This comment section has turned into something of a circle, it's cool to be mad nd all, but there was a comment expressing doubt at the details, wonder about a reason other than those stated, and asking if anyone independently verified, as I clicked it the comment was flagged to oblivion. No opportunity to engage with that viewpoint.
HN is always a mess when the subject contains Musk, Trump, Google, browsers or social media platforms in general.
I don't mind the slight political aspects of things, but reading a ton of hate and "I already deleted X" (pun intended) and "Just use Y other platform" (that no normal user can figure out) comments is just uninteresting and should stay on Reddit or wherever these nonproductive comments fit into.
I'd love to hear more about this case, the technical aspects and the follow-ups/investigations. Let's focus on that, no? Maybe it's just me.
The biggest exception to that is dead/shadow banned accounts. Requiring showdead (without much of an explanation what that is) to see some heavily-downvoted comments makes it rather difficult to engage with some people. Then again, I rarely feel the need to engage with dead accounts.
In terms of moderation, you also get to flag/vouch posts, so moderation isn't entirely binary.
Do all these commenters believe this nonsense? The conspiracy thinking has reached new peaks. Hard to take concerns of free speech seriously from people promoting platforms that routinely “moderate” any dissenting opinions (HN included).
Our ability for collective sense making seems to be permanently destroyed. Two people who seem to agree on everything point-by-point then reach different conclusions on the final step. Its bewildering.
Discussion mediums just don't seem to scale very well at all. Feels like we've arrived at a point where it's either this or walls of text where you spend more time trying to figure out what a post is replying to than you'd need to keep up with the new messages coming in (i.e. loads of discords)
I remember as a teen how much of a pain it was to find a good forum. Too few users and it'd feel like a graveyard, not worth checking in on often enough to build up a habit. Too many and it was impossible to keep track of anything or gain enough of an understanding of the regulars to know how to read their posts. Even the sweet spot in the middle would be frequently torn to shreds by one troll or mentally ill poster spamming the forum in a frenzy.
Far preferred it to the reddit tree based vote setup but I can understand how this is what most people have settled on.
How do you mean do we "believe this nonsense"? I don't use twitter regularly, but I have two accounts for reasons. I just signed in, I typed out a (fake) signal URL, and... posting was blocked.
It doesn't appear to be nonsense, it appears to be entirely true that any tweet with "signal.me" in it is blocked.
Occam's razor says they're blocking Signal. Hanlon's razor says they're just idiots. Either way: An important tool for communication is being blocked by twitter, which is both dangerous and not "nonsense".
Given Elon Musk's current propensity for authoritarianism and censorship, I'm leaning towards Occam's explanation. If you have evidence otherwise, I would genuinely like to see it, but honestly Hanlon's explanation that it's incompetence is not much better.
I think they're saying to give the benefit of the doubt (ex. maybe it's a glitch), without realizing many of us have no more leeway to give due to the continuing onslaught of criminal behavior from musk/Trump which we'll all have to pay for in the future and is now giving our enemies reason to celebrate.
1- The conspiracy is that blocking signal links is some top down dictation from Elon as part of geopolitical power play over censoring dissenting opinions about DOGE. This is some next level mental gymnastics. There may be good reasons to temporarily block links to a specific service, eg, maybe an ongoing phishing scam, or security issue. Plenty of rational reasons that have nothing to do with Elon and Trump.
2- X is full of people arguing about DOGE, positive and negative, and Elon is constantly attacked on his own platform by both small and large accounts. These posts are not censored.
3- Elon routinely talks about the importance of free speech, and yet I keep reading claims he’s against it from people advertising bsky and mastodon, which absolutely do not (by any reasonable definition) represent free speech platforms. They are more heavily moderated than even old Twitter was.
4- I have seen no evidence of Elon having a “propensity for authoritarianism and censorship”. Every time he gives a speech he specifically talks about being pro 1st amendment, regularly responds to his detractors, and actively defends the constitution.
I do not know what version of Elon you see, but from my perspective you are talking about a cartoonish media caricature that is the opposite of the reality that I see. We appear to be see the same person, same events, and are drawing opposite conclusions. Hence my point about sense making no longer seems possible, even when we actually appear to agree. (If anybody comes out as pro-censorship, I would be the first to call it out.)
That doesn't hold up because there are 200 year old people as well, and apparently millions of 100-year olds. I'm not saying all of it is fraud but incompetence leading to waste would not be surprising.
It sounds like there are several million in the db with those ages and without death records, but it also sounds like the vast majority are NOT collecting paychecks either. Also unclear how many of those who are collecting involve money going to living spouses or whatever other rules exist.
Too late to edit, but I've learned this is not necessarily true (but could be a default date used by the SS code in particular). Sorry for spreading rumors.
I'm not sure everything in there is 50 years old. Not even that everything is actually in COBOL. Those gigantic beasts tend to eventually be quarantined into some VM, never touched again, and then somebody puts some modern-ish wrappers around. For example some HTTP JSON API endpoints to query things. And what do they do when a date is missing? Not returning one would surely make sense. But I'd also expect layers and layers of abstractions in between, maybe some libs to transform some data type in one representation into another. Somewhere on the way, this date as a default value could easily slip in. It's not entirely made up, it's in an ISO standard. Maybe the lib was strictly following that standard.
It's not hard to imagine that something like this actually happened. Dismissing it outright just because COBOL does not have a datetime data type and the standard is only 21 years old (that far pre-dates node.js btw) could be playing into the hands of the Muskians who surely love any possibility to get out of this BS in case they made a mistake. Would not be the first they made nor the first they handled that way.
There is no cluster at 150 in the underlying data though, there's even distribution among unrealistically high age ranges. This is yet another case of people taking partisan telephone game conjecture literally.
> There is no cluster at 150 in the underlying data though, there's even distribution among unrealistically high age ranges.
Is that so? How do you know? Afaik that data is confidential and access is highly restricted. Or are you saying that that's what Elon said and we should take his word for it?
> This is yet another case of people taking partisan telephone game conjecture literally.
Everything political gets downvoted, from either side, but you're going to need better evidence than Musk and rumors for this fraud.
(There probably is some fraud! There is in any large money handling system! Japan had a problem with elderly people claiming pensions after they'd died, for example. It's just that you need a better standard of evidence before cutting off money that people are legally entitled to, because otherwise the fraud detection process is going to have false positives.)
Being down-voted is OK, but posts being flagged and removed for posting factual news is not.
You will need to define your threshold for standard of evidence. If you automatically disbelieve everything on doge.gov, then there is nothing one can do to convince you. You have chosen to shut your eyes.
Please note: I am not an American citizen. As for "rumours", when I was a junior developer working in a service company in Bangalore over 15 years ago, developing tax filing software for an American state, during a test run on live data, I filed bug-tickets for duplicate SSN, SSN's with folks over 150 years of age, obviously spurious unemployment claims, etc. All of them were closed and the contractor told my manager not to file such tickets. (I am really thankful I left that line of work)
These problems are actually very well-known. They really aren't "rumours". You can choose to put in a few hours or a few days of effort in talking to people and figuring this out yourself.
Something can be factual and political. The guidelines suggest that political content is off topic for this site and that you should flag it.
Right now there is an interesting convergence of tech, politics and general newsworthiness that is going to stress the content moderation system. But people flagging a story as obviously political is the system working as designed.
He's just queried records with dead=FALSE. It's not active recipients of social security payments. All its showing is that some portion of people die without the death being officially logged on their record in the social security database.
Edit: Also, it's not clear that the death field is the sole criteria for determining the eligibility for payments (i.e. determining the recipient is alive)
Yep, it doesn’t sound like that’s the sole criteria based on this thread, which includes a NYT article (from 2023!) showing less than 50k users over 100 collecting payments despite over 18M records.
https://xcancel.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/189135619250239902...
I can’t say how annoyed it makes me that Elon’s initial reaction to anything odd seems to be “fraud!!” rather than curiosity
> I can’t say how annoyed it makes me that Elon’s initial reaction to anything odd seems to be “fraud!!” rather than curiosity
To be fair, being curious about things isn't going to get as much support as screaming "GUBBERMINT FRAUD!" (a red rag to the GOP bull) when you're trying to trash any government departments that stand between you and more money.
Politics in general. Because everyone has an opinion, often based on their values rather than cold facts, and people do not like their values being questioned. The discussion is more civil than on other forums, but the difference is not night and day. Disappointing.
