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Submission + - Musk had Twitter engineers boost his tweets after Biden got more views (arstechnica.com) 7

SpzToid writes: Twitter CEO Elon Musk had Twitter engineers set up a "special system" to boost his tweets after his post about the Super Bowl got fewer views than a tweet from President Biden, according to a report by Platformer yesterday.

Biden's tweet supporting the Philadelphia Eagles has 29.1 million views, while Musk's now-deleted tweet also supporting the Eagles received a mere 9.1 million. Hours after the Eagles' loss, Musk's cousin James Musk posted a message in Twitter's Slack asking anyone "who can make dashboards and write software" to help with "debugging an issue with engagement across the platform," the report said. James Musk's Slack message reportedly called the situation one of "high urgency."

Additionally, Elon Musk "flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team."

"Late Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in-person," Platformer wrote. "Roughly 80 people were pulled in to work on the project, which had quickly become priority number one at the company. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk's tweets weren't reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing out possible solutions."

Fix it or you’re fired

Earlier this month, Musk reportedly fired an engineer who tried to explain why his tweet views were down. More firings were threatened as Musk's "deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the engagement issue wasn't 'fixed,' they would all lose their jobs as well," the Platformer report said.

A solution was found by Monday. Musk's newfound reach was immediately noticeable to users in the default "For You" feed that isn't limited to accounts each user follows.

...meanwhile in related news, Slashdot's shadow ban on All News or Nerdy Discussions About Elon/Twitter remains in full effect.

Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Submission + - Call to Action: Plan an #InstallFreeBSD Event (trollaxor.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Trollaxor is putting out a call for individuals to organize #installFreeBSD events in their locales. The purpose of these events is to increase awareness of FreeBSD. These events will take place simultaneously the evening of Wednesday, April 1.
Facebook

Rusty Foster Isn't Dead 162

While he was vacationing with his wife, Kuro5hin founder Rusty Foster was killed — at least in the eyes of Facebook. NBC News details how it happened: a "pal" pranked both Foster and Facebook by notifying the social site of Foster's supposed death, providing as documentation the obituary of another, much older man by the same name. Getting the Facebook version of his life back took some doing; based on this article it seems much easier to convince Facebook that you're dead than that you're alive.
Math

Goldbach Conjecture: Closer To Solved? 170

mikejuk writes "The Goldbach conjecture is not the sort of thing that relates to practical applications, but they used to say the same thing about electricity. The Goldbach conjecture is reasonably well known: every integer can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Very easy to state, but it seems very difficult to prove. Terence Tao, a Fields medalist, has published a paper that proves that every odd number greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes. This may not sound like much of an advance, but notice that there is no stipulation for the integer to be greater than some bound. This is a complete proof of a slightly lesser conjecture, and might point the way to getting the number of primes needed down from at most five to at most 2. Notice that no computers were involved in the proof — this is classical mathematical proof involving logical deductions rather than exhaustive search."

Comment Re:Napping (Score -1) 277

I think this is what you meant to type:

"Call it a self discovery, but I found fapping after I get home from work for two hours is life changing. It clear sthe mind from stress and when you finish, you feel like the work day happened just 12 hours ago. Feeling mentally and physically detached from the office has been extremely beneficial to me. But then again, I suppose it's because I do work about 50 to 55 hours a week."

User Journal

Journal Journal: in which i am a noob all over again 17

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

Idle

Submission + - The RMS Rider (mysociety.org)

larry bagina writes: It's no secret that rock stars have riders — provisions on their contractual appearances that require a bowl of brown-free m&ms or specify the exact brand of bottled water, cocaine purity, etc. Well, Richard Stallman has his own list of provisions. Nothing about toe jam, oddly enough.

I can't wait to see Eric Raymond's rider!

Security

Prototyping Boards Make It Easier To Find Flaws in Specialized Hardware 56

wiredmikey writes "Author Robert Vamosi writes an interesting piece on how security researchers are using open source 'prototyping boards' and other open source tools now available via the Internet for rapid prototyping of tools used in hardware analysis. 'The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading,' he writes. Vendors who do not test their products before selling them into the field are doomed to be targets of future research and, perhaps, attacks."
User Journal

Journal Journal: Trolling: I still got it 4

http://www.facebook.com/cracked/posts/288992449948?ref=notif&notif_t=feed_comment

So, the folks at Cracked.com on occasion are funny. When they're not funny, they're very easy to troll about it.

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