The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Who could have predicted this?

As professional narcissist Elon Musk threatened, on Thursday Twitter abruptly ended their verified "blue check" program. Suddenly, Twitter users had no way to know for sure whether tens of thousands of government agencies, celebrities, journalists, and other people whose jobs depend to some extent on their credibility, were who their Twitter accounts purported to be.

It only took two days for someone to hoax the City of Chicago:

Impostors posing as Chicago government officials, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot, posted a series of tweets early Friday morning falsely claiming that North Jean Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive is being permanently closed.

The accounts posting the false tweets claimed to be Lightfoot, the Chicago Department of Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation. Their posts were seen by well over 100,000 people early in the day, according to Twitter data.

The impersonation effort came just a day after Twitter removed verification from accounts that had been previously verified for the purpose of credibility. Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s controversial decision to remove the “legacy” verifications took away the authenticated status of all three of the impersonated accounts.

Before Friday, the usernames of the true mayoral account, CDOT account and IDOT account had all previously appeared alongside a blue check mark signaling that the accounts had been proved to actually represent the authorities they claimed to represent. However, those check marks were taken away Thursday because of Musk’s decision.

New York City's government also had their own problem.

But this highlights a real problem: in a disaster, or an election, how will people know what information is real? I think "by not using Twitter" seems like the right answer but I also don't think Twitter will fully die by next November.

I didn't publish on Twitter very much before. Today, I'm just standing on shore, watching the ship sink. But it's a big ship, and its sinking will foul the environment for a long time.

Stuff I may come back to later

First, because it's April 20th, we have a a couple of stories about marijuana:

(The Daily Parker owns shares in Chicago-based Green Thumb Industries.)

Second, because it's the 21st Century, we have a collection of articles about the end of democracy:

And in me. I've got software to write.

Clear, cool April morning

The clouds have moved off to the east, so it's a bit warmer and a lot sunnier than yesterday. I still have to wait for an automated build to run. For some reason (which I will have to track down after lunch), our CI builds have gone from 22 minutes to 37. Somewhere in the 90 kB of logs I'll find out why.

Meanwhile, happy Fox News On Trial Day:

Finally, I've started reading The Odyssey, so I applaud National Geographic's article this month on the history of the ancient world in which Homer set the poem.

And hey, a bug

Not five minutes after my last post, I discovered a completely borked feature, caused by a change to the way Azure.Data.Tables executes queries.

The Daily Temperatures feature stores data in the same table as the History feature. Each row represents a weather report, where the table partition key is the weather station identifier and the row key is the date and time of the report. So, for example, the first row of data for Chicago-O'Hare in the 2023 table has a partition key of KORD and a row key of 20230101-0051.

Climate records use a row key of "Climate-" and the date. So yesterday's climate data for Chicago-O'Hare has a partition key of KORD and a row key of "Climate-20230415". Easy to remember, and easy to construct queries.

To that end, the original (.NET 6) code looked like this:

var query = 
	from entity in table.CreateQuery<ClimateRecordTableServiceEntity>()
	where entity.PartitionKey == locationId
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, lowerRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) >= 0
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, upperRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) <= 0
	select entity;

When I upgraded to .NET 7, I naïvely just changed the first line, to this:

var query = 
	from entity in table.Query<ClimateRecordTableServiceEntity>()
	where entity.PartitionKey == locationId
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, lowerRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) >= 0
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, upperRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) <= 0
	select entity;

When confronted with a 30-day query, though, it spun off into the abyss and crashed the whole app.

The correct code looks like this:

var query = table.QueryAsync<ClimateRecordTableServiceEntity>(entity =>
	entity.PartitionKey == locationId
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, lowerRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) >= 0
		&& string.Compare(entity.RowKey, upperRowKey, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) <= 0);

See, now the filter part of the query goes inside the method call. (There's an extra step in reading the async results back, too.)

So the effect of the naïve fix was to hit the table 30 times getting back the entire partition each time. Remember that all of the weather reports go into the table? So, yeah, the 2023 table already has something like 7.5 million rows, or about 2,500 in each partition. So it tried to read 75,000 rows just to bring back 30. Oopsi.

I'm deploying the fix now.

New Weather Now build

It took a few weeks at odd hours, but I have finally deployed the latest version of Weather Now (5.0.8507). I didn't update anything visual, but all the plumbing got a refresh. It's now running in .NET 7 (until November, when .NET 8 comes out), and I did a top-to-bottom review of its asynchronous code.

The app now runs noticeably faster, and I believe the corrections to the async bits will cure the nagging (but invisible) problem of thread exhaustion that happened from time to time.

Now I can start making some other fixes and adding some long-missing features. Really, I just needed to get back into the swing of it.

Asyncing feeling

I spent all day updating my real job's software to .NET 7, and to predominantly asynchronous operation throughout. Now I have four stubbornly failing unit tests that lead me to suspect I got something wrong in the async timing somewhere. It's four out of 507, so most of today's work went fine.

Meanwhile, the following stories have backed up:

Finally, a very rich person is very annoyed after his or her private jet got stuck in the mud at Aspen's airport. It seems the guy sent to pull it out of the mud maybe needed another lesson on how planes work, because he managed to snap the nose gear right off the $3.5 million airplane. Oopsi. (There's video!)

Twitter's long slide into irrelevance

I woke up this morning to about 450 error messages because our team's Twitter account got suspended at midnight UTC—that is, at 7pm last evening. No one knew about it because we never considered Twitter errors critical enough to keep them in our inboxes; they all go to an Outlook subfolder. Apparently, Twitter finally decided that our 15-minutes-apart API calls violated a policy, but we never got informed that this would happen or that we needed to correct something.

As near as I can figure out, Twitter's new pricing structure gives developers access to post 1,500 Tweets per month for free, but doesn't allow searches. Our app doesn't post, it only reads Tweets. The "Basic" level costs $100 and allows reading 10,000 Tweets per month. Anything more than that and you have to apply for an Enterprise license—and they don't disclose pricing information online.

Our app read about 12,000 Tweets per hour because each API call brought back about 2,000 Tweets at a time. And as far as we knew, that was what we signed up for. We even have code that checks whether we're approaching the API rate limit so we can pause the API calls.

All of this happened on the same day that Twitter decided National Public Radio is "state-affiliated media," i.e., in the same category as TASS and North Korea's "news" channel. NPR is not amused:

NPR operates independently of the U.S. government. And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.

Noting the millions of listeners who support and rely upon NPR for "independent, fact-based journalism," NPR CEO John Lansing stated, "NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."

NPR officials have asked Twitter to remove the label. They initially assumed it was applied by mistake, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara said. "We were not warned. It happened quite suddenly last night," Lara said.

In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks.

Mastadon user Rod Hilton posted this in December, which perfectly captures  the value of Twitter's infantile owner:

He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

I figure, I'll keep Twitter as long as some of the people I like keep posting on it, but I know the app will eventually fail. It's a little annoying that our research at work has to stop, because now I have to build an API adapter for a new app.

I can't help but compare Musk to Eddie Lampert, the guy who destroyed the department store Sears. I despise sociopaths like Lampert, but at least Lampert had a definable business strategy and extracted value from tearing the brand apart. Musk really isn't all that smart, and Twitter isn't all that valuable. "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude. At least it's an ethos."

Lunchtime links

Once again, I have too much to read:

Finally, it was 20 years ago tonight that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley had city workers vandalize Meigs Field so that he could sell the land to his pals. The Tribune has a photo history.

After "calm" discussion, Lebanon pirouettes on daylight saving time

The Lebanese Government has capitulated after the massive outcry and international ridicule that followed their asinine decision to postpone daylight saving time on two days' notice:

Translation:

Mikati: I decided to invite the Council of Ministers to present the above. The discussion was calm and it was decided to adopt daylight saving time, starting from Wednesday-Thursday night...

Uh huh. Perhaps that's because most large institutions, including airlines and banks, told Mikati where he could stuff his decision?

Lebanon's incompetent government

Lebanon has one of the most chaotic political systems in the world. The previous government presided over a massive ammonium nitrate explosion they could have prevented had any one person in government taken responsibility for removing a derelict Russian freighter.

Once again, the Lebanese government has displayed head-shaking incompetence, this time on what seems like a minor matter but could lead to more religious unrest as hot weather combines with people not eating or drinking water during the day. Always a good combination.

So what did the good burghers of Beirut do this time? They decided on Thursday not to change to daylight saving time this weekend, most likely so that people can make Iftar "an hour earlier." Of course, changing the clock time of sunset doesn't actually change the duration of daylight; Earth spins on its axis all the same, indifferent to how we measure it. So observant Muslims in Lebanon will still fast for a little over 12 hours today, just as they did yesterday.

I found out about this idiocy right away from the Time Zone Committee email list, but some Lebanese just found out about it this morning. It hasn't gone well:

Daylight Saving will be introduced from midnight on April 20 rather than from midnight on March 25.

No official explanation has been given for the move although local media suggested it was introduced to coincide with Ramadan.

But the decision is facing widespread revolt, with two TV channels going ahead with the clock changes in protest.

MTV Lebanon and LBCI Lebanon say they will refuse to cooperate with the adjustment, announcing they will go ahead with switching to Daylight Saving Time on Saturday.

CNN also reports, "Adding to the confusion, the government is yet to say whether it has informed officials responsible for synchronizing times on mobile phones, laptops and other electronic devices of the change." This is true; the Government of Lebanon has not officially informed IANA of the change. Fortunately—or unfortunately—for them, someone sent us a link to a reliable Tweet, so we went ahead with a patch, and some guidance on how to use the new rule by changing your phone to the Libyan time zone until April 20th.

The problem with authoritarian governments, of course, is that they believe they control everything within their domains, without having the first clue how things actually get done. Add some religion and it gets even stupider.

Democracy is messy; democracy is frustrating; but democracy doesn't usually get such basic technical decisions so maddeningly wrong.