You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
Sure but my point is the Twitter experience is trash and not required like, say, paying an evil ISP or interacting with Google (for 99.9% of people abandoning and fully dodging Google is incredibly difficult). It’s working out for him because people won’t leave (even though engagement and user numbers are still below pre-acquisition numbers). It only has value because of his acquiring it with his other company. Prior its value was tanked. It’s a crap site that isn’t profitable and serves as a mouthpiece for his politics and whims.
You don't need an ISP or Google either. It's incredibly difficult for some people to leave either, but it's also incredibly difficult for some people to leave Twitter.
Except some people still want it, thats the uncomfortable truth that lots of people cant accept. I see lots of comments giving different reasons people think that other people cant leave twitter, but at the end of the day millions of people still like and use it all the time. Thats why its still there.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
Generally we in the western world consider ourselves 'free' citizens. Yet to live this life you need to register your birth, get a social security number, and enroll in education etc.
I dont see signing up to twitter any differently to this. You register with an email address and you are granted access. Similarly to registering a birth and being granted access to 'society'.
Many feel X, or gating access to X, is fundamentally unjust, superseding the guidelines.
Feeling injustice converts the loss into a claim: "I didn't just lose free access, we're owed free access." The GP questioned whether the inconvenience is an injustice. The flags came because that question threatened the claim.
Free speech talk decorates a claim that, imo, doesn't really have much purchase.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.
"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
> "Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
This is one way to define it, yes, but Musk is a self-described “free speech absolutist” which I would argue means that he feels speech should be maximally free.
> It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost".
I have never meant it in that way, and I’m not sure why you thought I did.
> To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
This is possibly pedantic but this statement as written is false. I can view single tweets just fine, and I don’t see ads.
> Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
That analogy doesn’t really work here, IMO. My only point is that it’s objectively true that speech behind a login wall is less free (as in freedom) than speech not behind a login wall, and so a (non-hypocritical) “free speech absolutist” should always prefer the latter.
He is a hypocrite, so he defines it however is convenient at the time. But I think my interpretation is a reasonable one for someone calling themselves a free speech absolutist.
Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.
I mean, you could easily construct a mirror image of both of those, and I would say that that's closer to the reality of what the content available to downrank is actually like. I don't think questions like yours are engaging honestly or in good faith.
The person you’re replying to isn’t going to substantively respond, because fragile snowflakes typically won’t engage when they recognize that answering a simple question exposes their hypocrisy.
Free Speech isn’t about who is listening, it’s about who is speaking. Just because you can’t hear it doesn’t necessarily mean the person did not speak freely.
I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right). In the context of this type of free speech, if you have two identical posts, and one is behind a login wall and one isn’t, the one not behind the login wall is objectively more free.
> I am speaking about free speech (lowercase, in the colloquial sense), not Free Speech (the constitutional right).
So am I.
If a comedian is doing a bit at a bar and they charge a $5 cover to get in is that infringing on “free speech”. Of course not, that’s absurd. Why would be it any different online?
To live in our 'free' western society you must register your birth and get a social security number. You also need to attend education. This is effectively 'registering' for access to 'society'. I dont see giving twitter an email address to view content on their platform as any different to this.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
I have no idea what definition you're using, and I've commonly seen people who make your argument demonstrate all the same sorts of bias they allege Musk to have.
I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?
So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.
The accusation was that Twitter was working with the US government to censor speech on the government's behalf. Which would be a first amendment violation. The FBI's defense is that they technically never ordered Twitter to take down anything, but merely "flagged" posts and sent those flags to Twitter execs.
This type of loophole was (likely) closed after the ruling of Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order.
Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
It’s a private company. Free speech doesn’t mean I’m entitled to use your property to post and amplify my speech.
I also find the context of the whole thing suspect since Trump in his second administration has openly used the FCC and other federal pressures to attack speech he doesn’t like and Musk’s X has not been “free speech absolutist.”
I always thought it was just the far right being mad their side wasn’t in charge, and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated.
>Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
The entire point of the case was to determine exactly that. Read the judgement. If it were an open and shut case, it never would have made it to the supreme court.
>and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated
How in the world did you get to that conclusion from Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" order?
From the open use of the FCC to threaten television networks for saying things the president doesn't like? Among many other examples? That's just a particularly overt one.
I'm just saying overall behavior -- outside this specific case -- is not consistent with a regime (or a larger political movement) that believes in free speech. It's consistent with "we want to be the ones in charge determining speech," with opposition to Twitter's previous moderation being motivated by that rather than principled belief in free speech.
The net effect of the Twitter takeover was not to make it a free speech absolutist platform but to shift the pattern of selective boosting and selective de-boosting and moderation to one that favors the far right's message.
I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
I assumed the parent post was referring to the Constitutional meaning when they said "Yes, we all know what 'free speech' really means and it has nothing to do with X," but if I misunderstood then I apologize!
But I now understand the growth in Github's activity that led to its instability recently. Folks just see a project (Cursor's Origin), open up a claude session with a couple harness, and just throw a lot of money, and external energy at generating what will most likely end up being garbage.
But this garbage looks and feels good at the onset, and so a few iterations happen, more PRs, more commits until it dies down.
In the end, almost nothing of value was created, it was just machine creating stuff for other machines, while humans were mostly spectators of an illusion.
Prior to this it would have been the millions of throw-away "hello world" intro projects, or "todo app" websites. Hell - think of how many people wrote "facebook clones" back in the day.
The author is likely still gaining some skills & experience - although they're more likely project management & ops style skills than technical coding skills (ex - what does interaction with this look like, what's the desired cli surface, how do I configure/deploy it, etc).
Intellectual property is pretty much always going to be a case where 99.999% of everything gets thrown away. Because the cost of duplication is zero, so the model trends very hard towards a "winner take all" popularity contest. A very small number of projects will see large success, everything else will likely be gone in a couple years.
---
If anything, I quite like this new space. I no longer have to worry about trying to make software "big enough" for other people to use. Previously, it would take a large enough investment that simply scratching my own itch was prohibitively expensive - so I had to be picky about what I would pick up and work on.
Now I can bang out all sorts of things designed just for me.
I needed a way to limit screen time for kids, and existing apps are both expensive and junk. Cool - local llms wrote me a new home app for my android tvs in an hour. It does exactly what I want, and nothing else.
I wanted to point my Home assistant audio satellites at unsloth studio instead of ollama. Cool - local ai in unsloth picked apart the ollama implementation and updated it to work with unsloth.
Wanted a new ph monitor for my hydroponics setup, with an auto-doser (some super cheap peristalitic pumps), awesome, an old arduino plus an llm and it runs just fine.
etc...
I love it. It's simple to get relatively effective results on a scale of 1, for a scale of 1. I don't have to worry about trying to get community help or onboard people, or pitch it as a product, etc... It's mine, it'll last as long as I want. It is trash? Sure - to you (seriously, it'd be hard to run, is explicitly designed for my stuff, has no docs, etc... I'm under no illusions that it's not garbage in the broader context). But it's treasure to me.
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage.
The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up.
Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better.
It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
There are a lot of factors to getting wealthy. Most of them are out of your control. Hard work happens to be one that is in your control. Its not like you can choose to be born to different parents or a different place.
But its still not magic. It doesn't guarantee anything. Worst of all its useless if the work is directed to the wrong ends.
Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
How about hard work + courage ? Without ability to take risk and potential failure it is very difficult to change your economic level. It is very naive to think that doing the same thing everyday will somehow change your economic level.
> The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die.
The purpose of the concept is to push kids from a young age to be industrious. You are much less likely to become wealthy if you sit around doing the bare minimum.
Putting in an significant effort isn't a guarantee, but it does increase your chances from whatever the baseline is given your context.
The concept doesn't claim that wealthy people all worked hard; everyone knows you can be wealthy without having worked at all, such as through inheritance or the lottery!
You mischaracterized my argument, people aren't "lazy" by default. Most people that walks the earth wants to explore, create and socialize. But you seem to imply that kids would otherwise "sit around and do the bare minimum" if not pushed from a young age to be industrious. This is ludicrous.
There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
> There are way more empirical evidence that luck plays a much bigger role in wealth creation than effort.
my point isn't that when you put in effort you WILL create wealth. my point also isn't that luck plays a bigger role than effort (though, there's no empirical evidence for that assertion). my point also isn't that if you're poorer you didn't put in effort.
my point is: when you put in effort, you increase the surface area for luck.
put differently: if you don't think putting in effort increases your chances and it is mostly luck, why put in effort at all? luck will just find your door, after all, and if it doesn't, oh well.
And that's why this concept (your "myth") has value and should not die.
> I don't understand why you can't see my argument for what it is: People work hard on their own merit.
I see. You're saying people either work hard or don't (from within), rather than what their parents or teachers or peers say.
Hard to argue with that.
At the same time, I am glad my parents instilled in me being a hard worker in whatever I chose because I am pretty confident it has made a huge difference in my success.
I would not concede that some people aren’t lazy, however.
It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast.
Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
>it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight
This does seem at least a bit intentional on Waymo’s part. They appear to have adopted an under promise, over deliver mindset (unlike some other robotaxi alternatives that come to mind). They’ve seen a lot of their competitors (Uber, Cruise, etc) capture a lot of ultimately negative attention and folded as a result; I would probably try to avoid the limelight if I were them too. The tech speaks for itself.
Every Waymo on the street is already an advertisement, especially since they're so distinctive with their LIDAR units and now they're driving Chinese cars. Every time a Waymo is remotely associated with anything bad, the media jumps on them anyway, like the times they've "hit" a pedestrian but literally after a human driver hit that same pedestrian.
Tesla Robotaxis need to hog the media spotlight because they're trying to prop up the stock price, not because they work.
How many times have you ridden a Tesla Robotaxi? They work fine, in my limited but actual real world experience, the problem is they don't like you giving rides to other people, vs Waymo you can call them for other people and they're fine with that. Tesla Robotaxis hog the media spotlight because it's Tesla and every tiny thing they do gets blown up because in the attention economy, a Tesla mention is a giant shiny distraction to go off and everyone piles on their opinion of Elon because blah blah blah lidar Elon stupid no he's not and media sites get all that rage engagement and that juicy ad revenue. Who outside of the industry can name Waymo's co-CEOs off the top of their head? I can't.
It's been 16 years since Google announced they were working on driverless cars. Waymo's been offering service to the public for six years. There's been plenty of news coverage and people already know about them. Being in the spotlight all the time just wears people out.
if you think the state of the art in this area is something you'll hear about from a guy that looks like santa in an academic journal, your investments deserve what's about to happen to them.
Although it's encouraging, they do mention that the reduction in the BMI also have an effect (they take it into the consideration by lowering the β −0.092 to β −0.066 (P < 0.001)).
Just skimming through it, it's possible there are direct benefits, but it could also be other environmental factor. This study will most likely generate others that give us more insight in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_returns_of_Donald_Trump
"Trump paid no net federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years of the past two decades. After the refund, Trump had an average tax bill of $1.4 million per year over the 18 years.[52][176] In 2016, Trump paid only $750 in federal income tax, and in 2017, he paid another $750 in federal income tax."
If there was an unequal vote, I am pretty sure rich people would want votes as heavy as possible.
Unfortunately, their valuation has almost nothing to do with starlink revenues. It’s almost entirely speculative oribital data centers that have not been invented yet. They could double their starlink revenues and it would have no impact on the valuation.
Might as well base the valuation on SpaceX getting a colony to Alpha Centauri and then billions living there and needing regular SpaceX shuttle services from Sol.
Then we could properly value the IPO in the quadrillions. (I know you know this is ridiculous. But investors clearly are riding high on the tulip mania).
In the meantime, until Musk comes up with the next big "idea" to switch to, all the current revenue levers need to be pushed to max to try to make it to that next stage, since public companies demand revenue every quarter.
A lot of their revenue is also from renting out GPUs to more productive AI companies, so depending on how long that game can keep on going (getting access to GPUs before other companies), it could last for a while too.
Here’s an idea: Musk launches a ton of orbital gpus but in reality it’s just an empty shell and real gpus sit in unused grok data centres. How would we even know?
I disagree, but not for the reason you think. They need to fund R&D to justify their high valuation. A new stock issue would decrease the valuation, and they will have a difficult time borrowing the money with their poor bond valuations. So this will (maybe) slow the bleed.
Musk doesn't need to deliver to keep valuation up. We've seen him doing pretty well stringing people along indefinitely with "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely" self driving capabilities.
It’s not an opinion it’s laid out clearly in the prospectus. Spacex is not a space company. It is a 2 trillion dollar AI company with a small launch business and a smaller ISP.
Regulatory problems are doing the heavy lifting. Sure power is "free", if you can launch it, station keep it and cool it and if the data services are useful at the modem latencies of geosync and lunar orbits. But if datacenter projects can't be built/powered fast enough due to permitting, this is an expensive workaround.
Also, the lifetime of the panels on the ground is longer by about the same multiple as the power advantage of going to space, so if you're limited by the size of your photovoltaic factory, there's no reason to go to space.
The best I have heard: It makes you fully independent of the terrestrial energy grid. There is also some nebulous freedom from governmental authority possibilities.
Both of which strike me as poor arguments. We are in a short term energy crunch. I expect within five years that most of the energy problems will be resolved and the eye watering financials of launching a GPU into space will look absurd
Governments also do not like to cede authority, so I find it hard to believe that they will not claim jurisdiction over any business operating within their borders (all of those ground stations).
if you launch enough solar panels to power the data center into space, its easier to put them on the ground. Yeah there's some less power, but also have six times the lifespan so just build twice as many and it's still more efficient. Getting land in Texas can't be that hard.
You could build them at the South Pole, or at the bottom of the ocean and it will still be easier than putting them in space. Just think of maintenance.
Oh no, your power supply burned out
Space: Welp, that entire data center node is dead now.
Antarctica: OK, put a technician on a modified C-130.
I think the idea is easy energy availability and no push back from the locals. Those both seem to be to be fairly simple to solve on the ground compared to the unsolved issues doing it in orbit.
No planning restrictions. Throw up as many as you can afford to build and launch. No grid strain because they're self-powered.
And they're likely out of national jurisdictions, so you can generate all the porn you want.
Technologically? Maaaaaybe a slight ping time reduction in certain configurations compared to terrestrial fiber, because even with multiple hops lasers can still be faster than fiber.
Super-expensive, questionably economic way to do it though.
It is possible they delayed this rise as they didn't want bad news in the run-up to going public; but the is absolutely no way this can touch their fundamental numbers.
reply