StDragon said:

companies should value the talent and employees with institutional knowledge. Sadly, large companies make stupid decisions all the damn time

And that is what I am criticizing?

Where do I say that other companies don't make odd hirings and firings? However, for engineers, these rarely come from the top/exective level, let alone C-suite. At the worst, you might have some petty manager who is trying to push you out from a team.

 

It is just that Musk, the CEO of twitter did so in a public forum, without much thought. Musk, once thought to be a visionary, now doing the same things you might see from bad manager/lead/scrum master. It just shows that he is not willing to be accepting towards criticism, no matter what he says.

 

Also, most pdc's do tend to value experienced programmers significantly more than their peers in the services sector. Sure, twitter ain't a hft firm, but you'd expect them to regard more clearly whether an employee deserves to be fired because the ceo acts like a moron in public forums.

7 hours ago, StDragon said:

he's not infallible.

Yep.

[StDragon]

6 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

It is just that Musk, the CEO of twitter did so in a public forum, without much thought.

....

Sure, twitter ain't a hft firm, but you'd expect them to regard more clearly whether an employee deserves

At this point I'm fairly certain the vast majority view Elon's purchase of Twitter as a play-thing to stoke his ego. It's no different than when some mega wealthy person buys a sports team. It's all vanity.

 

[Needfuldoer]

On 8/3/2023 at 5:09 AM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

 

9 hours ago, 4uffin said:

What a fantastic idea!

 

What a wasted opportunity. I mean, "ChanGPT" was right there.

[wanderingfool2]

17 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Yet you are the one providing all the best rationalizations for Musk's dumbfuckery, straight from the idiots with blue checkmarks. But suuuuuure, I am misinformed because I watch the "news" lmao.

Or you can use your brain and realize that the news has a propensity to report only one side of the story...and realize it's not just a simple case of "you're wrong", then "you're fired"

 

17 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Use your fucking brain. Why the fuck would internal server side calls reflect in such a significant load time/performance disparity between two clients?

Different API calls, different methods of retrieving data, different types of calls by Android team, lots of reasons why performance on the backend can affect specific clients...and then you can have additional things just based on how a program/app is written.

 

As an example modern explorer with tabs will refuse to do anything while it's rendering out thumbnails when switched from details (which on one of my folders takes a few seconds).  Classical Windows 10, while doing the thumbnails took longer the remainder of the tabs weren't essentially offline.

 

17 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Not:

"I'd like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing > 1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!"

But sure, a bit of wrong info and a bit of hyperbole and ill phrasing. That isn't too bad. Just strange that he could've been better versed about his company's product before making public claims about how bad it is.

A call to the homepage generated over 1200 calls to microservices located on other servers (which technically as well would be a RPC).  They were shutdown, what, maybe a week or two after that tweet (it did break some things, but the general latency that was reported had decreased iirc).

 

 

So even at that the tweet itself wasn't overly wrong, and depending how you choose to define RPC could technically be correct (especially if an API call generates tons of calls to US servers); and whether or not you consider the calls that spur on the RPC's to count

 

Since that SE was working on Android optimization and making it work better...then he should have known about the backend issues as well.  It gets back to the don't highlight yourself when working on a project that is openly being chastised.

 

17 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

there is just so much wrong with your mindset of thinking about employees that I can't even be sure where to start. Do you think that employees are fucking expendable? That one engineer with 5 years of experience in the industry will be as capable of doing some task as someone else with 5 years of working on your codebase? Have you ever worked/contributed to a large codebase or even know people who have?

When the employee is supposed to work on something, and the product is terrible yes they are expendable.

 

Just like the safety team who worked on adding the child abuse report tab for literally a full year was expendable.  If an employee is incompetent at what they do, they are totally expendable.  Your mentality is why there are "experts" at companies whose sole job is to waste money by doing less work than others because they are "experts" in the one section of the company they are in.

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Or you can use your brain and realize that the news has a propensity to report only one side of the story

Or, or, for once, maybe, just maybe, you can realize that Musk's behaviour has been erratic lately, and there is a high chance, that the amount of thought that went behind the decision mightn't be much. Have you ever met an egotist in real life? Musk seemingly has a large ego, and that is why a lot of thought mightn't have gone before firing a person who made him look kind of dumb.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

As an example modern explorer with tabs will refuse to do anything while it's rendering out thumbnails when switched from details (which on one of my folders takes a few seconds).  Classical Windows 10, while doing the thumbnails took longer the remainder of the tabs weren't essentially offline.

>compares a problem caused by a poorly threaded

 

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

lots of reasons why performance on the backend

And having a lot of "calls" as Musk suggested, or "internal calls" as you so helpfully inferred from what musk said isn't a good way to express the cause behind performance disparity between two codebases.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

A call to the homepage generated over 1200 calls to microservices located on other servers (which technically as well would be a RPC)

So instead of the commonly used definition, musk decided to use a misnomer for a call as RPC, which may or may not be true.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

So even at that the tweet itself wasn't overly wrong

As I said earlier, the main issue wasn't the tweet. It arose from him seemingly firing a person because he was contradicted on SM when he tried shitting on the work of existing employees.

Musk desperately needed to justify him laying off so much twitters staff, and so he and his rabid minions started to portray them as lazy, overpaid, incompetent buffoons. And people like you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Here's a thing. The work done on building a basic codebase is a miniscule fraction when compared to the work done on running a service that serves millions of people, maintaining said service, fixing bugs that might happen layers deep inside millions of lines of code, all the while thinking, just thinking of how to tackle said problem, which might affect hundreds of thousands of users, is extremely hard work. If you fuck up, everything can break loose. That is why before wfh took off, most programmers worked 60-80 hours a week.

 

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

If an employee is incompetent at what they do

>calls someone incompetent because a biased third party said so.

>doesn't have access to numbers

>doesn't realize competence is not a fucking binary value.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Your mentality is why there are "experts"

Your mentality comes from equating all work done in the "tech sector" as one. Here's a hint: different jobs place different amounts of importance over difference aspects of knowledge.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

whose sole job is to waste money by doing less work than others because they are "experts" in the one section of the company they are in.

How the fuck do you conclude that senior SDEs and experts do "less work" than non experts lmfao.

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

expendable

geez man, have you ever even seen a codebase greater than like 5 kloc? There is so much wrong with what you say that I can't even think of where to start.

 

 

3 hours ago, StDragon said:

some mega wealthy person buys a sports team

his decision making regarding twitter has been highly erratic and frankly idiotic. It is important to understand that musk's actions show he isn't an idiot, however he very well can be one(and stubbornly). Sometimes that pays off in spades, and some times it doesn't, like here.