Kontextmaschine

18th November 2022

Post reblogged from alluring heian courtesan with 132 notes

tanadrin:
poipoipoi-2016:
The unit of engineering is the team.
The team is >=4 engineers for minimum viable oncall coverage, ideally 6 because you know someone’s being onboarded at all times. and < about 12
88% attrition in 2 weeks. How many teams no longer exist? What were they responsible for? How many of those are actually important?
iPhone notification counts already don’t work. Is that… important? Supposedly, the tweet storage service was down to 2 engineers BEFORE 80% of the company quit. Because if they’re down to 0, that is definitely important and if that service sails in a straight line until it hits the metaphorical reef, that’s the end of Twitter.
And you know, I might ask why your architecture was so micro-serviced up that only iPhone notification counts broke 2 weeks ago and Musk probably has a point there that you were bloated and overstaffed… and fixing that will take a bit. And people. And knowledge that just walked out the door.
as someone who emphatically does not know how big websites work–why is their software so rickety that it could run for (max) a couple of weeks before it breaks so completely? is this normal for big websites?
Twitter’s tech stack is rumored to be worse than normal, but not that much worse. So yes, if you just walk away from a big website in general you don’t have too much time before something causes a cascading failure - a website like Twitter has a billion moving pieces that just have random failure rates, which is usually fine because someone’s there to fix the little piece that broke. But if there’s nobody there, the little piece starts breaking things higher up the stack until it all falls apart.
That was all pretty general, so here’s a tweet thread on the specifics of what might go wrong. I can vouch for a lot of this since I was close to operations at both Bing and AWS. Read it while you still can!
ALT

Can’t help but notice that half of these are in some sense political, and of those, like they range from “governments want something from us” to “the content we serve can radically change facts on the ground” to “governments want to influence what we serve as a tool to control facts on the ground”.

So, really, who’s the top dog here, Twitter or governments? Well, you

Congress and The Hague they have a sense that they’re over everybody but the US and EU. How’ve those been doing since Harambe got shot?

The EU saw Brexit, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, the Visegrad Group challenging West-Euro “Human Rights” hegemony, the Ukraine crisis with Russia now trying to break NATO by breaking (the unity of) the members in the EU. And the US… ::gestures::

Is their supremacy assured, and do Saudi Arabia and the South African expat richest man in the world even want it?

Probably on balance the staff that just left wanted it, bought into whatever it was legitimating itself in the name of (which was increasingly aligning with them!)

The staff that replaces them, drawn to maybe Austin to work for Elon! Musk!, are they particularly invested?

Big shifts in communication media often lead to new world orders as the old order suited to the old one shifts to the new order suited to the new one among much blood and dust clouds – the European Wars of Religion after the printing press, the World Wars amidst mass media (yes, even I, mass-circulation newspapers had made a big change in how governmentality was experienced), I honestly think platforms have the potential to displace nations here.

Really they’ve dallied too long, in like 2007 Facebook should’ve been summoning US officials to hearings for them to be grilled and publicly humiliated, with severe penalties in terms of how it shaped discourse around them if they declined.

Tagged: 2022 it's social media