Notices by Ken Sugar ☑️ (ken_sugar@mastodon.social), page 8

I want to be intellectually honest about it all, but it's hard to do alone or with only bad faith actors pretending to dialogue (bUt He iS geTTinG riD of cHilD poRn - ARE YOU PRO CHILD PORN, ffs no, for the record, NO). but part of what made Twitter amazing was the dialectic you could have in real time with all sorts of people (I still argue this was the most common instance of the quote-tweet that I saw, although I understand that other, more nefarious uses existed).

@denkmit

I'm mourning for something that is lost, I know, and over the past several months, I've gotten very accustomed to processing everything that was happening about Twitter, on Twitter. And now I'm having an emotional response to what Twitter is becoming, and I know all my @macaw.social peeps can understand, but it's just so much, so meta, and the tool that I had at my handy disposal for handling moments like this (a long, deep, cathartic tweet thread) now just feels wrong.

The fact that the site is still running mostly fine is a testament to how resilient these systems were built to be. But it would be extremely daft to say that our jobs were unessential. We were constantly in the process of making our own jobs redundant so we could do more impactful things. We were constantly automating tasks that we used to do manually so that we could move on and do more impactful work.

Complex systems such as Twitter are most in danger of breaking when new features are rolled out. Since the acquisition went into effect, Twitter has been in code freeze almost the entire time, which means that the risk of anything breaking has been relatively low. When you add a new feature, there could be many types of issues that can arise - functionality bugs, privacy bugs, scaling issues, reliability issues, etc.

With the massive reduction in headcount, very little of this medium term or long term work stands a chance of happening. If the number of users continues to grow, and the traffic into the site continues to grow (the World Cup will be an interesting case), Twitter will lack the staffing and specialized knowledge to add hardware capacity, respond to incidents, move traffic around, etc.

Want to ensure Twitter can handle that World Cup final peak traffic when the entire world is tweeting at the same time? Extra hardware capacity might need to be purchased, and you can’t really order this type of hardware off Amazon prime overnight delivery. Twitter added a brand new data center last year. This was a companywide effort that took ~three years.

Companies like Twitter operate on timescales of months and years. Teams plan years in advance to ensure future user growth and revenue growth can be accommodated. Want to double user growth? Some systems will need wholesale redesigning to maintain scalability.

At some point, there will be a need for some maintenance. If you leave your laptop on long enough it might restart automatically for a software update to install new features, bug fixes, and security patches. Your Wi-Fi router might overheat. Or a shark might chew through an undersea internet cable (look it up).

A thread on how/why the birdsite is "still up":

Software in general can run a long time if you leave it alone. Think of your laptop. If you open it up, leave it on and plugged in, how long could it run if you didn’t change anything?

@Gargron @atomicpoet @chad
also confirmed.

[ #NowPlaying ]

? Megadeth
"In My Darkest Hour"

? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w8lkrnw4WM

#Megadeth ??

[ #NowPlaying ]

? David Gilmour ft. David Bowie
"Comfortably Numb" (Pink Floyd)

? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGXu1lNmL-A

Live at the Royal Albert Hall, London UK 2006

#PinkFloyd ?? #DavidBowie ??

[ #NowPlaying ]

? David Bowie ft. Trent Rezner
"Hurt" (Nine Inch Nails)

? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhhEHuChFck

Bowie and NIN joint tour 1995

George Takei just said that Elon Musk wants to create his own phone if Apple and Google ban Twitter.

I can't seem to find a link on this story. Can someone send me one please?

Looks like juicy reading.

@atomicpoet
this.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596268804413476864

(機械翻訳において、日英双方で文章表現の概念的な意味が共通するように日本語を組み立てるの、わりと難しいですよね? )

(機械翻訳において、日英双方で文章表現の概念的な意味が共通するように日本語を組み立てるの、わりと難しいですよね ? )

@marizo そうですね。ビジネス化して広告収入がメインになると、なるべく多くの人を集める必要が出てくるから、規模が小さかったときには想像もつかなかったような弊害が出てきたわけですね。
ツイッターの８ドルの認証マークにしても、「有料にすれば悪戯は防げるだろう」というマスクの目論見は甘かったわけで、８ドル程度の参加費で社会を引っ掻き回せるなら喜んで払う人がたくさんいた。その辺の想像力の欠如、他人の意見を聞けない人が今や主要メディアのひとつであるツイッターをおもちゃにしちゃいけないのです。

考えてみたらTwitterもFB気の毒なところがある。

最初に開発した時は、楽しいとか、便利とか、いいんじゃね？とかで初めたと思うけど、大きくなればなるほど、管理しきれないぐらいの負荷がかかってしまうということ。

だからこそ、大きくなればなるほど、社会的責任も発生するし、それを統率するリーダーには最低限のコンプラを大切にして欲しいのよね。