https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636838845894279168
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
·
15h
Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Our “algorithm” is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!

We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source.

Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.
4:16 PM · Mar 17, 2023
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LMAO this stable genius. Overpay for company, then fire employees to reduce running costs, then open source parts of his project and hope everybody else will fix it for free because there's no employees left to do work?

Stupid people continue to provide hours of entertainment.

They could fix the site so that its not a script hog. You can't even read most twitter link urls without scripts run. I don't like that. There are python solutions to it, but just like youtube, its a moving target.

I'll believe it when I see it. The term "open-source" does not mean the same as Open Source and is unlikely to be under an OSI-approved license.

Furthermore, the OSI has been thoroughly taken over by M$ of late from the inside through a series of scandals, so expect further silence from the OSI on this situation both in regards to Twitter specifically and abuse of the term "Open Source" in general.

Maybe we can see what was in their original code?

Every major tech company is letting go of their over priced talent even GM. I do see a lot of help wanted signs so I don't worry about them.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
"Algorithm goes open source at noon Pacific Time"
12:56 AM · Mar 31, 2023
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1641680913661607936

Which OSI-approved license will it be released under?

I have no idea.

It's a site I avoid like the plague anyhow.

It is going to be incredibly embarassing at first. Will he accept patches I wonder? A patch to stop tracking users? Do we even know what OS it's running on?

For those who don't keep track of these things, Pacific Time is UTC -7, so "noon Pacific Time" is approx 5 hours from the time this post is made at.

Existing Twitter Open Source Projects are overwhelmingly Apache-2.0 (73 are Apache-2.0, vs 11 MIT and 2 GPL, according to Twitter's GitHub repo pages), so would seem likely that this would be Apache-2.0 unless there's a reason not to.

I think more interesting than license would be whether commit history is included, since that would allow seeing if there are changes which correspond with significant events.

Indeed. But I never got the impression Twitter was ever organised enough to have a patch history. I always had the impression it was hacked together and farted about with by guys who sorta knew which bit of the scripts did what, but never documented anything until someone really went jumping up and down at them.

I might be pleasantly surprised...

The quality of Twitter's programming practices can already be seen/judged from their existing projects.

I'm no fan of Twitter (nor Elon), but I'm pretty sure any random Twitter project would be no worse than the crap from Mozilla and others.

Taking a quick look at a couple of repos... well even a non-programmer should be capable of identifying which of these looks more like a farted about mess and which one actually looks clear and organized...
https://github.com/twitter/TwitterTextEditor
https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023/twitter-recommendation-algorithm

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

"1 commit"

Yep, thought so.

"License: AGPL-3.0 license"

Sensible.

Not so sensible is having Issues open, which are rapidly filling up with crap... although half of that is from a single idiot. *shrug*

Interesting choice of languages. Scala is a variant of Java. Starlark is a variant of Python. We can only speculate. It seems people wrote what they liked. I also see 1.6% of "Other." .bat files?

EDIT: I can't access the blog on Chromium - period. Palemoon lets me in, though.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering...tion-algorithm opens in Brave, Google Chrome, and Firefox.