5 ms·

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I

• epistasis 3y ago
  One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain, is that the very concept of truth is destroyed. I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a complete waste of my time, but it's a weird mental honeypot. The book "Nothing is true and everything is possible" describes Putin's use of misinformation to maintain control of the populace and eliminate democratic types of politics, but it really feels like it applies here too. There will always be Musk fanbois who will parrot whatever he wants them to say, but most know it's just self-serving BS. And anybody trying to get to the root of everything gets easily sidetracked into narratives that feel right but have zero data backing them, like this bug. Anyway, highly recommend this book if you want to see a likely path for the future of the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Is_True_and_Everything_Is_Possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Is_True_and_Everything...
  • kristianc 3y ago
    That’s exactly it. Musk a week ago was telling us that there were a record number of user seconds on the site. Now he’s telling us they’re all content-scrapers. The very concept of truth is eroded.
    • partiallypro 3y ago
      That's what makes it so perfect when he echos conspiracy theories, Russian talking points, and other whacky talking points and elevates untrustworthy sources by tweeting things like "interesting" catapulting them into everyone's feed.
      • 18pfsmt 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • epistasis 3y ago
          The substantiation is Musk's own words, easily visible to all. Part of the "nothing is true" aspect is to make people start to doubt their own eyes. Let's not fall in honesty to the point where Musk's own Twitter timeline is not proof of what he is saying.
      • Freedom2 3y ago
        As someone who doesn't use Twitter too much, what conspiracy theories has Musk echoed or platformed?
        • minimaxir 3y ago
          The most notable one is the Paul Pelosi incident: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelosi-conspiracy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelosi-co...
        • EdwardDiego 3y ago
          When Twitter's working, just search for any tweet where he says "Interesting". Or Google "Elon Musk conspiracy" and click the top link. I don't know if you'll be able to read the tweets they reference though.
    • 18pfsmt 3y ago
      His claim is that there are a few hundred scrapers causing issues, which makes sense given the recent changes to the paid API. An assumptions of good faith was once a well-held principle on this website, and it's too bad legacy media has led so many astray. Hatred for Musk has truly captured many otherwise very logical minds.
  • concordDance 3y ago
    > One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined persona gain I will note that the few times I investigated claims of Elon lies they were not proper lies, either being misunderstood, misleading (which IS unethical, don't get me wrong), of indeterminate truth value (he said, she said type stuff), delusional optimism or actually true. Like journalists, Musk rarely outright knowingly makes literally false statements, but this does not mean you should take what he says at face value.
    • epistasis 3y ago
      I don't want to quibble about semantics, but habitual behavior of this sort just falls under the category of "liar" for me.
      • concordDance 3y ago
        I think it's an important distinction to make. Because it does means that you can actually infer true things from his statements (or a journalists statements, as news orgs do this kind of "lying" a lot), unlike with a habitual liar.
        • epistasis 3y ago
          I don't agree. There is little to learn from Musk's statements. And lumping all of journalism as being as dishonest as Musk is just plain silly. Sure, if you're on the right the media which is biased towards yoi has been serving you dishonesty and lies for a long time. But that's not journalism as a whole. Saying "he really believes his lies" is not excuse, because most habitual liars are exactly the same. They have prioritized their own narcissism so far above reality, but that doesn't make them any less of a liar. They are just lying to themselves and everyone else.
    • NegativeK 3y ago
      There's a very well known case of Musk making the same claim multiple years in a row, with it being false every single time. I prefer to assume the best out of people, but when someone is that obviously wrong that many times with that much personal gain to come from it, I can't believe that man as smart as he is would also be that misled.
  • goodbyesf 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • EdwardDiego 3y ago
    I feel like that book title is paraphrased from the maxim of the leader of the Assassins in that Alamut novel. "Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted"
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    George Costanza said "it's not a lie of you believe it." Is it a lie if you don't know or even care if it's true or what it means? That's where we are with Elon Musk.
    • ProjectArcturis 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    I know this is getting too political so I'll deserve the downvotes, but totally ignoring anything else, this is why I fundamentally could not and cannot stand Donald Trump. This is his playbook too, just constant willful dishonesty and distortion.
  • Robotbeat 3y ago
    Man, the really annoying thing is that Elon-haters are so dishonest (refusing to engage when obviously wrong claims are made, repeating things that have been long disproven, repeating hearsay as fact, etc), that it's hard to actually identify any actual lies Elon has made. Meaning, not just exaggerations or failed predictions, but straight up intentional lies. My favorite is when things are claimed to be impossible, that Elon's lying because the thing is impossible, but then it happens anyway. Where Elon gets in trouble is he's wildly over-optimistic on a few things, such as AI. He predicted an AGI would take over in 5 years around 2015 or so (so we're 3 years off), and I think he really believed it. That's why he's always claiming things like self-driving, and doing it without sensors or whatever. His paranoia of AGI and his over-confidence on self-driving have exactly the same root cause (believing AI will conquer all). Elon has had so many instances of overcoming status quo expert predictions (whether on solar energy, battery-electric vehicles, reusable launch vehicles, or whathaveyou), that I think it makes him increasingly unable to very effectively listen to experts. And he's also incredibly gullible and easily taken in by all sorts of scammers, including rightists and just plain sycophants telling him what they think he wants to hear. Which is increasingly what he's left with as everyone else who is sick of his bull has left.
    • the_gipsy 3y ago
      He has always been a rightists. He just dumped money on some cool stuff like self driving electric cars and rockets. Which is really cool, of course. But he wasn't "left with no other options". That's a lame excuse.
  • aaron695 3y ago
    [dead]
  • mrcwinn 3y ago
    This. The media is flawed. Journalists are flawed. The Verge in particular has some atrocious coverage of tech. But the problem with Elon is that in his world, we must rely on him for true information. As if the direct source is inherently true. He’s just as full of it as anyone else with interests.
• evan_ 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s necessarily saying the self-inflicted DDoS has caused a technical issue that’s forced them to shut down access. I think it’s possible that shutting down anonymous access caused the DDoS, which led to giant spikes in some metric, which led them (Elon) to conclude that there was an uptick in scraping, so they imposed the 600/tweet/day limit to punish scrapers. Seems like either my quota reset or they changed the policy because I’m able to access the site again.
  • pschuegr 3y ago
    This. I'd bet substantial amounts of money that the evil scraper idea is the result of a) another issue + b) paranoia + c) Musk thinking he understands better than anybody else.
    • berkle4455 3y ago
      This is a really ignorant take to dismiss scrapers. LLMs operate by having petabytes of conversational training data. Scraping is how OpenAI trained GPT. It’s how all their copycats are trying to do the same. Elon can be a monumental asshat, and he can be self-DDOS’ing, and can be accurate about scraping at the same time. It’s why every single social media platform is heading toward becoming a walled garden.
      • pschuegr 3y ago
        I'm not denying that scrapers exist, I'm just highly suspicious of this explanation given that: a) he's proven time and time again how willing he is to say shit just to get attention b) he doesn't seem to understand software very well c) if shit was imploding for reasons related to decisions he made, this is precisely the kind of blame externalization I would expect.
        • evan_ 3y ago
          Yeah, scrapers have always existed and while their traffic is undoubtedly higher than it has been in the past, it can't possibly be any significant amount of traffic when compared to the rest of the traffic hitting the site. A real scraper would be stopped by a rate limit set to, like, 100 tweets/minute. 600 tweets/day is a completely pointless, punitive limit.
• redditor98654 3y ago
  Depends on the scale of the overall system. I have personally seen and attempted to mitigate degenerate cases where these retries overwhelmed the backend so much that the servers were falling behind in simply rejecting the requests. Infact it got so bad because of all those retries at multiple levels from upstream callers that requests were essentially timing out at the TCP buffer/queue before they could be processed by the application. Don’t know if the Twitter homepage backend is at similar scale.
  • aeyes 3y ago
    It is unlikely that a system with the scale of Twitter implements the API rate limiter in the backend. Usually you'd do this as early as possible together with other WAF stuff. If IPs or IP ranges get really annoying we block them on the network level. Big public sites like Twitter obviously need to have this technology. Due to their political content they probably also need sophisticated DDoS protection.
    • gmerc 3y ago
      Sometimes people are cheap and don’t pay their cloudflare bill or their engineers.