John Episcopo

This is a new image from #JWST.

The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way.

Everything else is a galaxy.

Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.

Ridiculously tense and exciting start to the final round of #themasters #comeonrory

So much free speech! 😬

Always love your write ups but whatever happened to the match ratings? They were awesome!

Nothing causes more waste in local and central Government than frivolous FOIs… so in trying to expose inefficiencies he’s going to cause a load of it 🤦🏻‍♂️

I'm writing this with a heavy heart and no small amount of fear. As a former X (formerly Twitter) employee on an H1B visa, I can't reveal my identity without risking everything, but I can't stay silent any longer about what I saw and was made to do. When Elon Musk took over, everything changed. What started as a social media company became something much darker. I was part of a team that was directly ordered to manipulate Twitter's systems to influence the 2024 US presidential election. It wasn't subtle, and it wasn't ethical. We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right-wing posts to the top of people's feeds. To make it look balanced, we also boosted some left-wing critics of Democrats, but it was all carefully calculated. These changes didn't just affect Americans - they impacted users worldwide. One of the most disturbing things we did was create thousands of fake accounts using advanced AI systems called Grok and Eliza. These accounts looked completely real and pushed political messages that spread like wildfire. Havn't you noticed they all disappeared? Like magic. We also knowingly allowed foreign governments to manipulate the platform. State-backed groups from Israel, Iran, and Russia were running their own influence campaigns, and because their goals aligned with ours, we looked the other way. Even when they clearly broke the rules, we didn't stop them.

Perhaps the most unethical part was how we manufactured news stories. One team would write completely fake articles, while another team would artificially boost their engagement metrics to make them go viral. We specifically targeted certain groups of people, knowing exactly how to manipulate their views and emotions. The moderation team became a tool for our agenda. We systematically silenced anyone who got in our way, enforcing the rules when it suited us and ignoring them when it didn't. Elon Musk himself was deeply involved in these decisions, often joking about being "Black Hat MAGA." What started as US election interference has now spread to other countries. We're currently doing the same thing in Germany and other European nations. The damage we've done is immeasurable, and I don't know if it can ever be fixed. People don't know what's real anymore, and that's exactly what we wanted. The pilot program for the Eliza AI Agent, was election interference. Eliza was release officially in October of 2024, but we had access to it before then thanks to Marc Andreessen. I'm terrified to be writing this, but I had to speak up. I just hope that someone with the power to do something about this sees this letter. You'll know what i’m saying is the truth by Elon's actions to the news someone spoke out. For more evidence look at the docs of Eliza AI Agent software. We left bread crumbs. Yours sincerely, A former employee who can't sleep at night.

Elon Musk's and X's Role in 2024 Election Interference, a letter from an alleged X whistleblower.

"What started as US election interference has now spread to other countries. We're currently doing the same thing in Germany and other European nations."

theconcernedbird.substack.com/p/elon-musks...

This quote has never seemed more relevant than it does right now:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

As always, @iandunt.bsky.social piece on Kemi is top drawer

Bad Sisters is great and so is Slow Horses. Both well worth a watch

Work Xmas party last night followed by the earliest meeting of the year this morning with prospective clients… 😫

This is both a thrilling, and potentially worrying, development. Right now though, I’m excited about the positives of this

The Engineering Team Performance Report 2024 Our survey of 900+ engineering leaders exploring how software engineering team performance is measured, the tools used, and the results achieved.

Very interesting Engineering Team Performance report from @leaddev.com this year. Lots of intriguing findings, especially in the use of #dora and #space and the performance metric rankings.

Find it here: shorturl.at/cO6Pn

#engineering #softwaredevelopment #engineeringleadership

The fact that Disney bought Star Wars and bought the Muppets and haven’t done a Muppets Star Wars is a crime.

Sometimes, I feel my existence as a #parent is to do nothing but pick up aqua beads. With the amount I find in random places, I’m convinced that they spawn like gremlins

#parenting #dadlife

Kicked off the #Christmas movie watching with Trading Places yesterday. That, Elf, Home Alone and Muppets Christmas Carol are the only ones I insist on watching each year but there are so many other naff ones that I love

Always nice waking up the morning after a comfortable #lfc win. The world always seems a much happier place #ynwa

This is so true in engineering too. It’s so easy to optimise too early when all you should really be focussing on is getting things working. Once it’s working, the you can focus on turning it into a masterpiece #engineering #software #dev

The best thing about #blackfriday is being able to unsubscribe from all of the websites I didn’t know I was signed up to

A great #LFC performance there and totally deserved the win. Looked a completely different team to the weekend where we lacked any sort of intensity and fluidity

I’d forgotten blazor was even a thing- it was still POC when I last read/ tried it. I’m quite intrigued to find out how widespread it’s adoption is

This is a very interesting thread

A good, albeit shaky #lfc win today and a Utd draw rounds off another good weekend for #liverpool. It was very important to get a result- especially off the back of an international break #ynwa

Having had long covid for a few years (since 2021) I’ve not been able to find a correlation between anything either. Thankfully my symptoms aren’t that bad anymore but something that has helped is using a grounding sheet- now when I’m tired, it’s a ‘normal’ tired and not a ‘long Covid’ tired

This was a perfect, unexpected start to the day #snow

So, I spent most of today playing with the #aws cli experimenting with provisioned concurrency for some lambdas that we’re having issues with during peak loads. It really made a welcome change to the meetings and reports I normally have to do #engineering #nerd #programming #cloud

So, I’m here. Now I have to go through the worst part of joining a new social network which is finding all of the people I want to follow… although, it does give me the opportunity to find new people so it’s not all bad