Yes. Always better to decide to build a new house before you set the current one on fire, especially if everyone got an invite to the neighborhood social and you didn’t.
10 Likes
There apparently is no shortage of new sycophants available, but yeah, their qualifications (let alone their judgment) certainly seems to be lacking.
12 Likes
Yeah, Musk and Thiel both have big egos, but Musk is the bigger loudmouth of the both.
3 Likes
God, I hope someone suggests Visual Basic.
15 Likes
This has to deal with a backend database. Visual Foxpro.
13 Likes
22 Likes
Uh, no, Twitter was one of the most respected SRE observed platforms in history, with performances surpassing levels of uptime seen only by the most mission critical apps. Between them and Netflix, they’re pretty much impossible to take down. It takes a confluence of disasters to even have Twitter hiccup, and their SREs are writing textbooks and teaching classes on how the industry should work. They’re amongst the best of the best.
Of course, that’s who they were BEFORE Elon fired everyone. Now the only thing keeping it up (and suprisingly, it’s still up) is the fact that these people did ridiculous work while they were there and built a very good system.
The stack isn’t the problem. The stack is near perfect. People not knowing what they’re doing and fucking up the stack… that’s the problem.
15 Likes
He brought in a bunch of Tesla engineers who are habituated to a completely different environment with hard real-time requirements. No software developer gets parachuted into a completely strange system and likes it.
5 Likes
Maybe partly.
“Full rewrite” is also an impulse that developers have early in their career, when they get their first long, critical look at a working product and think “does it really need to be that complicated?” They see compromises, and assume they’re the result of rushed or short-sighted decisions.
The unlucky developers get their wish, and are allowed to run a project to replace the hulking mass of compromises.
In the early iterations, it becomes clear that at least a few of those weird bolted-on bits made a lot of sense, actually. Hmmm.
Then, when the product is tested by people who didn’t take part in development, whose imagination isn’t constrained by what the designer pictured, all hell breaks loose. And bit by bit, every weird bolt-on that made the developer first think “we need a full rewrite” gets tacked back on in one form or another. Because of course it does; those bits weren’t added for fun, or because the company had too much money that needed to be spent. They were needed to keep the thing running.
The lucky ones don’t get their wish, and get to watch others flail around stressing out because the world isn’t simpler than it is. And with a shudder at the thought of what could’ve been them, they go on with their day, thankful.
Elno’s words in this meeting would’ve sounded spot-on for someone maybe a year out of university, full of great, beautiful, impossible ideas because the world isn’t that simple. Honestly, the professionals in the room needed to laugh at him more than they did. The words show deep, deep, unfathomably deep professional immaturity and that he’s not even doing a good job pretending anymore.
ETA: tl;dr I can’t stress enough how bad a mis-step those words are for someone trying to pull off a “looking competent” grift. These words show a lack of technical competence (which is fine, if code isn’t your job) and a lack of ability to shut the fuck up when he has no clue what he’s talking about (somewhat more generally important).
17 Likes
Ha, ‘stacks’ are also what those 92-supplement sets of daily pills are called. Can Scala integrate XFELS and some Cell-Seq? Maybe tack scanning transmission microscopy and microtome databases onto the regular graph database?
10 Likes
Schadenfreude supreme.
2 Likes
12 Likes
An inverted pyramid looks more like a bouquet of flowers.
3 Likes
Acton also attributed the collapse of Poland to the excessive distribution of power.
Really, the books as a whole are available without charge (click on the image), there’s no reason to condense an entire tome into something that fits on a bumper sticker.
4 Likes
5 Likes
As I said way up thread, both are fucking frauds. But since they’re powerful men, they get away with it, until they cross the wrong people.
As long as we have a society that gives passes to wealthy white men, this shit is going to keep happening.
16 Likes
(looks around) Did you forget you’re dealing with humanity? There’s a reason sound bites exist.
8 Likes
10 Likes
I guess. A certain percentage of Libertarians will see that John Acton is a “lord” and swoon. cf Alexander Fraser Tytler Lord Woodhouselee.
3 Likes
Musk theme song
6 Likes
