Interesting! I wonder what value they chose for the `reasonable_limit`.
When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
241–250 of 315 posts
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#242Hmm. Twitter/X appears to do this at quite a low number, as the "Following" tab is incredibly lossy (some users are permanently missing) at only 1,200 followed people. It's insanely frustrating. Hopefully you're adjusting the lossy-ness weighting and cut-off by whether a user is active at any particular time? Because, otherwise, applying this rule, if the cap is set too low, is a very bad UX in my experience x_x
> It's _insanely_ frustrating. > at only 1,200 followed people. I follow like, 50 people on bluesky. Who is following 1,200 people? What kind of value do you even get out of your feed?
I can come up with 100 people I'd want to follow on Twitter, and I don't even have an account. Don't dismiss other people's use-cases if you don't have or understand them.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#243As a systems enthusiast I enjoy articles like this. It is really easy to get into the mindset of "this must be perfect". In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those…
I guess I hadn’t considered that search engines could be reranking pages on the fly as I click them. I’ve been seeing my DuckDuckGo results shuffle around for a while now thinking it’s an awful bug. Like I click one page, don’t find what I want, and go back thinking “no, I want that other result that was below” and it’s an entirely different page with shuffled results, missing the one that I think might have been goo…
This behavior started happening for me in the last few months. If I click on a result, then go back, I have different search results.
I've found a workaround, though – click back into the DDG search box at the top of the page and hit enter. This then returns the original search results.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#244In the fanout design, why not dynamically move on to the next 10,000-user page as soon as all tasks for the current page are either queued or processing? Would that approach improve throughput, or could it introduce issues like resource contention?
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#245I wonder why timelines aren't implemented as a hybrid gather-scatter choosing strategy depending on account popularity (a combination of fan-out to followers and a lazy fetch of popular followed accounts when follower's timeline is served). When you have a celebrity account, instead of fanning out every message to millions of followers' timelines, it would be cheaper to do nothing when the celebrity posts, and later…
This is probably what we'll end up with in the long-run. Things have been fast enough without it (aside from this issue) but there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Timelines architecture updates. We're spread pretty thin from a engineering-hours standpoint atm so there's a lot of intense prioritization going on.
Just to be clear, you are a Bluesky engineer, right?
off-topic: how has been dealing with the influx of new users after X political/legals problems aftermath? Did you see an increase in toxicity around the network? And how has you (Bluesky moderation) dealing with it.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#246Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.
BlueSky has starter packs that allow you to mass follow in the click of a button. You join 10 starter packs in one day, you are following over 1000 people. Sometimes following others is the only way to get people to engage with your content.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#247Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.
You don't need to follow anyone (or even have an account) to scrape content… Someone following a huge amount of accounts usually wants to get a lot of followers quickly this way through follow-backs.
Yes, and Starter Packs make this possible.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
The airline has literally all of the data on this, they definitely do not have to pay a team millions.
They probably do pay millions of dollars in wages for business analysts to figure out what this rate is on their flights.
They probably just have an SSRS report that prints out in a few dozen offices automatically on some schedule.
I'm not trying to be pedantic but this is table stakes stuff. I know we're supposed to shy away from saying things like this but compared to the other engineering that airlines have to do, this is easy. It costs - at most, including wages - a few tens of thousands of dollars yearly to come up with these figures. It's a fraction of the salary of one United Airlines BA.[0] This cost might go up if one of the senior developers convinces their boss that this needs to be a machine learning model but unless they're resume pumping it's going to be at most PCA and a regression.
This is not a team of people working for months on this one thing.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/analyst-revenue-manage...
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overbooking is not a mistake, though. People miss flights for many reasons, and the airlines predict this with impressive accuracy, to the point that they can afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong and yet still come out ahead.
> afford to pay tremendous sums for being wrong Or they can just haul you forcefully from the flight you paid for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...
Case in point! Imagine how much United(Express) settled this for.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#250Nice problem to have, though. Over on Nostr they're finding it a real struggle to get to the point where you're confident you won't miss replies to your own notes, let alone replies from other people in threads you haven't interacted with.
The current solution is for everyone to use the same few relays, which is basically a polite nod to Bluesky's architecture. The long-term solution is—well it involves a lot of relay hint dropping and a reliance on Japanese levels of acuity when it comes to picking up on hints (among clinets). But (a) it's proving extreme slow going and (b) it only aims to mitigate the "global as relates to me" problem.