Nicolas' toot: https://emacs.ch//@galdor/110120040016684054

Nicolas' toot: https://emacs.ch//@galdor/110120040016684054
Twitter's Microsoft Github: https://github.com/orgs/twitter/repositories
Twitter's release blog 1st archive:
(concatenate 'string
"https://web.archive.org/web/20230331184701/"
"https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/"
"open-source/2023/twitter-recommendation-algorithm")

The metaphor we end with is the salvage of Lovecraftian old one
technology (Twitter) after the old ones (Twitter employees) were killed
by the Shogoths they created (Elon Musk), and the Shogoths' attempt to
continue the old ones' culture faded away due to lack of interest.

Thank-you to Nicolas @[email protected] on Mastodon for letting me know
Twitter sort-of released their The Algorithm yesterday slash earlier
today in another hemisphere. My theory is that the confluence of
circumstances around this release are especially unique in this fallen
world.

Elon Musk bought Twitter antagonistically. There was a large amount
of leaving and firing as he seized the means of blue-checking. And then
The (Evil) Algorithm Twitter Edition was displayed on Microsoft Github
May 31st, 2023.

Parts of The Algorithm exist in-memory only, which suggests there
will be a power failure and what it was being used with will be gone
forever if it's ever meant to be produced. I'm grabbing what I can of
all of Twitter's Microsoft Github account now, since I think the amount
of rogue and rogue-rogue actors at Twitter and missing senior employees
mean that even the bowdlerised public release shares more than any sane
and composed international megacorporation would deign to. Already
(sub-24-hours) at least once the initial commit was clobbered because
they had accidentally increased the visibility of otherwise publically
available knowledge about their users, expect it to be done again, sez
their commit message.

So while I had hitherto happily ignored Twitter's entire existence I
don't think there will be another similar case of a hostile actor buying
a company, losing its staff, then trying to save face by revealing how
the sausage is made. This makes /every/ part of Twitter interesting,
since we have an embarrassingly complete picture, even through the
mirror darkly of a publicity stunt.

There's the easy side: Pillaging Twitter's codes, since we have
unlikely access to how they were being used. Dealing with one partial
megacorporation of code release as an individual is problematic. Lots of
it is also fundamentally uninteresting: How a small megacorporation uses
Google's Hadoop in Scala and Java, and some python deep learning. I also
believe this release harbinges Twitter throwing away this code and
pivoting hard into the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM generative models. (Due to
Hadoop and Java, I checked whether Twitter was tight with Google;
sources say they are/were not). In contrast I would say Twitter is
technologically opportunistic. If something has buzz, Twitter will take
it and its associated publicity, whatever it is.

Still, I guess one plays one's hand and I got dealt a haphazard
partial code release by Twitter. Maybe I can build some fantasy golem
out of parts raided from Twitter's graveyard and activitypub but in
interlisp and with gophers. Several lifetimes' labor!