Maybe Musk should stick to Tedx talks in some relatively marginal venue for a bit, get some experience. TED talks not infrequently feature people who know rather less than they let on; but they are prominent enough that the self-absorbed bullshit artists are pretty talented in that department, even if not so much elsewhere.
8 Likes
Musk is, true to form, going above and beyond when it comes to blinkered incompetence; but this sordid performance reminds me of a more general trend that seems likely to lead to some really messy stories in the future.
The vendors of various low code/no code/AI-driven/‘visual’/etc. tools are all very rosy on the glorious future where we’ll get software just by describing what we want (and, in fairness, there has been some progress in the area); but what never gets discussed is that you still need to know what you want in order to describe it.
Today it’s easy to delude yourself about how well you understand what you want because programming is a nontrivial specialist exercise that requires a lot of fiddly syntactic knowledge, familiarity with libraries, etc. If someone did cook up an indistinguishable-from-magic “you tell me what you want and I generate software” AI you’d suddenly have a lot of people who can no longer believe that their inability to produce software is down to unfamiliarity with C syntax; but stems from their lack of conceptual clarity.
In this case, we don’t even need to postulate such a system because programmers are basically strong AIs that turn requirements into software, if you know how to talk to them; and oh man does Musk not know how to talk to them.
15 Likes
Swirling around Musk, I’ve seen comments from people who think that redoing Twitter should take a team of 50 and 12 weeks. (“Because WhatsApp only has 35!”)
Oh my…
Stripped bare, Twitter is:
- Provide an online community of communities, that attract people, who attract even more people.
- Sell advertising to them, do the advertising, and get paid.
That second part alone, yeeesh! And that’s before even thinking about how many countries and languages that involves, nor the non-devel people to run sales, advertising account contact and management, support…
Hm. Underestimating projects is an industry disease, but I wonder if techbro libertarians are exceptionally bad at it?
I mean, if they think civilization can run without governments or mutual-support mechanisms, just rugged individuals self-supplied with bootstraps, they have to be rubbish at systems analysis!
14 Likes
I would argue that techbro libertarians are exceptionally good at underestimating complex projects.
Positively stellar, actually.
17 Likes
Honestly double that time frame (Or triple it, most likely), and the team of 50 can get it done… if that team has support. If we’re talking 50 swe III’s with expertise in high end scala and infrastructure design, and the specs are written cleanly, and they have good SREs in support, and they have a budget that lets them do full scale load testing… that is a doable thing. Close, but doable. Possibly without even crunch time if they go to 36 weeks. The specs are already written for much of twitter and the whole microservice architecture likely can be replaced piece by piece using very tightly contained contracts.
But the real problem is, he’s not going to find that crew of 50, because that crew of 50 would never work for someone like Elon.
5 Likes
I think that you’re making the same mistake as Musk: exclusively focusing the user side, rather than the advertiser side, which is what makes them money.
11 Likes
unfortunately, we already have this 
i’ve long believed the best programmers are english majors because structuring writing to convey a particular idea is the most important skill coding requires.
that would be the most interesting use of something like gpt chat: to “translate”, in an interactive way, from a description to the instructions in the particular programming language at hand…
of course, the problem would still be needing to understand the final output in order to know whether it’s correct; because: “all non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.” ( see also: le ton beau de marot )
9 Likes
i think that’s optimistic. generally the services are going to make assumptions about each other and the core. ideally they wouldn’t, but inevitably they always do. and some of those assumptions aren’t even known by humans. they work because they work.
( squeaky wheels get the grease, not the ones that just happen to have enough grease due to splattering by other wheels. or something like that. )
the “fastest path” would probably be to write an entirely new service and call it twitter. only they can’t do that because the users they do have wouldn’t migrate until the features are in place. and they won’t be ready for prime time until they have enough users to find all the problems.
systems like twitter, i think, are grown. they never arrive fully formed.
11 Likes
All these Musk sycophants remind me of the “baptism” scene from Rawhead Rex.
2 Likes
Yes.
11 Likes
Twitter’s problem is that it doesn’t make a profit.
That’s nothing to do with the technology stack, it’s to do with the fundamental concept of the service and the way it’s used in the real world.
This problem may actually not be solvable, and Musk, whose people skills are clearly abysmal, is probably the worst choice of person to solve it.
11 Likes
And that’s fair, but the only reason he’s GOT something that advertisers can buy is because of the good work of the team he decimated. He absolutely needs to focus on the advertiser side, but if he doesn’t hire the needed people, there won’t be anything to sell to them.
2 Likes
Unlike Musk’s imaginary Mars colonists, Twitter users have no power to stop him from migrating them whenever he feels like it 
1 Like
they have the power of their eyeballs. and if twitter was rebooted with an incompatible feature set, or failed to preserve messages or followers as is, id expect most of the still remaining would bail
it’s difficult to fundamentally transform a platform while people are still using that platform
5 Likes
Whether he understands it or not, Twitter is in freefall.
User-facing Twitter is the last thing he should be concerned with right now, and mumbling about 4000 character posts or totally changing the stack is a complete waste of what time he has left.
First, he needs people who can keep the site running. The lack of a major outage so far is a credit to the former employees who built it. A few days outage would kill the site stone dead.
Second, he needs to reconnect with the advertisers. Last year advertising was $5B. After this, he’ll be lucky if it’s $2B, but probably less than that. Fortunately the people he needs to give advertisers the tools they need don’t have to be network experts, but they do have to understand advertisers.
Losing users isn’t good, but Twitter has always had a high churn-rate, and could recover if he can refrain from further stupid moves to accelerate the trend. Like, don’t piss off the journal… oh, too late. On the plus side, the people with huge follower trains are going to be reluctant to leave so long as it’s not a total Nazi hellscape.
If he continues to disown severance packages, I doubt he’ll be cutting much from the $6B costs after the legal fights are done. Add another $1B+ to service the debt. If the ad revenue is south of $2B, then it’ll be a good time to buy second-hand networking equipment.
11 Likes
Musk has no idea what he’s doing but apparently he does have a line that can be crossed or someone does.
5 Likes
In modern enterprise cloud software the “stack” is all your layers of client software, libraries, REST APIs, server software, databases, virtualizations, etc. Like many terms in computer science, “stack” has been overloaded so context is key. So in current parlance, a “full stack engineer” is someone who can work on client and server code, as well as understanding all the databases, caches, etc needed for the whole system to operate.
Not that Musk really understands any of this, of course. He just heard a word getting thrown around by technical people and tried hamfistedly to use it so he would sound technical.
12 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
