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.)
https://theoutline.com/post/4147/in-twitters-early-days-only...
HN discussion:
https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own...
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."
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...
- Outages really are common: https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1577806809217503232
Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019.
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
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.
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
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.
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...
Yeah, it is going great.
I see HackerNews is counterintuitively up its own ass again.
> 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:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754 and self-reply
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer...
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.
The webdev or JavaScript mentality of if it breaks, don't worry, we can fix it live strikes again.
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
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.
>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.
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...
https://visaguide.world/us-visa/nonimmigrant/employment/h1b/...
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/mudge-twitter-whistleblower-secu...
[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.
[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.
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.
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."
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-...
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.
> 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.
https://www.engadget.com/twitter-has-supposedly-started-payi...
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
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.
>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.
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)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761?s=46...
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.
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.
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"
