What I’m wondering is, how is a Russia-controlled domain still working, if it’s been banned by Russia?

Smart to have a buyback clause in the contract, otherwise this would’ve been lost and locked until the patent expired.

Beware that they’ve already said if Trump doesn’t get elected… they’re going to rename it “Project 2029”.

Redundant, like the server staff who told Elon it would take 6 months to move the servers… so he decided to move them himself on a whim… and it took 6 months to finish making them operational again?

Or redundant like the content moderation staff, whose redundancy has turned X into an even bigger dumpster fire?

Moderating and serving the content from 300 million users, worldwide, in near real time and no downtime, might seem like a simple task, but it really is not.

AI has been overhyped since it first played tic-tac-toe in the 1950s. One definition of “AI” is: “an algorithm that people don’t understand… yet” 🤷

Analysts can only work on existing data. A key to winning a war, is to keep your data secret, whether it be number of units, positioning, strategies, etc.

Maybe, just maybe, the real analysts and strategists, don’t go blabbering all they know to the media.

“Give us all data about you… we’ll decide what to make out of it later”

What a deal! 🤦

How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?

A lot.

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.

Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.

Keep in mind this isn’t some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random server and keep it going. It’s a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface… and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.

It’s kind of sad to see Musk fall from “nerdy workaholic” to… whatever he’s now.

This is going to get interesting:

The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-x-could-face-ban-in-brazil-after-failure-to-appoint-legal-representative