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What a badly written and dishonest article. > Allowing Twitter’s algorithm to be visible to others, and adaptable by competitors, theoretically means someone

What a badly written and dishonest article. > Allowing Twitter’s algorithm to be visible to others, and adaptable by competitors, theoretically means someone could just copy Twitter's source code and release a re-branded version. Large parts of the internet run on open-source software most famously OpenSSL a security toolkit used by large parts of the web, which in 2014 suffered a major security breach. Sounds like the desperate, misinformed anti-open rhetoric from the mid 1990s. The real issue with Elon opening the algorithms, which I commented on a few days ago [1], is skilfully avoided. Those algorithms, and their version histories, encode many dirty secrets that will enable an astute analyst to walk back through the timeline exposing prior politically influence. The actual source code is irrelevant (for Kerckhoff-Shannon reasons). It's the parametric data associated with it that tells a thousand tales. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31183198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31183198

karmakaze 4y ago
I almost stopped reading there, as it didn't seem honest or accurate. It does get somewhat better: > For Cobbe, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. The computer code doesn’t give us any insight into how algorithms were trained or tested, what factors or considerations went into them, or what sorts of things were prioritized in the process, so open-sourcing it may not make a meaningful difference to transparency at Twitter. Meanwhile, it could introduce some significant security risks. So really this is saying that opensourcing a selection of algorithms isn't enough. Whenever I see something that says this is a bad idea or can't be done, I see the reasons given as a TODO list of how to actually make it work. What we want is transparency of changes. What's the goal, what's being measured, what's the impact of a change.

karmakaze 4y ago

I almost stopped reading there, as it didn't seem honest or accurate. It does get somewhat better: > For Cobbe, the risks outweigh the potential benefits. The computer code doesn’t give us any insight into how algorithms were trained or tested, what factors or considerations went into them, or what sorts of things were prioritized in the process, so open-sourcing it may not make a meaningful difference to transparency at Twitter. Meanwhile, it could introduce some significant security risks. So really this is saying that opensourcing a selection of algorithms isn't enough. Whenever I see something that says this is a bad idea or can't be done, I see the reasons given as a TODO list of how to actually make it work. What we want is transparency of changes. What's the goal, what's being measured, what's the impact of a change.