I know I’ve talked about it before but it never ceases to amaze me that the city of Toronto created this labyrinthine series of underground walkways that stretch for kilometres under the heart of downtown and they called it the fucking PATH. like how much more ominous could that even be. It doesn’t even stand for anything it’s just the PATH, all caps. What fucking fae named this artisanal bakery maze.
“PATH is downtown Toronto’s enclosed pedestrian walkway linking 29 kilometres of shopping, services and entertainment connecting Toronto Coach Terminal to Maple Leaf Square/Air Canada Centre. The Acronym (PATH) does not stand for anything - just signals that there is a pathway.”
Like I always lose my mind at this. If it doesn’t stand for anything it’s not an acronym Toronto!! Toronto!!!!!!!!!
Copying my tags:
I’m not exaggerating about the part without a ceiling:
This is, by the way, right under Bay & Bloor, dead centre of the city and some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. It radiates an incredible aura of menace.
Okay far more poeple have reblogged this than I thought and I just wanted to clarify- the horror of the PATH is not that it all looks like a spooky basement where you’re about to get murdered. There ARE spots like that, but to understand the ~vibe~ of the PATH, you have to understand that it is essentially one very large mall co-designed by like, 70+ different corperations who all have different aesthetics. SO, the PATH looks like that, but it also looks like this
and like this
and like this
and like this
Here’s an entrance to the PATH at Union
And here’s another- also at Union
And here’s another a few blocks away, though tbh I have never been able to enter here because it always seems to be locked, no matter how much I want Wendy’s that day.
And you’d think these mixed aesthetics would make it easier to navigate, or at least figure out where you are, but again, there are over 70 different entities designing this shit and not one original thought between them. So while you may well know when you step from one property to the next, whatever the look of your current section it’s more than likely they’re a nigh identical section somewhere further just to confound your mortal sense.
Basically, everyone tagging this with the Magnus Archives is very correct- If any place on earth could be the true domain of the Spiral it’s the PATH, and it’s just a shame Jonny didn’t know about it before the show wrapped up.
Oh my God
It’s actually a great illustration of the failures of capitalism. The PATH isn’t something designed by the city, instead each building has their own section. And because of that, the signage isn’t just inconsistent, it’s actively hostile to you leaving that section. Every incentive points towards keeping you in that one area and not making it easy to find another building.
Also one time I tried to leave the PATH at night through a small set of double doors and while the doors leading to a small atrium opened, the doors leading to the outside were locked, and had I not caught the first doors before they closed I would’ve been trapped in an unheated 2m square between-space, neither in the PATH nor out of it, overnight
For the last two days, Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organizations” who were conducting “EXTREME levels of data scraping,” forcing them to bring “large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis” and enact emergency measures.
Yesterday, Twitter started blocking all logged-out access to Twitter, requiring signing in to view any tweet or profile. Elon Musk called it a “temporary emergency measure,” claiming they “were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
Apparently, it didn’t stop the crush of traffic and, this morning, Musk announced they escalated their actions against supposed “extreme levels of data scraping” by rate-limiting the number of tweets you can view.
Immediately, Twitter users started seeing “Rate Limit Exceeded” messages and every trending topic was about the collapse of Twitter:
Are shadowy AI companies scraping Twitter for training data? Maybe!
But on Mastodon this morning, web developer Sheldon Chang noticed another source of unusual traffic: a bug in Twitter’s web app that is constantly sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop:
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
He posted a video of the bug in action, sending hundreds of requests a minute.
On Twitter, software engineer Nelson Minar independently reproduced the bug with his own video capture.
It’s currently unclear when this bug went into production, or how much it’s actually impacting their traffic, so it’s hard to determine whether this bug inadvertently inspired Twitter to block unregistered access and add rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the rollout of those changes.
On Bluesky, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote, “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter. There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”
Sheldon suspects the bug was related to yesterday’s decision to block unregistered users from accessing Twitter, but in a followup, wrote that it’s “probably not the cause of their scraping panic and most of these requests are being blocked.”
It seems very likely that killing free access to the Twitter API led to a big increase in scraping, since countless businesses, organizations, and individuals used it for their projects. It’s also plausible that these issues are entirely unrelated.
Still, how funny would it be if this “emergency,” from start to finish, was brought on by a Javascript bug that caused Twitter to DDOS itself, spawning all of these truly terrible decisions? At this point in Twitter’s downward spiral, nothing would surprise me.
If you know more, leave a comment or get in touch. Confidentiality guaranteed.
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