It seems an outlandish claim, but then again Muskified Twitter has previous form for this kind of thing with that time when they self-derailed by locking themselves out of their own api, right?[1]
Sidekiq falling over is a big one. See: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/> and <https://nora.codes/post/scaling-mastodon-in-the-face-of-an-e...>
(I have to email my own admin every few months to ckeck if things are OK.)
And during the October Revolution as hoardes arrived from birdland, things got ssssslllloooowwww globally.
Worked out eventually, but it took a bit.
Individual instances also tend to run into scaling issues, with Jerry Bell's Infosec.Exchange coming to mind. (Mostly because Jerry's discussed this a bit.) And of course individual instances can be shut down or fail in various ways. I've migrated several times myself.
I will say that most of the time things seem fine, and it's exceptionally rare for there to be truly Fediverse-wide issues.
(I've been on Mastodon / the Fediverse since 2017, for the most part quite actively.)
Judging from the screenshot, a huge amount of GET /TweetDetail is generated which triggers some rate limiting, as shown by the 429.
If this is indeed due to the recent decision to enforce authentication for all API calls, it means the curlprit may actually be the API gateway or something similar downstream.
Also, this behavior seem to never stop, which isn't what one would expect from an exponential backoff retry.
I don't claim to be a better engineer than the folks working at Twitter, but it is interesting to see something like this in the wild, all Musk-related considerations aside.
And the interface is not trying to assault me. It loads quick.
...Seems like a better product than Twitter for a public feed.
Its a hive of misinformation, disinformation and toxicity. Its succinct I guess, but nothing is eloquent or descriptive because of the character limit. And its full of repetitive "filler" information.
Who wants that in a foundational LLM dataset?
Maybe its OK for finding labeled images... But that still seems kidna iffy.
I'll add a dedicated microservice
I've now two scalability problems
I mean as far as uses for LLMs go that seems to me a pretty realistic one. Mass quick propaganda with little effort. Go for immediate impact, doesn't matter if people look deeper, you're just looking to get a swell of emotional reactions.
Talents left twitter already, I wouldn't be surprised if the ones that took over are the ones who come from the intelligence industry, as opposed to the tech industry
... That is horrifying.
Maybe... if you build a LLM scrapping for the lulz?
They're only holding out because they still believe the Fed will cut rates and they can borrow some more cheap money to keep the gravytrain going.
The way I understand it, DDoS is not caused by enforced authentication - enforced authentication is just a temporary measure against DDoS.
Conversely, relatively nothing goes into pushing people to use mastodon. It can only take off if it really does prove, not just useful, but more useful than a centralized version that's got money behind it.
For a personal website, that's a great performance.
And if some massive org needs bandwidth for posts, can't they host their own public instance? I'm sure many organizations would prefer that over being at Twitter's mercy.
Or maybe you want to get an aggregate idea of what people are currently talking about in the world, stuff that doesn't rise to the level of capital-n News. There aren't a lot of alternatives for that.
I prefer Twitter in the sense that it's more laissez faire in terms of what kinds of speech get you banned.
https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
HN discussion:
People are going to assume it's something you don't want to name, if you won't name it.
Though, the only time when I did see that happen, was when someone was transphobic, homophobic, racist and such.
I really don't think it is. It's still largely political, and subject to the whim of the reader.
The guy who tracked and reported on Twitter Blue subscriptions was suspended today.
You always have to kiss someone's ring.
I'm not sure how common this issue is but I _can_ say that I've been through a defederation bullshit myself because the large instance did something as egregious as welcoming people regardless alignment to Swedish government party (i.e. any party with over 4% of votes in Sweden). That was far too much for some instances like mastodon.art to handle. The admin got fed up since he had neither will nor moderation resources of that kind and shut down the instance, so everyone had to migrate which is a headache by its own even if supported.
From other stories, I swear the greatest threat to the Fediverse is politics and more or less childish cross-instance strife. I just now checked my Mastodon feed and this very fucking issue was discussed once more so I guess some drama has went down again while I was away. There's been trouble of this kind on Lemmy too already.
People say "it's like e-mail". Yeah, if we have like 20 major e-mail servers in the world and there's drama across them as we bet on the winners via Patreon.
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 course not say whether the people currently working at Twitter did warn that the recent measures could have such major side effects, but I would not be surprised in the slightest, considering their leadership's mode of operation.
Even as someone who very much detests what Twitter has become over the last few months and in fact did not like Twitter before the acquisition, partly due to short format making nuance impossible, but mostly for the effect Tweets easy embeddability had on reporting (3 Tweets from random people should not serve as the main basis for an article in my opinion), I must say, I feel very sorry for the people forced to work at that company under that management.
Also true.
You know, just like in real life.
There are plenty of instances that allow abhorrent content, if that's what you want, but you can't force others to receive it.
“I mean, when all the wrong and bad people are kicked out everything is great!”
No one is complaining about people with Ford vs Chevy comments being banned. It’s the controversial things that need to be refuted, not hidden.
What makes you so absolutely certain you are on the “right side” of any opinion? Because the people in charge of these services are censoring the other side?
How long before you find yourself with “the wrong thoughts”?
What happened to thinking for yourself?
Mastodon instances are largely moderated by people from the other 30%. You are free to judge if you want. But don't pretend this is a violation of publicly accepted morals in the 1st world.
Yeah, lots of general chat is unfortunately stuck in Twitter (or difficult -to-scrape siloed off platforms.
It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.
Twitter is great for examples of that, and the toxicity and disinformation doesn't get in the way.
Conversely, a training set doesn't need to be up to date to be useful for that.
I don't know if anyone really was trying to scrape it (examples of Musk disagreeing with his own engineers come to mind), but I assume it's possible, and given the quality of code ChatGPT spits out I can easily believe a really bad scraper has been produced by someone who thought they could do without hiring a software developer. If so, they might think they can get hot stock tips or forewarning of a pandemic from which emoji people post or something — not really what an LLM is for, but loads of people (even here!) conflate all the different kinds of AI into one thing.
This is why P2P is superior. Federation nodes can be used to strong-arm collective behavior against the will of individual users.
I don't mind being exposed to liberal and conservative thought. I want to consume almost the entire spectrum of human discourse so that I can synthesize ideas for myself and understand more effectively. As long as the signal is reasonably high.
Reddit and fediverse moderators wield absolute power over their fiefdoms. They're intellectual dictatorships. (Not to mention egotistical behaviors some of them have.)
P2P allows the end user to consume what they want, weight discussions how they want, and participate in any number of emergent clusters. It's the real path forward.
Maybe it works different on Mastodon?
https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own...
What do you think I'm doing, right now?
Someone is invoking censorship as a reason not to adopt a new platform. No specifics, just rabble rousing. That's manipulation. Pushing back is thinking for yourself.
Or, they are being imprecise and undermining their position, in which case what I said works as advice on further conversations. Either way is thinking.
Most of the world doesn't.
But generally speaking, anything that the US/"San Francisco" left wing ideology deems "bad" is generally unwelcome.
The ability for /r/conservative to ban my counter arguments is just as harmful as Mastodon shutting down the anti-trans positions.
Conversation is what moves us forward and is how we find commonality.
I grew up religious and conservative. I changed a lot of my viewpoints through friendly conversations in the internet of 2000-2010, before tumblrism, cancel culture, and censorship took hold.
If I grew up in today's world or internet, I might never have been exposed to different opinions in a non-hostile, no-judgment environment. By trying to segregate, censor, and ban we're only leading to intractable polarization. Never giving folks an opportunity to change. Never accepting that people are capable of growth.
Please let's talk with each other. Even if we disagree. You'd be surprised how effective that can be.
We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh away our differences and find the ways and the things that we share. We all hold more in common than you might think.
Love your enemy, even if they don't love you (yet).
If I could have one lasting impact on this world, it would be this message.
Now, this has been severely degraded by the changes that Musk has made. The spam in direct messages is off the charts now, whereas in the past I would get maybe a spam per year. And when one of my areas of interest has a post that gets popular, I have to scroll past all the insipid clout-chasing replies from blue check marks which get floated to the top of replies in an attempt to reward some of the worst people on the internet. Also the long form tweets that need to be expanded are a big deflation of user experience, as reading and replying to those are suboptimal compared to a tweet thread.
But this is also the general internet: 99% spam plus 1% quality. And the quality of the 1% of good Twitter is some of the very best of timer material out there.
And since LLMs have been trained on this same mix... they seem to be mostly good at filtering. But they do lie an awful lot.
Or is the complaint that you don’t have the power to force yourself on people who don’t want to read your shit?
On top of that, you can host your own webfinger alias, as sibling suggests, which lets you have an unchanging address that forwards to your current server. But note that accounts follows URI's not the handles, so you still need the move process to migrate existing followers.
It's not by any means perfect, but it's improving (e.g. the move process is relatively new) and probably will keep improving.
Musk literally just said that the term 'cis' is a slur that will get you banned.
(thanks RFC 2119)
If you have the energy to politely engage people who think of you as a child molester who should be shot on sight, great! Go for it! But I have done that, and I am tired, and I do not want to do it any more. I run a Mastodon and I just want it to be a space to talk to my friends and maybe make some new ones, and thus, I block the fuck out of places I do not expect to get anything but hate from.
1. I create an account @ploum@writing.exchange on writing.exchange.
2. I go to mamot.fr and, in the settings, I enable migration to @ploum@writing.exchange.
3. I go to writing.exchange and, in the settings, I start the migration from @ploum@mamot.fr.
All my followers and following are automatically transfered. For them, it is transparent. They still follow me on my new account without them being even notified.
Of course, you need cooperation from mamot.fr. If mamot.fr decide to close your account, you can’t migrate it.
But it works well, I’ve used it myself. It is really great and allows people to do "server hoping" to join a community that fit better their need.
As much as I want this to be true, I think this sentiment is really only popular on tech-savvy forums like HN. Most people don't use ad blockers, and I've had people get mad at me when I suggest that they do (directly in response to something where they are complaining about ads).
I realize it's a complicated issue, and I'm never a fan of banning speech. But not all speech deserves a response.
Their default of “just go ham on that API” feels like the same footgun of “by default this Humongous Database is wide open.”
You can’t debug and root cause if you do. So you end up adding hacky point fixes
Users on those instances who want to listen to you are free to go to instances that don't defederate you.
After some pondering I think it's peoples' insecurity misfiring. They use these complicated layered and potentially risky and dangerous pieces of technology, aware they don't fully understand them, that they work as magic that could stop any moment. Trying to understand and secure them is a massive rabbit hole. So I think there's kind of a rejection to go down that hole or acknowledge the problem or, most of all, face the vulnerability and exposure.
My 100 Croatian lipa fwiw :-)
People that aren't tech-savvy don't want to think about tech any more than they already do. Having to understand something new about tech is just another problem to them. I'm not saying that as an insult - just an observation.
Ooh, ooh, ooh? Like what kind of "vanilla opinion?"
Not everyone is cut out to be an educator, and I think you should have the option not to be voluntold for the job. Not just because it should be your right, but because insisting that everyone in a group can speak for that group is itself stereotyping. I think once you see that it's really hard to be patient with people who don't.
I think you're probably using the term "enshittify" differently than the parent comment. Enshittification, at least as I tend to see it used, doesn't really follow from a particular technology stack, but more about how an organization itself approaches its end users, particularly against over-exploitation/monetization of a given platform. It typically doesn't speak to the underlying technology (i.e. html vs. MB of Javascript vs. WASM), since that is (within reason) somewhat orthogonal to how the organizations running instances treat their users/how end users actually experience the platform.
In the case of Twitter, the new owner has thoroughly broken the advertising business and is trying to aggressively pursue a new version of the data business Twitter once had-- E.g. Google's Caffeine, which Twitter also eventually lost https://searchengineland.com/google-search-algorithm-change-... ... The statements about "too many scrapers" are almost certainly as illegitimate as the previous pre-acquisition statements about "too many bots."
The nature of business is that there's no judiciary or referee... the purpose of a business is to make money. Tech businesses just happen to hire lots of academically-oriented engineers who developed their skills in a different environment. It's possible to build a culture of "fairness" in a business, but at the end of the day even Google dropped "don't be evil."
Engineering isn't like service positions where the lack of competent personnel is felt immediately; the debt keeps growing until your whole system collapses under it one day, how far the day is in the future depends on what system you're working on.
So the result wasn't an outage, it was a radical reduction in functionality.
I think that still qualifies as a self-ddos.
And you're free to engage the people who want to put you and your spouse on a train car in conversation all you like. Maybe you'll deprogram one or two, but you'll just help spread their propaganda to exponentially more people than you could ever help.
I have no commonality with such people and don't want to find any. I don't want to share a society with them, and I know they don't want to share one with me. I certainly don't want to debate the Jewish Question or "groomers" or race science with them on my gamedev instance.
>We're all suffering though this world together. Laugh away our differences and find the ways and the things that we share.
You know these people want you dead, right? They don't believe you have a right to exist. You and your spouse. Especially your spouse. We're not talking about a difference in belief about tax laws or support for opposing soccer teams here. "Laugh away our differences?" I'm sorry but with all due respect fuck that.
I really dont understand how the "investors" who will end up holding the bag after the IPO dont see that.
Barring that, turning off server side throttling or atleast making it less aggressive to slow the retry storm seems the most reasonable.
Mastodon confronts you that if you say shitty stuff, nobody wants to listen to you.
People complaining being banned or being on defederated instances are people other don’t want to listen. They pretend to have a personal opinion while they are only assaulting others.
LGBT is a good example: you cannot have an opinion about it. Those people exist. They have the right to exist. You have the right to not engage in any LGBT activity. But you don’t have the right to talk about a "debate". There’s none. If you do, I you maintain that using "cisgender" should be a banned word, you are simply an asshole and can’t complain that people don’t want to listen to your ramblings. And yes, this will get you banned.
They deteriorate piece-by-piece, potentially over the course of many months, until the compounding effects of these problems and the growing technical debt overwhelms the team that they have left.
Your freedom just doesn't override the freedom of others to avoid you. You can't force others to interact with you and there's nothing wrong with that.
The best discussion platform is IMHO the older version of reddit / i.reddit with the nested comments + possibility to be indexed by google + possibility to reply to old posts. The super-nesting comments feature is great.
Twitter was previously a public company, which was beholden to shareholders, and aimed to try and increase its stock price (as far as "shareholder value" actually means anything, this is basically it). I wouldn't praise previous management (the company wasn't profitable), but they were not a complete dumpster fire.
Then Twitter was bought out, and taken private, removing the obligation to "shareholder value." The ensuing dumpster fire is one that will be marveled at for years.
I'm not saying public corporations are better than private, or that "shareholder value" is a good slogan. I'm just saying that your comment is every bit as irrelevant as the porn spam that's clogging Twitter these days. (Thanks for fixing the spam problem, y'all!).
what the fuck is this response?
I hear always that centralising everything is great because efficiencies of scale: but then we have something that works as good or better and the response is; “ah yeah, but the load is so high!”
Why do I care? I don't honestly give a shit about how much load you have, you could be factoring Pi on every page load; it means -nothing- to me. I kindly invite you to give more of a shit about user experience.
This also goes for when “complicated” systems fail, maybe making them so complicated and centralised is not the way.
80% of Americans think that the southern border should have increased security: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/09/08/republica...
50% of Americans oppose affirmative action (with 33% approving, 16% not sure): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/08/more-america...
This is actually hugely beneficial to discussion as it makes people focus on the most salient point first, and further points go below, and each are easy to address individually.
Longer form material goes to outside links, sometimes, but Twitter threads are also great for long form content. At least for executive summaries that link out to the detailed bits for each primary point. Once the UI for Twitter prioritized threading, it became quite easy to express extremely long chains of evidence.
1. Noone understand what "federation" is so they all flock to the big servers hence making the majority of the system totally non-federated in nature
2. Findability (of users, topics, servers) is terrible which pushes people to 1)
3. What you said. Until there's such a thing as federated identity, we're all still tied to one server, thus one server owner can ban / switch off / over-moderate and we're all back to square one
Some of this can be solved with ux and education but I worry that some of it is basically baked in to federation.
Edit: yeh I mean in theory you can move servers but it's apparently not easy...!
I would say that Twitter is an automatic transmission, mastodon is a standard.
Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money.
Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant.
Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before.
Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower.
Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?
Definitely a good one to revisit.
- Outages really are common: https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1577806809217503232
It REALLY sounds like you don't understand how any of this works.
Tech products don't stop working when you fire most of the staff.
But bugs stop being fixed and problems begin to add up, until a critical point is reached,m where the whole house of cards collapses.
Thinking that "Elon was proven right" simply because Twitter didn't implode the second he announced the layoffs, makes me think you don't understand how tech and software works.
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
Edit: clarifications.
I'd consider that deteriorated service.
also just out of curiosity while trying to find historical outage data I found this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/14/twitter-e...
Last july (before elon took over), the site was apparently down for 45 minutes and "one of the site’s longest outages for years". Today it's been basically barely usable for most of the day.
Does it really though? Private shareholders are still shareholders. It replaces a diffuse duty to keep a bunch of public-shareholders happen with a possibly-more-direct "do what I say or be replaced tomorrow."
> "shareholder value" is a thought-terminating cliche
I think when people use it dismissively, it's not really about shareholders per se, but about one that are focused on short-term growth at the expense of long-term growth or a sustainable business model.
Can we start to call companies with almost 18 years old just "companies" and not startup anymore?
I mean, I would expect Microsoft to do a much better job than Twitter to keep GitHub from going down every single month after acquiring it. The frequency of GitHub going down with 100M+ users using it is much worse than Twitter.
It turns out that GitHub's constant downtime for years is all fine (especially tech folks) here despite the monthly complaints anyway. The latest one here [0] But only with Twitter, the speed-bumps are exaggerated and magnified.
[0] >>36523843
The twitter post you linked to was from October of last year; I'm not sure how to draw any conclusions from it.
I mean, if I'm reading that screenshot correctly this is 700+ requests a minute.
I've tripped the rate limiter with less on other sites.
I never liked Twitter, don't have accounts, etc. To me this "dumpster fire" talk sounds like just sour grapes.
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 expensive work before returning an error but that's why we have rate limits on all public endpoints.
I also guess that the webapp is the least of Twitters traffic and the native apps probably don't have this problem.
Я, Unless your visa is sponsored by your employer.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching this.
This 2019 article says they cut costs/Vine and jumped to video ads which boosted revenue 24% which might explain why they were profitable in 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/tech/twitter-earnings-q4/inde...
In 2018 there is mention of a "one-time release of deferred tax asset valuation allowance,” which accounted for $683 million [of income]".
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/25/18018046/twitter-q3-2018-earn...
OP's point stands in my opinion. Twitter was/is a flagging centralized service that may not survive if it doesn't pivot.
This would disappear with more widespread usage. The problem is the software, not the culture. If the software is improved, or the dead ends are pruned and something else is created that learns the lessons from previous tries, the new cultures will bury the old.
If building software required experts on model trains or K-pop, the culture would suck, too. The goal is to make that a stage rather than an endpoint.
edit: I enjoy model trains, but I do not get into political or social discussions with model train guys.
As opposed to something like Amazon which grew and grew for nearly 20 years, always burning more cash than it made to fuel growth, but they understood the business really well and when they decided to optimize for profitability rather than growth, never never gone back.
The root cause is business & feature experimentation at scale with a tight runway & no executive oversight.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/americans-oppose-in...
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 complete waste of my time, but it's a weird mental honeypot.
The book "Nothing is true and everything is possible" describes Putin's use of misinformation to maintain control of the populace and eliminate democratic types of politics, but it really feels like it applies here too. There will always be Musk fanbois who will parrot whatever he wants them to say, but most know it's just self-serving BS. And anybody trying to get to the root of everything gets easily sidetracked into narratives that feel right but have zero data backing them, like this bug.
Anyway, highly recommend this book if you want to see a likely path for the future of the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Is_True_and_Everything...
It's hard to find nuance and information anymore. It's as if all we have to work with is politics and hatred.
I think "shareholder value" is just a distraction and a rationalization.
The driving force is the MBA-ization of management and people looking to juice short-term profitability so that they can cash out or get large bonuses and then job hop away.
Often times the best posters are not the same people publishing the best stuff in their field, but sometimes they are. Aggregators are a different category.
What types of science are you interested in? Some random accounts that I can see right now:
@ShanuMathew93 - renewable energy tech and biz and news
@IdoTheThinking - California housing
@TheStalwart - finance, macroceconomics, microeconomics, etc.
@doctorveera - general genomics
"i'm favoriting this so i can come back to it, like that dropbox comment."
Delicious.
I don't doubt that Twitter saw a massive increase in traffic recently, but I feel at least somewhat confident that it's mostly self-inflicted on Twitter's part.
But that being said, a loop of users requesting access from Twitter's system is a thing that would burden Twitter's system.
Requesting access and denying access isn't free. You can definitely DDOS your own website by having all of your users repeatedly request access to it in a loop.
But you gotta have a very good relationship with someone to just do that I guess
Yeah, it is going great.
I see HackerNews is counterintuitively up its own ass again.
Being unable to look at anyone's tweets doesn't count as unavailability to you?
Not American or white or whatever, just stating the obviously less widely supported stuff that may sound uncontroversial to the more terminally online.
And it's a tough market where 5% of IT engineers across the board have recently been let go.
Even non visa holders at Twitter have had to wait it out, sometimes months, until a suitable job was found.
What does this mean? Drag queens shouldn't be allowed to read? Like what concrete policy are you saying they can't propose which isn't obviously overreach?
Also probably not the best argument to make in a thread whose main topic of conversation is about how one of the biggest social networks on the internet is disintegrating in real time thanks in part to the management of its owner.
I don't think you'd agree that it would be weird to not want your social media and what you see online to be tied to what some, for example, Saudi dudes think is acceptable at the moment.
Like: we have the sources and you could detox you model if you pay for it.
Mastodon isn't a person, you're talking about the guy who runs the instance.
> nobody wants to listen to you.
The person who runs your Mastodon instance is not everybody.
I will note that the few times I investigated claims of Elon lies they were not proper lies, either being misunderstood, misleading (which IS unethical, don't get me wrong), of indeterminate truth value (he said, she said type stuff), delusional optimism or actually true.
Like journalists, Musk rarely outright knowingly makes literally false statements, but this does not mean you should take what he says at face value.
So, there may be a much simpler explanation for why their new rate limits on regular users to can-barely-scroll levels, and how that has all sorts of unintended consequences they weren't ready for
* Loli porn
* Extreme neo-Nazi content; I'm talking about swastikas, hardcore racial slurs, and the like
* Targeted bullying and harassment
You want to spark a conversation about the relative merits of Republican fiscal policy, let's chat! You want to say that we should still own slaves, Jews eat babies, or gay people shouldn't exist? Go away. I don't owe you a soapbox.
Disconnecting from a server with despicable content doesn't take away that server's right to speak. It just preserves my -- and my users' -- right not to hear it.
Seems like either my quota reset or they changed the policy because I’m able to access the site again.
...said no one who's ever been a moderator.
You find out quickly that there are some perfectly horrid people out there. You absolutely do not want to hear everything that people say. It seems like you would, but you really don't.
I would still recommend not using the word “shareholder value” for the concept. It’s just…having a business that you don’t want to lose money? Some people do dislike the concept of business, but I don’t think they should talk about “shareholder value”, they should just attack capitalism.
In any case, it’s still irrelevant to a discussion of Twitter. The old management was also expected to turn a profit, but somehow avoided Elon’s string of silly ideas.
I’m pretty ambivalent about advertising, but it was the only reasonable way for Twitter to make money, so I would not have bought Twitter and then chased away all the advertisers.
If you introduce a bit of randomness into the retry timing (say, multiply by 1.8~2.2 instead of a straight doubling), that thundering herd will spread itself out and be much easier to recover from.
In this case the horrible idea is being forced to push changes to production at a moments notice
What you can't do, and should never expect other people to do, is to be forced to receive what you're posting, or to put it another way, you can't force people to listen to you.
I'm about 2 for 8 but you gotta try sometimes.
> Twitter’s Google Cloud contract dates back to 2018.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-payi...
Oh... this explains all this fiasco :facepalm:
Those who do care are very loud (on both platforms) but they might be a minority in practice.
I worked in the games industry for a while, and came to understand how they could spend so much money and so much time, and yet release a game where even basic functionality was broken. It's exactly this sort of extreme schedule pressure that, ironically, makes a huge morass where changing one thing breaks 10 other things, so progress grinds to a halt.
It’s hilarious to think it is at all acceptable to kill public access, and drastically limit authenticated access, because of a few scrapers. There is no way Twitter prior to Musk’s acquisition would have had to do so.
> What do you think?
I think you are not looking at the situation objectively.
There's nasty form of this where the site is offline for a bit and then all the clients rush their requests in when it comes back online. The client requests are all coordinated on the site recovery time and end up overloading the site with their coordinated retries.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 and self-reply
Being the bearer of bad “stoves are hot to the touch” news makes you a downer.
Not enough of you believed and now this balloon is adrift and will never make it to Imaginationland.
Reporting it publicly this way can also be a favor to both, as it gives them a fairly malleable narrative for reversing course, or directing responsibility, or both. Even if it’s simultaneously embarrassing to have it out there. And it’s not like either Musk or Twitter is a stranger to embarrassment, or particularly shy about courting it.
"Nothing is an absolute reality, all is permitted"
Edit: this of course depends on some other implementation details, like the rendering flow and browser behavior. If showing the error is memoized, it shouldn’t trigger the loop unless they’re also rendering some intermediate loading state asynchronously.
Can't I just think Elon Musk is a twat without it being somehow political?
Twitter links are now poisoned, and basically useless.
The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.
The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side. Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.
Not really, our team maintained a reverse-proxy that fronted all requests that came into amazon. And whenever we would have a self-ddos event, we'd get a request from the backend team whose service was getting self-ddos'd to shed traffic before it reached their service hosts to prevent it from browning out. In many case ddos's were coming from kindle devices which were not even easy to update so deploying a "fix" wasn't even always an option.
Maybe that theory is correct. But I feel like pretending this post is getting to the top of HN because it's a technically interesting diagnostic analysis is sort of silly.
> In addition, Twitter will continue to use AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront (AWS’s fast content delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency and high transfer speeds to customers globally) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS’s key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale).
The OP is fundamentally wrestling with an issue of justice, but the bottom line is that in business there is no punishment for stupid. There is only reward for profit.
The tweet threads are not terrible, but are inconvenient enough for people to be succinct as possible. Now there are walls of text from blue check marks that like the sound of their own voice far more than their content is insightful.
Sure I've read interesting long tweets, but I'd rather have a link to another site meant for long form writing than it living on Twitter, doubly so now as what bits of good content there were are behind a login wall.
But i get it, Elon needed something to make the blue check "worth it".
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 the company for healthcare coverage (Thanks, America, for being the greatest country in the world) because they can't afford any other health insurance option.
But also, yes, I use it to observe the latest meltdown; why shouldn’t I?
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...
Hahahahaha! Man, Parag Agrawal and his team knew exactly what they were doing. A fool and his money are soon parted, indeed.
With respect to DynamoDB specifically, Twitter has its own custom distributed key-value store: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-... that twitter.com itself runs on.
Citation needed. Show me the 2020 Twitter headcount. Show me the 2023 Twitter headcount.
> The only difference between then and now is that there is a big personality at the top who now personifies everything Twitter does, especially if things go wrong, whereas before it was mainly just a faceless bureaucracy whose Trust and Safety lead at times had more visibility than the CEO.
That is not the 'only difference'. There is also the matter of all the hate speech. Which I guess you don't really notice, as you're not one of the targets, but I sure am. This is like Trump going 'boo hoo everyone hates me because I'm Donald Trump,' when in fact there is this small matter of an armed insurrection. You are writing off the valid political concerns of your opponents as being rooted in personality, rather than in odious politics.
> The subtext is that Twitter changing hands also involved trimming a lot of the dead weight, particularly hitting the softer managerial/diversity/HR side.
This is the most reality-defying way of recalling that the entire company basically quit on him overnight, but ok, bro
> Now a lot of people are rooting for the site to fail because it has gotten too "bro-ey", as the era of trust-and-safety and $15k backchannel bluecheck deals has made way for free-speech and monthly subscriptions.
That is not the reason we are anticipating its failure. We are anticipating its failure because we understand how people, platforms, and software interact. 'Hope' has nothing to do with it; we just read it off the verniers.
I don’t pretend to know all of the motivations behind the policy moves.
That said, I’ve got some experience with scraping; got sued by LinkedIn in 2014. We were using AWS Spot Instances to hit it hard for very little money. It was not uncommon to accidentally take large services down.
Scrapers can and do add very significant load. We also scraped Twitter back in the day as well.
Personally, I prefer not to listen to certain peoples’ Important Opinions about how people like me shouldn’t have rights (life is too bloody short), so I use a Mastodon instance which doesn’t tolerate that. People with such opinions are of course entitled to use a Mastodon instance which does (and there are plenty of them). I’m struggling to see an issue here. Person A is free to say whatever old nonsense they like, Person B is free not to listen to it.
I am, by the way, genuinely curious; I just don’t get the issue here. If a person with Important Opinions can’t hassle the rest of us with said opinions because we choose to opt out of them, well, so what?
Heck, I've hired people to teach me things, told them they were wrong, and learned the hard way, many times.
An assumptions of good faith was once a well-held principle on this website, and it's too bad legacy media has led so many astray.
Hatred for Musk has truly captured many otherwise very logical minds.
Infact it got so bad because of all those retries at multiple levels from upstream callers that requests were essentially timing out at the TCP buffer/queue before they could be processed by the application.
Don’t know if the Twitter homepage backend is at similar scale.
And then Twitter is used for "relevant" information as well, from emergency or transport authorities using it for quick information instead of having their own system to news of any kind or discussions and information exchange in different peer groups.
Considering that they count all tweets being loaded towards the quota (for instance replies to a tweet, if you open the detail page) and they like to shove tweets from Musk and others in the timelines the quota can be reached quite quickly even on considerate use.
The data is in now!
Your statement is gross.
Here’s just a few of the people (in these cases journalists) that Elon has banned. It’s not hard to find other examples of censorship either. That’s his right, he owns all of it, but he lied about ideals of free speech. If it’s speech he doesn’t like, he kills it:
Ryan Mac
Drew Harwell
Micah Lee
Matt Binder
Aaron Rupar
Donie O’Sullivan
Tony Webster
EDIT: these bans were related to reporting on the elonjet tracking account that was banned. He didn’t just ban the account he didn’t like, he banned the accounts of journalists who talked about that.
> And then I get defederated for having done so.
> It's an illusion freedom that does not exist in practice because this is Mastodon we're talking about.
Not those who just punish anyone who dares. Then they're just not told anything but "yes, sir" until disaster strikes.
And if he didn't make his politics part of how he runs stuff, I probably wouldn't even care about his politics. But you know how celebrities get crap for inserting politics into things, when they know very little about that topic? Elon is going to get the same.
I prefer to assume the best out of people, but when someone is that obviously wrong that many times with that much personal gain to come from it, I can't believe that man as smart as he is would also be that misled.
The webdev or JavaScript mentality of if it breaks, don't worry, we can fix it live strikes again.
Compare:
- hoping Ballmer-era Microsoft would fail in their attempts to snuff out Linux
- hoping that USSR would fail in their attempts to snuff out large numbers of their own citizens
- hoping that the Confederates would fail at snuffing out resistance to literal slavery
- (in fiction,) hoping that the Death Star would fail at snuffing out various planets, etc
and so forth.
There is not some weird list of permissible root-reasons. You have no gotcha; you are just gotten.
The latest on cloud hosting is from a week ago, and I'm guessing you don't have any more recent info than this:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-go...
>To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: > >- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day >- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day >- New unverified accounts to 300/day
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
> Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754
> Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
That's vastly superior to Twitter, which routinely shoves stuff in your timeline from people you do not follow.
Are you saying the engineers who are now at Twitter don’t have the right skills?
Maybe not
> if twitter isn't going down
I disagree. Ddos is a type of attack, not the result of an attack. If they're hitting their services way too many times in a distributed fashion, it's a ddos regardless of how it was handled.
Similarly, would you say this[0] wasn't a ddos because it was mitigated? I think not.
You should have warned me about this more convincingly!
If you’ve never had to handle authorization in a particular area, it might have been safe to assume that any 4xx error should have been retried when the code was originally written and someone didn’t write them all out
> The problem with this asinine debate over debating is that everyone is trying to come up with a content-neutral principle.
Because I kinda think Bill Gates has bad politics?
I am only half kidding. "Profiles of specialized Twitter readers" would be an excellent dataset if it could somehow be filtered down to that.
The easiest path will always be the default for the majority of devs, with a simple "timer" type solution being the easiest to implement in pretty much all cases except where otherwise it's literally forced on them.
All. the. time...
Pervasive cognitive glitch: inability to distinguish between _problems_ and _people_.
Identifying the problem ==> causing the problem.
Doubt either care at this point.
And never created sufficient testing.
The initial and biggest waves of layoffs last year were of people who hadn’t yet had a chance to demonstrate whether they were or were not sycophants. They were essentially random.
And even if you do retry, exponential backoff has been the standard for a long time (and is mentioned by the Twitter API documentation as a good solution to 429 responses)
>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
>It’s just a feed, and needs to be rate-limited for unregistered users. No need to pull out your philosophy-degree. The people that were fired from Twitter were fired for good reason and if you think you’d do a better job than Elon with Twitter, you wouldnt.
>* PS: Dislike my comment fags
And then they sum up their politics and best arguments and what the Twitter they're fighting so hard for and what Musk they worship so much is all about, in just one word:
>trevioustrouble 1 hour ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | flag | vouch | favorite | on: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself
>fag
And that's the best they've got.
It really makes Musk's apologists so angry and frustrated to see everyone laughing their asses off at Musk explosively and bloodily sharting himself in public like that, because now they have to follow behind the elephant and wipe up all the mess.
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).
They had to change it to "Move Fast and Build Stable Infra" for a reason.
They don't get paid after the company dies.
Is it a lie if you don't know or even care if it's true or what it means? That's where we are with Elon Musk.
Unless the home feed being down is simply a side effect - the service that fetches tweets being DDOS'd by other views in the app making numerous non authenticated calls.
But I was also thinking about this earlier today. These days, everybody is so quick to say "the software is easy, it's the community that's hard" - I've even said it myself a few times in the past few weeks, but I think that might be overstated.
Building good software is hard. Keeping it good is even harder. What does the codebase look like for Twitter's front-end at this point?
How many frameworks has the base functionality been ported through? How many quick pivots from product adding features, adjusting things squashed down the ability to address technical debt or even have functioning unit and regression testing?
The fact that this 1. Made it to production and 2. Was not noticed and rolled back immediately (like, in under 30 minutes) is extremely concerning (and obviously very embarrassing.) If I had private data stored on Twitter of ANY kind (like DMs that I don't want getting out - a messaging system rich, famous, and powerful people have been using like email for over a decade), at this point I would be trying to get that data removed however I could, or accept that there's a strong possibility there's going to be a huge data breach and all of the data will be leaked.
The tweet reads: "Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in."
Does that strike you as complex? I mean, surely they had the context (need to log in) because it was all over the news
I should also add that Musk's management methods are likely to turn any remaining people in to yes men. E.g., his "demon mode" routine: https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/elon-musk-demon-mode-rip-peop...
Gcloud only supports batch jobs and data analysis.
Companies that behave that way and have good returns on capital employed and have large growth in earnings, free cash flow, etc are good investments. Doesn't matter if they're not showing profits.
Twitter serves their service to the entire world, with multiple layers of systems working in conjunction in order to make things work smoothly. A new engineer that has not been working on it for no more than a couple months would likely be unaware of how the different systems communicate and interact. A change like this will have have a lot of unintended consequences, and not having a senior engineer with lots of context leading the change will undoubtedly cause these kinds of issues.
Once you are signed up, it's tempting to use it. Then you realize it's a bad idea to use it, but it takes self-control.
Now, with the current leadership, who knows if they will purge inactive accounts and/or reissue IDs.
I don't know if this scenario accounts for much of the antagonism, but it is one possibility. It is possible that some people don't like it, but can't let go of it completely, and the new management creates uncertainty and doubt that never ends.
https://visaguide.world/us-visa/nonimmigrant/employment/h1b/...
Dumb but obvious consequence
This is why I find if you don't already have good relations with management and trust each others judgement, it really doesn't matter.
They will do as they wish, and throw you under the bus as needed.
If an affordable or free healthcare option was offered on top of making employer provided healthcare illegal, then I completely am behind your idea.
You have zero idea if that is true or not.
He then asked me to do weekly RAG status for stakeholders. So I did and it all slowly turned red with no easy remediation.
He did two things that made me realize it was time to go:
First, when I suggested that "if I report red status all year and then it doesn't complete on time, but I kept everyone well informed - am I going to be rewarded end of year".. to which I got nervous laughter response.
Second, he started talking about "what if we change the definition of done", such that we just start marking things amber/green because like.. well some of it is running in QA or hey its like 70% done, so why not mark it done?
Just seemed like he handed me the keys to a sinking boat as he stepped off in the last life boat.
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.
On that note, the 10 requests/second in the post is also negligible for the same reason. Only requests that hit backend servers matter
And no, there is no such thing as eradicating "transgenderism" without eradicating transgender people anymore than you could eradicate "blackism" without eradicating black people. It is a meaningless distinction invented to provide a paper-thin veneer over what is simply a call for mass murder.
Look at how these systems work in other countries
This is protection in adversarial scenarios, but is also just a great habit In general. Verbal discussion is really good for getting people on the same page, but without notes it's very easy for details and decisions to get lost.
It can take a lot of time and effort to develop instincts like “scrollbar jumping and network calls are related”. They’re so obvious to me that I didn’t even bother inspecting anything, I just “debugged” on my phone by connecting familiar dots and describing the familiarity. But if it’s not immediately obvious to you and if you have an inclination to be more familiar, I’d strongly recommend spending more time manually fuzzing rando sites with dev tools open. You’ll probably get a lot more out of that than dissecting personal motivations on any thread on any site. And you’ll have a much better calibrated bullshit detector too.
But this is Scaling-101 stuff. It's not some super complex or unique system going wrong. At least according to the article, it's a classic case of bad retry logic leading to a death spiral.
Plus there’s always technical debt and even the ‘best’ engineers at Twitter made mistakes
Maybe if the architecture wasn’t so brittle and more easily testable by these engineering ‘gods’ then we wouldn’t have this problem
The media is flawed. Journalists are flawed. The Verge in particular has some atrocious coverage of tech.
But the problem with Elon is that in his world, we must rely on him for true information. As if the direct source is inherently true. He’s just as full of it as anyone else with interests.
In the case of a platform like Twitter, aside from random acts of god and weather, aside from money, what are the sort of stuff that slowly breaks its wheels off over time such that, without staff, it inevitably stops working completely?
There’s just no chance this specific thing is actually what’s causing issues for Twitter, it’s obviously a consequence of the heavy scraping and steps to stop the heavy scraping. It frustrates me to no end that smart technical software people, who can have intelligent discussions on not just code but a wide range of topics from nuclear powers to superconductors, suddenly lose their ability to have these discussions when a certain person is involved.
Though the expected norm nowadays is for it to be a cheaper second-rate labour supply restricted by years long waiting lists and lotteries, and not a smooth pipeline of geniuses and super-geniuses interested in emigrating to the US,
Any professional worth his salt would do the same.
What I’m more surprised about is how gum and shoestring the twitter engineering is now a days. They put in no emphasis on doing deep divides into the code base and instead opt to do the simplest shortest fix. And it causes problems.
That would give the server side more control over the retrying logic (when the header is properly interpreted). I'm surprised Elon hasn't implemented this himself.
It's already a bunch of private companies.
> These private companies would drive up the cost even more.
Other way around - by having to actually directly compete for customers, instead of just having to convince a few large corporation prices would go down, not up.
Although we really should not ignore that insurance companies are not the drivers of higher costs, it's health care providers that do that.
It's enjoyable to blame insurance companies, but the reality is their profits are capped by law - they are not the problem. Dr.'s will have to take a pay cut, and there will have to be mass layoffs, there's no other way to reduce costs.
Elon can be a monumental asshat, and he can be self-DDOS’ing, and can be accurate about scraping at the same time. It’s why every single social media platform is heading toward becoming a walled garden.
then how do they have confidence that anything works before they subject hundreds of millions of people around the world to system updates? that seems disrespectful to the user, if you asked me.
Forced? You know slavery was abolished a long time ago no?
If you are in the kind of adversarial management relationship where this is necessary, you have already lost.
Do you think this kind of guy, when you point to "hey remember the conversation, here's the follow-up mail with the meeting notes" he's gonna be like "oh yeah, I was wrong, you are right." ?
It's good to have meeting agendas and follow up minutes, I just rarely find that they are going to help you litigate anything. More to remind you how a decision came to be.
Its the weekend before the 4th of July, the independence day for USA - many employers give employees Monday and Tuesday off, creating a potential four day break during what is typically very good weather - that being said Twitter is presumably (still) an international company with people in all different holiday areas.
A real scraper would be stopped by a rate limit set to, like, 100 tweets/minute. 600 tweets/day is a completely pointless, punitive limit.
If you work for a large US tech company, you are replacable automata. How do people not know this? Am I the crazy one here?
Ironic that someone saying it's scaling 101 follows up the comment with a completely wrong explanation.
I don't think you understand what a "tyrant" is. Companies aren't democracies.
Now me... I know someone personally who was a senior exec for Twitter's software team, who left after Elon's purge.
He left because all the people who understood the system and could predict the side effects were fired or left. He'd been with companies going through death spirals before, and had no interest in being involved with another one.
So, while the person you're replying to might not know, my friend DOES know.
Having a senior engineer with a lot of context is worthless if the work environment does not promote open communication. You don't want to be the senior engineer or leader who shows "poor judgement" by opposing the mercurial owner "for no reason" if you're overridden and the feature launch succeeds without a glitch; no one gets fired for implementing a request that came straight from the top.
This is why non-rushed, scaled roll-outs are essential for large system: had they tried this on 1% / 5% / 10% of random traffic first, they could have caught this. Yet again, if the directive to roll it out to production came from the very top, you set that gate to 100% immediately.
It's very easy to get caught in assumptions like, "Nobody would ever do things THIS way, so they must have built it THAT way," only to find out that, once upon a time, THIS way was the right way to do things, only for it to over time become less and less optimal, but the costs of changing things were too high to fix it. Once your system is old enough and large enough, you'll have several thousand things just like that.
lol nobody would do this to solve this problem because it doesn't even remotely solve it or give the appearance of solving it, if anything it's guaranteed to make things go slower
I really don't think it's wise to be putting so many eggs in one basket, convenient as that might be. This right here is a strong example of that.
I understand the abstracted theory of how a nuclear power plant works (uranium heats water -> makes steam -> drives turbines etc) but if you sat me down at the control console and asked me to restart a reactor? Yeah I'd have no idea where to even begin. Even if I had a manual as thick as a fridge to (slowly) flick through
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/mudge-twitter-whistleblower-secu...
I used to work at a company where both the main data center and the main dev office were in the flight path of a major airport. We joked that if the data center had a plane hit it we’d go down quickly but recover but if the office building got hit we be fine for a while but long term in trouble.
I haven't witnessed what happens if the members were determined to anyway, or read up on the circumstances of past wildcat strikes.
Also, the last time I saw something about my local hospital nurses' union in the news, they were alleging that the recruiting and employment of foreign nurses violated human trafficking laws. Basically, they signed people up from another country with a huge penalty if they quit early as "compensation" for the cost of importation.
To me, that strongly suggested the union was not playing a strong hand, when it comes to "unsafe policies".
Seems more like a thinly disguised attempt to force people to purchase subscriptions. Blue checkmarks and all.
Wait, what? That's a ridiculous assertion, even taken as hyperbole. A huge percentage of people in power surround themselves with "yes-men", and are allergic to (even constructive) criticism, let alone direct disagreement.
"State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi.
Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have.
But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same.
If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway.
Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.
If IPs or IP ranges get really annoying we block them on the network level.
Big public sites like Twitter obviously need to have this technology. Due to their political content they probably also need sophisticated DDoS protection.
What a delightfully naive view.
Answer me two simple questions:
1) How are insurance companies profits capped?
2) How does increasing or decreasing costs affect thier allowable profits?
The "America is the default" is tiring. The US makes up ~ 5% of the population, and most of us do not default to American thinking.
What I've noticed is there's little technical discussion, and more so emotional-provoking replies.
However, even with my limited experience in similar scenarios on smaller scale - it still feels accurate.
Sometimes people buy media corporations because they're interesting in using them to promote their other more lucrative operations (think Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post) so they don't really care about profitability, but I don't think Twitter fits that model, but who knows?
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674865731136020505
> Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825
> This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.
> Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
> It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.
It seems that this statement can lead to different conclusions based on one's biases for or against Musk / freedom of speech:
1) The code base is a mess because the smaller, current team don't know what they're doing and/or management (i.e. Musk) is pushing them too hard and making poor decisions
2) The code base is a mess because the far greater number of engineers there before didn't know what they were doing and/or management weren't pushing them hard enough and were making poor decisions.
Both could be true but I'm going with something the more complex view that it's a little bit of everything, and that Twitter does seem to be moving in a positive direction overall.
[1] "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k" (in reference to rate limits which were originally 6K 0.6K and 0.3K)
And another tweet that confirms disabling anonymous access was an emergency measure: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825
> This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.
> Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
> It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.
Well, for one, this sounds just like yet another Elon-hater's comment. In _most_ cases, Elon's businesses are fairly successful, so a sarcastic "Elon's latest genius innovation" doesn't belong here.
For second, how do you know the idea came directly from Elon? It could easily be the result of a brainstorming session led by a product team.
Elon is not writing Twitter's code. He is not a Software Engineer at Twitter. Even if the idea came from him, why is he being attacked for a bad deployment?
And lastly, why do people think that the change is bad? There are plenty of web sites that do not allow you to view their content without creating an account first. Is Twitter not allowed to experiment? Why not? I would appreciate hearing well-thought-out arguments that explain the potential negative impact on the business.
Funny things is Twitter views are hiher than ever and it will be fixed quickly.
(No reason to make a big deal out of it) But I think tests and refactor of the codebase will be necessary to increase their speed of innovation.
That way, it's unavoidably in front of everyone's face, and you get the perk of ironclad timestamps in the document-editing history.
If you ever have a beverage with me or drop me an email I'm happy to discuss without naming names, but public is unwise, sadly.
One of these years I'm going to retire and start a youtube channel. If you like similar stories, ThePrimagen[1] definitely has a similar flavor. He talks about some situations at Netflix that are eerily familiar, even though I've never worked for them.
The other employer still needs to be willing to sponsor you, and that's often not the case.
Edit: here is my take on it + the most likely scenario of what's going to happen next. This was a bad deployment and such things are not unusual in software industry. In this specific case, there are zero reasons to blame the CTO. From what I'm observing right now, Twitter has already fixed the issue - the website loads just fine. Next, they will do a retro, learn from their mistakes and try to not repeat the same mistakes again in the future. There will be more bad deployments and that's normal. However, with time, they'll make things better, the SLA will go up and the overall stability of their services will stabilize, – one of the biggest social networks on the planet will have the least number of engineers running that same social network.
Yes
> can start working immediately
Abso-lutely not. Check out Reddit to look for accounts of how the transfer works and see how easy it really is...
When you transfer, you need a lot of cooperation from the new firm as they have to be ok filing paperwork, they have to do it in a timely fashion, and due to processing delays on the order of weeks (if all goes well) you cannot start work immediately. For many, many employers, this puts you at a strong disadvantage against applicants who are all good to go and ready to show up for work on Monday.
You’re in an America conversation thread, whether you like it or not.
That's an asshole take.
Everything I've read is that Twitter is working its remaining engineers to the bone. Job searches can be extremely draining, and I can imagine many Twitter engineers don't have the energy remaining. Add to that mix visa and immigration issues, and I could totally see people getting trapped there.
Twitter was very good at this, and their new-found inability is a glaring sign that their engineering is slipping.
Because it's quite literally one of the things he's responsible for at Twitter, by his own choice and description of his role (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1656748197308674048).
(The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing):
"As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."
Detaching myself emotionally from my employer was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health. When I was young I got upset when "the company" made bad decisions. Now I feel no negative emotion about it, sometimes I laugh at them.
Health insurance profits are capped only as a percentage of premiums collected, not a fixed dollar amount cap. The rule is you must pay out 80% of premiums collected, everything else is OH&P.
Turns out, if healthcare costs go up, then premiums go up. If premiums go up, then insurer profits go up.
Healthcare providers and health insurers have an aligned perverse incentive to have healthcare cost as much as possible, since that is what increases their profits.
This isn’t a hard relationship to uncover if you are familiar with the insurer profit cap portion of the ACA and also how money gets made.
Not necessarily. I’ve predicted bad outcomes for decisions in a few cases and been ignored but stuck around regardless. Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.
Of course to remain productive and improve my influence in future decision making it is absolutely critical that when predictions come true, I do not go anywhere near an “I told you so mentality.”
Instead I do what I can to clean up the mess with a “how can I help?” attitude. And increasingly over time people take my opinions and analysis much much more seriously.
I wouldn’t say that’s the path everyone should take, especially because some work environments are just too toxic for any progress at all (I ran away, fast, from two jobs like that). And some people cherish having an entirely new type of challenge every few years instead of shepherding something through longer periods of time. All valid paths.
We don't kmow it's true but it is a likely explanation.
The point of a decision-maker is to make informed decisions, if you fail to do that, then you fail at leadership.
Surely there are some colossal archives of all tweets before whatever date floating around that those startups are using instead.
Or Google "Elon Musk conspiracy" and click the top link. I don't know if you'll be able to read the tweets they reference though.
Not anything close the the number of people who suffer from the all the inefficiency in delivering health care, but guess which has more money to bribe lawmakers with
Everyone has their horror story and extreme examples, but for any mildly profitable company that went through a decade or more of operation, I think it's kinda of a meaningless statement.
In my mind, it is much closer to needlessly asking every server for the same information because the requests are most likely load balanced, but I guess it's true that I don't know the load balancing strategy. Even still, is it not more likely than not that those retries are hitting multiple servers?
The curse of IT Operations: if you do everything right, management grifters never think you did anything at all. Why do I need you? Everything works fine!
Most Internet platforms are put together by popsicle sticks and bubble gum. If Reddit didn't have 2000 full time employees babysitting that steaming POS, it would be offline by the end of the week. But Twitter was like a chicken running around with its head chopped off, and it didn't stop running for 9 months. It's a testament to how incredible those engineers were.
This collapse at Twitter should have happened by January. It's a real shame it didn't. How many thousands of tech workers were laid off because Musk's fellow parasitic oligarchs saw Twitter running "fine" after the lobotomy, and followed him off the cliff like a bunch of lemmings? How many billions of dollars has the economy lost because of this one despicable man?
Elon Musk is a fraud. He is not an engineer. He's a lazy bum who mooched his whole life off his groomer daddy's apartheid emerald money. He would be nothing without that disgusting, incestuous old man. Despite his enormous financial privilege, Elmo was too lazy to enter the US legally. He was in the US for many years as an illegal immigrant. He only bothered to get off his lazy ass and finish his Economics degree because the risk of his deportation was becoming a real problem for X.com. That crooked philistine doesn't know the first thing about hard work, engineering, or finance. He's a damn good conman, he's good at shitposting, and that's about it. He has no other skills. He is not an engineer. He has no STEM degree. His only real accomplishment in life is proving that you can, in fact, spend billions of dollars in one lifetime, if you simply buy a bird app, run it into the ground, and salt the earth behind it.
Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
Twitter could be packed with extremely skillful senior engineers who don't understand the product well enough to predict complex outcomes of planned changes.
People think they know what a job is, without having done it.
You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it.
If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do.
But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.
One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy.
But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.
And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.
I'm printing up t-shirts already, pre-order now and get 10% off the insane nest of logic tee while stocks still last!
Do you know what conditions are like in most jobs?
The WeChat model is the obvious answer to that rhetorical question. Build paid services on top of your hellsite with millions of addicts using it daily. For example, Twitter could have easily been the gateway to OnlyFans, or to Patreon. Apple is another example of this kind of value-added ecosystem that leverages a foothold to sell other crap to people.
Or there's the TikTok model: gobble up all the data, sell data to governments, give MBS or Putin admin access to Twitter, build AI on top of the dataset.
Even a private equity chop-shop like Bain could do a better job of extracting value from Twitter than this mess.
This isn't a profit-seeking venture for Musk. This is about politics, about power, and primarily about revenge. Musk is giving Notch stiff competition for the title of most pathetic billionaire.
No Twitter, no Arab Spring. No live updates of disasters, no need to shutdown the internet to prevent dissenting voices from spreading.
Either that or people should stop linking to broken pages.
This specific problem we're discussing, of concurrent client retries effectively launching a self-imposed DDOS attack, isn't exactly the thundering herd problem. It's clients and servers instead of threads, for one thing. But it's a good enough analogy to another type of cascading failure in concurrent computing, IMO.
This thread is talking about, from employee's perspective, it is hard to jump ship.
Edit: Maybe the clusterf*ck was Rumsfeld's idea.
"all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were to be removed from their positions and be banned from any future employment in the public sector... When the CPA turned over enforcement of de-Ba'athification to Iraqi politicians, however, these rules were broadly expanded and used to punish political opponents, including nearly 11,000 teachers who were dismissed from the party and removed from government"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5px/twitter-employees-on-...
2: Costs change nothing. But increased health care expenses do allow them to earn more (the 20).
OK, I can agree with that - but it doesn't change my point that cost reductions need to start with providers, NOT with insurance companies.
Instead of engineering trying to buffer and fix weird management decisions, this just exposes them.
The gigantic UPMC is a non profit. Actually a TON of hospitals are non profits - every religious founded hospital is a non profit (Maimonides Medical Center, or every Mercy Hospital (Wikipedia counts 33 of them)).
60% of hospitals are non-profit.
I still remember watching podcasts, reading blogposts, hearing prominent VC's like Elad talking about etc.. Now everbody silent because Elon is the baba yaga...
I have a bridge to sell you.
The one's left don't know all the code (how could they?), but were forced to change many things about the site at a "just do it" basis. This error didn't happen because someone was too stupid to remove the code, it did happen because the connection to another thing was removed and the failsafe on the landing page doesn't have exponential backdown built in, not something you can necessarily know or investigate before, when an executive breaths down your neck and wants you to just do it.
This is about the new managment, not about engineers.
You have multiple clients (android, ios, web) and a whole cluster of microservices calling each other. The microservices calling each other will easily use up more requests.
IMO the likely culprit is rate limits being triggered by a huge increase in scraping caused by the new api pricing.
But since you've begun a knee-jerk reaction against this, I think there are some flaws with your criticisms (assuming you have read the book):
> People think they know what a job is, without having done it. > But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.
What Graeber has done in the book is to actually do numerous interviews with the people who have actually claimed to have done these jobs, and then categorize them into some noticable patterns to arrive at a conclusion. If you can't experience every job in the universe, the closest you can get is to talk with the people who have done them - and this is what he's precisely did. There are claims that the sample size wasn't enough or it was biased - which I think is totally apt. But it's incredibly dismissive of you to describe this attempt as "ignorant": how are we supposed to do any anthropological / sociological work in a large scale when you claim "no scholar can even try to analyze various types of work without actually doing everything in-person beforehand?"
> But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.
I think the "duck-tapers" Graeber describes in his book are a bit different from what you understand currently. He's mostly talking about the people who are doing tedious cleanup work because of reasons that can obviously and trivially be fixed but the higher-ups in the organization are not doing it for various reasons (mostly politics).
If I am sick I can just get an appointment with my GP within the day and not pay a thing, they can refer me to specialists or blood tests if needed, which are also fast and free. The remaining healthcare costs for medications or dentistry are so low I don't even notice them.
Hope this will shed some light to you about what's happening in other countries.
HN has a tendancy to find something like "nominative determinism" - "comment determinism" where a comment about a job produces a (contradictory) reply from someone doing that job.
Musk has a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/.
Further, while I share some criticism of the man, many very technical people from companies such as SpaceX and Tesla have come forward with public comments, praising him for "truly grasping the engineering" and "being involved in every technical design decision". Make of these what you will:
Kevin Watson, Falcon 9 avionics:
Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Tom Mueller, SpaceX founding employee:
We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”*
And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing.*
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.
Josh Boehm, former Head of Software QA at SpaceX:
Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business (but I would say the former takes up much more of his mental real estate). Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.
Along with many others.
It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.
But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.
Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.
And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.
This is what I think happened:
- few companies are willing to go through paperwork to sponsor visas. Old Twitter was, Musk Twitter probably isn't
- Musk inherited a bunch of visa-sponsored devs from old Twitter, and they will have trouble finding a new h1b sponsor to transfer
- those are the devs that cannot negotiate better salaries or leave easily
Basically Musk's Twitter's lights are on thanks to those employees. And whether they are good or not doesn't matter, they can't leave either way, job market is hostile
I strongly disagree; this is about Musk buying Twitter accidentally, and then running it as best he could without losing face as "real world iron man". He's fucking up left, right and center because he was completely unprepared to actually run it, and suddenly needs $40B to pay off his debtors.
It's also about politics, power and revenge, but it's primarily about Musk being a fucking idiot and constantly digging himself deeper.
It was easier to ignore this when they had a more benevolent dictator.
If they're talking about some other kind of speech that I might actually care about, they should have mentioned it. Because the next bad one I can think of is even worse than hate speech.
It’s a mistake to stay.
As said, I don't want to speculate whether someone raised their voice on this being a likely outcome specifically, as not having testing prior to release is the much more obvious and significant issue here, driven by leadership.
Musk gets away with it because he's the owner but most social media and tech companies aren't led by this awful people.
Twitter was not bad because of its tech. Musk made it worse.
It's important to note that Twitter's desires are fundamentally at odds with the desires of the content creators on Twitter on this point. Twitter, ideally, wants to only show it's tweet to real people who will click on an ad, since it costs money to show tweets and bots or people who don't look at ads are not paying that money back. Creators on Twitter want their tweet to be shown to anyone at all, and will leave if they feel people just aren't seeing their tweets.
So, Twitter must walk a fine line when trying to restrict who can see their tweets, lest they alienate content creators. Inventing a common foe is a tried-and-true tactic for getting people to accept changes that hurt them.
I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.
So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.
Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.
(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)
The goals of the organization are mostly a facade. The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.
The second instance, I feel I can comment on, though allow me to leave out details to spare the people involved public embarrassment.
There, the changes, whilst annoying and born out of a complete misunderstanding of a core part of their alleged competency (Imagine a Botanist telling you leaves are always blue because that is the color of the sky), were not going to break anything, just look silly and create unnecessary, but compensated, work.
In that case, I also viewed the specific project finally launching as vitally important to our user base and wanted the results to go public for their benefit, so the decision was made to document and execute on their requests, so we could go live.
Of course, two weeks before our go live date, they changed their requests again ("leaves are not blue, they are violet because of the wave length of light") and had a hard time understanding that changes can have a knock on effect and some things are a bit more complex than Find and Replace. If I had been forced to make those changes at that point, I'd have packed my bags.
Simply said, when my work has the potential to benefit users and I know that arguing, even though I am correct, will lead to massive delays, I'd rather just put that silly request in writing and deal with these things after the users have received what has been worked on. Try to explain when someone is wrong, but if that doesn't work, finish the project, argue later.
Of course, if after the fact responsibility isn't taken, that finished project gets mentioned in my CV for the next employer.
They were just summarily fired.
Let's say there are a 100 people who actually interact with him in a professional context. Those are the ones that are yes men.
What I maintain though is that most anyone still working on code at Twitter, regardless of their experience or overview of the code base, would strongly argue for testing and staging, which appear to go against current leadership's mode of operation, likely because of the time pressure you mentioned.
Not pushing such changes straight to production is a concept I feel anyone working at Twitter would subscribe to, yet has to painfully go against, lest they be led go.
Edit: Ah, nvm, if you are trying to do a chat bot it is essentially what you want.
Elon strikes me as worse because he likes to think he understands what his engineers know.
1. Twitter decides to go account only for monetization reasons, and implements this feature with some bugs.
2. People start complaining about the new Twitter policy.
3. Availability issues start being observed, caused by the bugs in the implementation of 1 - possibly a self-DDoS.
4. Elon, in response to 2, lies about 1 being a temporary response to an external pre-existing DDoS attack. People start associating 3 with the claimed DDoS attack.
5. In a hasty attempt to fix 3, whose exact cause they have not yet determined, Twitter starts implementing stringent view quotas. Since 3 was not caused by an external DDoS attack, this actually only makes the problem worse.
I'm not claiming this is definitely what happened, just that it is a plausible time-line of events. The one Elon presented is also plausible, of course.
The best question that could help us distinguish these two cases from the outside is whether Twitter's availability issues started being observed before or after the authentication policy change. I would say that Elon's claim is far less likely to be true if the noticeable availability issues only appeared after the policy change. Conversely, my version of events (which is more or less the same as TFA's, I think) is far less believable if the availability issues happened before the Auth change.
I will note that I didn't use Twitter at all in the last few days and thus don't know which is the case. On HN, I definitely saw the Auth policy change story at least a day before seeing significant complaints about other availability issues, though.
But when a higher-up so clearly takes responsibility of something that is risky but deemed necessary, it provides for a lot better space to also respond to any potential problems that pop up, while not needing to suffer snarky comments in hindsight as a dev.
Of course something like this is easier to hate on ...
Nobody good stays during ALL of this.
That usually gets them to sit up and reconsider.
Occasionally they sign the damned thing, and then it’s popcorn “I told you so” time.
The push to "make the content less user friendly" and push then to our app/logged in experience is similar to reddit's push and it doesn't really present an insurmountable challenge on the technical side.
These technical hurdles are temporary. Not the end of the world. The "only in our app/only logged in" requirements are bad on a philosophical level of user choice, not on the "this is terrible technically" side.
Attacking it on that note is just perpetuating the narrative where elonmuskmanbad (which is more political than consistent with the treatment others get) above more specific truths.
I would imagine a lot of the H1 b visa holders are there just to let their visa run out while making some money.
Anyway it doesn't matter. This isn't and engineer problem. It's a management problem. The management is the definition of incompetent.
Demonizing past hard decisions at every unrelated point of difficulty has to be the worst kind of toxicity there is.
> Funding for all short-term health care is 50% from employers, 45% from the insured person and 5% by the government.
…
> Premiums paid by the insured are, on average, €137 per month for basic health care
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Only an order of magnitude if you're in base-2.
That said, this doesn't quite track with the numbers for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_dollar
But even then, counting all payers and not just the residents' sticker price, the USA is the high-priced outlier.
I'm not complaining since, first, this is a political decision and second, the level of service is outstanding.
For example: psychotherapy is paid for or, if your doc orders an MRI you get an appointment after tomorrow.
There's also no such shit as in network health providers (exceptions apply for some insurance models) or pre-existing conditions for the basic health plan (which is still pretty good and comprehensive).
While I do think that it's an overall good system it is expensive (and subsidized for people who can't afford it).
Also, health insurance is mandatory.
It is easier with other tech companies because unlike Musk they are/were generous severance time so those probably got 90+ days in severance time and the 60 days with say FAANG layoffs.
Also switching jobs can set them back on their path to permanent residency application timelines , depending on the country of citizenship that could be adding some years to continue on H1B and this dependency cycle so people close to their PR may try to stick it out
No one gets deported per se, most undocumented immigrants are people who fly over and overstay their visas, the USCIS will not check anything when they leave (by design so no one worries about leaving) however if they overstay the visa, it will be a tough time entering again , very likely to be rejected at the border or new visa application would be denied.
(B) Are you familiar with the expression “the buck stops here”?
It's not great, but that's really a bizarre thing to say. There are many many things far more toxic than that.
He should have lost that libel case imo as I do think he meant it.
If those information providers weren't on Twitter (well, a year back, nowadays may be sifferent) they'd be ridiculed.
Of course using Twitter as only/primary channel is and always was questionable, but alternative systems are more expensive.
6k tweets a day even with the blue mark of shame makes something like tweetdeck functionally useless.
Obviously Elon and I have different uses for "The Worlds Town Square"
They are potentially more vauable than the 100x engineer who has intimate knowledge of how googles shipping container datacentres work.
A typical family premium (two adults in their 40s and two children under 10) can vary from £700 to £1,800 a year.
The average price of a private healthcare policy in the UK is £1,032.84 per year (February 2022)
Google results ...
Will admit that seeing a billionaire go mental is funny. Petty I know.
I think it's a pretty wrong complaint too, but for sure that's not on Twitter.
(And I really don't think Twitter employees are the best case study here, they are mostly capable of not literally being homeless if they work somewhere else.)
I did use the word "taxpayer". The UK's health service costs £2700 per head of population. Obviously what people contribute towards that varies.
Also my question remains unanswered. Is the Dutch health system topped up by government funding?
100 tweets / minute is hardly deterrent for a botnet using comprised devices on non data center IPs
If you can’t refer to “last time this was disaster” (aka “I told you so”) how do you prevent it.
same way we are a tenant( and have rights) even if you don’t pay rent.
Disputes are resolved via arbitration and courts , no payment does not give GCP ( or any vendor) unilateral right to terminate (the contract however possibly might ) .
Usually vendor has to give notice of termination and there would be a time window before termination can occur .
Unpaid dues are like unpaid mortgage there are many steps before the vendor can get a court to force the party to make payment or seize assets in lieu
Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.
E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.
Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).
At least if it's blocking me from viewing the tweet's comments, returns me some decent messages. But no, just a plain "Something went wrong." like a hackathon page.
Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.
In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.
It's not just hypothetical either. There was a bug in a sorting algorithm a few years back that had been 'proved' correct. I think it was to do with numbers wrapping, and that hadn't been considered in the mathematical proof.
Interesting. My "generic uses and purposes" was to occasionally scroll around through tweets somebody linked me to.
That's entirely impossible now since I don't have an account (and don't plan to create one).
Roughly speak, it has become infinitely worse for me.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
This is why context matters.
You are wrong because you were right but unable to persuade me. Not "hmm, maybe I should be more receptive to my reports feedback".
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-payi...
Early on in my career I had a name for this. I called it "gamle helter" in Norwegian which roughly translates to "old heroes". An "old hero" is someone who used to be competent in a field, has stopped being competent, doesn't recognize this themselves and is now a nuisance to anyone who actually knows what they are doing, but can't pull rank. One way to become an old hero is typically to end up in management and not practice whatever discipline you think you understand.
To be fair, I highly doubt that Musk was ever a competent software engineer, much less a good engineering manager. He is a PR person. He sells an image that he is a technology person.
Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.
Nope. Look at how much the Netherlands actually spends on Healthcare, it's about 11.2% of GDP in 2021 [1]. Per capita GDP in 2021 was ~53k€.
((53k€*11.2%)/12) ≈ 495€
Only problem is, like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%). Someone will have to pay their share too. Chances are, if you're posting on HN, that's you, as you'll be somewhere in the top 5% income bracket. I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.
> But even then, counting all payers and not just the residents' sticker price, the USA is the high-priced outlier.
The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2...
There are entire communities of people who relied on the ability to simply read Twitter without an account, took the time to write code of their own, and now are reacting with much more maturity than HN seems to be. The petty personal attacks are simply astonishing.
"RIP Nitter" https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/919
GP wrote:
> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.
That means "nobody" is talking about the group of people who have the option of "waiting around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship". H1B visa holders aren't included in that earlier group, so I didn't think a further qualification is necessary.
There is no doubt that, after firing Vijaya Gadde (sp?), the corporate focus has shifted away from censoring every single tweet, and more towards letting people say what they want. This does not mean every single tweet is left up, or that annoying Elon isn't a catastrophically stupid thing for journalists to do.
Do you dispute this?
What I claim is that: - OPs story that Twitter was a healthy and productive tech company pre-Elon is complete non-sense. How many years did people pine for an edit button? - Twitter returned to pre-2020 staffing levels, which is true - Twitter struggled to push out new features (like an edit button) for years, which is true, wheras post-Elon they pushed out edit buttons, longer tweets, subscriptions, etc.
However talking in a way that takes the current critical temporary state as the default forever isn't very fair
This isn't an unrelated difficulty—this kind of bug is the direct result of losing (or ignoring) the people who knew better. Institutional knowledge is a tech company's lifeblood, and Musk gleefully discarded most of Twitter's when he came in.
I don't care if you "like my graphics work" or not. You seem to be implying I owe you something, which is crazy. I have been publishing stuff online for decades and I can tell you, judgy and entitled people such as yourself have _never_ done anything useful in return.
What's amazing is you chastizing me for a "bad post", even as you dispute something you could've googled in 5 seconds.
Rumors suggest that part of the change is moving from GCP to something else. Something like can't be reverted without signing a new contract with Google (and paying the bill..).
On the tech side, it has retained everything that made it good (didn't implode!), and the tweet length / "show more" logic fits my style of writing perfectly. Spaces are also a kind of thing that I didn't use before but became immediately accessible as it was added right to twitter itself (and things like the 24h wagner coup space with 6M visitors isn't something I have seen in the past). And other simple things, like long videos sometimes fit a need, even while most of the time a youtube link also works.
Some things like crypto spam also seem to be in a bit better state, though can't obviously ever be completely removed
Facebook was reportedly ~15% H1B workers. It doesn't take a lot of skew in who was fired and who didn't leave for other employment for Twitter to be >50% H1B at the moment.
Insurance companies are incentivised, under law, to have the highest healthcare expenses possible.
As an industry we need to stop perpetuating this idea that everyone is fully mobile and software engineers are some mythical creature that isn't also shackled to the same constraints the rest of the labor force is. It's a job and a lot of people are dependent on a steady income stream. Part of that is putting up with the least worst of the options they have reasonably available to them, or sometimes taking up worse options just because it balances other aspects out. Ultimately during certain times you may have more or less leverage to put up with or reject crap practices. SWEs tend to have a lot more leeway than say a retail worker of course so we can be a bit more demanding but we can't just say crud off, I don't deal with any BS, even in the best of times. Higher salaries give you some negotiation room as well as you can lower your TC expectations in terms of negotiating better working environments (i.e. taking lower rates but demanding things like less pressured schedules, make autonomy, etc.) and as the extreme sof the markets are high enough, even taking TC hits can still let you live comfortably (this is to contrast many other professions who don't have this flexibility).
Unless you've lived modestly and invested significantly or started some side venture to become financially independent of labor based income, you're ultimately giving up some degree of agency to employers. We like to pretend this isn't the case but it is the case for most people, even highly paid labor.
Two nines is atleast 99.0%.
Three nines is atleast 99.9%.
and so on.
>7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State;
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/duce.html
Prior to Twitter's acquisition by Musk, they worked quite closely with the State and even hired the former top FBI lawyer as their chief legal counsel.
As in my OP here, if you've set up your life around working at Twitter and then a new CEO rocks up and demands everyone 'go hard or go home', then sure you can go home and if you don't like his approach then eventually you'll have to. There will be people who find it more difficult to change jobs for whatever reason, and while they need to take responsibility for getting themselves out of a bad situation, it's not their fault that a new bully turned up in a position of authority on their block
The original ideal and present situation seems fairly clearly spelled out in an unbiased manner.
This is backwards logic. Those few large corporations have the bargaining power to negotiate lower premiums. Individual consumers have zero bargaining power.
- Daniel Ellsberg - Julian Assange - Glenn Greenwald - Seymour Hirsch - Chelsea Manning
This "famous person/brand posts something medium witty 10 times a day, urge to consume intensifies" thing isn't that popular worldwide.
I'm guessing you've never played an offensive or defensive role in scraping because what you've described is in no way a problem for a serious scraping effort. I agree the rate limits are stupid. They fuck over users, they stop amateur scrapers, and do nothing whatsoever to impede professional scraping.
If you want to stop most scraping, employ device attestation techniques and TLS fingerprinting.
Like several times in different roles.
People do it, exponential backoff is everywhere in your stack, but it doesn’t end up in your application layer until you have enough traffic that you actually have to manage throughout.
You simply setup API deals with those who you want to have your data, those that benefit your business, aka Google etc…
Then you close everything else up. This saves cost and complexity and real users, the target of your advertisers, don’t even notice.
This isn’t a sign that engineering is slipping.
It’s a sign that a in a company which struggles to make money, someone is paying attention and trying new things to fix the money problem.
If you use a listener, useEffect in react, to load data, it will start the request, track it is loading with a boolean, and then store the payload. That passes unit tests and QA.
If the listener doesn't check the error before starting the api request again, you have this infinite loop happen where the loading flag goes off and the payload is still null, so it just starts it again.
It's sloppy code, but its an unintentional side effect.
And you're right he has a degree, although he repeatedly lied about when he received it, and even lied about where he received it, so please forgive people for their confusion.
It’s actually exactly the type of problem declarative UI libraries like react were supposed to prevent, yet here we are 8 years later.
Deportation is a different legal event. It's a forceful expulsion which occurs because you did something seriously negative like break the law. Deportations are a big deal and a bad thing to have on your record in any country when it comes to your future prospects with that country.
To use a super rough analogy it's kind of like an honorable vs dishonorable discharge from the military.
You know what all corporations should do to maximize short term profit? Fire everyone. It's amazing how much money we spend on people /s
For the to;dw crowd: he makes the case that Twitter is by far the most useful social network to government agencies, because the graph is mostly public (unlike Facebook) and all users are both consumers and creators (unlike YouTube). Thus, it is being used by “researchers” and state departments to build what he calls “the Death Star of AI censorship engines,” and these moves to rate limit will cripple those efforts.
This is something I don't get. They say that Twitter is now blocking embeds and I've seen an author respond by... including a screenshot of a tweet in their piece.
Except that's obviously better than embedding a tweet in the first place. It's better in every possible way. It's easier to write your article with an included image that you provide than to hotlink content from some other website. And when the tweet vanishes into the mists of history, your captured image of it will still be around, illustrating your article the way you were hoping the embedded tweet would do. There are so many articles out there with dead embedded tweets illustrating... something.
So, all that said... what was the effect that embeddability had on reporting? Why hasn't it been screenshots the whole time? What did easy embeddability enable that wasn't just as easy anyway?
Twitter had many issues as a company, but one of its strengths was a lot of independent thinking and honest speech among staff. That's surely gone, and once gone it's very hard to get back.
What's the difference between my first and my second? I don't know. If you force me to guess, post-retirement and/or terminal care, possibly?
> like most developed countries, close to a majority of people are net recipients (around 40%)
Yes, and? Isn't much the same also true for private insurance?
You've got the potential for arguing about what "fair" looks like; I'm fine with it being funded like a progressive tax, based on income rather than risk factors, but that's not hugely important.
> I think if the OP does the math based on their actual numbers, they'd be more likely to find themselves in the ~1000€/month ballpark than the 150€/month they seem to think they are paying.
I would assume that zer0tonin pays whatever they say they pay. They're likely to have better insight into their own finances than random internet strangers like thee and me.
> The Netherlands (11% of GDP) is not quite as extreme as the US (17%), but it's certainly nothing to write home about, especially as I don't get the impression that either health care expenditure as percentage of GDP or demographics are moving in a favorable direction.
The direction of movement may or may not be favourable (given the pandemic I assume "not"), but the USA is kinda the outlier in developed nations for spending a lot without delivering particularly good outcomes:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_h...
(Sourced from: https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low)
Obviously. Are you suggesting that one can’t appreciate those? Or that this is some secret? Maybe the communication in the orgs you’ve been with has been poor?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...
Claiming that nothing is different other than Elon's presence implies that Twitter was just as much of a technical dumpster fire as it is now. That is not _at all_ what you're now claiming you said, which is, effectively, "Twitter made slow progress on product priorities". No one disputes that, but it's not what we're discussing here, which is the rapid degradation of service since Musk took over. Maybe those "diversity hires", as you call them, actually contributed to keeping the site running.
It's comical at this point.
There are definitely more and more sites doing TLS/TCP/etc fingerprinting or device attestation for mobile APIs, but it's still pretty rare. I mean Twitter is trying to limit requests by IP, so definitely amateur hour over there.
What I wanted to say is that if the state of the code is bad, it might make them care a bit more when their own state gets synchronized with that. Not necessarily about the code, but surely about the revenue and the looks.
Now, management being what it is, they of course will try to find a scapegoat. But that’s just part of the game and may be better than burning yourself out by trying to fix their nonsense.
Which runs against every good piece of advice that has ever been uttered about leadership. Musk far overpaid for twitter because he wanted to be the center of attention and what better way to do that than to buy the network which gets the most attention from "important" people?
He then took the Michael Jordan trope of "I never asked anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do" and tried to turn that into reality by sleeping in his office every once in a while. The problem with this sentiment is that the only employees who are going to stick around long-term in such a ridiculous working arrangement are those who either can't find jobs elsewhere or are terrified that they won't be able to find jobs elsewhere.
So now you've got a highly toxic work environment full of people who are unconfident in their own abilities to get the work done, and Elon constantly pretend like he's some sort of business genius from the movies who just walks into a meeting, throws a bunch of turds on top of the agenda without having a firm grasp of anything, and storms off to light the next fire.
It's fucking insane.
On the other hand individual consumers have ALL the bargaining power - they can simply pick a different insurance company, and insurance companies have to work very very very hard to get customers. They would compete on price because that's by far the most important thing to a consumer.
A company on the other hand cares about other stuff, how integrated in the system, how easy can we import members, manage members, how much marketing material do they give? Do we have to educate our employees, or will the insurance company do that for us?
Just tons of other stuff that isn't price. Individuals: It's 99% price.
Yes, that is true. But it doesn't change the fact that prices will have to change at the healthcare providers. Dr.s will earn less, people will be fired as positions are eliminated. There's no other way to reduce prices.
Where do you think all that "incentivized" money is going? It's going to people in healthcare will either take a pay-cut or will lose their jobs.
Are you hoping for non-profit drug and equipment makers as well? How far do you need this "non-profit" thing to go before you acknowledge it doesn't help at all?
The twitter engineers were presented with an opportunity to jump ship and also get 3 months of severance. I think the rational ones, who had a choice took it, leaving employees who didn't consider it rationally, as well as employees on H1Bs who didn't have the luxury to quit without something else lined up
Saying "he really believes his lies" is not excuse, because most habitual liars are exactly the same. They have prioritized their own narcissism so far above reality, but that doesn't make them any less of a liar. They are just lying to themselves and everyone else.
But I do work in an industry where even the C-level people usually (not always) have at least a little interest in truly pursuing mission <X>
I know this for a fact because even though I am not at all C-level or even the manager of a large team, I often have a seat of the table in the meetings where such people come together. Those meeting can be ugly, they can reveal how the sausage is made, to borrow that analogy. And I’ve seen how many (not all) truly are trying to get <X> done but doing so may require a bit of ugly sausage making to get there.
And I’m not a wide eyed 4th year either. I’m a grizzled and usually cynical veteran in my field. My job is often to put out fires, or produce analytical tools or output of strategic importance, and also to sometimes to plug a major gap in operational capabilities. I’m not really a manger but I’ve earned a seat at the table when the highest people get together as well as when they interface with counterparts at other organizations.
Don’t take that that to mean too much though: I may have a voice, but it is by far, very far, the smallest voice in the room.
(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)
That's no more likely to be true. In order to correctly understand the context of our jobs, we would have to understand other jobs we don't and never will do.
It's called "alienation" - do you even Marx, bro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Somebody needs to submit this with (1843) appended.
The second being free speech, I'm a big supporter of that and there's certainly more of that now. It's not perfect but I'm not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater by arguing against perfection or pointing out some of the hypocrisies in play. It's a move in a positive direction.
They're comparisons against recent Twitter, which before Musk felt like an app with so many broken parts that were never going to get fixed (the login problem being the cherry on that cake for me). Now there's a feeling that things might get fixed, that new features definitely are coming, and that complaints might be listened to.
I also don't like the changes you've highlighted, though I do see them as inevitable at this point in internet history. We see Instagram and others moving towards paid verification, Reddit closing down its API and killing apps (and should we forget that Twitter has done this at least once before in one form or another). So, I don't think it's all rosy in the garden, but overall it's positive, and the negatives (mostly) feel inevitable.
Add to that, alternatives are now getting a bit of a look in from people that wouldn't have have bothered before. I don't think that Mastodon, to choose one example, is a direct replacement, but it's good that people are giving it a try.
No, no different - this sounds like every bit the same phenomenon I thought I was addressing.
It's a fake distinction because every job can be framed in a way that puts it on either side of the divide.
And lack of understanding of other peoples' jobs is clearly at the core of the issue.
The "higher ups being stupid because of politics" can never be really definitely false, but it never, ever, is an explanation that shows understanding or justifies calling something trivial.
I can acknowledge that it not just helps but that it is far more functional than the US system I've had to suffer through for many years. In addition to years of experience with the US and NHS, I also have many years of experience with Italian national healthcare which is also non-profit and better than the US system.
The US system is better for some diseases but only if you are rich. And an absolute failure if you aren't employed. Even if you can manage to stay employed with a serious illness you better have a healthy family member with a lot of energy who can fight the insurance company that really doesn't want the cost and burden of you and will make that clear in every action.
How far do you need this "for profit" thing to go before you acknowledge its very serious flaws and inadequacies?
This combo (system as you like to call it, although that leaves out a ton of stuff) also exists in the US as a non-profit. I said this already.
It doesn't help
What will help is doctors taking a paycut and mass layoffs.
The problems in the US are not on the payment side, they are on the service side: it's simply too expensive.
We need twice as many doctors, working half as many hours, for half as much pay.
That's what would fix the US.
I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.
Personally I'd just cache HTTP 429 responses for 1 minute, but you could also implement rate-limiting inside the load balancer with an in-memory KV store or bloom filter if you wanted to.
Perhaps the context you're missing is that all large sites use ECMP routing and consistent hashing to ensure that requests from the same IP hit the same load balancer. Twitter only has ~238 million daily active users. 10 requests/second on keepalive TCP+TLS connections can be handled by a couple of nginx servers. The linked "Full-stack Drupal developer" has no idea how any of this works and it's kinda sad how most people in this thread took his post at face value
But to your last sentence - I ended up trying Mastodon, found a nice server, downloaded a familiar app (Ivory by TapBots, the team who made Tweetbot - RIP) and found a pretty good bunch of people to follow so I'm pretty happy there. I probably wouldn't have otherwise tried it had I been able to continue using Tweetbot. I'd be happier if both existed and I could bounce between them, but if Twitter melts into obscurity I'll be a little sad but it would be fine.
It is absolutely unbelievable that anyone could say this when every Tweet is currently censored to non-members.
I've traditionally considered the Dorsey administration to be the worse steward, but this is an insane take to steelman considering how self-conscious the past few months of banning has gotten.
What I said is that they must handle the problem transparently to their valuable users. That includes (requires, usually) targeted techniques to block high-volume scraping.
For example, the fairness and safety issues with regards to males competing in women's sports, or the issues of safety and dignity in women's prisons when males are incarcerated there.
Honestly, I don't think the "public market square" has ever worked all that well, not even in a physical market square. You get 2 groups with sufficiently different views and before long it's devolved into shouting, if not a brawl.
In practice, the immigration authorities have enforcement priorities, and deporting overstating H1B is very far from being one.
As long as you don't cross a border, no one will come looking for you.
Source, my immigration lawyer when I was in danger of overstaying my H1B.
My recommendation is to recognize the stock options, bonuses, etc. as the emotional manipulations they are. Either perform the tasks or don't, but try to avoid getting emotionally bogged down in it. Instead, lift your head up and look around at the broader economy and make your decision based on that. Most of the time the fastest path to a promotion, higher income, etc. is to leave.
The better place to seek emotional fulfillment and validation is at home with your family.
Source: Was kicked out, poor, and intelligent. Ended up a submarine reactor operator.
We'll see how self-sabatoging the strategy is. It's cost cutting and customer-squeezing season, and as a user, I'm as unenthused as you.
I had a long list before that, off the top of my head:
- notifications were broken (disappearing or not appearing at all) which included DMs, or appearing late
- the follow/unfollow problem that so many complain(ed) about
- the algorithm dominating the main feed (the For you and Following is at least an improvement on this, if not a fix). Not really a Twitter only problem that one.
- lists was the old fix for the main feed problem, but they would go missing at times and set up was a pain
- clicking on "More replies" (or whatever it is/was) and they disappear/don't appear, sometimes on tweets I've already seen
- Let's not forget when they last killed off 3rd party apps en masse[1]
- changing settings often wouldn't work, and are still a UI mess today
Related to the freedom of speech thing because the ways it was implemented lead directly to them:
- shadow banning (I hate that everywhere, including the hellban here). Even searching a particular account was blocked, which is a pain when you're trying to find something you know exists.
- watching stats drop precipitously on tweets after Twitter had put their thumb on the scale. Shouting into the void isn't a fun experience. Watching interesting accounts wither also was a waste. Still plenty of trolls and bots though.
- trending topics being curated. Possibly Twitter's real USP is instant news, the trends can give an idea of what people are really talking about at a glance and get you straight into breaking news. Most of that was gone. They're worth a look again.
And several forgotten problems, I'm certain of it, I could've spent all day going through them, at the time. What a pile of steaming rubbish!
I often wondered if the first half of this list should go under the second half of this list because most of them appeared after Twitter became blatant in its ways, and some of them occur on other social networks too, but only on contentious topics (it amazes me how little is said about the heavy censorship Facebook engages in, must have a better PR department than Twitter. Maybe that's why Musk fired them all).
Then you find you can't log in often or at all. When I saw that Project Veritas video about Twitter, I believed it, because it made sense that no one was doing any real work.
For example, you say that Microsoft should fail in attempting to snuff out Linux, not that Microsoft should fail generally.
You say that the USSR should fail to kill their own people, not that the USSR should fail to thrive as a people or a nation.
In this case the equivalent would be to call for Twitter to fail at... what exactly? Free speech?
I think you've been gotten. You don't perceive these examples as equivocations when they are, and it is blinded by dislike for a figure you disagree with rather than a specific bad goal.
I'm writing this from the UK where I use the NHS. I've also used the US system extensively and the Italian healthcare system extensively.
You need to get basic facts right if you want to be a part of the debate.
It's just the sad state of the world that the most aggressive, but voice-defining leftists would like to live in a situation where politics is talked about less but take a speech-impeding dictatorial rule as the precondition to allow for something like that to happen. Meaning, as long as every person in the thread or platform has somehow been "vetted" to not be conservative or even moderate, they'll act "normal". (and that ignores purity spiraling in such echo chambers making even that a stretch)
Maybe in one of the futures of this planet people can go back to not being as polarized and twitchy about talking with people with even the opposite viewpoints. Increased amount of mutual respect in a conversation plus all sides having more mental robustness reduces escalation, reducing the speech and experience of having the kind of speech you probably are talking about to a very manageable level and is absolutely best for everyone.
I've learnt to personally take a lot of pains to maintain communication lines with even some quite extreme leftists and actually managed to retain a level of mutual respect with people some of my peers don't even dare to talk to. The end result makes otherwise impossible things greater than individuals could achieve, possible. But it's not very fair feeling like the human in the "pigeon vs human" chess match at times.
Regardless of everything, as long as we're not in some kind of shittyfuture war scenario, I will not stop believing in the concept of a "public market square" of free speech. I don't believe there is any other value that can keep an intellectually diverse human society together.
Hotz is very vocal and blunt about the messy codebase situation at Twitter.
So. With Mastodon instance admins and this kind of drama, making internal strife about politics, gender equality, whatever, between a few persons affect thousands of users and greatly inconvenience them, and running a personal Mastodon instance taking great technical know-how and basically being a bit of a geek, I still consider these major issues with Mastodon as it stands today.
So, yes, I want to "enforce" people to hear me. If they choose to follow me. Because this means all the above problems are solved. The only problem federation solves today seems to be the scaling problem. Everything else is about friction and this kind of trouble and persistent worry. "Which instance do I pick" where it feels like you want to have an interview over a beer with the admin first. This has thus far been the major demotivator from what I've seen as a Mastodon user. I think I'd like it more like a P2P-based social network.
Of course you can avoid hearing this!
You do so by not following said person. Mastodon works just like Twitter or Facebook in this regard.
This is not the problem that I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about the infrastructure problem. It's about instances shutting down, people not having had time to migrate, and thousands of users losing everything (their entire account and content) because some admin decided he didn't like furries enough or let any political party member join his instance, admin is defederated, admin says fuck this.
Sure, I can make my own instance to guarantee my place on the network if I buy a server and run it on that but how many do you guys expect are enough Mastodon enhtusiasts (of all things, haha) to even bother with learning and doing so. It's a stillborn workaround if this problem keeps resurfacing.
Note that this still (of course) requires following said person on said instance. So people won't be spammed by views they disagree with. Mastodon is no different than, say, Facebook there. You still need to explicitly follow people. Mastodon doesn't even have an "algorithm".
But I can't see any positives from being able to defederate like this. What is the main benefit to remove the freedom of your users to follow people?
Yeah, on Mastodon we usually do so by not following that person?
This is not what I'm talking about but the infrastructure issue of internal strife between admins affecting tens of thousands of users for the most ridiculous of reasons, and this has not just been a hypothetical scenario, unfortunately.
And no, setting up your personal instance isn't a realistic solution for most people who just want to chat.
On Mastodon, no one is forced to listen to anyone without a follow. You don't have to worry about that. This is not what I'm talking about, but the infrastructure problem.
I've repeated myself a lot already so I refer you to one of my replies to your sibling comments if you still want to discuss this.
I haven't generally used sentence-style queries wth any search engine since AskJeeves. Paitly because AskJeeves was terrible at finding what I was looking for, and partly because it almost always produces poor results on every other search engine I've known.
I just don't expect natural-language queries to work (yet). I've also watched too many people struggle to get "Ok Google, …" to return usable results; seems the majority of the time it fails or would have been faster to type out.
I still don't have a feel for Kagi. I used it occasionally when they had a free tier, but was always afraid my habit of submitting multiple revised queries to search engines would use up the free allotment. The current sample search for headphones was somewhat helpful recently, though "best x" is not a search pattern I tend to use, and even though I tend to search for 'phones with flatter response than most.
I have the base plan (1400 queries a month I believe) and regularly revise queries or put in things I should use something else for (e.g "current time UTC"). I'm yet to exceed the included query quantity.
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
I tried to point this out below. It's not even a DDoS, it's fake news.
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life" ...
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
fdsa
it's a 429 error, so the developer who posted this is an idiot. they're not even wrong. the 429 doesn't even touch twitter's infrastructure. the HTTPS TLS terminates at a Google VM, which gets relayed depending on the VIP used to hit it, but the traffic never gets past that Google VM. This is literally /HOW/ companies deal with DDOS.
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
it's unbelievable that my median salary for the past decade is $3,000 after several years of "Startup" followed by "How to Start a Reboot of My Life"
Since you linked Wikipedia, I'll quote it.
> Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
> Among laypeople, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as the claim that people with low intelligence are more confident in their knowledge and skills than people with high intelligence.
I agree. DoS is an attack, so without intent it is fuzzy. But I think it is pretty descriptive, so it's okay. I know exactly what self-ddos means instantly (flooding your own service, without malicious intent).
I think it's kind of a limitation with English or the term ddos. If it really is only used it for intent to attack, it becomes less useful of a word IMO.
