The team is >=4 engineers for minimum viable oncall coverage, ideally 6 because you know someone’s being onboarded at all times. and < about 12
88% attrition in 2 weeks. How many teams no longer exist? What were they responsible for? How many of those are actually important?
iPhone notification counts already don’t work. Is that… important? Supposedly, the tweet storage service was down to 2 engineers BEFORE 80% of the company quit. Because if they’re down to 0, that is definitely important and if that service sails in a straight line until it hits the metaphorical reef, that’s the end of Twitter.
And you know, I might ask why your architecture was so micro-serviced up that only iPhone notification counts broke 2 weeks ago and Musk probably has a point there that you were bloated and overstaffed… and fixing that will take a bit. And people. And knowledge that just walked out the door.
as someone who emphatically does not know how big websites work–why is their software so rickety that it could run for (max) a couple of weeks before it breaks so completely? is this normal for big websites?
Twitter’s tech stack is rumored to be worse than normal, but not that much worse. So yes, if you just walk away from a big website in general you don’t have too much time before something causes a cascading failure - a website like Twitter has a billion moving pieces that just have random failure rates, which is usually fine because someone’s there to fix the little piece that broke. But if there’s nobody there, the little piece starts breaking things higher up the stack until it all falls apart.
That was all pretty general, so here’s a tweet thread on the specifics of what might go wrong. I can vouch for a lot of this since I was close to operations at both Bing and AWS. Read it while you still can!
Can’t help but notice that half of these are in some sense political, and of those, like they range from “governments want something from us” to “the content we serve can radically change facts on the ground” to “governments want to influence what we serve as a tool to control facts on the ground”.
So, really, who’s the top dog here, Twitter or governments? Well, you
Congress and The Hague they have a sense that they’re over everybody but the US and EU. How’ve those been doing since Harambe got shot?
The EU saw Brexit, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, the Visegrad Group challenging West-Euro “Human Rights” hegemony, the Ukraine crisis with Russia now trying to break NATO by breaking (the unity of) the members in the EU. And the US… ::gestures::
Is their supremacy assured, and do Saudi Arabia and the South African expat richest man in the world even want it?
Probably on balance the staff that just left wanted it, bought into whatever it was legitimating itself in the name of (which was increasingly aligning with them!)
The staff that replaces them, drawn to maybe Austin to work for Elon! Musk!, are they particularly invested?
Big shifts in communication media often lead to new world orders as the old order suited to the old one shifts to the new order suited to the new one among much blood and dust clouds – the European Wars of Religion after the printing press, the World Wars amidst mass media (yes, even I, mass-circulation newspapers had made a big change in how governmentality was experienced), I honestly think platforms have the potential to displace nations here.
Really they’ve dallied too long, in like 2007 Facebook should’ve been summoning US officials to hearings for them to be grilled and publicly humiliated, with severe penalties in terms of how it shaped discourse around them if they declined.
Huh you know if this last summer of yard work has yielded muscle gain that’s quite disproportionate to muscle use by standards of my previous experience, AND I’m much more confident AND I’m pulling chicks a lot easier I should consider the possibility my testosterone levels have increased
I mean, you do look like a man who underwent a great ordeal and unlocked secret inner knowledge. Also a bit like The Dude, mixed with someone I can’t quite put my finger on.
Canadian health-worriers like “we need mask mandates back!” and like, yes, pediatric respiratory disease is in a surge this year that is already far exceeding hospital capacity and if not somehow suppressed will see many children die who within capacity were saveable.
At the same time, last time we gave those public health types an inch they took a mile. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”?
You know how theres like ‘Big Pharma’ does mean theres like 'Small Pharma’ somewhere? Some tiny drug making cottage industry somewhere like Papa Joes Homemade Morphine or Ma'n’Pa’s Old Fashioned Prozac or someit?
So someone just pointed out to me what I was actually describing there and as I understand it that practice is somewhat frowned upon by some authorities
like I knew the FTX crypto exchange was a ponzi scheme but finding out it was run by a polycule of racist Harry Potter tumblr nerds was a real gut punch ngl
This is so cartoonishly unethical. This mfer invented Dark Polyamory.
not that i expect yahoo to but everyone reblogging this should be able to recognize the dark polyamory imperial harem stuff as a shitpost (even if it’s a joke people nonjokingly get off on, infinite fractal weirdness of human sexuality, blah blah blah)
I think regarding it as a joke is cutting these ppl too much slack, from what I’ve read her blog was filled with this kinda shit and her and the other people were very much in a real polycule with her. She also believed very openly in “human biodiversity” (aka eugenics/race science) which she also talked about explicitly on her blog in a way that was related to the whole “polyamory is a cutthroat market” deal. Polyamory is a cutthroat market in her eyes because the end goal is for the strongest and best humans to mate and produce genetically “better” people
I will throw my weight behind the shitpost thesis based on my sense from having followed her and the people she was in conversation with at the time
any body part is automatically more erotic when viewed from an uncommon angle, like looking up at a dick, sideboob, backsack, etc. this is known as the Rare Sex Pepe Effect
🗨Readers added context they thought people might want to know normal people don’t say things like this. https://www.tumblr.com/logout
I actually think Elon’s not doing a terrible job with Twitter – this isn’t some master plan, no, but we’re getting an effective reset of the employee base and the site culture; it might fail whale for a while but the user base is being reminded that however it is, they need it, and brand loyalty will carry through to relaunch if it’s down for less than a full year
The real issue was that it created a groupthink so strong it captured parts of its own structure – advertisers, staff, finance – and I think whether consciously or not, the people talking about how it would fall apart were trying to speak that into existence.
Musk is really the only figure out there with deep enough pockets, including established personal relationships with funders – like, whatever Anil fucking Dash says wouldn’t come into it, and where would he even say it? – to tank the hit and power through
Also like, breaking that capture will have ripple effects on the tech economy and even national and world cultures – the groupthink was hostile to capital in significant ways – that Huge Capital might find worth the expense in its own right
