What is considered an "active" user? From a lot of people I understand they still have their Xitter account, but aren't engaging much in it anymore, sometimes checking in, but generally on a declining trend.
yes but imagine +1% per week growth, even if 1% per month that is a serious chunk
twitter had the advantage of nothing else like it in the SMS days
and at least half of those 600 million are bots, I don't think anyone disagrees
I'm actually impressed so far how Bluesky works right out of the box, it's like oldschool twitter and I didn't even have to break out any adblock rules or stylus modifications
I think people and outlets just need to start cross-posting and see how the traction goes, there is nothing to lose unless Musk orders automated scans to ban people.
> and at least half of those 600 million are bots, I don't think anyone disagrees
Not that I disagree (or agree) but I would like to know (out of curiosity) how would you (or the source of this information) got the number > 300M bot accounts. Do this include inactive accounts? Does this include people with multiple accounts?
And how would you determine that without access to the database? Is there a tools that can help you derive this number based on some statistical analysis? I would be very interested in the details.
Hint: I am not trying to start a debate around X policies or Musk. I just find that it could be interesting the way we can get into this number if it is supported by any rigorous methodology.
That's interesting although from a quick skimming it seems that these studies are focused on the activity of the bot accounts. This might give a hint on their relevance but due to the fact that their activity is probably above average it doesn't tell much about their percentage of accounts (in absolute numbers). So I am not sure if there is a studies that shows that something near 50% of accounts would be bots. The number is huge and that's why it is interesting for me to see if it is true and how could we determine that.
But I also don't think that the blocking change here would affect signal to noise ratio. You still cannot engage with accounts who blocked you but can see their public posts which you could do by logging out (before X required account to show tweets) and create alt account for that. Blocking access to the already public posts/tweets didn't make sense anyway. And I don't think this is even restricted to X or any particular website.
From my experience, at least 2/3 of them are bots or propaganda accounts, at least the ones in the firehouse stream and the ones that comment under “news” posts
I see very low engagement and half of my followers are obvious fakes. Although I previously said that Twitter as a product has improved, the content has become horrendous and I wouldn't be surprised if it shuts down after the US elections.
I even subscribed to to premium, but only to use Grok. It's not only alright for most task, its also the only LLM integrated with the current events feed(which is twitter) and its actually very useful to get informed about recent events.
Also, the app still has most of the interesting people but it feels like wandering into the most disgusting part of the town just to go to this cool club and I kind of feel like people wish those people move somewhere else.
I don't know, maybe Elon should just put a pop-ups with the few talking points that he keeps pushing for so I can accept and hide those from my timeline? Something like "I agree that the following people are horrible: ..." then "I agree that only Trump can save us from those" and be done with it. It's just boring, the same BS over and over again just so I can keep up with a few interesting people and current events.
I agree that content has gone down hill quite a bit. Though personally I don't think it has anything to do with bots. People I used to follow and respect have devolved into posting memes and engagement bait. When there is discussion it usually ends up as 2 sides taking past eachother. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with social media feeds in general, information overload, and providing means of fast gratification.
It really does feel like social media is making people stupider, myself included. At the same time it's also providing me some sense of interest aligned community aligned that I can't really get elsewhere. I'm sure others feel the same.
It's possible that I'm wrong about social media making us stupid, and very possible that it's just illuminating the stupidity that was always there.
Either way I wish it were reversed and trending towards increase in highlighting smart discussion.
(Side note, I've also tried Mastodon and found that there was equal or greater stupidity in the communities there)
No, I don’t attribute it to bots. IMHO it’s the algorithm that optimizes for the most outrageous stuff and the Elon’s politics.
I’ve also seen that people I follow because I enjoy their stuff also start getting much less views and engagements and I attribute that to not tweeting on the topics the algorithm is pushing for.
It almost feels like the site has an idea on what the content should be and those providing the “correct” content are awarded.
> I even subscribed to to premium, but only to use Grok. It's not only alright for most task, its also the only LLM integrated with the current events feed(which is twitter) and its actually very useful to get informed about recent events.
In April of this year Grok hallucinated a missile attack
An ML algorithm with a news feed attached seems kind of interesting, like if it was going to try and make predictions about what’s going on and about to happen, it would be able to use the actual events later that day as a cost function, or something like that, haha.
I didn't find this article especially compelling. It basically says, "Don't use React for the game dev specific aspects of development. Instead, use it for the UI since that's what React excels at."
I don't find that to be especially insightful because there's clear parity between a game's UI and a website. In contrast, the actual game rendering logic has the potential to ask far more of React than it's capable of giving.
A couple of years ago I tried building a 2D ant colony sim using React+PixiJS. (https://github.com/MeoMix/antfarm) It didn't go great because React's reconciler became a performance bottleneck very quickly, even with everything memoized, and the GC caused stuttering which was difficult to mitigate when React wants to work with immutable objects rather than mutating existing state. The latter is easy enough to work around, but trying to avoid instantiating strings, etc. just felt like I was working against my tools a bit.
That said, new versions of React and PixiJS have come out since I last tried and it's possible that those performance enhancements + subdividing my grid and doing smarter updates would allow me to continue on for a while, but, at the time, I didn't feel like I was getting the dev experience I wanted out of React for a canvas-driven simulation.
All that said, I absolutely find the idea of declarative, reactive game development quite appealing and if your game doesn't ask much of performance then the trade-offs for getting that could very well be worth it.
Project Hail Mary is amazing, but personally I think it is just one step below The Martian. Both incredible books, though. I've read the Martian three times.
I'm playing around with this right now and it's pretty sweet. It real-time shows which lines it's "thinking" about working and feels very dynamic, like I'm working with a machine in real-time.
It can't display markdown and formatted code side-by-side which is kind of a surprise.
I haven't tried doing anything super complex with it yet. Just having it generate some poems, but it's smart enough to be able to use natural language to edit the middle of a paragraph of text without rewriting the whole thing, didn't notice any issues with me saying "undo" and having data change in surprising ways, etc. So far so good!
I'm not very skilled at creating good "test" scenarios for this, but I found this to be fun/interesting: https://i.imgur.com/TMhNEcf.png
I had it write some Python code to output a random poem. I then had it write some code to find/replace a word in the poem (sky -> goodbye). I then manually edited each of the input poems to include the word "sky".
I then told it to execute the python code (which causes it to run "Analyzing...") and to show the output on the screen. In doing so, I see output which includes the word replacement of sky->goodbye.
My naive interpretation of this is that I could use this as a makeshift Python IDE at this point?
Is it possible to have the local context be a directory and all files within it or something? Ie to just ask it questions on the side of your WIP repo? Use your normal editor/etc.
As another data point: I wasn't notified either. I didn't have it when I first read about Canvas here earlier but coming back to the topic now I do have the feature. This is for a Teams account, the post says Plus and Teams are the first to get it rolled out with Enterprise and other in a week.
The easiest way to check if you have access is it will appear as an explicit choice in the "Model" selector.
I wasn't. I saw this post on HN, opened a new tab for ChatGPT, and saw that I had access to the model. I assume it's rolling out incrementally over a few hours to all paid users.
The xorshift family is one of the top two RNGs in the modern day (the other being PCG). Unfortunately, "choosing the ideal member of the family" is nontrivial if you're trying to eke out every bit of performance.
The problem with the xorshift family is that it doesn't implement the nice auto-scaling (and thus auto-testing) that PCG has. Re-parameterizing it means inventing whole new numbers from scratch and hoping you plug them in correctly. Xorshift also has a rare-but-severe "stuck near zero" problem.
The problem with the PCG family is that its trusted way of scaling (nobody likes the `_k` variants) relies on 128-bit multiplication (a modern member of the family at least reduces that to a mixed 128x64 multiply), which remains notably slow, unlike xorshift which only uses small integers.
(But I must emphasize: all RNGs from other families either have worse variants of these problems, or give up on performance entirely. These concerns should be used only to select your preferred tradeoff between the two, there is no excuse for ever using any other RNG family unless you need cryptographic security)
This! We don't use it for mission-critical crypto or the like. It's there to figure out whether a bot goes left or right. Given the enormous complexity of the League game state and input surface area, it likely won't be a concern unless someone devises a way to exploit it for RNG manipulation (this seems unlikely.)
The reason we didn't use crand was just code ergonomics. C-style rand has global state (by default) and we wanted our own interface to be explicit in the code so you knew when you were using a gameplay-impacting random number.
Besides the other answers, could also be that they wanted to make sure they had their hands on a fully deterministic implementation across different hardware/software stacks (like Windows and OS X).
As a sidenote on a project the size of LoL, the time, size and cost of implementing a PRNG based on a known one is a rounding error.
B.S. in Comp Sci at no-name school (Washington State University)
Got taken advantage of in my first job out of college, started at $45k/yr working locally in a small city in California (San Luis Obispo). Worked for a small shop making B2B software to sell to the government. Spent a long time there (7 yrs) because it was chill and I had enough downtime to work on side projects, but wasn't really advancing in all the right ways technically. Didn't use JIRA or work on sprints or have a manager, etc. Got a $12k raise each year. Left at $120k because I could feel myself stagnating.
Moved to San Francisco, but, ironically, got a fully remote job helping a B2C online ecommerce shop. Small shop, about 10 engineers and ~40 people total. Started at $150k/yr + fractional percent of equity + bonus as a Sr. Software Engineer. Pay was not based on locality. Stayed with the company for 4.5 years and was promoted to Team Lead ($180k/yr) and then Staff Software Engineer ($200K/yr) where I oversaw a team of 6. Also received ~$30k EOY bonus + equity that ended up having a value of approx. $400k.
Second job was definitely more intense than the first. I worked more than 40 hours a week frequently, but enjoyed the fast-paced environment and worked with a lot of intelligent people that I learned a lot from. I would repeat the experience. I didn't work on-call at all, just opted in to trying to push the quality on projects which took more time.
Overall, I don't feel I did anything too crazy. HCOL isn't necessary. I would definitely make more ($250k~) working locally in SF. It's just consistent effort, putting yourself in jobs that have upwards trajectory, having loyalty when the job is a good fit, taking on more responsibility when it's offered rather than having a negative view that more work is a capitalist trap, and learning to push a little in negotiations.
1) On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse.
The volume of negative engagement overwhelmed our moderation efforts. While attempting to protect the Godot community we mistakenly blocked individuals who were not participating in the harassment. The Godot Foundation Board takes full responsibility for these moderation actions.
If you believe you were blocked in error and have not violated our Code of Conduct, please contact us with the form linked below. We are committed to swiftly rectifying any mistakes.
We firmly stand by our mission to keep our community spaces free from hate, discrimination, and other toxic behaviors.
– The Godot Foundation Board
2) On community moderator Xananax
We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.
We want to clarify that Xananax is not hired by nor a spokesperson for the Godot Foundation.
As an organization, we have our own official Discord server, moderated together with new volunteers vetted by our team.
– The Godot Foundation
I found their responses to be... insufficient and potentially blind to the amount the debacle affected public perception?
>we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community.
What terrible gaslighting here, shifting the blame from their community manager in charge doing the harassments, to the community itself as being the harassers.
Wrong. That was only one person who made the woke comment which only got 8 likes. Meanwhile, there where hundreds of other people who got blocked and made no such comments and were blocked only because criticizing the product and the poor actions of the CM. That's the real community.
If the CM only blocked that one person with the woke comment and kept quiet, everything would have been fine, but instead she kept antagonizing the community using the woke comment as fuel to start a fire based on her own world and political views as if
that one comment represented the whole community, so the community told her to drop it and focus on the product instead not on politics, then she started banning all those people.
If one comment of one person is enough for someone to loose their shit and go on a tirade about identity politics on the org's social media account and ban hundreds of people untreated to the offending comment, they must have some rice paper thin skin, low emotional maturity, or untreated mental issues either of which make them unfit for such positions.
I don't know who are on Godot Foundation's board, but as I've mentioned elsewhere: these people might want to lawyer up. This situation may very well have legal ramification, including for them.
Particularly if this was indeed their (only) response, to the events so far. Their attempt to distance themselves for the actions of Xananax, characterized as unofficial and an individual not sanctioned by them, means little if that person was effectively able to exclude access to Gotdot sources (as I’ve read from several sources) and/or at least a substantial part of its community. If the Godot Foundation made this possible by somehow by giving away the keys to their castle, then that's on them; they can (and will) carry the consequences. Even more so if they had any power to at least “freeze” the situation and somehow failed to do so.
Either way ... the tone, character and message of these two tweets sound pretty clear to me. Sad to see Godot go down this road. I always did see plenty of potential in Godot, albeit in need of a lot of work (of which I even considered actively participating at some point).
After this, I think no serious business could/should risk doing business based on Godot. Not after such a lackluster and “it wasn’t us”-style of response. Personally, that was about as dumb a move they could make; also precisely what I hoped they would not do. Two major rules of any successful sustainable business: all ultimately comes down to relationships of trust, where trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback. Godot could just as well have pointed this proverbial gun to their face instead of the foot.
Addendum:
On another level, not just related to Godot and more to all politically/ideologically driven dramas that have done harm to Open Source in general over the last decade or so: It looks like most of these incidents center around geographical regions/cultures (maybe covert commercial interests too), that apparently deem such incidents acceptable (or even weaponized them). Apparently even believing (or at least acting like) people should just move on, without the damage-causing entities facing substantial/material punishment nor be held accountable for the damage done.
This is not about censorship, political/ideological oppression, or what-not in that “department”. This is about people doing damage, yet typically walking away with near-impunity. Many of which having “freedom of speech” as their only excuse, while their actions clearly go way beyond speech. Also, since when did the right not to never be persecuted for speech became a license for saying anything without any consequences?
Most of the push-back against that kind immunity has time and again been framed as just politically/ideologically-driven responses themselves, even if they were obviously not. Unsurprisingly, mostly by those who use politics/ideology as their weapons of choice. Still, why is such framing even accepted in the first place? Since when is doing harm considered acceptable, no matter what kind of political/ideological excuse it’s packaged in? If that fundamental flaw isn’t fixes, on a cultural level, then many people may eventually see increasingly more Open Source (development) moving towards regions/cultures where playing such games isn't (politically/culturally/legally) tolerated. Not because of politics; simply because of business and even societal needs.
Probably doesn’t sound like a big deal, until a whole geographical region gets cut off. Maybe only because too many abuses kept coming from there: arbitrage mitigation and unfortunate guilty-by-association. No doubt sounds like a wild idea now. Would not count on it staying that way.
