You will own nothing and be happy etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/z2s93d/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/z2vc1j/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://old.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/z2yh1d/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/z30ia8/mercedes_is_charging_1200_a_year_for_faster/

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/z2w6p4/you_wouldnt_download_basic_features_of_a_car/

https://old.reddit.com/r/mercedes_benz/comments/z2x9sd/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://old.reddit.com/r/BMW/comments/z2wpet/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/z325hy/mercedes_locks_faster_acceleration_behind_a_1200/

https://x.com/verge/status/1595422975972454401#m

https://x.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1595453546190602242

https://x.com/search?f=tweets&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2022%2F11%2F23%2F23474969%2Fmercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price&since=&until=&near=

Other discussion https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z2i2wn/using_rust_at_a_startup_a_cautionary_tale/

Orange site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714007

Article https://mdwdotla.medium.com/using-rust-at-a-startup-a-cautionary-tale-42ab823d9454

WikiLeaks website is struggling to stay online—as millions of documents disappear

WikiLeaks’ website appears to be coming apart at the seams, with more and more of the organization’s content unavailable without explanation.

WikiLeaks technical issues, which have been ongoing for months, have gotten worse in recent weeks as increasingly larger portions of its website no longer function. Even attempting to visit wikileaks.org is a gamble in itself, often producing a 502 message that indicates an error was detected on the website’s server.

When the website does become available, problems still abound. The main banner on WikiLeaks, which includes the organization’s logo as well as links to subdomains such as the “About” page, has been entirely missing since earlier this month. A similar banner at the bottom of the page, which once showed links to sites for Bitcoin and the Tor Project, is now gone as well.

A search bar that once scoured the site for information also appears to no longer work and instead redirects users to the homepage.

But the biggest issue relates to WikiLeaks’ entire purpose: Leaks.

Many of the group’s leaks have either vanished or become inaccessible to the public. Of the seven leaks highlighted on the homepage, three produce no content. Two of those redirect to error pages while the third merely sends users back to the homepage.

Some of the organization’s most prominent leaks have also been affected. A cache of more than 1 million emails from Hacking Team released in 2015, the now-defunct Italian surveillance vendor, are gone. An archive of tens of thousands of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email are inaccessible. The Democratic National Committee emails, provided to WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 election by Russian state entities posing as rogue hackers, are similarly missing.

Although WikiLeaks long boasted that it released more than 10 million documents in 10 years, at current, less than 3,000 documents remain accessible, according to an analysis by the Daily Dot of the website’s leaks archive. The issues have become so apparent that supporters of the group are now voicing concerns across social media.

In a post on the WikiLeaks subreddit over the weekend, one user complained that every search request made on the website produced an error message.

“The site is completely down for me,” another responded. “All I get is a ‘502 bad gateway’ error.”

And despite similar complaints on Twitter, many of which tag WikiLeaks’ account, the organization has failed to publicly address any of the issues. WikiLeaks did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Dot over Twitter DM.

Even organizations tied to WikiLeaks appear to be struggling. The website for Defend WikiLeaks, a group that raised funds for the legal defense of WikiLeaks’ imprisoned founder Julian Assange, has now been taken over by a Vietnamese sports blog.

The website for the Courage Foundation, which similarly raised funds for whistleblowers and journ*lists including Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, was also taken over in the past week and transformed into a Japanese blog selling knockoff designer merchandise. The domain now shows nothing more than a blank page. The Daily Dot reached out to the Courage Foundation over Twitter DM to inquire about the issue but did not receive a reply.

The latest technical issues are not the first for WikiLeaks. The Daily Dot noted in February that despite openly asking for leaks on Twitter, none of WikiLeaks submission cowtools were actually working. In July, the Daily Dot reported on WikiLeaks release of a new submission portal for whistleblowers that still didn’t work.

The organization has largely moved away from releasing leaks in an apparent effort to rally behind Assange, who is currently being held in a U.K. prison while fighting extradition to the U.S. on charges related to his work with WikiLeaks.

While the organization is raising money for Assange’s defense, it appears none of those funds go to website maintenance.

Update 3:02pm CT: Following the Daily Dot’s reporting, the websites for both the Courage Foundation and Defend WikiLeaks were taken offline. The Twitter account for the Courage Foundation also appears to have removed a link to its website from its bio in recent days.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/z25m6r/millions_of_documents_disappear_from_wikileaks_as/

https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/z239fv/wikileaks_is_slowly_disappearing/

What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté.

— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) November 18, 2022

Great thread which produced hundreds of seething responses.

Jacobin writer: this is the dumbest motherfricking analysis of power I've ever seen in my life

Sit down, journ*list. The producing class is conversing.

You couldn’t have made his point any stronger. Offering an emotional critique with zero substance and no counter argument…basically producing nothing while feeling all important. Basically stamping your feet saying, “nah uh!” You’re like the definition of participation award

Youre involved w DSA, your profile says, but have never heard of Burnhams theory of the managerial class? How is that possible?

Ok journ*list.

As someone who appears to be in the class outlined as the problem by the thread, your response is neither surprising nor terribly imaginative.

Super articulate analysis Comrade Shure

Says the lady writing for checks notes @BuzzFeedNews

aren't you the guy who wrote the book complaining about all the women in the bay area who won't sleep with you

ad hominem attack.... always the best approach when one's actual arguments are inferior

YIMBY Jeopardy guy with very valid criticism: the funniest thing about this is that you clearly think you are very smart. spoiler alert: you’re not

some blonde foid: He’s just very mad women don’t like him.

that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks

also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet https://t.co/vZbSfEqlfW

— George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) November 22, 2022

This guy's work on hacking iPhones and the PS3 was legendary at its time. He also tried to make his own self-driving car, but of course,

So here we go. Twitter supposedly dumped 80% of their work force and ex-employees and media predicted it would collapse in on itself. We have all seen the articles ad nauseam at this point. Well we have another article from someone who supposedly did some worky at twitter.

Twitter supposedly lost around 80% of its work force. What ever the real number is, there are whole teams with out engineers on it now. Yet, the website goes on and the tweets keep coming. This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat. I’d like to explain my little corner of Twitter (though it wasn’t so little) and some of the work that went on that kept this thing running.

For five years I was a Site Reliability Engineer(SRE) at Twitter. For four of those years I was the sole SRE for the Cache team. There was a few before me, and the whole team I worked with, where a bunch came and went. But for four years I was the one responsible for automation, reliability and operations in the team. I designed and implemented most of the cowtools that are keeping it running so I think I’m qualified to talk about it. (There might be only one or two other people)

So basically this one guy and maybe 2 other people designed all the automation cowtools to help keep Twitter afloat. It gets more technically but let's admit it, most none of us really care.

This substack generated a 1000 comment thread on HN

Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down: From a Real Twitter SRE

Top comment

This left a lot wondering what exactly was going on with all those engineers and made it seem like it was all just bloat.

I was partly expecting the rest of the article to explain to me why exactly it wasn't just bloat. But it goes on talking about this 1~3-person cache SRE team that built solid infra automation that's really resilient to both hardware and software failures. If anything, the article might actually persuade me that it was all bloat.

This is where my went as well. If 1-3 people can automate something that kept Twitter up and running, the frick where the other 6,077 employees doing?

Twitter had 7,500 employees. most of the roles you mention (security engineers, code reviews, data architecture, HR, internal audit teams, content moderators, scrum master) are not bloat. So the question is what are the other 7000 people doing?

They had over a thousand moderators. So maybe your estimate of how many people is required is a bit off.

Twitter had a lot of people in marketing.

1-3 people doing SRE engineering to keep Twitter automated vs 1,000 moderators.

I think the real question is: Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front with a flat stock price over the course of less than 5 years. What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing and why did the previous CEO think what they were doing was worth hiring them for? That's just basic accountability from a stock holder or employee perspective. That's apparently a ton of money being wasted on nothing at all.

Twitter used to experience significant downtime compared to all other major platforms and one of the reason was its lack of redundancies across everything. Headcount is one such thing and it takes manpower to automate infrastructures as discussed in the post.

Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say 98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. As always, the last 2% is a hard problem and business doesn't really want to deal with a such unreliable platform. You wanna onboard big advertisers which potentially spend $100M ARR? Then you need to assign a dedicated account manager to handle all customer escalations. PMs then triage and plan their feature requests and later engineers implement it. Which all adds up.

And they also uses your competitor's product, like Google, FB, TikTok etc etc... Twitter is a severely underdog here, so you need to support at least a minimal, essential subset of features in those products to convince them to spend their money on Twitter. That alone takes hundreds of engineers, data scientists and PM thanks to modern ad serving stacks with massive complexity...

Does your product keep crashing? Just hire people. That is all you need to do. See that bum on the corner. Increased headcount. Bam. Solved. Yeah Twitter is lacking in staff compared to Google, which run a multitude of other products, or Facebook, which runs a multitude of other products. I keep seeing this weird misconception that Elon fire 80% of Twitter and that 80% were all engineers and coders.

No matter if it was or not and for better or worse: If Twitter survives this without any major harm it will have profound consequences for the whole software industry.

There are many, many posts like these basically arguing that "it runs fine now, and fine for the nth week, but " I'm lazy and won't link.

The most helpful thing to reflect on in these Twitter operational discussions is the difference between homeostasis and evolution. You can get rid of 80% of the work force and the existing homeostasis systems will keep things running smoothly despite known day-to-day chaos. Where you’re really going to run into trouble is inventing responses to novel chaos and gradually changing times.

I agree those were odd takes. I've likened firing most of the engineers to taking your hands off the wheel in the car. It won't crash immediately, but it doesn't mean the car can go driverless. With that said, there are differences between internal systems and something like Twitter on the public internet. I assume that Twitter is a system under constant attack. What happens when the next log4shell level vulnerability comes out?

All this does is point out that smart people worked at Twitter who may now no longer work there, whether on their own accord, or due to Elon’s bulldogging tactics.

Elon thinks he knows what he’s doing, but what he is going to be left with are people who are willing to work hard by his standards, but not necessarily smart.

The simple truth is Elon knows nothing about the actual work involved in tech. He knows words or elicits help from others on what to say that sounds like tech speak (RPCs!), but when it comes to being truly knowledgeable in this space, he is losing his most valuable assets because of his amazingly poor managerial and ownership style.

I know there are a lot of Elon fans on this site, and will disagree with all of this; but his abilities have not at all been proven. Yes, he knows how to spend money to claim credit for technical advances, but until he actually has his hands dirty in the muck of the hard work of tech, he will always be a glorified self-promoter with no substance.

And Twitter will suffer for it.

I think people's expectations became so exaggerated it was inevitable they wouldn't be lived up to. I'm sure Twitter will experience degradation from the drastic cost-cutting, but it was never going to happen overnight and I'm not sure why news outlets were saying that (except that their sources were employees with slightly inflated senses of their own importance, which we're all sometimes guilty of). And people became really invested in the idea that a site cannot possibly stay up without dedicated SREs, as though tons of tech sites (including big names like Amazon) don't just devolve this work to their on-call rotations.

Now to talking about things being overblown

Because politics and ideologues are so prevalent and everyone's attaching 'the other' (both sides) for the own. And of course people in 'important' roles who've been laid off are going to say the company is doomed, these are the probably the worst source to go off. They're not going to say "oh yeah I didn't do much at all really, just bossed people around and spent my budget every year."

It's actually scary how many people, even engineers, put their reputation on the line saying Twitter wouldn't survive the weekend. It wasn't just Twitter employees. It's like a mass psychosis of some kind. It comes off as a kind of desperation, as though they need Elon to fail. Why? What's driving that response?

It wasn't only news outlets. A majority of my... politically-noisy tech friends on Facebook went through a recent phase of intensely posting about Twitter on fire and collapsing. Now just because they're "in tech" doesn't mean they have any idea about Twitter, but they should at least know enough to know they don't know what's going to happen, but obviously they're not actually using their brains when posting comments like that. Point is a lot of people opposed to Musk have been participating in a spiraling echo chamber of fairy tales and wishful thinking, it's not just journ*lists (although clearly they're printing lies with ulterior motvies too, as usual).

I'm unable to find HNer's discussing how the media souring recently fired employees is probably not the best non-biased source of information, but, there are too many words.

Me rn :

Oh heck naw we getting the tumblr verse

it's over btw

I can update this table periodically as Elon starts to unban more and more people. 9.8% restoration so far. Obviously this ignores the countless unknown plebs that have been banned. Only the famous elites are in this one (sourced from Wiki's list here).

Greens are good! That means Elon is keeping to his promises. Pale red are neutral - Elon has yet to unban these.

But deep red is bad. This means Elon is being hypocritical. We want as few of these as possible.

Summary: iCloud for Windows is corrupting videos recorded from an iPhone 14 pro max resulting in black videos with scan lines. On rare occasions, it is inserting stills into videos from unknown sources, possibly other's iCloud accounts. I've been shown photos of other people's families I've never seen in my life, soccer games, and other random photos. Obviously, this is extremely concerning and does not exactly make me feel safe using iCloud.

I reported it to the apple security team and they told me it wasn't a "security concern"! Can you believe that?

My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat.

I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2022

A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced the cryptocurrency economy will shortly experience a systemic risk. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be concerned.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) November 20, 2022

A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced the Bingus economy will shortly experience a systemic risk. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be concerned.

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685209

A former advertising sales manager who worked at Twitter until last week tells Fortune that the tweet may come back to bite Musk, and cause the site’s biggest advertisers to suspend—or continue suspending—their marketing on the platform. He and his team were earlier bombarded with questions about what Musk’s policy was on Trump’s return, with concerns from advertisers assuaged only when Twitter sales staff could point to Musk’s Oct. 28 declaration that no decisions would be made without oversight of an independent council.

“I saw the question asked, especially early after the acquisition,” he says. “But Elon’s promise of not making decisions like that until he had convened a content moderation council before reinstating any banned users seemed to help. Of course, now we know how that turned out.”

Melissa Ingle, a former senior data scientist working as a contractor for Twitter focused specifically on civic integrity until earlier this month, tells Fortune that the reinstatement of Trump undoes the platform’s hard work. “Elon Musk’s decision to let Trump back on the platform is incredibly upsetting,” she says. “We all worked very hard to keep the platform safe for people to use.”

Ingle is concerned that the former president will act as a lightning rod, attracting others who seek to spread disinformation and sow division. “Donald Trump attracted and amplified the most extreme content and conspiracy theories,” she says. “He was banned because he instigated an insurrection and tried to interfere with the free and fair elections of our country. His return is an example of the growing toxicity and abuse on the platform since Musk’s acquisition and will have serious consequences for our democracy.”

I'm getting ads on a meta platform for a product that I have not viewed in any capacity besides in an internally-distributed work pdf on a work computer in a browser that I don't use for anything personal/tied to my non-work identity. I've checked my history in all of my browsers; my only connection to this product whatsoever is this internal pdf that I downloaded from an internal/nonpublic work server.

Assuming they aren't listening to my microphone the only explanations I can think of are that they know I was on a specific local network and subnet at the same time as coworkers that were probably googling said product, or that meta has broken Chrome's sandbox. Or they have a tracking pixel embedded in our internal site.

It's possible I'm missing something obvious but this seems incredibly sus.

twittercels never going to make it

Maybe Twitter will survive after all, especially after that embarrassing ban Mastodon did today. Good, kick the pedos out .

https://x.com/JohnnaCrider1/status/1594210082060836865#m

https://x.com/elizableu/status/1594208079200935937#m

https://x.com/HSajwanization/status/1594213238874308610#m

@BeauBiden @Soren @Snakes @SlackerNews @grizzly @MarseyIsMyWaifu discuss

@BeauBiden @Soren @SlackerNews @Snakes @grizzly @NoUntakenNames01 discuss

Quillette article:

The Erasure of Women From Online Pregnancy Literature

After lugging around two fetuses that won’t stop kicking my bladder, I have no patience left for gender activists who pretend that men can give birth.

One brave soul tries to separate the T:

Does the tech field seem to be highly represented in the T part of LGBT? I can’t count how many times I’ve see a woman’s name as the maintainer of some software and thought, wow it’s awesome to see a woman working on something as low-level or esoteric or whatever and it almost always ends up being a trans woman. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

Don’t trans females tend to be neurodivergent? Given how well neurodivergent individuals do in programming it isn’t surprising.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675235

Regardless of everything else, "chestfeeding" is just a hilarious term. It brings to mind the middle-stage of a xenomorph.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675464

Transphobic trash. Some men can be pregnant, get over it.

"men can be pregnant"

Source for this knowledge, please?

Trans men exist. Trans men can get pregnant. Trans men are men. Therefore:

Some men can get pregnant.

Take a read through this to understand better. https://helloclue.com/articles/lgbt/what-it-s-like-to-be-pregnant-as-a-transmasculine-person

Edit: Flagged for saying trans men exist. Anyone who tells you HN is a political monoculture is wrong. :D

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33674624

Uploaded some of the [dead] comments since you need an HN account with karma to see them:

lawsuit pdf

orange site

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health conspired with Google to secretly install a COVID-19 tracing app onto more than 1 million Android users' devices without their knowledge and without obtaining warrants, according to a class-action lawsuit filed this week by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

The Massachusetts app, according to the legal complaint, gave the public health department, Google, application developers, and others access to the device owners' media access control addresses, wireless network IP addresses, phone numbers, contacts and emails, thus making these parties privy to the owners' personal information, location and movement. If Android users discovered and deleted the COVID-19 tracer, the state's health agency would reinstall it on their devices, the lawsuit alleges.

"In sum, DPH installed spyware that deliberately tracks and records movement and personal contacts onto over a million mobile devices without their owners' permission and awareness," the lawsuit claims [PDF]. "On knowledge and belief, that spyware still exists on the overwhelming majority of the devices on which it was installed."

This violates Android device owners' federal privacy and unreasonable search protections as well as the state's computer crime laws, according to the lawsuit, which also names the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Commissioner Margret Cooke as a defendant.

Those are the highlights. The Register and some r-slurs on HN got uppity cause Kochs donated money to the organization suing MA. Here's a thread from last June about it if you're interested in how something without the Kochs being involved Massachusetts health notifications app installed without users’ knowledge

Also remember contact tracing? That was something that went nowhere in 2 weeks