I had the same thought about the death count when I was 11 years old. Then you grow up and realize why an attack of that nature on American soil was and still is the big deal. That's how they were able to push the PATRIOT Act and normalize surveillance, the death count numbers weren't scary enough to get that job done.
When it comes to CEO actions I'd unfortunately still choose Elon over Jackoff if the question is which site to use because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate.
Two evils, but one has a better (still not amazing) track history of supporting free speech and ideas, so that's the what I would use. I don't have to follow the CEO on their platform.
AFAIK Jack Dorsey has not been affiliated with Bluesky for quite some time. I was thinking of Jay Graber, but actually she's not CEO anymore either. I don't know anything about the new guy TBH.
EDIT: Oops, I think I misinterpreted, you meant to compare Jack vs. Elon as CEOs of Twitter itself.
> because the latter has shown when he ran Twitter that he will happily manipulate and censor discourse to appease the current mob mentality/political climate
Could you expand a bit on what you are referring to here?
There were many examples of Twitter censoring and suppressing people and subjects. Some of the best reporting of the time was from Matt Taibbi, who won awards for his reporting, sometimes called the "Twitter Files." These are some of the worst examples:
1. Internal records released in the Twitter Files showed employees used tools like “Search Blacklist”, “Trends Blacklist” and “Do Not Amplify” against users. Verified examples included lockdown critic Dr Jay Bhattacharya, conservative commentator Dan Bongino, and political activist Charlie Kirk.
2. Twitter’s ranking systems could make replies much harder to see, collapse them beneath conversations, exclude posts from search/home feeds, and reduce distribution. Twitter itself admitted to hiding “questionable content” from replies, search and timelines as part of its enforcement system.
3. Twitter labelled and reduced the reach of claims it considered "misleading" about elections. Between 27 October and 11 November 2020 it classified around 300,000 tweets as "misleading". 456 users received warnings that also prevented normal liking, replying, or retweeting. Twitter estimated its interventions cut "quote-tweets" of "labelled" posts by about 29%.
4. In October 2020, less than three weeks before the presidential election, Twitter prevented users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden through both tweets and direct messages, and locked the Post's account. Twitter initially cited its "hacked-materials/private-information" rules even though it had not established that the material had been hacked. Jack Dorsey later acknowledged that blocking distribution publicly and privately had been a mistake.
5. Twitter adopted COVID-related rules under which staff would label users or tweets so they could be suppressed. By March 2021 Twitter said it had removed more than 8,400 tweets and “challenged” 11.5 million accounts under its COVID policies. Twitter explicitly stated that labelled COVID material could receive reduced visibility. This meant that legitimate political and scientific arguments about lockdowns, vaccines, and public-health policy could become moderation questions if Twitter classified them as "misinformation."
6. From 2018, Twitter's "hateful-conduct" rules explicitly prohibited "misgendering" or "deadnaming" of transgender people. Scores of users were permanently banned under these rules. In 2022, Twitter locked the Babylon Bee's account after it called transgender Biden administration official Rachel Levine its “Man of the Year”. Twitter required deletion of the tweet before normal access would resume.
7. Twitter permanently banned Trump in January 2021 after stating that two tweets "created a risk of further incitement of violence." These were the Tweets:
> “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
> “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
8. They maintained regular contact with US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. Yoel Roth stated formally that from 2018 he had regular meetings with the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, including weekly discussions concerning anticipated 2020 election “hack-and-leak” operations. Internal records showed government agencies forwarding individual social-media posts to Twitter for review.
I will end by telling you of my personal experience during the worst years of Twitter. As someone who disagrees with San Francisco social orthodoxy on a few issues, I received an account warning for writing a rather milquetoast tweet about how I thought children should be allowed to grow up normally without medical intervention. For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
Ah yes the amazing twitter files. I remember when they came out and reading through them.
I was appalled at the audacity of the government pointing out what they felt were TOS violating tweets to Twitter and Twitter occasionally agreed with them.
I also watched an interview with some of the Twitter files journalists, Leighton Woodhouse, David Zweig, and Bill Ottman, where they admitted they just took the data from Twitter about Twitter at face value. To the point where they accepted the data by verbally asking a Twitter engineer for searches, who then built the queries for them.
The Twitter files were a giant nothing burger done by a hypocritical “free speech absolutist” who was baby raging after being forced into buying a company he was only bluffing about buying.
I went into thinking the twitter files might have something to them with all the hubbub at first but then I read Taibis and Bari Weiss’s work and to top it off saw this interview with those three previously mentioned journalists where it became obvious they were just being led around by their nose.[1].
David Zweig actually said “I worked backwards” from his conclusions during this interview.
> For a few years, it was one of the most censorious places on the internet.
Also lol at thinking this still isn’t the case. Musk came in and just flipped what was getting censored. You may not run into it because your views align more with his right now, but that doesn’t mean he made it less censorious.
It's laughable to claim Elon supports free speech: he's the guy who will ban anyone for calling him out or challenging him (Google it if you don't believe me)
If you keep your feed on "following" instead of "for you", then the algorithm is irrelevant.
TBH I'm pretty confused why anyone uses "for you". For me at least, any time I accidentally wander over to that feed, the stuff it shows me is just dumb... not even political necessarily, just dumb clickbaity shit that insults my intelligence.
The only time I ever see hyper-political stuff is if I peek into the replies to a prominent politician. Highly recommend never doing that.
Not to mention coming from something like Niri, or even default Gnome to MacOS Tahoe is just gimping productivity tenfold. It is so incredibly unintuitive in every way for window management and keyboard shortcuts and everything in between.
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
I'm doing the same thing. Set up a honeypot API and having it log everything anything tries to access outside that home page. Collected 15,000 hits in a week from 300 unique IPs doing the usual WordPress and .env scans.
I'm just collecting the data now to be used to secure some of my upcoming projects, but I would absolutely also like to take it in a direction where it sends the bots into an infinite slow loop, or preferably something that burns as many tokens as possible for them.
I don't really care about the morality of that. I'm a big fan of fighting fire with fire.
I recently did and have been getting crazy spam calls that I never had before. I've already replied to GP about this but didn't mention I registered the DUNS number due to it being a requirement to release and Android app.
I noticed this too. It's a number I've had for years and have barely given out to anyone. Registered for a DUNS number last month and have been getting all sorts of spam calls from all different area codes. I assumed it was due to the DUNS form.
I noticed D&B have recently had FTC violations/settlements but not sure they touch this specific situation, but I'm honestly curious if there's anything we can do about this.
With all the botting and slop going on right now on HN I'd say these once annoyances are now quite arbitrary. I'm sure it bothered you and maybe one other person at this point in time, but it's pretty damn easy to scroll past it compared to actively reading comments that you half way through realize are just LLMs.
Do you use DeepSeek for both planning and building or do you have a preferred builder? I've been looking into moving from Cursor to OpenCode, or at least have Opencode for when my allocated usage for the month is done.
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