25-apr-2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160546 380 comments
31-mar-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391433 1185 comments
However, this gives roughly zero insight into how Twitter's feed behaves.
[1] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/main/trust_and...
Despite not containing more than a few random files, there were headlines everywhere about the "Open Source Tesla Roadster". There were countless comments, Tweets, and posts about how amazing it was that the Roadster was now open source.
None of the people reporting on it or praising it actually looked at the files and realized you couldn't actually build anything other than the HVAC control board for the car.
Ars Technica’s space editor, Eric Berger, interviewed Musk only a few months back: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/elon-musk-turns-his-fo...
Why you take this so serious? The world is moving on. Nobody will trust anyone with their freedom of speech, ever. Is this so hard to see?
Any centralized solution qucikly implements censoring, starts banning users.
wandb_key = ...
wandb.login(...)
train_query = f"""
SELECT
{{feature_names}},
{",".join(labels)},
...
"""
cat_names = [
...
]FWIW, they see it - but interpret it as "Twitter being less biased" now, because from their POV, Twitter had a pro-liberal bias before Musk, and is now trending towards what they consider neutral.
They did. Community notes are just the rebranded "Birdwatch" program that predates Musk.
Making everyone 'equal' is a political heuristic that IMO presupposes that journalists can't be trusted and are as useful as a random person paying $20/mo.
I also think Twitter under Musk is much better, way much more functionality in it.
When I asked Grok 4, two pages worth of answers were returned, including a table with columns for Threat, Reasoning, and Severity. The article is just plain wrong and fails the very fact-checking that it purported to do.
author_is_elon, author_is_democrat, and author_is_republican are in fact gone. Now there is grok_politics_neutral, grok_politics_left, and grok_politics_right. This is in addition to a whole group of other categories, such as grok_category_sports and grok_category_music. All are based on annotations by Grok.
Importantly, this file is not used for recommendations. Everything in this file is only used for "metrics tracking purposes to measure how often we serve posts with various attributes." This would also have applied to author_is_elon.
author_is_elon
author_is_power_user
author_is_democrat
author_is_republican
Wow.
This is political targeting. This guy was one of the biggest political donors, how can this fly?
The people left on twitter earnestly believe that it is better now that you can shout racial slurs at people, buy your way to the top of any chain, get literally paid for ragebait, and genuinely think this repo is meaningful.
It's a massive self selection bias.
The system is rigged. Haven't you noticed yet?
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/7f90d0ca342b92...
When this started it really put me off X - I'd have tolerated, and almost liked the idea, of a freedom of speeech place. But a place that boosts its owners posts... Nope.
I'm out - it's such a big personal diss of me, I'm not interested any more.
Source: worked at Twitter in ML/recsys.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/c54bec0d4e029f...
(I'm not necessarily saying that's what's going on. But I do seem to recall that when reddit open-sourced, they deliberately chose to redact info related to vote manipulation/spam detection/etc.)
And people who work at X don't say they work at Twitter.
I don’t have any knowledge of the reality inside Twitter but I also have no reason to believe the company would be transparent given the many past controversies, or that any one employee would be able to look at this code which has obvious redactions and say “everything else is definitely 100% prod” and not exactly what GP suggested.
Please stop
why would they tell someone not working at twitter anymore to stop working at twitter? and how does that amount to "biased, hypocritical, one-way persecution"
It's redacted.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
There's multiple mentions of slop, for example: SlopsAuthorScoreFeature in HomeTweetTypePredicates. That means everyone gets a slop score between 0 and 1, which makes me wish that it was openly visible and that people with a high slop score would get a little piggy emoji next to their name.
There's a CLIENT_TWEET_TAKE_SCREENSHOT action, which is likely used to keep track of when a (mobile, presumably) client takes a screenshot. I hadn't considered this before, but for a social media app where posts are often shared externally through screenshots, keeping track of this can give you another engagement metric.
They have two types of NSFW filters: isNsfw and isSoftNsfw, but I couldn't figure out the distinction. Other metadata types include: isGore, isViolent, isSpam, isLowQuality, isOcr.
In ContentFeatureAdapter there's a getTweetLengthType function which shows the range for each tweet type. This is used to set TWEET_LENGTH_TYPE elsewhere. I wonder if it would help your virality to switch up your tweet lengths to regularly put out tweets which hit every length category, or if it doesn't significantly affect your potential reach.
There's a hardcoded list of top-level Grok topics [0]. Just mildly interesting to see what they consider to be top-level categories. Anime has achieved a significant cultural victory by getting separated into its own major category.
The timeout values for different service request types varied a lot across the application, which makes me curious about how they settled on those numbers. This is a question I've pondered in the past but haven't gotten around to researching deeply.
[0] https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/blob/c54bec0d4e029f...
Has anyone found anything useful? Interesting needle-in-a-haystack problem for LLMs to try as well.
https://people.com/human-interest/elon-musk-errol-musk-relat...
’“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon, 46, told the magazine. “You have no idea.”’
Daddy issues out the ass. This is actually the simplest answer, because people that pursue external validation (in Elon’s case it is very extreme, nothing is ever enough) are a genuine product of child abuse (it’s obvious emotional abuse is a major factor here).
I’m not absolving Elon, just trying to understand the initial state.
Edit:
When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. "I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless," Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. "My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-excerpt-elon-musk-by-walte...
Remember, this is a guy that showed up with a toilet to the Twitter offices and fired everyone, got on everyone’s case to sleep in the offices. He is a literal product of child abuse, and while he may not be continuing the cycle with his kids (which is hard to say because he disowned his Trans kid), he is absolutely unleashing the cycle of abuse onto others wherever he goes.
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nearly-400-million-you...
This is a common thing, not a hot take.
This is the case for every open source software ever.
> AFAIK the patch which made it obsessively bring up white South Africans was never published
Or there never was a specific patch for that purpose, contrary to what you are assuming.
> this algorithm repo went over two years between updates so it obviously wasn't tracking prod.
You are mixing up something. The Grok prompt repo is a different repo from the recommendation algorithm, and the former has been updated regularly.
The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).
False, you made that up.
https://decrypt.co/329365/bye-bye-mechahitler-elon-musk-xai-...
> The Grok repo is a smokescreen for deniability (just not particularly plausible).
Completely unfounded conspiracy theory.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
Most likely they rolled back finetuning on that thread at the same time they adjusted the prompt.
People's choices can change, maybe the economic/geopolitical reality of AI race has been impressed upon him, but I think that's what he said.
As for his claims about opening up Grok: Elon said that they would publish the n-1 weights for Grok. However, he dragged his feet and only recently released the weights for Grok 2. So now we're up to Grok 4 but he has yet to release the weights for Grok 3 despite his claims.
I think the problem with Elon is that he doesn't fully hold himself accountable for his words. If he decided that it was no longer economically viable to share Grok's weights then he should post an update about that. You cannot expect to win the goodwill of claiming to support open source and then continuously drag your feet while refusing to communicate your intentions clearly.