Octopus Overlords

The "air" in potato chip bags is nitrogen gas, used to force out oxygen and keep the chips fresh (as well as to cushion the packages to minimize breakage, as many others have pointed out)

Sudy wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 2:03 am I wish my rational mind could detach from this, but it just pisses me off so much when I make a genuine post on Reddit and it gets downvoted for no apparent reason. Though I did recently make a somewhat insightful post on a very active subreddit and came away with 100 upvotes in 24 hours. Yay I guess? I mean it got my account karma cred at least. Only it didn't, because I could keep vomiting up trite nonsense on a popular sub until I suddenly struck gold on a hot topic.

pr0ner wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:16 pm I mean, karma chasing is the point for a lot of people on Reddit. There are whole subreddits devoted to people getting upvotes for no reason, and entire other subreddits where people post nudes of themselves simply for the upvotes.

Smoove_B wrote:

pr0ner wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:16 pm I mean, karma chasing is the point for a lot of people on Reddit. There are whole subreddits devoted to people getting upvotes for no reason, and entire other subreddits where people post nudes of themselves simply for the upvotes.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:24 pm

pr0ner wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 12:16 pm I mean, karma chasing is the point for a lot of people on Reddit. There are whole subreddits devoted to people getting upvotes for no reason, and entire other subreddits where people post nudes of themselves simply for the upvotes.

Elon Musk is having trouble letting go. Twitter needed to reassure its own laid off employees that an email sent in the early morning on Saturday was “not a phishing attempt” after it went directly to their spam inboxes. The email, sent from twitterseparation@cptgroup.com rather than from an @twitter.com address, contained former Twitter employees’ separation contracts and provided information regarding severance pay.

Former Twitter employee Parker Lyons tweeted on Saturday, “If you were wondering about the current state of Twitter, many folks just received their separation agreements in their spam folders, pointing to a URL that was registered this morning from a vendor with a 1 star [Better Business Bureau] rating.” He continued, “If still there, I would have reported this as phishing.”

The email included login information for the CPT Group website where the ex-employees were told they could view the full separation agreement, but many remained unsure if it was legit. Twitter’s Human Resources department sent a follow-up email confirming that the email was intentional.

Twitter, which no longer has a media department, did not respond to a request for comment, as all emails were returned as undeliverable.

Tweetbot, Twiterrific, Echofon, and other third-party Twitter clients have failed to work for many people since late Thursday night, and the social network has seemingly not notified the apps' developers as to why.

Paul Haddad, a co-creator of Tweetbot, posted on Mastodon at 11:10 pm ET Thursday in reply to a post from tech journalist Casey Newton that multiple third-party clients were failing, with "no communication as to if [it's] a bug or ..." Tweets from the official accounts of the Tweetbot and Twitteriffic clients on Thursday night confirmed their communication issues. The account for Echofon posted shortly after 8:30 am Friday that it was working to resolve its issues and that "Twitter has not yet replied."

Haddad told TechCrunch that the connection issues started at 10:30 pm on Thursday and noted that all API requests from his app were failing. A post on Twitter's developers forum shows numerous Twitter-based app developers noting that their apps have been listed as "suspended" or showing invalid authentication credentials.

We could not reach Twitter for comment, as its public relations department reportedly no longer exists. The company had yet to comment on the API outage or related third-party client issues as of 11 am. Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted at 9:06 am about changes to the bookmark button placement, image cropping, and "other minor bug fixes next week."

Max Peck wrote: ↑Fri Jan 13, 2023 12:50 pm At some point, I'd assume that journalists will stop noting that Twitter has nobody handling communications and simply tweet @ Elmo and report whether or not he responds in some manner.

Twitter has not yet explained why third-party clients like Twitterific and Tweetbot stopped working late last week. But a new report and testing by one app developer suggest the outages and lack of communication are intentional.

Internal Twitter Slack chat messages viewed by The Information (subscription required) show a senior software engineer writing in a "command center" channel that "third-party app suspensions are intentional." Another employee, asking about talking points to use when addressing the outages with product partners, was told by a product marketing manager that Twitter had "started to work on comms," but there was no delivery date, according to The Information's report.

Some Tweetbot users seemed to briefly regain account access early Sunday, without the ability to post, only to lose access again later. That resulted from Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad swapping out the app's API keys, but all of his keys were later revoked. That result "proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted," Haddad wrote on Mastodon Sunday evening, as noticed by The Verge.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Sat Jan 21, 2023 10:26 am With the Twitter diaspora landing in multiple alternate Twitteresque social media (mastodon, post.news, probably others I haven't heard of), are there any 3rd party social media clients that pull access to multiple platforms together for one-stop reading or posting?

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

Rumpy wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 12:58 pm Yeah, that's pretty shitty. But on the other hand, he possibly did the guy a favor. If it were me, I wouldn't want to work for Elon and have to deal with his toxicity.

Jaymann wrote:

Rumpy wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 12:58 pm Yeah, that's pretty shitty. But on the other hand, he possibly did the guy a favor. If it were me, I wouldn't want to work for Elon and have to deal with his toxicity.

Good point. "Fired by Musk" is a feature not a bug/badge of honor.

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 2:29 pm

Jaymann wrote:

Rumpy wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 12:58 pm Yeah, that's pretty shitty. But on the other hand, he possibly did the guy a favor. If it were me, I wouldn't want to work for Elon and have to deal with his toxicity.

Good point. "Fired by Musk" is a feature not a bug/badge of honor.

That all depends on if you can find something quick if you need to and support yourself and/or your family.

malchior wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 8:58 am I don't trust the owner or the leadership to address or fix these issues. is not implementing this as intended or with some other antithetical end in mind.

Max Peck wrote: ↑Wed Feb 15, 2023 4:10 pm I have no idea how that works, especially given that all states (IIRC) allow employers to fire an employee for no reason at all.

In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning. The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.

At-will employment gradually became the default rule under the common law of the employment contract in most U.S. states during the late 19th century, and was endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court during the Lochner era, when members of the U.S. judiciary consciously sought to prevent government regulation of labor markets. Over the 20th century, many states modified the rule by adding an increasing number of exceptions, or by changing the default expectations in the employment contract altogether. In workplaces with a trade union recognized for purposes of collective bargaining, and in many public sector jobs, the normal standard for dismissal is that the employer must have a "just cause". Otherwise, subject to statutory rights (particularly the discrimination prohibitions under the Civil Rights Act), most states adhere to the general principle that employer and employee may contract for the dismissal protection they choose. At-will employment remains controversial, and remains a central topic of debate in the study of law and economics, especially with regard to the macroeconomic efficiency of allowing employers to summarily and arbitrarily terminate employees.