Twitter's Nasty Side Dishes

Actually dope guy builds an entire theme park with accessibility at its core

(This is not really breaking news I just wanted to share it cuz it rules)

Gordon Hartman has built a fully accessible theme park for folks with physical and cognitive disabilities. Hartman's daughter Morgan was his inspiration as he envisioned a theme park where everyone could enjoy their time as much as possible.

The park has a sports center, water park and all sorts of rides, all of which are tailored to be as accessible as possible. They will literally outfit you with a pneumatic wheelchair if needed so that you can enjoy the water park without damaging an electric wheelchair.

This shit rules.

Turns out, Tesla's Autopilot  sucks at safety, objectively

Elon Musk has been very loud convincing people that Tesla's self driving technology is safer than a human driver. That rhetoric has taken to some degree, as people were pointing to statistics about Tesla crashes and whatnot.

Turns out, much like everything else out of Musk's mouth, that is a lie. According to new incident reports, Tesla accounts for the vast majority of automated-driving related crashes, and Tesla crashes are an outlier in otherwise normalized data sets.

Said another way: Teslas are more likely to crash than other cars, possibly due to Tesla's aggressive rollout of self-driving capability.

The self driving crashes seem to show patterns of not identifying pedestrians, emergency vehicles or motorcycles, among other things. While previously, arguments could be made that Autopilot crashes were less frequent than human drivers, the data shows otherwise.

Hey, maybe technology being forced out to the public by the tech industry from a firm that is well known for overworking employees (and being deeply, deeply racist while doing so) shouldn't be put into the hands of untrained humans using it to pilot a multi-ton vehicle filled with combustible chemicals.

Boris Johnson just kinda quit

Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the U.K. has resigned from his lawmaker position on Friday after getting the results of an investigation into government parties hosted during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

On his way out, he kicked and screamed at his own party as well as his political opponents. His seat, along with a few others who vacated, will now be up for election and threatens the stability of the existing hold on the government by the conservative party currently in charge (which is uh… not super loved at the moment)

Twitter isn't paying their bills, again

So we already knew that Twitter has been not paying their rent among other bills, but now they've decided to not pay their Google Cloud bill, where they have a bunch of their moderation and safety services hosted.

First a technical overview, then I'll give an analogy to make it make sense if you don't care about technobabble.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud hosting service akin to Amazon Web Services, where companies can basically rent large scale web infrastructure to host apps. In this case, Twitter has their own data centers, but also has stuff hosted in GCP, mostly from acquiring other companies that had their stuff in GCP. Specifically, the services they have hosted in GCP are moderation tooling to help crush bad actor accounts and whatnot.

Instead of paying their bill (which is due regardless), per Musk's direction, they're trying to rip everything they have in GCP out of GCP by the end of the month. Put simply: there is a 0% chance of that happening.

Analogy: pretend you are running a fried chicken fast food chain (possibly also the front to a large drug empire). You have hundreds of thousands of chickens in large coops that you rent from a company. That company says "hey, your chicken housing bill is due" and you instead say "fuck that, I'm going to move my hundreds of thousands of chickens out of your coops by the end of this month". However, you just fired the majority of your chicken handlers and shut down all of your other available coops besides one. So now you've got very few people who know how to move chickens, very few vehicles to do it with and virtually no time to do it. The only viable way to meet your deadline is to simply kill all the chickens and start over, which will basically mean you can now only serve your shitty side dishes.

tl;dr, Twitter will soon have many more shitty side dishes.

On This day…

On this day in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that all state laws preventing interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

That was only 56 years ago, by the way. People are alive today—and not even really old—who lived in an era where it was literally illegal in some states to marry someone with a different skin color.

I mean. In addition to the other people who are still alive today who were living in segregated America.

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• After cracking down on password sharing, Netflix has seen a record rise in signups (Edit: Note that this data may be unreliable. It's too early to know the long term impact, but it at least did not result in a massive net loss, as far as I can tell)
• The Unabomber has died in jail at age 81
• The Justice Department has launched a corporate crime database
• Trumps personal valet has also been charged with crimes
• ZUCC says he plans to cram generative AI into every Meta app
• Google is now using office attendance in their performance reviews to force people to stop working remotely
• There have been multiple black bears found wandering neighborhoods around D.C.
• ChatGPT is being sued for fabricating another lawsuit about a person that never happened