Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31
nitter.bird.froth.zone
nitter.bird.froth.zone
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
On HN, there's no harm in waiting for the actual thing.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
One problem with threads like this is that, because the story itself contains so little information, the comments fill up with low-substance dross—and if the topic has anything sensational about it, often indignation too. The mind seems to resort to these things in the absence of anything chewy to discuss.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In this human existence of timelines of information consumption, the sooner we confront and address new information the better. Isn't one of the most dopamine-inducing fun parts of news to be the first one to know about it, and be known to others you share it with as being skilled at keeping up with it?
"Low-substance dross" seems very subjective, but I kind of get the idea. I would call it "reddit-tier". I guess your moderation is what keeps us above that level of content quality, and I certainly don't have time to dig into the history of your reasoning here, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
My counter opinion - decreasing latency beyond a threshold is one of the most harmful things in humanity today. It makes it impossible to form opinions based on deep thought / Type 2 systems.
Similarly, one of the best ways to feel good immediately are cocaine or heroin. Fast news is cocaine - feels good now, but harmful.
Doesn't sound like an "announcement of an announcement" to me.
There's never just "an algorithm", there might be a model, there might be a bunch of feature extraction code, there might be a server that runs it all, but none of these would be that useful in isolation, it's likely that all would be needed to be able to get an accurate idea of the behaviour of the system. But, as Musk says – no one really understands it all, so even then is that really useful?
What may be more useful is releasing a set of policies, or product decisions about recommendations. Not necessarily code that implements them, but the ideas and values of the system and the people building it. The code would likely only be an approximation of that, but the policies/decisions are really the part most people can or will engage with.
I think reverse engineering the policy from the code will be hard – this is why no one really understands these systems in full.
However I think given the policy, assuming we trust that Twitter does in fact attempt to implement that policy, the code doesn't really matter. We wouldn't be able to run the code anyway, and bugs aren't really a problem compared to what the intention is, as Twitter would supposedly be constantly working to make the code match the policy.
Sounds like Elon wants to crowdsource the analysis work.
> Our “algorithm” is […] not fully understood internally.
Unlike with the software itself, there was never a serious attempt to open-source such algorithms in the big social media space. Obscurity was the undisputed king.
I would be glad if this attempt actually worked out. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant. But there will be a lot of bad actors trying to nudge the resulting algorithm somewhere in a subtle way. I wonder if all of them can be detected.
Incidentally, also March 31st.
> So this is a joke, right? It's on April 1st. So it's a joke, right?
> No, it's not a joke. It's on April 1st, because the source is going to hit the net on March 31st. The source is going out on March 31st because that's when the folks who wrote Netscape's press release said it would go out, way back on January 22nd.
> Besides, posting a joke announcement a week before April Fool's Day would be bad form.
Note that they set a date and stuck to it.
Somewhere, I've still got the T-shirt.
There will be people who replay tweets through the algo, but as we all know - the secondary market of simulation is going to be different than the in-moment reality.
(We also have no reason to trust Musk or believe the code will be complete. He is a well-documented stretcher-of-truth, and likely doesn't understand where all the relevant code lives. After firing 3/4 of the company, it's also likely that nobody at twitter knows this.)
A great recommendation engine is tuned to what people like. However, that would be subjective, and solving the problem in an abstract fashion seems difficult.
So with crowdsourcing you could sidestep some layers of abstraction. For example, you can crowdsource how you label and group tweets, and use that for the machine learning.
But, for example, if you use crowdsourcing for removing manual tagging of data (embarrassing?) then you might make things worse.
Social media algorithms have done a lot of harm, covered and discussed endlessly on HN, and transparency would be a first step to reducing that harm.
I believe the move is in line with his original motivation.
And I agree, linking it on HN is just a childish way of showing you're not down with Twitter. Don't force your views on others.
I run my own nitter instance for a group of friends, the secret is to never link it publicly because the traffic will destroy it.
[0]: https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/elonmusk/status/16368352095879...
Forcing your own nitter instance on others and not letting them make their own decision is absolutely forcing something on others.
> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
This also didn't age well at all.
Are they going to take pull requests? Or will they just publish a read-only code dump?
Will they include Git history? If not, how will anyone hope to understand the code that Twitter engineers themselves apparently don’t understand?
Also are they publishing the spam detection algorithms? That’s implicitly part of the recommendation system, but I bet it’s a separate service.
Like maybe? I'm sure it'll get a lot of eyes, so I guess they're hoping for some free labour?
Most of the supposed damage to Elon’s reputation is simply attacks by Twitter competitors. Think of the hoax a few weeks ago about people being forced to read his tweets.
Most likely what happened is Elon felt insulted and decided to use his enormous platform to make wild allegations
—
"He's an old, single white guy from England who's been travelling to or living in Thailand for 30 to 40 years, mostly Pattaya Beach, until moving to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time.
"There's only one reason people go to Pattaya Beach. It isn't where you go for caves, but it is where you'd go for something else. Chiang Rai is renowned for child sex-trafficking."
if following:
rank += 10
rank += 9999999
rank = 1I predict this will be a one time thing and any changes will no longer be made public.
summoning dang.
That was accurate.
His most inaccurate estimate was in 2020 that they could be a million robotaxis on the road in a year. That was off by a factor of 75% or so, as there were only about 200K beta testers in 2021.
Today that figure is about 450K.
FSD10 is good enough to drive 98% of journeys and 11 looks closer to 99%.
Tesla is more cautious about removing humans because the scale and theater of operation is drastically different from the waymo/ford taxis which have no path to full self driving (as they cannot operate on the full roadway system) and because they are consumer products instead of their own internal tooling (complete with remote monitoring and control capability).
> “I think we will be ‘feature-complete’ on full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year,” Musk said during a podcast interview with the money management firm ARK Invest, which is a Tesla investor. “I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.”
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-drivin...
That is really not very good at all. If I take 4 trips a day (home to work, work to home, drive to pick up kids from school, drive home) that means I get into a car accident once a month.
This is all just very irrelevant from the main point which is that Elon routinely makes highly dubious statements about the future.
He already promised it “next week” a while ago.
March 31 is suspiciously close to April 1.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-humans-on-mars-in-...
https://www.gearbrain.com/spacex-commercial-rocket-travel-25...
I'm on the edge of my seat!
Even better that there's absolutely no indication of what this will actually look like.
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
If some politics discover that Twitter has influenced in one way, they may be able to sue for example.
Or if there were illegal discriminations.
Also it makes it much easier for scammers to game the algorithm.
The smart move would be to do nothing, as nobody has ever asked for Twitter's ranking algorithms.
> as nobody has ever asked for Twitter's ranking algorithms.
Actually many many people have. And this is good PR for his marketing department