someday(tm) I’ll get around to looking into getting a season pack from the states to here (which possibly might be distinctly non-trivial, and if it is I’ll have bother trying to figure out the logistics of it, which ugh)
heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.
yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited
you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm.. open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn't have to do everything in minutes
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that
probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don't have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho
it's kinda hilarious how close "steelmanning" (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own
hadn't seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it's a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are
and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner
from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a "give us your actual phone number" thing even before felon took it over...
so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again
not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno
[0] - ....well, 4 years ago, "had". probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn't get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon's mania to rebrand it to "x" overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)
[1] - when going through the "your interests" list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you'd hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow
ruby's had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the "rockstar dev" archetype literally became big directly because of ruby's popularity and perception at the time
I haven't been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can't speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven't really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but... yeah
The protocol is built for a future in which AI agents routinely shop for products on customers’ behalf
as I was ranting in dm earlier elsewhere, the part about this that especially fucks me off is how much of this is not just simply unnecessary but also strictly worse than what we already used to have!
~15yo ago the entire bloody internet was awash in APIs and accessible interactions! hell, it's the whole reason shit like Yahoo Pipes and IFTTT became a thing!
(and then after that ~everyone made fucking fences to wall their gardens because they want to Capture Users! to this day I still don't know if it could've gone any other way under how capitalism operates, but fuck it sucks.)
meanwhile so many people (both those who've come up Touching Computers, as well as casual users, in the last 10~15y or so (who I typically refer to as the Cloud Generation) typically don't even have a conception of doing it any other way but The Billable Platform Way. I have long suspected that this won't hold out (it's a truism that at some threshold people will start asking "wait why am I paying for this?") and I am heartened by seeing some indicators of this starting to happen, but...... fuck. there's been so much damage from years of this shit
I still stay hopeful for change (esp. because this current way can't hold), but I also grimace about what's coming in the near future (because I know that a fair number of these platforms will be cognizant of the same problem)
this is one of those things that's, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that's fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!
to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it's playing on the definition of the conceptual "smart" computer, as it relates to human experience. there's been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole "omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)" arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it's one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express "grappling with $x to make sense of it"
The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)
personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it's a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it's a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: "is it my knowledge of this domain that's spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?" is the question that comes up, and it's surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering
on the whole I think it's often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it's also worth keeping an eye on how much it's a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something(tm) is up
hot off the heels of months of “agentic! it can do things for you!” llm hype, they have to make special APIs for the chatbots, I guess because otherwise they make too many whoopsies?
clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs
aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho
I asked the other day whether they've actually spoken with these people that they keep posting such takes about, and thus far my presumption is "they haven't". posts like the above reinforce that view
which naturally leads us to: having to fix a portage overlay ~= “compiler engineer”
wonder what simonw’s total spend (direct and indirect) in this shit has been to date. maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
someday(tm) I’ll get around to looking into getting a season pack from the states to here (which possibly might be distinctly non-trivial, and if it is I’ll have bother trying to figure out the logistics of it, which ugh)