I’ve been awaiting the release of Grok to assists with delving into the possibility of using X as a platform to bootstrap delegate.network because the API was (like most) somewhat arcane, is transitioning from v1 to v2 and pricing and subscription levels for developers are apparently still in flux. My hope was that it will become a coherent platform for developing a system before the Iowa caucuses.
I just got Grok access and, well, things have sort of cohered. However, the picture is pretty bleak in terms of costs for an app using X for user interaction with a proxy voting system. They don’t say how many direct messages can be received per month by the user ID I created for this and when I asked Grok it said 1500/month for the $100/month “Basic” tier. Even assuming it is equal to the number of posts per month, it would not be adequate at 3000, which is the per-user limit at Basic.
The alternative UI would rely on filtered streams so as to avoid direct messages, watching for anyone posting a public message with the right #tag and parsing it (with DM to alert to the voter for bad input) into the public database for public audit and any UI anyone might want to build to tally votes. That costs $5000/month but even then it isn’t clear what the limit would be since their docs say “1,000,000 Posts per month - GET at the app level”. I suppose that would be adequate for testing purposes then that would mean shelling out up front money with no promise it would catch on. If successful, the next level of service doesn’t even have a price – just says “Monthly subscription tiers”.
I’d look into Facebook Threads were it not for the fact that it is really obvious that Zuckerberg would have no compunction at all in simply pulling support from anything that permitted people to have a real voice on immigration. He’s apparently dead set on having the entire Western World blow itself to smithereens rather than releasing the over-voltage through anything remotely resembling consent of the governed. But then he’s just another of the army of marching NPC morons that the WRC has produced in from the top down.
As previously mentioned, the purpose of this would not, of course, be the pipe dream of reforming the political system, but merely making it so that people who have been hunkered down might be drawn to at least talking to the people in their community before things blow sky high, and thereby have options other than drastic measures like taking out the electrical substations of the cities with population above 1M.
Falling back to militia.money as a way of boostrapping self-organizational preparedness is far less likely to work because of the intransigence of property owners toward young men. Chicken and egg problem there. Mutual hate is growing as evidenced by all of the “Boomer Bad” talk as well as the contempt with which employers view young men.
My hope for doing something with the huge potential of algorithmic information to reform the social pseudo-science is gone for all practical purposes unless some sort of miracle happens, because even Shane Legg seems to have thrown in the towel on the lynch-pin distinctions between data selection, model creation and model selection. I feel a particular distress for this. We’re so close with Musk saying he wants X.ai to discover truth but he’s just lost his bearings on what data-driven truth means in the natural sciences.
Worse, I feel I’ve wasted time I should have spent preparing my own Camp 38, because I fear that’s where things are going to have to fall back to for everyone.