10 ms·

So why did they opensource it?

by meghan_rain 4y ago

daveguy 4y ago
So they could pretend to be open. It's the "Open"AI model. Open-washing?
- cubefox 4y ago
  This is a very cynical take. They should be commended for publishing recommendation code at all, which no other major social network does.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - hanniabu 4y ago
    This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code you can see yourself using inspect. If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling
    - cubefox 4y ago
      No, that's very different.
  - SequoiaHope 4y ago
    Well if they say “we will open source the algorithm” and then what they really open source is a little bit of slightly relevant code that doesn’t allow us to understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that they are trying to weasel out of public commitments. I can’t say for sure if that happened, but if they made a clear promise and then did something else, it’s perfectly reasonable to call that out.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - OJFord 4y ago
      Devil's advocate though: imagine you were to open source (probably with quite a short deadline) some 'algorithm' used in whatever you work on, but the rest should stay private; how would you go about that? I don't think it's easy, there's inherently some interface(s!) where it's a hand-wavey 'get the thing from the private bit', and defining that sensibly is hard, and if you try to do it well will probably lead to a lot of meetings, scope creep, etc. - and as far as that goes it's not easy anyway, since it's highly technical and implementation-specific yet also a management/policy decision to make.
      - jjeaff 4y ago
        If you were doing it in good faith, you wouldn't need to publish the actual code. Most likely you should publish an article and a flowchart explaining how the algorithm works. Publishing a partial chunk of code just creates a story that supporters who don't understand can parrot that "they opened their algorithm".
        oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        Exactly. Publishing what they have is the worst of both worlds - hopefully people will create flowcharts based off it, though, although it sounds like there will still be a low level of accuracy.
      - anyonecancode 4y ago
        It depends on what your goal in open sourcing is. Are you looking to provide a base for others to build software on, and to provide a way for others to contribute back to your code? Then publishing the code makes sense. Are you looking to build public trust in you and your organization? Then dumping a bunch of code with no context isn't going to help much, as it's not code but behavior that builds or destroys trust. Are you looking to lean into a polarized partisan environment, pushing a narrative where its you and your supporters against an unfair group of "others"? Then a big splashy move high on symbolism and low on substance that will inspire lots of high profile, divisive media coverage is a great way to go.
  - misiti3780 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      Because the way he acts gives people every right to. I agree that he may be misrepresented, but if he is, then he has to shoulder at least some of the blame.
    - guelo 4y ago
      Any time a billionaire buys a media company it's bad for the health of democracy.
      - Mordisquitos 4y ago
        Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for the health of democracy, and the billionaire's incompetence destroys the company's social standing and thus its ability to do more damage (even in the billionaire's own interests)?
        nonbirithm 4y ago
        Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead? (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.) A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money? Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response. I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you see it.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      Wait, what? AFAIU what you say is true, except for the part where the “main proprietary blob” does not run on the CPU. This isn’t as glorious as an actual open-source driver would be, but it does have meaningful advantages—e.g. you now have a ghost of a chance of implementing Nvidia GPU support on a non-Linux kernel, by uploading the GPU-side blob and rewriting the CPU-side shim as required. Or is the blob license-restricted from being used line that?
      - mort96 4y ago
        The "main proprietary blob" they're talking about is the userspace portion of the driver; the portion which does all of the heavy lifting. That definitely runs on your CPU. The only part they open-sourced is the kernel portion of the driver, which just exists to facilitate communication between the userspace driver and the hardware.
  - philote 4y ago
    Hey, we can get even more cynical. Why should we trust that this code is even similar to what they run in production currently?
    - concordDance 4y ago
      I can't imagine deliberately special casing Elon's account in something they made from scratch to fool people.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    Let's have reasonable goals, shall we ? "Their shit doesn't stink as bad as others'" is nothing commendable, especially after souch publicity.
  - raiyni 4y ago
    They should be commended for open sourcing something they don't understand because they fired all of the people whom understood it? Elon admitted as much.
  - LastTrain 4y ago
    I’d give them more credit if they’d been honest and kept it secret then lie to my face and pretend they didn’t?
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I say "why not both". Even if they are doing it only for good PR, we encourage it by giving them praise, because we should encourage things we want. (While remembering that they are not our friend, they are an entity we should pressure, and the way we pressure is by giving praise when they do things we like, and critcisim when they do not).
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  If we are willing to not assume some borderline "it's what they want you to think" conspiracy play, obviously there was always going to be a lot of highly interested and qualified people taking a very close look at this and, at some point, there was always going to be very definitive conclusion of what's the deal with what they released. If your play was "it's some source code, hence people will think we are open, and that should be really good for us", that would make you a very special kind of idiot in this space.
- correlator 4y ago
  There is clearly a lot of information to share. It's worth considering this could be step 1 of n as opposed to assuming the worst possible intention.
  - yurodivuie 4y ago
    It's healthy to have a normal amount of cynicism. They released it for a reason. "The goal of our open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to you, our users, about how our systems work." Why be transparent (or try to appear transparent)? To convince people to trust your platform (or to recruit - which seems to be another goal of the post). Why would Twitter want or need to do this now? Well, there is a bit of context. This disclosure doesn't exist in a vacuum.
    - mirkules 4y ago
      I love this take. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.
    - drstewart 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - blitzar 4y ago
        I agree, which is why I wonder what your motivation is to defend Twitter. You're posting about this for a reason. If I were a social media company, I'd probably have paid agitators to defend them.
anigbrowl 4y ago
PR
kzrdude 4y ago
If we can't build anything with this, is it "source"?
- bilekas 4y ago
  "Does not include batteries"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
justapassenger 4y ago
You must be new to Musk's business practices.
bradly 4y ago
Because they let go many of the engineers working on it?
w0m 4y ago
PR and it was already leaked last week.
joshspankit 4y ago
That was one of Elon’s core statements when he first talked about buying Twitter. If he had gotten it out sooner there would be an easier link between the two, but if you want more context just go read the old tweets and articles from the Twitter vs Elon days.
avanti 4y ago
It's no secret that Twitter, like any other social media platform, is driven by user engagement and ad revenues. The more time we spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes for them. With this new open-source algorithm, they're essentially crowdsourcing improvements to their system to better serve us the content we crave. this move could be seen as a strategic PR play to boost their public image amidst the growing concerns around algorithmic bias and lack of transparency. By inviting the community to collaborate and address these issues, they're not only shifting some of the responsibility onto the users but also deflecting potential criticism.
llx2 4y ago
bc he have no devs anymore and thinks the community will fix it for free
carstenhag 4y ago
Noone has mentioned this before - I don't know if it's really related, but afaik the European Union is thinking about requiring social media platforms to be more transparent when it comes to recommendations etc. If you can already say "hey we have a lot already online!" then maybe the laws will become less strict.

So why did they opensource it?

daveguy 4y ago

So they could pretend to be open. It's the "Open"AI model. Open-washing?

cubefox 4y ago
This is a very cynical take. They should be commended for publishing recommendation code at all, which no other major social network does.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hanniabu 4y ago
  This is like FB open sourcing the compiled frontend code you can see yourself using inspect. If we commend them for this we're helping promote and encourage this faux open source virtue signaling
  - cubefox 4y ago
    No, that's very different.
- SequoiaHope 4y ago
  Well if they say “we will open source the algorithm” and then what they really open source is a little bit of slightly relevant code that doesn’t allow us to understand the algorithm, then what we can deduce is that they are trying to weasel out of public commitments. I can’t say for sure if that happened, but if they made a clear promise and then did something else, it’s perfectly reasonable to call that out.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Devil's advocate though: imagine you were to open source (probably with quite a short deadline) some 'algorithm' used in whatever you work on, but the rest should stay private; how would you go about that? I don't think it's easy, there's inherently some interface(s!) where it's a hand-wavey 'get the thing from the private bit', and defining that sensibly is hard, and if you try to do it well will probably lead to a lot of meetings, scope creep, etc. - and as far as that goes it's not easy anyway, since it's highly technical and implementation-specific yet also a management/policy decision to make.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      If you were doing it in good faith, you wouldn't need to publish the actual code. Most likely you should publish an article and a flowchart explaining how the algorithm works. Publishing a partial chunk of code just creates a story that supporters who don't understand can parrot that "they opened their algorithm".
      - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        Exactly. Publishing what they have is the worst of both worlds - hopefully people will create flowcharts based off it, though, although it sounds like there will still be a low level of accuracy.
    - anyonecancode 4y ago
      It depends on what your goal in open sourcing is. Are you looking to provide a base for others to build software on, and to provide a way for others to contribute back to your code? Then publishing the code makes sense. Are you looking to build public trust in you and your organization? Then dumping a bunch of code with no context isn't going to help much, as it's not code but behavior that builds or destroys trust. Are you looking to lean into a polarized partisan environment, pushing a narrative where its you and your supporters against an unfair group of "others"? Then a big splashy move high on symbolism and low on substance that will inspire lots of high profile, divisive media coverage is a great way to go.
- misiti3780 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    Because the way he acts gives people every right to. I agree that he may be misrepresented, but if he is, then he has to shoulder at least some of the blame.
  - guelo 4y ago
    Any time a billionaire buys a media company it's bad for the health of democracy.
    - Mordisquitos 4y ago
      Not necessarily. What if the media company was bad for the health of democracy, and the billionaire's incompetence destroys the company's social standing and thus its ability to do more damage (even in the billionaire's own interests)?
      - nonbirithm 4y ago
        Yeah, have to wonder how many people, if they had the money, would want to buy out Twitter just to wipe it out. Doesn't a huge chunk of HN hate Twitter and wish it were dead? (Regardless I think that would be useless in the long run, since the millions of stranded users will still want another Twitter-like platform. And Twitter imploding without a designated archive will wipe out a tremendous amount of digital history.) A lot of his decisions look pretty incompetent in the surface, like how could he not see how charging for verification devalue the system to whoever has the money? Instead it could just be an intentional ploy to completely devalue Twitter disguised as incompetence. He can justify firing employees and charging for API access/verification as money-saving strategies, even if they're terrible strategies that have little chance of succeeding. And he could make enough people believe he's an idiot who makes things up as he goes rather than someone specifically driven or apathetic enough to run Twitter into the ground. Not to mention he was forced to buy them after changing his mind. Almost feels like a "so that's what happens" response. I wonder how higher powers would be able to distinguish fake incompetence from real incompetence. Would they care how Twitter as a private company ends up if it's the case that it implodes from its own legitimately bad business decisions? It reminds me of how employers won't directly fire employees for discriminatory reasons, instead they make the employees' lives miserable so they're compelled to leave on their own, thus they escape scrutiny.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  I still hear reverse-FUD about nvidia supposedly fully open-sourcing their Linux driver, when in reality they opened a tiny kernel portion of it that allows the main proprietary blob to connect to necessary kernel interfaces. You have to call out this bullshit when you see it.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    Wait, what? AFAIU what you say is true, except for the part where the “main proprietary blob” does not run on the CPU. This isn’t as glorious as an actual open-source driver would be, but it does have meaningful advantages—e.g. you now have a ghost of a chance of implementing Nvidia GPU support on a non-Linux kernel, by uploading the GPU-side blob and rewriting the CPU-side shim as required. Or is the blob license-restricted from being used line that?
    - mort96 4y ago
      The "main proprietary blob" they're talking about is the userspace portion of the driver; the portion which does all of the heavy lifting. That definitely runs on your CPU. The only part they open-sourced is the kernel portion of the driver, which just exists to facilitate communication between the userspace driver and the hardware.
- philote 4y ago
  Hey, we can get even more cynical. Why should we trust that this code is even similar to what they run in production currently?
  - concordDance 4y ago
    I can't imagine deliberately special casing Elon's account in something they made from scratch to fool people.
- rakoo 4y ago
  Let's have reasonable goals, shall we ? "Their shit doesn't stink as bad as others'" is nothing commendable, especially after souch publicity.
- raiyni 4y ago
  They should be commended for open sourcing something they don't understand because they fired all of the people whom understood it? Elon admitted as much.
- LastTrain 4y ago
  I’d give them more credit if they’d been honest and kept it secret then lie to my face and pretend they didn’t?
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I say "why not both". Even if they are doing it only for good PR, we encourage it by giving them praise, because we should encourage things we want. (While remembering that they are not our friend, they are an entity we should pressure, and the way we pressure is by giving praise when they do things we like, and critcisim when they do not).
jstummbillig 4y ago
If we are willing to not assume some borderline "it's what they want you to think" conspiracy play, obviously there was always going to be a lot of highly interested and qualified people taking a very close look at this and, at some point, there was always going to be very definitive conclusion of what's the deal with what they released. If your play was "it's some source code, hence people will think we are open, and that should be really good for us", that would make you a very special kind of idiot in this space.
correlator 4y ago
There is clearly a lot of information to share. It's worth considering this could be step 1 of n as opposed to assuming the worst possible intention.
- yurodivuie 4y ago
  It's healthy to have a normal amount of cynicism. They released it for a reason. "The goal of our open source endeavor is to provide full transparency to you, our users, about how our systems work." Why be transparent (or try to appear transparent)? To convince people to trust your platform (or to recruit - which seems to be another goal of the post). Why would Twitter want or need to do this now? Well, there is a bit of context. This disclosure doesn't exist in a vacuum.
  - mirkules 4y ago
    I love this take. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - blitzar 4y ago
      I agree, which is why I wonder what your motivation is to defend Twitter. You're posting about this for a reason. If I were a social media company, I'd probably have paid agitators to defend them.

anigbrowl 4y ago

kzrdude 4y ago

If we can't build anything with this, is it "source"?

bilekas 4y ago
"Does not include batteries"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

justapassenger 4y ago

You must be new to Musk's business practices.

bradly 4y ago

Because they let go many of the engineers working on it?

w0m 4y ago

PR and it was already leaked last week.

joshspankit 4y ago

That was one of Elon’s core statements when he first talked about buying Twitter. If he had gotten it out sooner there would be an easier link between the two, but if you want more context just go read the old tweets and articles from the Twitter vs Elon days.

avanti 4y ago

It's no secret that Twitter, like any other social media platform, is driven by user engagement and ad revenues. The more time we spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes for them. With this new open-source algorithm, they're essentially crowdsourcing improvements to their system to better serve us the content we crave. this move could be seen as a strategic PR play to boost their public image amidst the growing concerns around algorithmic bias and lack of transparency. By inviting the community to collaborate and address these issues, they're not only shifting some of the responsibility onto the users but also deflecting potential criticism.

llx2 4y ago

bc he have no devs anymore and thinks the community will fix it for free

carstenhag 4y ago

Noone has mentioned this before - I don't know if it's really related, but afaik the European Union is thinking about requiring social media platforms to be more transparent when it comes to recommendations etc. If you can already say "hey we have a lot already online!" then maybe the laws will become less strict.