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Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

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Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is it net negative effect? they have Hundreds of millions of ACTIVE users even if it was spun off to be stand alone product without Instagram it would still be worth billions

DAU is a very one-dimensional and misleading KPI, one that gave us ever-growing, VC-backed unprofitable companies. The Threads is definitely net-negative in the sense of wider impact and not just single-dimensional KPIs. Take as example Uber and AirBnB. Both have had millions of active users and one could argue their service is even useful to a lot of people. It's still quite easy to argue that they are are net-negat…

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Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.

> Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.

This comment is perplexing.

Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already places Threads as one of the top social media services in the world. It's projected revenue for 2026 is over $10B.

What exactly are you talking about?

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#73
post #4

> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product te…

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

Threads is odd. The thing about Twitter was its very high media profile; you'd see tweets quoted in all sorts of places like newspapers and TV. The sharp heel turn is in the process of killing that, especially by closing off the site to not logged in users, but you can still see people quoting/screenshotting tweets on other sites. Including bluesky.

I don't think I've ever seen a viral Threads post that escaped the network?

Meanwhile Facebook screenshots still circulate as memes (derisive, but hey, the motto of the modern era is that the world hating you is better than them not noticing you). And Instagram is fairly entrenched as a marketing channel.

Is Threads the new Google+?

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#74
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing, but then realize that Threads was a huge flop. Is it really a skill to very quickly release a dud app? I don't know the answer to that. Bypassing bureaucracy seems like heaven, but it feels like it also bypassed the product folks entirely.

What is threads lacking from a product perspective?

The "product" in a social network is the community and the culture. Despite being terminally online I can't tell you what those look like for Threads. I can for FB/Insta/Twitter/Bsky/LinkedIn/Mastodon.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#75
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the same thing, but then realize that Threads was a huge flop. Is it really a skill to very quickly release a dud app? I don't know the answer to that. Bypassing bureaucracy seems like heaven, but it feels like it also bypassed the product folks entirely.

What? It has more than 300M users.

Using it for what? Can someone list their fave Threads accounts so we can get a picture?

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#76
> Moreover, for non-AI compute workloads, we offer only a single server type, equipped with one CPU and the same amount of DRAM (previously 64GB, now 256GB).

I'm reading something like this for the first time. Is this common across industry or only typical to Meta? In contrast, we use multiple instances for sub-components of our ML training pipeline.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a horrific place to work. Imagine the pressure

I’d far rather work in an environment that required and enabled me to get shit done than the opposite. My last W-2 job required a quarter-long planning period and then I had to go from team to team pleading my case and begging them not to stone wall me. Each time requiring a specially tailored slide deck, going behind the scenes to ask what questions _that one guy_ is going to try and derail us with so I could have a…

That sounds really unpleasant, sorry you had to deal with that.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#78
Quickly developed serverless functions combined with continuous deployment, and anyone can make edits in the entire codebase sounds like a dystopian nightmare. The amount of logging that is required to debug and find bugs is extreme.

Using Erlang to write serverless functions seems like avoiding all the huge benefits BEAM can offer.

>Additionally, product engineers predominantly write code in stateless, serverless functions in PHP, Python, and Erlang for their benefits in simplicity, productivity, and iteration speed.

>To boost developer productivity, Meta has adopted continuous deployment universally and enabled more developers to write serverless functions rather than traditional service code.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#79
post #4

> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product te…

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

It this what happens with very engineering led businesses perhaps? In other places, there would have been a lot more focus on the the final product before shipping but nowhere near the speed of delivery Meta achieved which is impressive.

Re: Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.

> Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect. This comment is perplexing. Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already p…

See further below please, I wrote just about this kind of tunnel-vision focus on DAU/MAU vs. a more holistic view ;)
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