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 @galdor@emacs.ch 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!