Twitter C/D

Twitter is not in a cloud infrastructure

!! I find this hard to credit

apparently it isn't. it could be in what you'd classify as a 'private cloud'; I've read a few comments that things are 'on prem' which could mean a number of things.
also, does anyone know if the majority of backend services are still in scala? because it's significantly more difficult to hire scala engineers than java engineers. this is going to really limit their ability to hire more people, since they fired a good portion of the scala community already.

I think we’d all be better off if none of the existing social media sites were around, but I realize my Ludd tendencies in this regard are not looked well upon

I never would have got tickets for the last autechre gig if I hadn't been checking twitter during a work meeting - and nor would three of my colleagues when I had to fess up. Thanks for nothing, warp and ae mailing lists!

this thread has about 40 entirely realistic scenarios that could fuck up twitter in a variety of ways.

I've seen a lot of people asking "why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?"

As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience, I wanted to write up a few scenarios that are real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

Say what you will about Elon’s management style, but before he took over all you guys posted was “ugh another day on this hell site” and now you’re all like “ah twitter the extraordinary place where I met all my best friends, started my career, had sex for the first time”

— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) November 18, 2022

Twitter’s core services are housed in its own datacenters, not a public cloud provider, yes

someone just pointed me to this. https://twitter.com/romabysen/status/1593632173629706240?s=20&t=RPH5ltwuWHzfifME09Iufg

weird

https://knowtechie.com/twitter-moves-to-aws-expanding-twitter-to-the-public-cloud/

no idea how far along in this process they are/were. in fact if some of this stuff was still being worked on, that's yet another huge risk area

fwiw we just had this conversation on the musk thread and a recent twitter worker said:

almost all of twitter is in private datacenters. ml experimentation (not serving) and data science stuff is the big (and expensive exception).

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, November 17, 2022 6:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Elon Musk

> As an SRE and sysadmin with 10+ years of industry experience

noob

the mosquito capital thread is startling and some of its scenarios are p dark -- but i have to say that (grim outcomes and social benefits to one side) it also reveals that what was constructed just as a working piece of machinery, on a semi-chaotic, learn-as-you-go, ad hoc basis, is fucking amazing and fills me with admiration at what humans can do

time to be nicer to coders

No if you’re not their management you can still be mean to coders, a lot of them are libertarian freaks

oh no

the stuff that thread went into that most people dont seem to be thinking about is the intersection of legal and tech aspects, if youve just thrown a company into chaos by say firing half the workers and alienating most of the rest into quitting both your tech and legal depts are unlikely to be functioning well which makes them really unlikely to be able to coordinate well between each other

yeah that thread's more just a good reminder of the insane amount of logistics necessary to run a social media platform at that scale

hmm suggest just watching the world cup

24) World Cup. It is *the* defining event. We used to have watch parties for the traffic charts. The amount of traffic your site gets in one week is mind-blowing. It's in huge bursts. It tests *every* system you have to its limits. If one breaks, hope it doesn't cascade. It will.

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

They are, they can probably see the goals in the graphs

technically not true, tho you may have to say "oh jeez sorry" before congress once for each genocide

28) Genocide. People use your platform to orchestrate mass murder, the machetes in churches kind. And fast. Lightning fucking fast. You need to be prepared *before*. If you don't have a team who knows how to detect and stop this ASAP, your ass is getting dragged to The Hague

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

dont worry the cia will tell you what to do

29) Rebellion. Millions of people will use your platform to orchestrate rebellion against their government. Do you use the tools for #28 to stop them? Do you let it ride? How do you decide? What if you let it ride and the same thing happens next week in a country you really like?

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

you purposely hire ccp representative so they dont have to bother with the hacking

33) Invaders: State Actors. The CCP just gained access. If they have their way, they're here to fucking *stay*. How will your security team find out? How will they find and eradicate backdoors? How will you protect user's DMs and private tweets? If you don't, people will die.

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

all the political ones are so easy

I've got all kinds of anecdotal experience running crap, can I just start a tweet thread about how servers work and go viral now? lol

yes

theyre all offshore contractors, you dont care, go home and lay in your bathtub full of money

37) Content moderation. You need 3 things: a *giant* team of people checking reports 24/7, another team working on tooling to help that team, and regular psychiatry appointments for the first team. Not kidding, again. Humanity is DARK. Your moderators can and will commit suicide.

— Mosquito Capital (@MosquitoCapital) November 18, 2022

no point in going viral if the site is about to die forever in 50 different ways as per your thread

slip out the back, jack/find a new plon, elon

What if Twitter*is* the virus

sorry if i think how servers and logistics work is p amazing, remember i correct spelling for a living

i agree that its impressive

I am definitely seeing an extinction burst of this “buckle up my cromulent fuckstubbles time for a thread” stuff.

even being a very non genius level programmer working on some dinky lil thing sometimes im like whoa this computer shit is pretty powerful

we are all standing on the shoulders of giant nerds

the weight is too much for them they dont lift haha twitter crashes

Standing on the Shoulders of Nerds was The Four Tops best

crazy that twitter has both an obvious best and worst poster

Even before this Elon was a competitor for one of the all-time wackest posters on this site. A sweaty reply-guy for the worst accounts on here, a joke-thief and a bore, and a relentless, charmless ROFL emoji donkey in every facet. At this point he's clearly the worst poster ever.

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) November 18, 2022

Your moderators can and will commit suicide.

Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

I am definitely seeing an extinction burst of this “buckle up my cromulent fuckstubbles time for a thread” stuff.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, November 18, 2022 10:48 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

time for some cloud theory

sorry if i think how servers and logistics work is p amazing, remember i correct spelling for a living

― mark s, Friday, 18 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Putting words and facts in the correct order and spelling is more impressive than the stuff in that thread.

you can put words in any order it doesnt matter its called a tweet

letters to the editor are the new tweets

if twitter goes down you can find me in the news paper. you will see what i can do

— Mike F (@DeputyWarlock) November 18, 2022

i love that whenever i say "die in hell twitter you worthless haven for attention-starved sociopaths" ppl are like "you must be bad at twitter, i manicured my feed so expertly that i only saw nice things" good for you, i didn't know that in order to be good at twitter you had to be an obtuse dick oh wait i totally knew that

lol

sorry if i think how servers and logistics work is p amazing, remember i correct spelling for a living

― mark s, Friday, 18 November 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Putting words and facts in the correct order and spelling is more impressive than the stuff in that thread.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 18 November 2022 17:01 (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

plainly this is false i myself can do all that words stuff = not impressive

describing a whale in a weirdly cosmic way using written words is impressive tho

call me ishfail

I don't know who needs to hear this but Craigslist has being running for the last 20+ years with a team of ~50 people.

— Chad Hurley (@Chad_Hurley) November 18, 2022

lol xp