There are two aspects to the feature. There's not a setting to disable that one. I've disabled the setting that does exist but the while-you-were-away version of the feature persists.
I'm going to expand on this. There are two distinct annoying features.
1. The one you're talking about, messes up the chronological order of the timeline completely. That one is called "Show me the best Tweets first", in settings, and I have disabled it. Some people report Twitter flips the switch whenever they see fit, but that has never happened to me.
2. The second one is a small widget that appears at the top of your timeline that says "while you were away" and shows three tweets. There is no way to disable this. This is what it looks like on a desktop: http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg There are similar ones for mobile. I don't personally care too much about it (I close it... just one of hundreds of annoyances I have to put up with when I use a computer) but there's a huge problem: those three tweets are removed from your timeline, wherever they were. So they mess my timeline up (someone might have tweeted two things in rapid succession, and one of the tweets goes missing because they move it up to that widget). And there is no way to disable this, at all.
Yes exactly. It's embarrasing. Those tweets are just removed from your timeline and there's no way you can make them return. For someone like me who follows just a few people and intends to read the entire timeline, it is very very bad.
That's their core product there and it's broken. And they don't care. I miss the twicca days... That's the Twitter I liked, a chronological stream of text. I mourn for it.
It's also one of very few changes I've seen (one of which was changing the icon and word for the favorite/like action [which was a breaking change as far as I'm concerned; it changed the semantics of past discussions and eliminated the personal bookmarking aspect]).
I cannot imagine what Twitter is spending its time doing.
Twidere for Android is a great client that respects chronological ordering, saves your previous position, and doesn't show ads. I don't know of a desktop solution. I just put up with their shitty website and avoid it whenever possible.
The Big Bang was the formation of the entire universe. About ten billion years later, our solar system, and eventually the Earth, started forming due to gravity pulling various bits of matter together. Ten billion years is a really, really long time! The two events are completely separate.
If you're interested in cosmology, there are a ton of fascinating popular science books on the topic, and research is very active and ongoing. As an introduction, I recommend Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It's a bit outdated these days, but the main points hold and it's a fascinating read from start to finish. Alternatively, if you prefer video, check out Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey with Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's an up-to-date retelling of Sagan's original idea.
Two generations of stars, including heavy stars that produced all the elements up to iron (including, relevant to this particular case, oxygen), and then became supernovae, which a) produced traces of heavier elements b) blew a lot of stellar material out into the universe, to become part of new star systems. So there was oxygen around by the time Earth was formed (~4.5 billion years ago, as opposed to ~14 billion for the big bang).
CRC's GED prep book used to contain this error. Most of the book was good but the "Earth Science" section looked like it had been deliberately mangled in order to discredit opponents of creationism. Or that was my theory, anyway, it was pretty bad.
Distributed systems design aside, the core of the problem is that they relied on ntp (as they probably should), and in their case ntp was not working properly.
Even if NTP had been working properly, you would not have clocks synchronised at the level of individual ticks - only to the level of time intervals. If two updates happened at roughly the same time, and fell into the same time interval, there would be no way to tell which one happened before the other. A paper by Cilia et al on timing of composite events in distributed event-based systems using NTP deals with this issue.
Ntp is good. Assuming that time is coordinated, much less monotonically increasing, is a bad plan. Just the other week i got paged in the middle of the night because a clock moved backwards.
The entire workflow of managing more than one write-up needs some more work. Few examples:
- if you come back and try to edit a write-up you'll have to first open the preview then remember the shortcut to edit it, not really another way around except maybe changing the URL.
- if you have more than one write-up with the same name, you don't really know which one you are on right now.
- deleting the write-up is kinda confusing too. and you
can't delete on the view mode.
- shortcuts gets mixed up between control and option.
But overall love it and will try to write more with your help!
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