WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1+ GB of RAM, doing nothing
I tested it on low-end, mid-range, and high-end PCs, and the experience is bad everywhere. Before even logging in, WhatsApp was already touching 400MB RAM.
After logging in and scrolling through chats, it jumped toward 1.2GB. Idle, it still holds around 600MB.
The old native UWP WhatsApp used less than 100MB at idle and felt instant.
The new app is basically web whatsapp com inside WebView2. It loads slowly, switches chats slowly, delays message sending, keeps running in the tray, and still gives worse notifications than the old app.
Meta has 3 billion WhatsApp users. Windows has 1.6 billion users. There is no excuse for shipping a browser tab as a desktop app.
If Meta can build native WhatsApp for macOS and even Apple Watch, it can build a proper native Windows app.
Windows users deserve better than this slop!
TRUMP DETONA A NARRATIVA DA IMPRENSA E ABANDONA ENTREVISTA
Repórter: Apenas para deixar muito claro, não há evidências do que você está dizendo.
Trump: Há muitas evidências. Há evidências tremendas. A eleição foi fraudada. E está acontecendo de novo na Califórnia. Eles estão trapaceando.
Repórter: Você tem evidências?
Trump: Tudo o que preciso fazer é olhar.
Repórter: Isso não é evidência. Os funcionários locais reconhecem que são lentos
Trump: Eles são corruptos. Assim como você é corrupta. Você é corrupta ou estúpida.
A wave of user cancellations is hitting xAI's SuperGrok and Premium tiers due to drastic generation limit cuts, aggressive content moderation, and widespread performance glitches. While xAI heavily restricted free tiers to funnel creators into paying subscriptions, paying customers are finding that their paid access is heavily throttled.The primary drivers behind the surge in cancellations include:Severe Quota ReductionsDrastic Limit Cuts: Users report that video limits on SuperGrok have been slashed by over 90%. Daily quotas that once allowed hundreds of videos have dropped to a restrictive 25 videos per day.Instant Timeouts: Paying creators frequently hit generation walls after making as few as 10 images or videos, resulting in frustrating 12-to-24-hour lockouts.Aggressive and Faulty
ModerationOverzealous Filters: The system's safety filters are triggering massive complaints. Entirely benign, non-NSFW prompts—such as characters wearing basic costumes, "anime women", or simple actions like "a hand touching a face"—are being routinely blocked or censored.Wasted Credits: When a prompt is flagged by the heavy-handed moderation algorithm, it still counts against the user's daily strict limits, prompting users to cancel out of frustration.
Grok is almost unusable anymore for photo edits and animations. Everything I do is moderated, and I’m not working with nudes or trying to create them. Half the time I work with images I’ve already created with AI, and it still tries to moderate them. 😑
Grok Imagine is now next to useless. Moderation is now through the roof. It's virtually impossible to get anything generated. Unless something changes quick then Imagine is dead.
@yagiznizipli Grok button doesn't appear in posts on older accounts like mine. Only appears if I reinstall the app or clear cache using web, but disappears after a few minutes. This happened with automatic translation and was solved in last few weeks, but the grok button is still missing:
⚡ xAI dropped the X algorithm yesterday and I don't get why nobody noticed what's actually in there
I burned $500 on Claude going through every single line
Here's what I found (LONG POST, save it for later):
0/ Every account has an "embedding" attached to it that describes you the way AI models do: in latent space. It's the internal fingerprint the model keeps of every user, a vector of numbers that sums up how your account behaves (what topics you touch, what engagement you generate, who you interact with). The model uses it every time it decides who to show your posts to. If your history is good, it stays clean and the model pushes you. If you accumulate negative signals (blocks, mutes, reports, not_interested), it goes toxic and starts penalizing you automatically. And the trap: it does NOT reset. What you do today stays in there for weeks, poisoning everything you publish after, even if it's good.
That's why getting out of a shadowban or a low-reach streak on X feels like trying to move a giant rusted wheel. It's not your imagination, it's literally that. Cleaning up your embedding is slow and painful, like the impression you have of someone you don't like: no matter how nice they get to you, it's gonna take a while before you trust them.
Another important finding: the embedding doesn't decay on a clock. It decays with NEW engagement entering the system. If you stop posting, the old bad signals stay frozen in there. Nothing overwrites them. If you start making content the algorithm likes, you'd see improvement after 6 to 8 weeks and a real shift around 12 to 16 weeks, assuming you don't pile up more bad signals along the way.
Why is nobody talking about this? It blows my mind. Finally a confirmation of that "I'm in a bad streak" feeling we've all been through.
1/ First 30 minutes are everything
If your post doesn't get engagement fast, Grok doesn't even evaluate it. No quality score, no deep analysis, no chance of reaching anyone who doesn't follow you. Dead and buried
2/ Post age caps at 80 hours:
POST_AGE_MAX_MINUTES = 4800, bucketed in 1 hour chunks. After that you're in the "overflow bucket" which translates to "ancient, ignore"
Best window: first 0 to 12 hours. After 24 you're already in a worse bucket
Far from rewarding "evergreen" content, X wants a constant stream of fresh meat (literally the opposite of YouTube)
3/ MY BIGGEST FEAR TURNED OUT TO BE UNFOUNDED (supposedly): living in EU posting English for US audience: ZERO direct penalty in theory:
The PostCandidate struct has NO field for author country, IP, or location. Gizmoduck (X's identity service) returns only follower count + screen name. The Phoenix transformer just sees a hash of your author_id
What hurts you indirectly: timezone (your post ages while US sleeps) and the language of the POST itself
So using a VPN to "post from the US" does literally nothing (unlike TikTok or Instagram, by the way)
4/ The 5 negative signals that kill your reach:
The model predicts 22 actions per post. 5 of them are negative weights that get SUBTRACTED from your score:
- not_interested
- block_author
- mute_author
- report
- not_dwelled (people scrolling past your post without stopping)
That last one is brutal tbh. A post that gets ignored is mathematically WORSE than a post that never got published
5/ Shadowbans 100% exist. 4 different kinds:
- Hard drop. X removes your post from everyone's feed without telling you. Applied to posts with serious content (child safety, etc.) or suspended accounts. You don't even find out
- DO_NOT_AMPLIFY label. Literally a field in the code that says "do not amplify this post". If they put it on you, ads stop showing next to your posts → X stops making money from showing you → the system stops pushing you. Full blackout
- BotMaker rules. The internal panel where X employees can manually limit a specific account by hand. The code shows the categories that exist (Content, ContentLimited, Safety, Grok) but does NOT show who they're applied to or why. The tool is documented, the usage isn't
- Poisoned embedding. The worst one, as we saw above. The model has an internal "memory" for every account. If your account racks up enough "not interested" + blocks + mutes + reports over time, that memory goes toxic. From then on, even your good future posts get penalized automatically. Nobody decided this. The model just learned your account gets bad engagement and self-corrected
6/ Only ORIGINAL posts get the "Banger Screen"
Replies and retweets never enter the Grok quality classifier. If you spend your day replying to viral accounts, you're optimizing for the Reply Ranker, NOT for amplification
Want to be discovered out of network? Write originals. There's no other way
7/ Replies to small accounts get spam-scanned. Replies to big accounts get Grok-ranked
Two separate classifiers. The SpamEapiLowFollowerClassifier hits replies to small accounts. The ReplyRanker scores replies to big accounts 0 to 3 with Grok
"First!" or emoji-only replies get a 0. "Sir, this is a Wendy's" energy gets penalized. Basically, if you write replies, they better add something. Otherwise don't bother
8/ 50% of all feed requests are "shadow traffic"
is_sampled(request_id, 0.5) marks half of every feed request as shadow. Many context features (gender inference, demographics, Grok topic preferences) only activate on shadow OR with a feature flag
Translation: you literally cannot know which version of the algorithm any given user is getting. Half your audience is in an experiment at any moment
9/ Dwell (the time a user spends looking at your post before scrolling) is 5x better than getting likes
The scorer has 5 different dwell signals (dwell, cont_dwell_time, click_dwell_time, etc.) but only 1 favorite signal.
- A post with tons of likes but people read it for 1 second and keep scrolling → low score
- A post with few likes but people stay 8 seconds reading it → high score
Optimize for time spent on your post, not for likes!
10/ Things that actually work:
- Get engagement in the first 10 min. DM your friends, ping your community, whatever
- Post in your AUDIENCE'S timezone, not yours. US targeting: 8 to 11am ET (14 to 17 Madrid time)
- Don't post 5 things in a row. AuthorDiversityScorer multiplies each next post by decay^position. By post 4 you're at the floor
- Video ≥ 10 seconds. Below MinVideoDurationMs you lose the full VQV weight
- Videos with audio. Grok runs ASR (speech to text) on every video. No audio = blank signal
- Quote tweet virals in your niche. The model already knows the original engages, your value-add stacks on top
11/ Things that absolutely kill your reach:
- WILD FINDING: threads of 10+ tweets. DedupConversationFilter keeps only 1 tweet per conversation per feed. Megathreads are mathematically a waste
- Reposting the same content. Bloom filters dedupe it
- AI slop. There's literally a slop_score field in the BangerScreen output. They explicitly detect it
- NSFW/violence/hate without tags. Auto MediumRisk = no ads = structural shadowban
- Reply-spamming small accounts. Specific classifier for that
12/ What they DIDN'T release, the sneaky bastards:
The skeleton is public. The dials are not
- Exact numeric values of every weight (FavoriteWeight, ReplyWeight, OonWeightFactor, AuthorDiversityDecay). Live in xai_feature_switches::Params, external config
- The actual Grok prompts (the 7 PToS policy prompts, BangerMiniVlmScreenScore, SafetyPtos). Could literally have any framing in them
- The BotMaker rules that apply DO_NOT_AMPLIFY to specific accounts
- util/phoenix_request.rs, which constructs the final model call
- 25+ xai_* crates referenced but not included
- The production Phoenix weights. They only released the mini version
My theory: they gave us a pretty skinny skeleton of the whole thing they actually have. The muscle (weights) and the brain (prompts and BotMaker rules) are completely opaque. They kept the best parts for themselves, clearly
13/ Cheat sheet so you don't forget:
- First 30 min matter more than anything
- Your location is irrelevant, your timing and language are not
- Shadowbans exist in 4 flavors. Worst is the model quietly poisoning your author embedding from past bad signals. Climbing back up by cleaning your embedding is gonna hurt, but it can be done
- Replies and retweets don't get the quality classifier. Originals do
- Dwell (someone actually staying to look at your post) beats likes 5 to 1
- Half of all traffic is in some experiment at any moment
- They kept the best parts of the algorithm for themselves, but hey, something is something
> Tira a taxa federal de 20%
> Deixa o Remessa Conforme
Na prática, o ICMS continua, compras acima de US$ 50 ainda vão ter 60% de imposto federal e não vai baratear praticamente nada KKKKKKKKKKKK
@Vinheteiro Bateria de PRIMEIRA LINHA só original pra montadora. OLHA A DATA gravada nela, parece ser velha, nao deu pra ver bem no video. É uma gravação profunda no plástico. Bateria nao pode ter mais que um ano de fabricação quando instalam. Fezes.
Apple and Google are gradually expanding their use of hardware-based attestation. They're convincing a growing number of services to adopt it. Google's Play Integrity API and Apple's App Attest API are very similar. Apple brought it to the web via Privacy Pass, which Google intends on doing too.
Google's Play Integrity API requires hardware attestation for the strong integrity level and is gradually phasing in requiring it for the more commonly used device integrity level. Apple already has it as a requirement. Over the long term, this will increasingly lock out hardware and OS competition.
The purpose of these systems is disallowing people from using hardware and software not approved by Apple or Google. This is wrongly presented as being a security feature. Banks and government services are the main ones adopting it but Apple and Google are encouraging every service to use it.
Apple's Privacy Pass brought hardware attestation to the web to help with passing captchas on their own hardware. Many people saw that as harmless since few sites would be willing to lock out non-Apple-hardware users. Apple and Google are both likely to bring broader hardware attestation to the web.
Google's reCAPTCHA is planning an approach where they use Privacy Pass on Apple hardware, their own approach on Google Mobile Services Android devices and a QR code scanning system to require an iOS or Google certified Android device for Windows and other systems:
https://t.co/7rQnioRa8A
Banking and government services increasingly require using a mobile app where they can use attestation to force using an Apple or Google approved device and OS. Apple's privacy pass, Google's 'cancelled' Web Environment Integrity and now reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification are bringing this to the web.
Current media coverage for reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification misunderstands it and the impact of it. They're bringing a hardware attestation requirement to Windows, desktop Linux, OpenBSD, etc. by requiring a QR scan from a certified smartphone to pass reCAPTCHA in some cases. They could expand it more.
Control over reCAPTCHA puts Google in a position where they can require having either iOS or a certified Android device to use an enormous amount of the web. Google defines certification requirements for Android which includes forcing bundling Google Chrome, etc. It's enormously anti-competitive.
Google's Play Integrity API bans using GrapheneOS despite it being far more secure than anything they permit. It also bans using any other alternative. This isn't somehow specific to an AOSP-based OS. You can't avoid this by using a mobile OS based on FreeBSD instead. You'll just be more locked out.
Google's Play Integrity API permits devices with no security patches for 10 years. The device integrity level can be bypassed via spoofing but they can detect it quite well and block it once it starts being done at scale. The strong integrity level requires leaked keys from TEEs/SEs to bypass it.
It doesn't provide a useful security feature, but it does lock out competition very well. Services requiring Apple App Attest or Google Play Integrity are primarily helping to lock in Apple and Google having a duopoly for mobile devices. Play Integrity is more relevant due to AOSP being open source.
Governments are increasingly mandating using Apple's App Attest and Google's Play Integrity for not only their own services but also commercial services. The EU is leading the charge of making these requirements for digital payments, ID, age verification, etc. Many EU government apps require them.
Instead of governments stopping Apple and Google from engaging in egregiously anti-competitive behavior, they're directly participating in locking out competition via their own services. Requiring people to have an Apple device or Google-certified Android device is anti-competition, not security.
reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification will currently work with sandboxed Google Play on GrapheneOS but it clearly exists to provide a way for them to start using hardware attestation on systems without it. People without an iOS or Android device will be locked out when this is required even without that.
This isn't about security or any missing functionality. GrapheneOS can be verified via hardware attestation. Google bans using GrapheneOS for Play Integrity because we don't license Google Mobile Services and conform to anti-competitive rules already found to be illegal in South Korea and elsewhere.
Services shouldn't ban people from using arbitrary hardware and operating systems in the first place. Google's security excuse is clearly bogus when they permit devices with no patches for 10 years but not a much more secure OS. It's for enforcing their monopolies via GMS licensing, that's all.