Twitter and Elon Musk

[Elmer]

23 minutes ago, iacas said:

Okay. You know what I was saying. This isn't a technical discussion, so you're awarded zero pedantry points. 😀

Not too bad.

Like John Gruber, I did it more based on grammar than the actual words.

Point are points! I will taken em!

I knew what you were saying, just used your words as a springboard for a rant!

I scored 67% which is a shame. As a lifelong Simpsons fan I though I knew Mr Burns words. I even have a Mr Burns bobble head at my desk!

[iacas]

[saevel25]

Does not look good for Twitter. 

[iacas]

37 minutes ago, saevel25 said:

Does not look good for Twitter. 

Here's what I don't get… I feel like something like Twitter should be capable of running for at least a few weeks… on its own. What types of things require so much manual attention?

Moderation, I get, but the whole infrastructure and actual "operation" should just… run, right?

[saevel25]

4 minutes ago, iacas said:

Moderation, I get, but the whole infrastructure and actual "operation" should just… run, right?

I am not sure. You'd think it you just took your hands off it, it wouldn't die immediately. 

[Carl3]

1 hour ago, iacas said:

Here's what I don't get… I feel like something like Twitter should be capable of running for at least a few weeks… on its own. What types of things require so much manual attention?

Moderation, I get, but the whole infrastructure and actual "operation" should just… run, right?

Dead man’s switch…

[Aguirre]

I find all of it f***ing hilarious.

[bking]

9 hours ago, saevel25 said:

I am not sure. You'd think it you just took your hands off it, it wouldn't die immediately. 

You'd be amazed what things have to be dealt with regularly - hardware flakes out, hackers keep scratching at the door, log files fill up unexpectedly. Hell, I've seen the AC crash at a data center before and stuff starts overheating in the middle of the night. 

[colin007]

8 hours ago, Aguirre said:

I find all of it f***ing hilarious.

As someone who doesn't use Twitter, I agree.

[Hohjoe]

1 hour ago, bking said:

 Hell, I've seen the AC crash at a data center before and stuff starts overheating in the middle of the night. 

 I’ve seen multiple AC failures that shutdown data centers.

I worked for a company years ago, back in the day of buss and tag cables, and a pump that pumped sewage from the city up a hill to a processing plant failed and the sewage came out of the toilets of a building at the lowest point and flooded the hall, ran into the data center and went under the floor tiles and pooled in the data center floor. A hazmat crew had to be called in to remove the buss and tag cables and clean the first floor.

I too find the Twitter thing hilarious. Looks like people are saluting and leaving in droves. That ultimatum didn’t work out well for Mr. Musk

 I didn’t take the Who Said It test because I don’t know who Mr. Burns is.

[GolfLug]

11 hours ago, iacas said:

Here's what I don't get… I feel like something like Twitter should be capable of running for at least a few weeks… on its own. What types of things require so much manual attention?

Moderation, I get, but the whole infrastructure and actual "operation" should just… run, right?

I think it is built to not operate on it's own. 

If they have ERP software like ours there are inbuilt manual gates - daily, weekly which require constant oversight and approval to move forward. Meaning operations (data flow) stop in absence of constant approvals/gate openings. It is not that operations just run in absence of someone flagging stuff down. 

The moderation aspect in itself is huge for constant sludge monitoring and filtering. Our IT guy says the constant onslaught of porn, spam has some auto filters but lot of manual filters are also required. That's for a relatively tiny company like ours. Twitter's scale is at least three orders of magnitude if not more. 

1 hour ago, bking said:

You'd be amazed what things have to be dealt with regularly - hardware flakes out, hackers keep scratching at the door, log files fill up unexpectedly. Hell, I've seen the AC crash at a data center before and stuff starts overheating in the middle of the night. 

Right. Also not all 'incidentals' manifest until shit hits the fan, so they have lot of insurance processes to prevent stuff upfront. Meaning - more manual gates. 

Yeah, I can only presume that a company of the scale of Twitter in terms of data flow requires a small army. It might be bloated a tad but I think majority of it is justified and necessary to keep the wheel turning because that's how structures of this scale are built in the first place.

P.S. Musk should know all this. I would beyond surprised if he truly doesn't understand all this.

10 hours ago, Aguirre said:

I find all of it f***ing hilarious.

But, it's not funny anymore.

[chspeed]

12 hours ago, iacas said:

Here's what I don't get… I feel like something like Twitter should be capable of running for at least a few weeks… on its own. What types of things require so much manual attention?

Moderation, I get, but the whole infrastructure and actual "operation" should just… run, right?

These systems are so complex that although a lot of stuff is semi-automated, even forgetting about the inevitable outages and cyberattacks that happen 24x7x365 at such a large service, there is an endless stream of decision that have to be made; Scaling up, scaling down, security patches, network optimization, equipment upgrades, etc. Each one of those things need to be tested and executed without affecting production.

Sure it can run for a bit, but pieces will start going offline pretty fast without constant attention.

[chspeed]

Too late to edit previous post, but if you want to get a sense of how big and complex Twitter's infra is, you can check out their blog. I like this post:

Processing billions of events in real time at Twitter

---

How we process large scale data in real time at Twitter while reducing latency and improving accuracy.

 

[bking]

1 hour ago, GolfLug said:

The moderation aspect in itself is huge for constant sludge monitoring and filtering. 

P.S. Musk should know all this. I would beyond surprised if he truly doesn't understand all this.

But, it's not funny anymore.

The cynic in me is leaning toward Musk being 100% OK with moderation being broken for a bit.

Word is that misinformation had a massive spike after the first layoff and through the election as the moderator teams were a large part of the first layoffs. 

[iacas]

Well, that answers that.

[bking]

8 minutes ago, iacas said:

Well, that answers that.

Musk as the Samuel Jackson character in Kingsman 2?

[iacas]

[Aguirre]

On 11/18/2022 at 9:23 AM, GolfLug said:

 

But, it's not funny anymore.

Nah, I'm still laughing.