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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

sfba.social

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#621
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter Engineers have had over a year to get out and find another job. At this point the terms of their employment and the expectations from their boss are all crystal clear. Hard to sympathize with those who continue to stick around for whatever reason.

Without knowing much about the people I opt to approach this with a bit more empathy. Things are shitty for lots of people. Now is not the time to judge people.

Why assume anything at all about them? Maybe they believe in the product they are building and don't mind putting in the extra work?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#622
post #126

Speaking from very painful, personal experience, few things are more agitating than being forced to execute on something you fully know is a horrible idea, especially when you tried and failed to communicate this fact to the individual pushing you to go against your best judgement. Even more so when that person later loudly proclaims that they never made such a request, even when provided with written proof. I can of…

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at leas…

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left.

You have zero idea if that is true or not.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#623
post #272

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some e…

One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain, is that the very concept of truth is destroyed. I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a…

Man, the really annoying thing is that Elon-haters are so dishonest (refusing to engage when obviously wrong claims are made, repeating things that have been long disproven, repeating hearsay as fact, etc), that it's hard to actually identify any actual lies Elon has made. Meaning, not just exaggerations or failed predictions, but straight up intentional lies.

My favorite is when things are claimed to be impossible, that Elon's lying because the thing is impossible, but then it happens anyway.

Where Elon gets in trouble is he's wildly over-optimistic on a few things, such as AI. He predicted an AGI would take over in 5 years around 2015 or so (so we're 3 years off), and I think he really believed it. That's why he's always claiming things like self-driving, and doing it without sensors or whatever. His paranoia of AGI and his over-confidence on self-driving have exactly the same root cause (believing AI will conquer all). Elon has had so many instances of overcoming status quo expert predictions (whether on solar energy, battery-electric vehicles, reusable launch vehicles, or whathaveyou), that I think it makes him increasingly unable to very effectively listen to experts.

And he's also incredibly gullible and easily taken in by all sorts of scammers, including rightists and just plain sycophants telling him what they think he wants to hear. Which is increasingly what he's left with as everyone else who is sick of his bull has left.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#624
post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..and using exponential back-off, if not limiting the number of retries. Though it’s hard to know for sure what really went down. Could be a number of things. Including a lack of subject matter experts (Elon recently admitted to laying off some people they shouldn’t have).

Devil's advocate here: did we consider that any such exponential back off goes out the window when users, faced with a non-working site, will just refresh the page therefor reseting the whole process?

The server load from that is negligible since those requests stop at the load balancer.

On that note, the 10 requests/second in the post is also negligible for the same reason. Only requests that hit backend servers matter

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#625
post #272

This bug is very unlikely to be the reason. The rate limiter on the server side is cheap and the frontend bug only gets triggered with the rate limit active. I have seen similar bugs in the systems I oversee because network libraries love to retry requests without sane limitations by default. But I never saw them make our rate limiters sweat. It's slightly more annoying when they hit an API which actually does some e…

One thing about having leadership that is known to lie about anything or everything, for any sort of imagined personal gain, is that the very concept of truth is destroyed. I agree that this is probably not the bug at the root of it all. But I also don't believe the story that Musk is selling for why he's in effect shutting down the site. But both could be true and I'm still thinking about other potential reasons, a…

[dead]

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#626
post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?

Are the very least they have terrible judgment considering they still work at Twitter (excluding people dealing with visa issues)

There might be numerous other reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36556578>

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. My guess is Elon said "the site's too slow!" Engineers noticed that the home feed request was slow. They didn't understand how it worked, had no tools to profile it, and were given an unrealistic deadline to fix it. So about the only thing they could do was issue multiple, parallel requests and hope that at leas…

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. You have zero idea if that is true or not.

About 80% of Twitter was laid off or quit. I think it's a reasonable supposition that a good number of those were critical personnel who felt they could get a better deal somewhere else.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I wish Obama care had simply been: 'employer provided healthcare is illegal in 2024'

I don't see how that would be any better than what we have now. If employer provided healthcare was removed, that would leave us with a bunch of private healthcare companies. These private companies would drive up the cost even more. If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.

Its not a given that prices would increase

Look at how these systems work in other countries

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people at Twitter who understood the system and could predict the side effects were all fired or left. This is like a case study in what happens when you fire everyone except the sycophants and yes-men. I only feel sorry for remaining non-yes-men twitter employees who might still be there because for whatever personal reasons they're in a precarious economic situation where they can't quit (H1B?) or are tied to…

Yeah I wish Obama care had simply been: 'employer provided healthcare is illegal in 2024'

That wasn't possible, having Lieberman's vote was required, and he said no to anything like that

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#630
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they’re on an H1-B, they practically are.

[flagged]

So what is your threshold of classing a behavior as excerting force? Using whiplashes and locks? I suspect that even then you would find an argument to bootlick.
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