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.
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”?
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
Me, under investigation by the SEC for the largest financial fraud in human history: “Fuck regulators”
New EA Cause Area: Assassinate SBF to shut his fucking mouth.
“Woke Westerners” bro you RAN A PONZI SCHEME this isn’t because you didn’t hit your DEI targets. Vladimir Putin-level of bitter ideological overreach.
Well obviously as far as millennials who leveraged themselves up from merely UUMC families into positions of world-striding, financially staggering prominence off of performances of personality they dramatically proclaim were never natural but purely artifice, I prefer Taylor Swift.
But I don’t think you should read him as blaming the collapse on wokeness – it’s just that you’re looking for him to take and assign moral responsibility and so if that’s what he talks about you get the sense he’s assigning it to, it’s an amoral account of
W H A T H A P P E N E D
, maybe demonstratively so to illustrate that he’s working – you know, having spent the last however long as head of an 11-figure court/harem in royal gardens in island paradise – from an aristocratic morality, not a bourgeois one. And, implicitly, that he is herald of the transition from a long 20th century postwar bourgeois order to an aristocratic one.
I’m not sure this’ll net help, awake this awareness in other Masters of the Universe to come together and claim their domain. I think he might’ve been oversampling cultural sense from the crypto crowd that’re largely in crypto for the goal of reaching this potential and then this state, rather than independently having the potential. (And the fallout from this shit sure won’t get them there)
Like, to return to the top there is a reason my money’s on Taylor Swift as the American empress. Her shit’s just as much artifice but there’s enough authenticity – and authenticity about artifice – mixed in to establish a royal bond with the people at scale and bring them onside.
Can she reach normies as the middle layers of society can she ever. Can she reach the white working class, you realize she was a country star? Can she reach the UMC have you seen the strange new respect for her in their writing lately? Can she reach the would-be aristocrats literally Caroline and me have talked about orienting ourselves with respect to Taylor Swift.
(Can she reach the Black community? No, Reputation was terrible.)
Whereas SBF just generates conflicts, with institutional capital, with the crypto base that you’d want to co-opt at scale, with attempts to congeal a left-populist base that’ll splinter if they can’t find targets to rally against
But like, yeah, that is the shift we’re headed towards, kontextmaschine sees it – remember how I talk about the boarding school as basis for an estate and domain? – Taylor Swift sees it, SBF sees it
So, I think I have my bearings again post-election.
In the culture arena, the 2010s-born commanding heights snot-left is shattered and turns on each other, Twitter as on-sides platform being disrupted is a big part
They might be able to wring some backup there from DC, maybe 2 or 3 years from corporate America before they read the writing on the wall
The Dems’ midterm Win! leaves them more or less where they were, getting a 51st senate seat gives them committee majorities so stuff comes to the floor quicker & easier, by itself the Senate confirms judges and like the GOP under Trump they do that singlemindedly, getting nearly as many in as Trump, albeit with the very best seats no longer open for filling
The legislative uppity Dems either settle in for more service to the oldsters or mount an insurgency that either just gets slapped down or gets a few token wins to mask being slapped down
The GOP in Congress is the same unstable mess it was, just now an unstably infighting one
In particular they won’t manage to get out of the Dems’ way as they fight amongst themselves, and will give them things to unite against
Biden pushes some economic stuff which fair, Reagan–Trump kept moving right even under Clinton and at least hardly left under Obama
DeSantis displaces Trump before the primaries start
The Supremes start to dismantle workplace/civil rights/(overlap) law
Russia’s pullback from Ukrainian territory just conserves lives and materiel as it switches focus to “break NATO”. It at least chips it. Putin’s cultivated a militant “civil society” that pushes right as third parties, it gets a bit out of his control but the CIA can’t well build them up to take over
States are firmly red or blue, and the blue ones get used as the best vehicle for liberalism just like the red ones. This makes life a bit insufferable with the cultural tide holding 3-5 years longer there, the bond market gets them in the end tho
Re:Mastodon, wasn’t really expecting “content warnings and not appreciating me burping up every last impulse that crosses my mind into your lap is some white bullshit” to become a thing, but I was more generically expecting it to take everyone who would performatively reject Elon Musk’s vision of Twitter and put them at each other’s throats, and I guess that had to happen some ways in particular
I’m reserving judgement until the missile is positively identified- it’s possible that it’s a Ukrainian air defense missile which went off-course while trying to intercept incoming Russian missiles.
But if it is a Russian missile, the consequences could be large: it would be a massive accidental escalation by the Russian government, and the Polish government could even use the incident to trigger Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and draw NATO into the war more directly. If we’re lucky, cooler heads will prevail and rather than a direct intervention this will only lead to increased resolve on the part of Poland and other NATO countries to back the Ukrainian government.
Given that Russia seems to have segued its purpose from “conquer Ukraine” to “break NATO”, that NATO has clearly conducted itself so far to avoid direct conflict with Russia, and that Soviet Cold War political strategy in case of hot war was said to include strikes on peripheral NATO members that more “core” powers might not be willing to go to war over, to the end of rupturing the alliance, are we certain this was unintentional?
i still think its so funny that someone walked up to a world leader in the street with a gun made of duct tape and PVC pipes and batteries and killed him in front of a crowd of people and in the following months everyone in the country was like “wait yeah he had a point”
I’ve noticed there’s a slight trend of ppl going to the zoo to show apes different pictures and videos. Was actually introduced to the trend by a vid of someone showing an orangutan the WOMBO COMBO SSBB video. As someone studying primates, do you think this has any adverse effects on them? Would you discourage the zoo guests from doing this? I know you said at the sanctuary you worked at, y’all would put on movies for the chimps. But since you were invested and involved in their long term care, I assume the rationale and long term effects are probably different that zoo goers showing apes internet bs on their phones.
the main negative impact seems to be that some gorillas are genuinely getting screen addiction and developing bad socialization habits such as ignoring other gorillas in their enclosure. basically there’s no reason for zoo guests to be doing that. it’s a lot different if its like occasional enrichment at a sanctuary though.
Like I’ve mentioned precedents, the ‘68 NYC teacher’s strike and ethnic succession in the outer boroughs, but at least that had imaginable stakes, I’m not really clear why a Black/Jewish front of the culture war is opening up right now
They really leaning on raising the visibility of “fires spreading from homeless encampments” in the moderate, put-a-bird-on-it, think-of-themselves-as -chill Gen X media to establish the background of why the homeless are a threat to you (or at least good peoplelikeyou) and just leaving them alone in place won’t yield acceptable results
the question is what’s the upshot of this, given that most of these children had mild or no symptoms, does it condemn them to the curse of long covid or does it mean that they’re more likely to shrug off future waves, or neither of these?
Covid-worrier Twitter is now thumping about how every infection carries the chance of progressing to “long Covid” which is a bother in its own right, is not yet confirmed to inevitably at any point end, and can damage systems in a way that may lead to later issues.
One of the things they’re talking about now is the circulatory system, not only the heart muscle but also blood vessel walls (and clots) – studies citing 30% increased risk of cardiac events in the following year.
And like, yeah, my blood pressure sometimes drops so low I faint standing up, and the last mania it went uncomfortably high, but honestly I was so unconcerned with 1X the cardiac event rate that 1.3X isn’t much – they cite cases of people suddenly dropping dead but like yeah, that’s what a heart attack is and if you harvest news cases from the entire world there will be occurrences in any given week, but there were back at 1X too.
They talk about brain damage and yup, I’m pretty sure it made my brain better but that’s clearly a radial keratotomy-ass thing where it took damage and healed just the right way, I haven’t heard of anything similar.
They ominously suggest it might raise the chances of cancers later, but while the mechanisms they suggest sound possible and precedented, their seizing on the concept really seems less connected to it being likely than on it being a possible way their hyperanxiety might still be proportionate even after everything we’ve seen
