>>455261 I agree with you actually - seems to work fine; I don't buy the "we need a rewrite" anytime from a team, least of all them.
Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on this - written in 2000, but everything applies today. Rewriting a body of code from scratch is the single worst thing any software team/person can do. It never works.
>Rewriting a body of code from scratch is the single worst thing any software team/person can do. It never works.
It depends. At some point, your old code can just become too convoluted, cumbersome and slow. Because you will have added on features time and again, but not necessarily in the most efficient and least resources-claiming way. And the more complex your code gets, the more error prone it will also become. At some point, it's less time consuming to rewrite your code than to spend your time painstakingly ironing out inconsistensies and incompatibilities. Where you draw that line is a judgement call that can go wrong. but it often doesn't.
Also, what nobody can guarantee you is that your lean new efficient code will behave exactly the way the old one did. Especially when your code interfaces with things like databases or other computers or devices or hardware, it can get tricky to figure out why your new code won't run, even though you feel it's so much more leaner and faster. And that's where a lot of reservations come from against redoing a code project from the ground up.
It's probably not a good idea to recode Twitter from square one because of its overall complexity. But for many smaller projects, it can be a viable option.
>>455265 >Also, what nobody can guarantee you is that your lean new efficient code will behave exactly the way the old one did.
Respectfully, couldn't disagree more with your post - this line highlights the problem - when you rewrite a large body of code, it's probably not the original team that is rewriting it, and you have lost all the institutional / tribal knowledge about how the system works, what the edge cases are, what bugs we encountered along the way and how it is actually used.
We can have a debate about "smaller projects" - its perfectly okay to refactor a class, a module, a subsystem, a service - however you might define that domain definition; but to the point that "Twitter needs a complete rewrite", no it does not and doing so would be an act of folly.
They moved to a microservices model, for reasons that were never entirely clear. That massively increased the cost and complexity of their infrastructure. Those services were never properly documented and were developed by fragmented teams using a variety of tools and methodologies. There's a lot of overlapping functionality, spectacularly weird bugs and massive performance problems. Dorsey hired a huge number of very smart computer scientists with no real plan for what they were going to do, so they did what all computer scientists do when left unsupervised - reinvent the wheel in arcane ways.
Laid-off Twitter staff have been saying that Twitter will start to fail completely, which is entirely correct, but not for the reasons they'd like to think - their infrastructure is such a dreadful mess that it's constantly on the brink of collapsing. They're constantly firefighting problems that nobody really understands, because of a fundamental belief that microservices are a substitute for sound architecture.
I don't expect a literal blank-page rewrite, but I do expect to see radical refactoring to bring the vast majority of core functionality back into a monolithic architecture. This can be done relatively quickly, because the Twitter product isn't all that complicated; ironically, the immense and unnecessary complexity of their infrastructure has absorbed so much engineering effort that they haven't been in a position to add much functionality.
As I said before, this could all end in tears, but there's a meaningful probability that Twitter will cut their operating costs by an order of magnitude and cut their payroll by >50% without badly affecting revenue, putting them in a position to actually start spending resources on product innovation. Elon's takeover has been massively disruptive, but that's probably a good thing when a widespread reaction to the possible demise of Twitter was "good, I hope that hellsite dies and never comes back".
>my recollection is that Twitter made a loss in 2020-21 as well, but a profit in 2019
Either way you look at it, I think it's hard to be confident in an internet based company that somehow managed not to make money during a period of global history in which events occurred that which massively benefited basically every single other online company.
Granted, I never worked on a project that came even close to Twitter's magnitude. The biggest things I've done was code bespoke web back and front ends that maybe served 15 to 20 unique users simultaneously at any one time. But even in that kind of environment, it can happen that features get tacked on haphazardly, worst of all by your coworkers, even worse on your day off, with poor understanding of the code's general idea and concept, and then it can incrementally start behaving weirdly and become clunky and just no longer efficient or capable of the job at hand. Let alone it'll be difficult to service.
It's not just poor commenting or ignorance or negligence. It can happen despite everybody's best efforts. And before you know it, you've got substantial code rot. The fact that a given set of employees knows the ins and outs of a codebase and its quirks and latent bugs and might therefore be irreplaceable as managers and stewards of that code shouldn't universally be an excuse to stick with and keep alive bad code.
I would actually agree with you that you don't just sit down and rewrite Twitter. But even at that kind of level of complexity, there comes a time when you're just better off at least putting parts of your codebase through an entire rewrite.
Hot take: Elon is doing a public service by owning the biggest electric car company and being a mad MAGA gammon. People used to argue that electric cars were just lefty liberal the shipping forecast, but they aren't saying that any more. The kind of people who go on an all-beef diet to own the libs can now own an electric car without shame.
>Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.
>Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
Never understood the point of twitter anyway. 99 percent of posters use it to unload their mental bum rubbish. The occasional actually useful public service announcement notwithstanding.
Yah It's like LiveJournal with a shittier interface but frighteningly good marketing. Like how certain News outlets will gush about TikTok, even though there is such an exasperating plague of mental nourishment on there that you must wonder why anyone is even telling us to look at it. FUCKING LOOOOK AAATTT IIIITTTT. I think this happens because "Haha no fuck off you deperate cunt" doesn't even make a good basis even for a Reach PLC™ Sharticle.
Maybe he should just wander around all the social media dives and threaten to buy them, just to make them worth fuck-all to anyone ever again. Or even better, have an slapfight with Zuckerberg á la Rich Kyanka vs. Uwe Boll. Whoever loses, we win.
There are local news programmes in much of the U.S. now which consist of little more than reading tweets out loud on screen and inciting equal parts vacuous warm fuzzy feelings and bitter outrage over the latest social media posts.
Lowest of the low hanging fruit that barely qualify as journalism. Thankfully not yet a big trend in Britain, but we should be vigilant.
Not on TV maybe, but if you use any kind of news-ish homepage website like Yahoo, MSN, etc, they're packed with examples of exactly that from our local papers (which have all been bought out by some sort of IRL Buzzfeed type mega-corp).
It really is dreadful. When I'm just idly browsing at work I'll spot a headline that catches my curiosity, something like "Wigan mum faces outrage from community" or whatever, and it's literally just a tedious repost of some Facebook or Twitter comment thread. It's like if we had newspapers twenty years ago running articles like "Two men in pub disagree on best Terminator" except it's actually real and in real life. I can't find theproper words to describe how just... This is what we've come to, know what I mean?
There's no way you can convince me social media hasn't degenerated our collective intelligence. It's not just an Old Grumpy Man Misunderstands Newfangled Technology thing, because I'm only in my early 30s, I grew up with it too, from Myspace and Bebo etc in the early days, in fact I credit those early experiences with being the reason I'm confident pulling lasses on dating apps and why so many other people struggle at it; they merely adopted the internet, but I was born in it, molded by it. But I genuinely think social media (or at least just its more advanced forms like Twitter and TikTok) are toxic for our brains.
A lot of local newspaper websites are like this. All stuff such as "Dad went to work and never came home", "Gorgeous £10 sweatshop garment clubbers 'need' in 'every colour'", "Mum in tears after encounter at Aldi checkout", "Police incident as main road closed after mobility scooter topples over", "Check your change for rare Kew Gardens 50p worth £600", "Toby Carvery brawl leads to £60m Crack Cocaine bust". Most of it is recycled with key details changes and reposted every few months.
I remember in the run-up to the last election, there were actually news headlines on web sites along the lines of "Outrage at BoJo's proposal to do X after the election", but when you actually bothered to read the article, it was boiling down to often one single twitter user taking offence at something relatively minor and irrelevant from the Tory manifesto that they completely pulled out of context and then started a full-on twitter cunt off about. Still dutifully pretending to deliver a news story, the reporter then basically just gave the gist of half-arsedly scrolling down the ensuing thread and quoting the most outrageous responses.
Also though, what I find more than mildly annoying is all those human interest stories that really serve no purpose at all, least of all the purpose of getting a regular fill of relevant current events off the TV. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I don't fucking want to hear on the evening news about some crippled kid with cancer who got a puppy donated from the animal shelter. Not even if it's their upbeat closeout story.
>>455737 Apartheid Clyde has given some stuff to sympathetic writers and "reporters" to get them to dish the dirt on Old Twitter, meanwhile he's told staff that if any of them dares speak out and fill the gaps he's leaving he'll sue them into oblivion. And of course all the people you would expect to buy into the bullshit are doing so.
One example of the "bombshells" being reported is that "Twitter colluded with the FBI to suppress some users and the FBI paid them for it". They did this by receiving legal requests from the FBI, which they are required to comply with, and for which the FBI is required to pay them the costs of compliance.
But to get this straight- What you're saying is big tech company good, and only bad now that evil rich car man took over, and any implication they weren't good before is disinfo agitprop by evil rich car man and his evil rich mates with their rightoid freeze peach agenda for antisemitic homophobic racist dogwhistles. Am I right?
How do you feel about the accusation that TikTok distorts its content according to the whims of the Chinese government? Do you have any trouble believing that? Do you feel the need to scramble to their defence? Well, same for Twitter and the Yank government. Musk's involvement is quite inconsequential in my opinion, and I already firmly believed they were up to exactly that sort of shit before this "reveal".
Sure, but I doubt we were getting the full picture from the multi-billion dollar big tech company before him either.
I get the feeling a lot of people are falling for the old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing and uncritically siding with Old Twitter just because Musk is a baddie.
It does when you read the article and it just turns out that someone spat at a member of staff and a copper used it as the catalyst to finally nab him.
>>455749 What I'm saying is, specifically and no more, that the narrative of "big tech company evil and rich car man come make everything good now" is bollocks, and since we're only getting one side of the story we have no real way to judge what in the "revelations" is actually true, to what degree, and what inferences to draw from them.
>the narrative of "big tech company evil and rich car man come make everything good now" is bollocks
Fair, but I don't think anyone here, or anyone besides Musk's personal fanclub, for that mater, is buying that to begin with.
Whereas on the other hand I find it excessively convenient for Twitter to just go "Nah Musk done went made that up din'ee." I don't think it's exactly the height of tinfoil paranoia to assume the likes of Google, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, etc etc etc have some level of collusion with the intelligence agencies. In fact I think it'd be daft not to.
>>455755 It would be insane to believe that Twitter doesn't collude with the intelligence agencies, but that's an evergreen statement. The only thing more insane than not believing they did it in the first place would be believing that Musk or anyone else will put a stop to it.
Which is the problem at large: It doesn't matter who runs Twitter because the basic design of Twitter is evil and the institutional environment Twitter exists in is evil. It's not a management problem - the only management solution to Twitter's problems would be to appoint asset strippers who put all the servers on eBay and drag all the copper wire in their HQ down to the local scrap yard.
>>455758 I'm not sure "hey there, we're from the NSA, this is an order, and if you don't comply you're going to jail, and if you tell anyone about it you're also going to jail" is strictly speaking an invitation to collusion.
But that's not all they do. They're quite happy to comply without the threat of going to jail, and they're quite happy to allow their platform to actively be used for propaganda, surveillance, coercion, and general spook bullshit.
Apple have actually done the right thing, because their business model is compatible with it. They fight warrants in court, they design their infrastructure to be surveillance-resistant, they encrypt everything they can and store as little user data as possible.
FISA doesn't compel Google to track the exact location of users by default and store that data indefinitely - it's just a convenient marriage between the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism.
>>455763 Not to excuse the security services, but at a zoomed out enough level most of those things are less objectionable than their platform operating "as intended." (i.e. preying on weaknesses in human psychology and group dynamics to keep people arguing with each other so that you can show off that you've got high engagement and convert that into financial gain via advertisers and investor shenanigans.)
The security services are bad buggers, but it's nice that it's easy to point out why they're bad: Maybe you shouldn't fly people to Egypt so you can pull all their teeth out while asking questions in a language they don't speak. It's also nice that you can spell out the solution in theory: The government tells them to stop being bastards and they stop. Twitter is tougher - it's a private multinational that no individual state could-or-would take offline and you sound absolutely nuts when you start talking about infinite scroll, low character counts, retweets, and all the rest of it as though they're more socially harmful than most weapons when they're all brought together with how people act. It's not that serious mate, it's just silly nonsense, alright? Musk might lose his mind over this stupid website, so too might a few "journalists"... but everyone else is safe, alright?
>>455763 >They're quite happy to comply without the threat of going to jail
Top tip: When it comes to the security services, there's always the threat of going to jail. Or worse.
>>455764 Apple doesn't actually care about privacy. There's plenty in their history as testament to that. They provide "performative privacy", but they don't really object to surveillance capitalism. What they object to is not getting a 30% cut of everyone else's business.
>Tesla shares dropped 11% on Tuesday and are now down 44% in December
>Investors are bailing on the stock as challenges mount for Tesla abroad and at home, and as Elon Musk continues to spend an outsize amount of time at Twitter.
I got out of Tesla stock last year, after briefly getting in around the top and suffering an almost 15-percent loss in just a few trading days. I got stopped out and then never quite had the courage to get back in. But I guess anything was better than HODL.
>Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blows up minutes after launch
>After a cancelled launch earlier this week due to a pressurisation issue, the 120-metre Starship rocket system took off at 8:33 am local time (2:33 pm in the UK) on Thursday. It gathered speed but then started to spin at altitude before exploding about four minutes after leaving the ground.
>It appeared that the two sections of the rocket system – the booster and cruise vessel – were unable to separate properly after takeoff, possibly causing the spacecraft to fail.
I've probably said this before, but the funniest thing about Musk taking over Twitter and making himself look like a complete cock in the process is that he didn't even want to buy it.
>In its letter claiming responsibility for the attack, the Volcano Group said it sabotaged Tesla because it ate up resources and labour.
>It also accused Tesla of contaminating groundwater and using huge amounts of drinking water.
Not saying I agree with that kind of destruction and sabotage of critical infrastructure, but I understand the sentiment. EVs may be the cleaner future, but as one of the world's biggest arsecunts, just because you own an EV company doesn't make you sacrosanct. You're still an arsecunt and people are allowed to hate you and your company.
And there's reasonable beef with that factory, because locally, it actually is an environmental disaster because they cleared thousands of acres of virgin forest to build it, and the factory uses so much water that the groundwater table has been receding as a direct consequence.
>>463060 The carbon cost of replacing fossil fuel powered cars with EV ones is astronomical and not a viable change, that's reasonable beef with the factory on a global level. There's nothing really clean about it.
Can we just admit that we've complete fucked it RE climate change? This line of thinking is very much under the section titled "things I don't say irl", but I find the idea that we're going to stop, let alone reverse, the climate breakdown utterly laughable.
We're not going to undo climate change at this point. It's all about slowing it down now. But even that is worth doing. Defeatism doesn't get you anywhere.
But it doesn't have to be a Tesla. There are increasingly other options, where a car company isn't run by a pound shop Bond villain.
>>463063 Honestly I think climate change is too convinient a cover for the use of weaponised weather manipulation technologies for it to be meaningfully tackled before a third world war. Also they're defrosting the Arctic to get at whatever's within the ice..
No, but also sort of yes. There hasn't really been a strategic decision to run at lower cruise speeds, but narrow body jets naturally have a cruise speed that's 40-50 knots slower than a wide body. The shift from hub-and-spoke to point-to-point operations mean that more passenger miles are being flown on smaller narrow body jets, which has unintentionally resulted in a reduction in average speeds.
