This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour.

#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

Strongly agree with the general point of this piece.

Am I very concerned about the privacy and security risks of TikTok?

Yes.

Am I any •less• concerned about, say, Facebook? Amazon? Any of the other many arms of surveillance capitalism?

No.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/01/our-growing-tiktok-moral-panic-still-isnt-addressing-the-actual-problem/

So OpenAI just released a detector of AI-generated text, I assume because of concerns in education / homework.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

Maybe this is good?

No, it's very bad.

They claim 26% true positives, 9% false positives. Assume 10% of submitted homework is chatgpt generated, you get the classic counterintuitive outcome of poor predictive power: if a homework is flagged, there's a 3:1 chance it's *human* generated.

This is going to cause a lot of harm. It should be immediately recalled.

UCU members at 150 UK universities are walking out on Wednesday 1 February.

Two disputes over pensions, pay and working conditions will affect 2.5 million students.

17 further days of strike action are planned.

https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/12770/University-strikes-ON-after-universities-refuse-to-make-further-commitments-on-pensions-pay-and-working-conditions

#ucuRISING