I bought a free website for $50 billion after my wife left me.
I was forced to buy a free website for billions after I posted cringe during an ambien binge
$100 a month and he’ll throw in a set of steak knives and a hair trimming kit. Please pay me, please, please, please, please. I’m a fucking idiot please give me money please the Saudi’s are riding me for a return on their investment or they’ll snap my thigh bones please please i’ll be your friend please i’ll dance like a little racist raccoon please pay $100 a month please please please everyone hates me please I cry myself to sleep holding a replica Blade Runner pistol I bought on etsy for $19,000 I was told it was an original prop but it was made from toilet roll tubes and PlayDoh please please my children don’t return my calls please oh god please.
reminder that Twitter has never had a software development life cycle, one of the most basic industry best practices imaginable, despite it being legally required of them since 2011
relevant section from the twitter whistleblower release:
- Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): An SDLC is a uniform process to develop and test software, and a basic best practice for engineering development at commercial companies. Twitter’s need to implement an SDLC was more than a best practice, it had been required since the 2011 FTC Consent Order and reported regularly to the Board of Directors.’ In or around May 2021, Mudge instructed that the Board Risk Committee receive accurate data showing that the company only had a template for the SDLC, not even a functioning process, and by Q2 2021 that template had only been rolled out for roughly 8 to 12% of projects.
If he removes the API, bots are just going to scrape instead which will use more bandwidth and cost more money.
Tweets are delicious candy. When you eat candies it comes with packaging and a wrapper, like the twitter website interface. API allows software to access the candy without the wrapper or packaging. If Elon removes direct candy access for the bots and other software, the bots will instead take packaged candy. When the bot removes the wrapper from the candy, we call this scraping. The candy packaging is useless to the bot because it just wants the candy. The extra candy packaging is going to cost twitter more money.
API is a way for software to access website data in a block of data. When a human visits a website, there is all sorts of html, css, javascript that gets interpreted by the web browser and makes the website data visually readable for humans. A computer program just wants a block of data, ex: the twitter handle, the tweet text, the tweet time stamp, etc. If a bot can’t access an API, it will resort to web scraping, that is loading the full page and extracting whatever data they want from it. Full page loads use much more data than API requests and will cost most bandwidth fees to twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping
APIs are access points to twitter that twitter has given you access to. You can get whatever twitter decides to reveal to you. Public APIs are available for anyone while private ones are limited.
Data scraping (or screen scraping) is a computer accessing a web page like a human does. It loads it in and then reads the data and then does this over and over again.
APIs are optimized for low resource use (usually) while scraping uses all the resources a human accessing a web page does and the scraper is doing it as fast as possible, possibly thousands of times a second. If you’ve gotten a CAPTCHA just to open a webpage that CAPTCHA is probably there to prevent data scraping.
HTTP APIs can be queried, eg you can ask for tweets from a specific user (probably) and get just formatted text with the contents of their tweets, and maybe some key stats about the tweet if you want.
Scraping works like a normal web browser, so any images or other stuff like tweets from random other people which you’d see in your browser as a normal user gets sent to a theoretical bot. It basically is forced to be as resource intensive as a normal user, or it would be identifiable and they can stop what they can identify. I’d imagine people will probably just scrape by emulating the mobile app though, that’s usually easier when a site/service has it.
Ah, yes, because the wealthy would never abuse AI 🤡
The tweet is about API, not AI. API is the interface that software uses to receive data from twitter. API basically sends an application a block of data instead of loading a full webpage. This makes it easier for software to interpret the data and reduces the amount of bandwidth that the site uses.
If Elon makes the API private, it’s going to break all the open source twitter apps and twitter frontends like nitter. Also the supposed malicious bots will just switch to scraping, which will use more bandwidth and cost twitter more money. I think Elon just wants to break frontends like nitter.
