Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.
The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.
This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.
Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
I can't believe X would take back the account of such an active and valued member of the community who is clearly not squatting on the name or anything.
Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.
If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.
But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing like a house where you have an actual ownership claim through the deed.
It's less like having the house taken away, and more like having your house's street address reassigned to someone else's house. Sure, no one's taken your land. Your deed gives you ownership of parcel #530453080, not of the identifier "123 Vine Street", so nothing you legally own has been taken from you.
But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.
And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.
This "ownership" or rather "identification" is a significant part of the service though.
It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to make money with it.
They've started to take this away now. Today it's some account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be one with wrong words. What you counted as value is nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?
God, how I hate all those "well ackchyually" idiots who think TOS are the only contract there ever was ignoring social norms that were there for literally decades.
Internet monolithic social services are run by private companies with TOS that no one reads and change, services that barely anyone pays for (except through their data).
We should definitely normalize this so that people see what the internet actually is for the vast majority of people.
> but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working
no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the things that keep it working are ads and normal users putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and absolutely moot.
It’s playing stupid to pretend that the theft of a hardly used handle has anything to do with an actual user account. I’m sure if @hac had a presence online, their handle wouldn’t have been sold from under them.
Since when do you "own" social media handles? Maybe you should, but that's not reflected in the laws of our countries or the policies of these platforms. They own your presence, your content, and your reach. This is our "solution" to self-publishing. Do you want change? Advocate for it.
Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule exists.
People have accounts and never post. Since X makes it mandatory to be signed in to read anything on the site meaningfully, there would be millions of such accounts with limited post history. And that doesn’t even include the fact that people sometimes go away from a platform for months for a variety of reasons.
Trust your own style, even if you aren't a native English speaker. Here's an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.
For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.
> The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.
I don't believe a single one of those people.
> For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s.
Those are notorious for false-positives, false-negatives, and generally nonsensical advice. Not that the LLM-based alternatives are much better (looking at you, Grammarly), but still.
> 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to.
I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.
Anna's Archive announced they intended to infringe on the label's copyrights by distributing their music without a license. The law allows the court "to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright" (emphasis mine).
Rights can be extended through contracts. A lawyer at Spotify might think to put in: "we distribute the music for you, your right to enforce copyright or otherwise litigate on behalf of that music is also extended to us as if we also own it".
The legal language would be different, that's a dumbed down version.
I do understand what can happen (I'm an IP lawyer), but this basically requires enabling spotify to act as your attorney, since they still do not in fact own the rights, even with this.
You can't manufacture standing here - only folks who are exclusive rightsholders can sue. Period.
So it would require giving them power of attorney enabling them to sue on your behalf, since you (or whoever) still own the exclusive rights .
I strongly doubt their contract terms have this in there, it would be fairly shocking.
I say this having seens tons of these kinds of contracts, even with spotify, and never seeing something like this.
What I have seen in practice (not with Spotify) is a law firm that is cozy with both entities will be delegated standing, the "powers" in power of attorney but with clauses defining a limited scope and "escape hatch" and "kill switch" clauses.
With the amount of content that has been described, it's not unlikely that Spotify actually owns some tiny fraction of it. They probably have some half-assed record label that owns two songs by a nobody.
Apparently you can win anything you want in a default judgement, no matter how ridiculous. When you know the other side won't show up because they'd be handcuffed, this is a useful way to achieve your goals.
Ek's initial pitch to Lorentzon was not initially related to music, but rather a way for streaming content such as video, digital films, images or music to drive advertising revenue.
So yes, they were always intending to get revenue from ads. And yes, the initial pitch included other types of media too. But I don't think we can call Spotify "an ad platform" that "never actually cared about music" any more than we could call Ars Technica "an ad platform that never actually cared about tech news."
And this is exactly why I had to use /s. Because some people would not understand that it was weitten tongue-in-cheek, while some others would fail to see the larger context and confuse my sarcasm with a simple joke (sure, as a joke it is bad; and that's precicely because it was optimized to be sarcastic, not joke-funny).
OP is Korean, and will be using the Korean wiki article which ranks squarely first when Googling his name in Korea from inside Korea. Would you ask for the same in the US case with the paralles I drew? Of course not.
> The betting markets were not impressed by GPT-5. I am reading this graph as "there is a high expectation that Google will announce Gemini-3 in August", and not as "Gemini 2.5 is better than GPT-5".
This is an incorrect interpretation. The benchmark which the betting market is based upon currently ranks Gemini 2.5 higher than GPT-5.
> This market will resolve according to the company which owns the model which has the highest arena score based off the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard (https://lmarena.ai/) when the table under the "Leaderboard" tab is checked on August 31, 2025, 12:00 PM ET.
> Results from the "Arena Score" section on the Leaderboard tab of https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text with the style control off will be used to resolve this market.
> If two models are tied for the top arena score at this market's check time, resolution will be based on whichever company's name, as it is described in this market group, comes first in alphabetical order (e.g. if both were tied, "Google" would resolve to "Yes", and "xAI" would resolve to "No")
> The resolution source for this market is the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard found at https://lmarena.ai/. If this resolution source is unavailable at check time, this market will remain open until the leaderboard comes back online and resolve based on the first check after it becomes available. If it becomes permanently unavailable, this market will resolve based on another resolution source.
> This is an incorrect interpretation. The benchmark which the betting market is based upon currently ranks Gemini 2.5 higher than GPT-5.
You can see from the graph that Google shot way up from ~25% to ~80% upon the release of GPT-5. Google’s model didn’t suddenly get way better at any benchmarks, did it?
It's not about Google's model getting better. It is that gpt-5 already has a worse score than Gemini 2.5 Pro had before gpt-5 came out (on the particular metric that determines this bet: Overall Text without Style Control).
That graph is a probability. The fact that it's not 100% reflects the possibility that gpt-5 or someone else will improve enough by the end of the month to beat Gemini.
2020 - "Ping"
2021 - "Pong"
2023 - "Boop."
2023 - "Bleep"
2023 - "will inventing new technology be the solution to our problems?"
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