Thoughts about Twitter

Post by paxys » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

nelsondev wrote: post #30

mikkergp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but complex systems are always changing and in some ways in a constant process of degrading. A lot of the biggest companies are growing exponentially faster than their processes and it ends up being nearly impossible for the tooling and supporting software to keep up. At that scale all the automation software you buy off the shelf won't scale with you. With over a billion dollars a year in surplus infrastructure…

At Amazon, near Black Friday and Prime Day, there are company wide deployment freezes, where no one is allowed to push to prod. When I was oncall for my team, I found there were less pages, less issues, and the system was generally more stable. Entropy, leading to availability problems, grows with rate of production changes. If no one touches the code, my guess is the system is more stable rather than less.

Post by ricardo81 » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 8:15 PM UTC

macmcirish wrote: post #159

ricardo81 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so friend. An exponent is short form for exponential or an order of magnitude. Do you work in SV? You're free to ask what X is.

Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude. The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.

Post by wnevets » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

throwaway82388 wrote: post #145

wnevets wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is because most Twitter users knew Musk would ruin what made Twitter Twitter. Twitter users just assumed the process of "muskifying" Twitter would be subtle and over the course of years. Watching him speed run the destruction of a $44 Billion company in a matter weeks has been absolutely shocking.

That may or may not be true, it's all unclear. All I know for certain is that the people commenting have no idea either.

Post by mcrad » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 8:17 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #6

dnissley wrote: post #2

The anger at Elon et al is understandable -- but I hope they can spare some anger for the years of stagnation (if not outright neglect) wrought by the former operators that led up to this moment.

They led to a stagnant company with -$200m in profits. Elon instantly led to a company that is now $1-2 billion in the red a year, and needs to aggressively cut costs and increase revenue to make it up. I'd say the current situation is 99% on Elon. edit: For those not aware, the buyout included $13 billion in debt to Twitter which they need to pay $1-2 billion a year for in terms of interest alone.

Post by d23 » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

infamouscow wrote: post #162

macmcirish wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s unfair to call out the first sentence of the argument, if you’re trying to persuade with several paragraphs of content and the very first sentence has a gross error, it transcends pedantry in my opinion. Rather, I think it makes the original argument look irrational if they have an extreme exaggeration if they have to use that to make their point.

It's a typo. There isn't some kind of grave epistemic problem with the first sentence where everything that follows is predicated on a falsehood. We don't discard the contents of books just because the publication has a typo.