Matt Bennett 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:47am

    Not sure how you get from: – “There was basically no reason NOT to do it.” To: – “Cost v Benefit”
    That's sad, actually. Really, you can't relate those two concepts? (Actually I'd argue they're the same concept.) Try.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 08:16am

    “Physics has the advantage that it is all completely math based.” would be the starting point. That ain’t the opinion of a physicist,
    Lol, the old joke is that physics is actually just applied mathematics. So yeah, it is. Not only can I tell you're not a physicist, you don't know any physicists, cuz we basically all make that joke, and you don't know anything about physics, or you'd understand why your quip about experiments didn't make nearly as much sense as you thought it did. (it did a little...there's a sharp divide between experimental and theoretical physicists, but no, not in the way you think) I'd ask you to try again, but it's clear you have no basis to do so. You just said you were a physicist cuz you thought you could catch me out in an inconsistency which you only thought you did because you don't understand it enough.
    Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.
    -Richard Feynman. I was going to joke that you may have heard of him, but then I realized no, you probably haven't.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 07:48am

    A lot of effort to say nothing interesting.

    Die mad.
    You first.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 07:47am

    “There was basically no reason NOT to do it.”
    Juvenile logic.
    Sure buddy. Cost v Benefit is TOTALLY juvenile.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 07:05am

    So you didn't understand the methodology nor why it was junk. Just say that, next time.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 05:40am

    So, research involving the opinions of of folks is garbage.
    "Research into opinions" is called a poll.
    as I said, the results are exactly what you would expect from a grossly misled audience which is how Faux News sees its audience, and it should know since it’s the source of a lot of the misinformation
    Lol, oh, sure, I'm the one "blinded by ideological nonsense" here, clearly.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 05:30am

    You know literally nothing about physics, I guess.
    Oh, this is gonna be good. Please tell me how and why you think I "know nothing about physics" particularly in regards to my response.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 05:24am

    As opposed to an inert mass, a roadster has many, many components that probably should have been sterilized (just like every space probe being sent toward anything of interest) to prevent contamination of any object it could possibly collide with. Also, any exotic or unusual materials making up the bodywork, the motors, the batteries, the electronics, the interior, all of that may degrade and break off in unexpected ways under stresses a car is not designed for. But hey, the point of that stunt is not about trying to be extra careful or responsible or to consider the possible harmful consequences, it’s about trying to score extra publicity and internet points.
    God, fucking none of that is true, amazing. It IS an inert mass. It's not being sent anywhere. Nothing needed to be sterilized. Nothing broke off and it would not matter if it did. None of your objections even make sense, and you are "not yet convinced there was a sufficiently thorough plan"??? Really? HOW THE FUCK WOULD YOU KNOW?

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 04:43am

    TL;DR: Musk’s Twitter just rolled over where they before tried to engage with different governments and their demands to ban accounts.
    Well that's not true, at all. Musk is pursuing all the same lawsuits that were started before. The legal options for the moment have been exhausted.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2023 @ 12:15am

    Yeah, so think about that. Cuz on twitter and FB you have NOT been able to say whatever is legal to say.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 10:13pm

    It was easily worth many times it's cost in marketing. There was basically no reason NOT to do it. Good business decisions are a "red flag" to you? Interesting.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 09:40pm

    I can’t wait to see the Musk stans twist themselves into pretzels while trying to justify this bullshit
    Kinda easy actually....this is not Musk's bullshit, and has nothing to do with Musk, at all. Old Twitter banned a bunch of accounts, sued over it. (one of several suits), actually.) Still had to ban the accounts. Those lawsuits are still going, btw, it's not like Musk had his lawyers make a motion to dismiss or anything. Under New Twitter the Modi gov makes the exact same demands, and all the same things happen. There's no difference here, at all. Lawsuit is still in the courts. The insinuation that this is somehow worse, or different under Musk is completely made up by Masnick. Musk is in fact continuing the legal fight to stop this. Usually when Masnick lies like this there's some grain of truth that he can twist and prod to make it seem like what he's saying is true, and you idiots lap it up, but this time he just made it up completely out of thin air and you guys are still lapping it up.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:57pm

    funnily enough, I was thinking the same thing with the EU. Just pull out, be a US company only.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:32pm

    Yeah, wikipedia doesn't decide that either, sorry. Less than half of socilogy studies can be reproduced. It's not science.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:30pm

    Meaning the modern era, dumbass. You said "ancestors", which is usually referring to well before that and not sociology.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:23pm

    As in they were trying to repackage opinions as objective metrics and follows no scientific principals at all, though it pretends to.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:20pm

    Physics has the advantage that it is all completely math based. So "reproducible" mostly means the equations balance out. Most of the results (by which we mean billions of collisions averaged out, since it is quantum and each event is random) fir within the standard model just fine -- which is a bad thing, as it means we haven't discovered "new physics" (but you can do things like add a few more decimal places to the rest weight of a tau particle or whatever). All this is very boring until something doesn't fit and then you get to argue for years about whether it was measurement error or real result and try to come up with new math to describe the new result.

  • On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:04pm

    I was referring to the blathering impression that “peer review is in an atrocious state” which is an indictment intended to invalidate the conclusions.
    Peer review IS in an atrocious state, tho I'm much more worried about reproducibility. And that IS and indictment that invalidates conclusions, actually.
    my reaction to this paper is solely on the basis of..
    It validates your preconceptions, yeah, I got that part.
    The evidence clearly shows
    It doesn't show fucking anything because there is no evidence.
    Conservatives tend to do this more than Liberals because they cite the worst misinformed crap in the world.
    That opinion, right there, is actually the nucleus of this "paper". They took the opinion of "conservative sites are bad info" (seriously, S1 is just based off of liberal academics opinion, nothing else) built fucking metrics off of that used it in the factor of an opinion poll, and then pretended that was an objective measure of some kind. Peer review IS in a sorry state, but it still would have thrown this shit out.
    I argue that any “reasonable person” in the legal sense of it would realize that citing Breitbart as a basis of any kind of truth claim is mostly horseshit.
    "Reasonable person in a legal sense" mostly related to negligence claims and the like and has nothing to do with political opinions, but I wouldn't. Briebart is very biased but also factually credible. Much more so than CNN, I'd say. (which is also very liberally slanted, and hilariously, this "paper" claims it is not). But arguing our opinions of various news sources has no point, none of that is fucking scientific.
    Last, this is not social science research. It does not examine human behavior and relationships qualitatively. This is data science, which in this case, would be highly reproducible.
    Wow, so this where I realized you're just an idiot. What you said is both meaningless, but also impressively wrong. Which seems hard to do.
    1. I really don't think much of social science, because it's sub 50% reproducible, but anything pretending to be science measures things quantitatively, not qualitatively.
    2. In that all science uses data and a great deal of statistics to understand that data all science is "data science". "Data science" is a term more used in business actually.
    3. This is not data science, beyond that it has math in it, it most definitely is Sociology, except it's not science at all. It's not reproducible.
    This "paper", is actual, flaming crap. Most sociology is pretty crap, but this is way worse than normal. It's just someone's opinion, wrapped up in some math to disguise that it's just someone's opinion. At every step the more you read the worse it gets. They started with the idea of refuting that there was an ideological bias against conservatives, and worked back from there. To get a number they liked they went with the rock solid datapoint of conservative sites are bad (just as you did) and assigned numbers to justify that. (they actually outsourced this, and obviously this opinion pretending to be metrics are commonly used, which is part of why sociology is junk.)
    • This is not science
    • You don't understand what science is
    • I doubt, based on what you said, you understand any of the problems with either peer review or reproducibility is.
    • You should actually feel bad for sharing this "paper" and giving it any credence.

  • On the post: Elon Musk Effectively Admits That He Set Fire To More Than Half Of Twitter’s Value

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 06:37pm

    That link shows the same data my link showed,
    It shows it a lot clearly and makes it harder for you to fudge.
    I didn’t cherry pick
    100 % did
    I chose 2018 because that’s when the company first hit profitability. So it seemed like a reasonable
    It absolutely was not, it allowed you to cherry pick. You picked a high watermark year and that allowed you to ignore the losses prior and wash out the loses since.
    has been slightly above breakeven
    That is a massive lie, that is only even vaguely true when you outrageously cherry pick the window oh so precisely
    The question to understand, from a quarterly to quarterly basis
    No, that doesn't matter at all, actually, you're just trying to spin a story where the financial loss isn't as bad for some reason. But it was.
    That’s simply not true if you look at cashflow.
    Cashflow is nice. Companies will sometimes sacrifice profit (through capital outlays) to increase their cashflow....when they're startups. Twitter was not a start-up.
    And you’re hiding numbers in aggregate by looking at the yearly statements, not quarterly
    Fuck no, yearly is fine, and there's no reason to look at it quarter by quarter unless you're trying to cherry-pick to mislead and say dumbshit like "Twitter has had 15 profitable quarters, compared to 4 unprofitable quarters"
    Yeah, but the main “concentrated” loss was a ONE TIME NON-CASH charge. That’s what I keep telling you and which you keep ignoring.
    You keep on saying that, and I haven't IGNORED it at all, I've told you it isn't relevant. Since you seem to think it's so important, why haven't you linked to a story about it? By any chance is it related to the huge erroneous profit the year prior? Accounting artifacts (which you seem to be insisting this is) tend to balance out. Which would, btw, make it not just irrelevant for total money lost but completely meaningless. Both the spike and the dip were illusory.
    I know how to read financial statements
    Funny, so do I. That's why I'm calling out your bullshit.
    I’m trying to explain them to you, but you continue to wallow in your ignorance.
    Oh, you're trying to help little ole me? How nice! Except I'm well familiar with how you "explain" things at this point. It's sorta like Bill Clinton "explains" things. It's just gaslighting. You've "explained" that there was nothing suspicious about weekly meetings with gov agencies and "censorship is free speech" and you're just fucking lying.

  • On the post: Elon’s Definition Of ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Allows Censorship In India, That Twitter Used To Fight

    Matt Bennett ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 05:55pm

    Hey! You found something legitimate to criticize Musk about!

    Well, not really. Because Old Twitter DID block a bunch of people at the Indian government's demand. And lawsuit is STILL going. I'm all about being belligerent towards government but unless you actually want to sacrifice all your Indian personnel to jail there's only so much you can do.

    complained about Twitter taking this action, worrying that it would hurt revenue in India.
    He was arguing that Twitter's valuation had gone down and he should be paying less, you ass, not that actually disagreed with the decision on a personal level. Holy shit you're just mischaracterizing shit just left and right. You gonna pull some "Since 2018 Twitter has had 15 profitable quarters, compared to 4 unprofitable quarters." (folks, they lost $1B+ the last 10 years) type shit here? How many more ways can you come up with to distort and lie?
    Twitter gladly blocked the accounts in question,
    "Gladly". They said that? "Yay, we're super happy to be doing this!"? Or did they do it because they had no other fucking option, even leaving a notice making it clear that this was at the Indian government's demand? You ass That lawsuit against the Modi government is still ongoing, dumbass. If Musk really was all happy to do bad government's censoring he could have withdrawn the lawsuit. He didn't. There's nothing else to do. Unless you just wanted to pull out of the country and ignore them offshore, but companies never do that. This isn't even about Musk, at all, you twit Nothing about this situation changed cuz Musk took over. It's just you being a little shit cuz your favorite dystopian censorship regime got shut down. Speaking of which...I see you had Yoel Roth write an article? The guy who aided and abetted the gov censorship by proxy scheme? Are you guys buds now? That might explain the outrageous gaslighting, misleading spin, and outright lies you keep on telling to defend Old Twitter (like weirdly cherry-picking financial data to pretend they weren't losing money) and trash talk Musk.

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