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Twitter has imposed limits on how many tweets users can view each day, with owner Elon Musk claiming the drastic change was needed to fight "data scraping" and other "manipulation." Users who hit the rate limits were greeted with error messages like "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."
"To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day," Musk wrote on Saturday.
When Musk says "verified," of course, he means users who pay $8 a month for the Twitter Blue subscription that comes with certain perks, such as adding a blue checkmark to the accounts of subscribers. Prior to Musk's ownership of Twitter, "verified" meant that a user had been confirmed to be notable and authentic.
Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
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After the Federal Trade Commission launched a probe into Twitter over privacy concerns, Twitter’s negotiations with the FTC do not seem to be going very well. Last week, it was revealed that Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s request last year for a meeting with FTC Chair Lina Khan was rebuffed. Now, a senior Twitter lawyer, Christian Dowell—who was closely involved in those FTC talks—has resigned, several people familiar with the matter told The New York Times.
Dowell joined Twitter in 2020 and rose in the ranks after several of Twitter’s top lawyers exited or were fired once Musk took over the platform in the fall of 2022, Bloomberg reported. Most recently, Dowell—who has not yet confirmed his resignation—oversaw Twitter’s product legal counsel. In that role, he was “intimately involved” in the FTC negotiations, sources told the Times, including coordinating Twitter’s responses to FTC inquiries.
The FTC has overseen Twitter’s privacy practices for more than a decade after it found that the platform failed to safeguard personal information and issued a consent order in 2011. The agency launched its current probe into Twitter’s operations after Musk began mass layoffs that seemed to introduce new security concerns, AP News reported. The Times reported that the FTC's investigation intensified after security executives quit Twitter over concerns that Musk might be violating the FTC's privacy decree.
Journalist Matt Taibbi made a name for himself in 2010 with his brutal takedown of the finance companies that orchestrated and profited from the crippling mortgage meltdown, which ran in Rolling Stone. His description of Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money," has gone down in the annals of investigative journalism history. — Read the rest
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Four and a half months after the chaotic rollout of paid checkmarks, Elon Musk's Twitter is following through on a plan to remove verification from individual accounts that don't pay $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription.
"Starting April 1, we'll be winding down our legacy Verification program and accounts that were verified under the previous criteria (active, notable, and authentic) will not retain a blue checkmark unless they are subscribed to Twitter Blue," a Twitter FAQ says. Twitter also stopped accepting applications for verification checkmarks under the old criteria.
"To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue here," Twitter said yesterday. "Organizations can sign up for Verified Organizations here."
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When Elon Musk blamed Twitter's outage yesterday on code that "is extremely brittle for no good reason," he ignored the effect his massive layoffs had on Twitter's ability to keep the site running.
Twitter said the outage, which broke links and other functionality for about an hour, was caused by "an internal change that had some unintended consequences." That change, according to a Platformer article, "was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API."
"The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with," Platformer wrote, continuing:
Halli Thorleifsson, a 45-year old manager at Twitter hired when he sold his design agency to it, was locked out of his work accounts but could find no-one at the company to say why. Eventually he challenged the new boss, Elon Musk, on Twitter. — Read the rest
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Twitter's revenue and adjusted earnings reportedly fell about 40 percent year over year in December 2022 amid an advertiser exodus following Elon Musk's takeover.
Twitter no longer reports earnings publicly since Musk bought the company and took it private in late October. But Twitter reported the December 2022 revenue and earnings declines in an update to investors, according to "people familiar with the matter" cited in a Wall Street Journal report on Friday.
Many big companies cut advertising spending on Twitter shortly after Musk's acquisition, largely over concerns about content moderation. Twitter offered special deals to advertisers throughout December 2022, but it wasn't enough to prevent the 40 percent revenue and earnings declines.
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Twitter suffered an embarrassing technology failure today that temporarily broke links to outside websites and even to Twitter's own webpages. The problem lasted for about 45 minutes or so.
In our tests, clicking any link brought up this error message:
{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}
Clicking that developer link didn't clear anything up while the problem was still happening because it brought up the same API error message. In addition to news articles and other outbound links, the error message appeared when we tried to click Twitter's terms of service, privacy policy, cookie policy, and other similar pages. Some images embedded in tweets were broken, and there were reports of TweetDeck being broken too.
The big, giant message Tesla CEO Elon Musk and other execs tried to impart during its four-hour Tesla Investor Day was how the company would be the driver of a global shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy. Investors, at least those active after the market closed, weren’t impressed perhaps because it lacked that big product announcement, specific details on the next step in its so-called master plan 3 or Musk’s signature “one more thing” line.
Shares of Tesla fell 5.66% in after-hours trading.
Much of the event was more history lesson than a forecast of future business — although the nuance was that, of course, all roads lead to the future. And large sections of the event were dedicated to operational efficiencies and efforts to reduce cost at virtually every level of company. (which normally investors like).
Perhaps the most interesting parts are what was not said. Musk and an unusually long lineup of department leads did not share new details on Tesla’s next-generation EV and its upcoming factory in Mexico nor did they address current issues with its Full Self-Driving software that is currently unavailable to those who opted to buy the $15,000 option due to a recall.
Still, there was some news and insights from the event. Here’s a roundup highlighting the big stuff.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
This isn’t a new goal for Tesla. But a string of executives, who came on stage to talk about everything from manufacturing and raw materials to design, charging and batteries, all really tried to prove their case for how they would reach that goal.
The slide above shows the existing portfolio, the Model S, Model X, Model Y and Model 3 — as well as the Tesla Semi and the Cybertruck, and two veiled vehicles.
It’s worth looking at the 20 million vehicles per year number for a bit of a reality check. Tesla produced 1,369,611 and delivered 1,313,851 vehicles in 2022. Toyota, the global sales leader, sold 10.5 million vehicles last year.
That means, and follow the math, Tesla would need to increase its production (and sales mind you) about 15 times from 2022.
So, how will Tesla achieve this? Musk said it’s not a demand problem (a phrase he has used repeatedly in the past). The tough part is building the darned things, he said. Tesla’s answers are: vertical integration, scaling existing factories and building new ones, making the manufacturing process more efficient and adding a few more models. (But, interestingly, not too many; Musk said maybe 10 models total).
Tesla is famous for its constant push towards vertical integration. It’s the only car company in recent memory that took on making its own seats, for instance.
That message continued at the investor event, with executives discussing different pieces of the vertical-integration goal. Tesla has brought in house already, including building its own chip. But the company has continued to push the bounds of vertical integration, right down to the software it uses for in-house operations. Execs said that recently that got rid of an outsourced software for recruiting to use its own and that it developed its own purpose-built microprocessor for high-power electronics that will reduce costs by half.
For Tesla, vertical integration equals cost reductions. And that’s one of the big aims to achieve that bigger mission.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
Tesla has even extended its vertical integration efforts to the materials it uses in battery cells.
Tesla officially broke ground at a new lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, Drew Baglino, senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering, confirmed during the event.
During the presentation, Tesla showed a rendering of the 50 gigawatt-hour per year lithium refinery. The company’s messaging around speed and scale continued with the refinery project, as Baglino noted they’re working to have it operational by the end of 2023.
“This is a good example of something where we’re basically talking about breaking ground and and starting commissioning within 10 months and with actual production within 12 months,” Baglino said. “That’s the target.”
Musk added later, during a Q&A session, that a cathode processing facility will eventually be built adjacent to the lithium refinery. He also noted that the company would prefer if others took on lithium mining.
“We’re doing it because we have to not because we want to,” Musk said.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador technically broke the news Tuesday, but Musk reiterated the announcement without sharing any new details aside from a rendering.
“We’re excited to announce that the next Tesla gigafactory will be in Mexico near Monterey,” Musk said. “We do want to emphasize we will continue to expand production at all of our existing factories, including California, Nevada, here in Texas, Shanghai, so we intend to increase production at all factories. So the Giga Mexico would be supplemental to the output of all the other factories.”
Musk went on to tease a grand opening event at the factory.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
As we mentioned above, Tesla displayed two veiled vehicles during the presentation, hinting at how it will build its next-generation of vehicles on a completely different platform design. A big part of that design is building in a way that relies on automation to scale faster and cheaper.
“It’s going to look something like this where we build all the sides of the cars independently, we only paint what we need to, and then we assemble the parts of the car once, and only once. We put them where they need to go,” Baglino said.
Baglino noted that this would mean more people and robots having the space to work on separate pieces of the car, rather than lugging heavy objects to a central buildout. What that looks like on the factory floor is sub-assemblies, wherein the front, rear and floor with seats are assembled separately, and then put together at final assembly.
“To increase the scale of adoption of electric vehicles to the orders of magnitude that we just showed you, we have to make constraints part of the solution,” he said. “It leads us to greater than 40% reduction in footprint, which means we can build factories faster, with less capex and more output per unit dollar.”
While that theoretically sounds neat, factories are dangerous places and when more people work in closer quarters, injuries can happen.
Neither Baglino, Musk nor head of design Franz von Holzhausen gave additional details on next-generation vehicles. The only hint: This next-gen design may also be used on the Cybertruck, according to Baglino.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
As part of Tesla’s next-gen design, the company is developing a new drive unit that it says will be more scalable, in large part because it will eventually eliminate the use of rare earth materials.
“We have designed our next drive unit to use a permanent magnet motor to not use any rare earth materials at all,” said Colin Campbell, VP of powertrain engineering, noting that the new drive unit cost has been reduced to $1,000. Those savings could, in theory, be passed onto the consumer to make for a more accessible, affordable EV.
Tesla said its next powertrain will also use 75% less silicone carbide without compromising performance or efficiency of the vehicle. The new powertrain is also compatible with any battery chemistry, which will give Tesla more flexibility in battery sourcing, said Campbell. Finally, Tesla’s new powertrain factory is apparently 50% smaller than the current one in Austin, which Campbell said means faster scaling of EV production.
The third part of Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 is to switch home, business and industrial heating to heat pumps. Most of that portion of the presentation was just a Climate Tech 101 on the ill effects of traditional heating systems and how heat pumps could help. Musk said at some point Tesla might consider building heat pumps for the home to help solve this problem.
Tesla already produces heat pumps for its cars, so expanding into homes wouldn’t be far out of left field. But if you have a gas or oil heater, the good news is you don’t have to wait for Tesla to replace it. Plenty of other companies already do this, including Sealed and BlocPower.
Image Credits: Tesla
Tesla broke up its info-dump with some announcements, and several hints, on the future of its EV charging and energy storage businesses. Most concretely, the automaker formally introduced Magic Dock, an upgrade to Tesla’s charging stations which opens them up to vehicles that aren’t Teslas. Rolling out the tech will enable Tesla to tap into billions in federal subsidies.
Tesla also said it will add a $30 “unlimited overnight home charging” plan to Tesla Electric in July. An invite-only electric plan, Tesla Electric is exclusively available to Powerwall havers in parts of Texas where retail choice exists. Tesla added that it aims to expand its electric plan into other areas — “market by market, in the same way that we’ve approached Tesla insurance.” The company offered no specific dates.
Later, the automaker said it would debut new energy storage products in 2023. One chart shown to investors appeared to depict new megapack and powerwall designs, also hidden beneath illustrated veils. Take this with a grain or more of salt; Tesla has a track record of missing its own deadlines.
Image Credits: Tesla/screenshot
Tesla teased a little more information about its humanoid robot, the Optimus, with a video showing two robots slowly building another bot — a big step up from the prototype Tesla showed last October at AI Day.
As usual, Musk stated that Optimus will be worth significantly more than the car side of things. Optimus is trained using the same AI that trains Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD, and Musk detailed how even much of the hardware for Optimus is taken from Tesla’s cars.
“The actuators in Optimus are all custom designed Tesla actuators,” said Musk. “We designed the electric motor or the gearbox, the power electronics, obviously the battery pack and everything else that goes into Optimus. The same team that designed the groundbreaking electric motors that are in the Model S Plaid designed the actuators in the robot.”
What this means, said Musk, is that Tesla has the tools to bring an actual humanoid robot product to market at scale. Now it’s just a question of timing. And also, apparently, of what the ratio of humans to humanoid robots will be. Musk reckons it’ll be greater than one-to-one because the robots can be used at homes, in industrial use cases and more.
How the robot fits into Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3, which is focused on a sustainable energy future for Earth, isn’t exactly clear.
Everything Elon Musk and execs shared (and skipped) at Tesla Investor Day by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying 60 Starlink satellites on November 11, 2019. (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Before launching 53 Starlink satellites from Florida last August, it seems that SpaceX failed to submit required data to the US Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Now, the FAA has proposed a $175,000 fine to SpaceX for not sharing that data within at least seven days of its launch.
According to the FAA, the missing SpaceX data is critical because it’s used to “assess the probability of the launch vehicle colliding with one of the thousands of tracked objects orbiting the Earth.”
The FAA and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Twitter owner Elon Musk gave incels who pay $7 a month to ingratiate themselves with their dear leader the ability to post long tweets. Musk declared his new offering to be "terrible."
In other words, totally on-brand.
Yeah, the format is terrible.
Apparently, Musk's masterful plan to woo advertisers by re-platforming Nazis, racists, and homophobes isn't working as well as he expected. CNN reports that "625 of the top 1,000 Twitter advertisers, including major brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had pulled their ad dollars as of January." — Read the rest
Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.
Woz did not hide his feelings about Elon Musk. While he admits Musk and Wozniak's former colleague Steve Jobs, share some traits: they both communicate well and like to lead cults, Steve says the similarities end there. Musk is dishonest and doesn't deliver on what he promises, said a Wozniak focused on his not Full Self Driving Tesla. — Read the rest
Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and Internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and data protection staff have departed.
Since Musk acquired Twitter and started laying off thousands of employees at the start of November, remodeling the firm in his vision, multiple waves of tweeters have abandoned the platform. When they do, they often try to download their Twitter archive and delete DMs. In the chaos, the process has often been glitchy.
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The European Commission, which is tasked with tackling disinformation online, this week expressed disappointment that Twitter has failed to provide required data that all other major platforms submitted. Now Twitter has been hit with a "yellow card," Reuters reported, and could be subjected to fines if the platform doesn’t fully comply with European Union commitments by this June.
“We must have more transparency and cannot rely on the online platforms alone for the quality of information,” the commission’s vice president of values and transparency, Věra Jourová, said in a press release. “They need to be independently verifiable. I am disappointed to see that Twitter['s] report lags behind others, and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations.”
Earlier this month, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, met with Twitter CEO Elon Musk to ensure that Musk understood what was expected of Twitter under the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA). After their meeting, Musk tweeted that the EU’s “goals of transparency, accountability & accuracy of information are aligned” with Twitter’s goals. But he also indicated that Twitter would be relying on Community Notes, which let users add context to potentially misleading tweets to satisfy DSA requirements on stopping misinformation and disinformation spread. That process seems to be the issue the commission has with Twitter’s unsatisfactory report.
There's a great quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly about the true power of capitalism:
— Read the restApologists for capitalism claim that the profits of capitalists are the reward for their brains and skill, but here we observe the profits are reaped by those who bring neither brains, skill, nor technical knowledge – nothing but cash to purchase the brains and muscle of others.
[Update: Late Wednesday night, Musk tweeted in response to a Twitter user asking if the platform was glitching, confirming that Twitter had "multiple internal & external issues simultaneously" and "should be fully back on track later" on Wednesday night. An Ars test this morning confirmed that some Twitter accounts that were previously experiencing reported issues are now able to tweet, DM, and follow accounts.]
Late Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began experiencing international outages, with many users unable to perform basic functions like tweeting, sending direct messages, and following accounts. When Ars reporters attempted to tweet, an error message was generated saying that a daily limit of tweets had been reached, even from accounts that had not tweeted that day. According to Twitter, users typically have to tweet 2,400 times to reach the platform’s daily limit.
Independent Internet monitor NetBlocks tweeted that the outages impacted Twitter's website, mobile app, and features like posting and retweeting and were “not related to country-level Internet disruptions or filtering.”
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