Category: Twitter

Twitter / X changed the rules, and I have deactivated my account.

Previous title: Twitter / X changed the rules and I’d like to cancel my subscription now

When I signed up, I did so without installing an app to my cell phone. I signed up with the website, email, and SMS texting only. I had two-factor authentication enabled, and all that worked well. I paid for a subscription. Like a dumbass, when it came time to renew, I bought a year’s subscription because of a discount.

For an unknown reason, they’ve locked me out of my account. I get a prompt “Let’s confirm you are a human” with a URL to an app store.

I don’t want to install an app.

Really, X / Twitter wasn’t much fun for me anyway. If they’re going to be jerks about randomly locking me out of my account and demanding I install an app so that they don’t have to respond to email, I might as well just cancel my account.

I’ve tried the automated help at https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/locked-and-limited-accounts three times now, but no one there is bothering to help me. It’s been about a week since the first time I asked for help.

I’d received an email from paidfeatures@x.com and tried to ask them about my account lockout, but received the reply: “Our customer support options have changed and this mailbox is no longer monitored.

If you are a Premium user please DM @Premium: https://x.com/premium“

Can’t very well DM you if you won’t let me log in, dudes.

Generally, I think it was terrific for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Before Elon, Twitter was a willing conspirator with the US government to throw the 2020 election.

But somewhere along the line, X (new Twitter) gave up on keeping all the forms of customer service open.

I’d like to cancel my account, please.

I have deactivated my account. Apparently in 30 days they will delete it for me.

AI is getting good

Perplexity AI is proving to be a much better search engine than Google. It is astonishing.

For several years now, Google has been shooting themselves in the foot by trying to reform society through tainting search results. Accordingly, their search results have gone to shit. There are numerous examples of A/B tests against Google search: getting uplifting / supportive results when the female gender is the search, but getting condemning / demoralizing results when the male gender is the search. Ditto A/B test searches for Democrats versus Republicans, and Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

Okay, I’m done: I have replaced my search engine in all my browsers with Perplexity AI.

So while Google was going to shit, Large Language Models became capable. Jeff Bezos of Amazon spun up his own, trained it, and is now putting it out there as Perplexity AI. They have a commercial license for $20 per month, which is too rich for my blood. If they had a $5 per month plan, I’d pay for it now.

But currently, I’m freeloading. I do pay for Twitter, so I might start using Grok (Grok3 just came out) instead. I prefer to spread my activity over different services. Yet, I feel that freeloading is something I don’t like in other people; therefore, if I want to live a high integrity life, I shouldn’t be a freeloader. Anyway….

Today I get to do the minutes for a monthly meeting that I am Recording Secretary for.

On my Windows machine that plays nice with the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, I uploaded the recorded MP3 file to Nextcloud. It syncs to the server, and the file ends up in my folder where all these recorded MP3s go. That folder syncs to my main machine I’m working on now.

I had that moment of inspiration that finding these files / messing with the folders is more trouble than it should be. I’m in these folders a lot. Windows has a “Favorites” feature, surely KDE has such too?

Asking of Perplexity AI “does KDE Dolphin have a Favorites feature” instantly took me to a page which presented a ZD Net article “How to use KDE Plasma Places for a much more efficient desktop“. This is precisely what I was looking for, yet I had no idea that it was called Places.

This is great. Google search might have gotten me to this page eventually, but I doubt that I’d have gotten to it without going through many different page views (thereby increasing Google’s ad revenue).

And yes, I’ve asked Perplexity AI to generate a Perl program for reading a Nextcloud calendar, and it took no time at all to do it. Now, the program did not work….

But troubleshooting the problem with Perplexity AI was pretty easy. It suggested I try curl and that worked perfectly.

As it turns out, Nextcloud doesn’t play nice with Net::CalDAVTalk.

Whether this is a problem with Nextcloud (which doesn’t try to do anything on its own – it uses SaberDAV underneath) or this is a problem with Net::CalDAVTalk isn’t a terribly fruitful pursuit. What is almost trivial to do is to ask Perplexity AI to generate the Perl program without Net::CalDAVTalk. The whole thing can be done with HTTP::Request, LWP::UserAgent, and XML::LibXML.

It is astonishing how well this is working, and how quickly this change is taking place.