Eventually he will be right, only idiots will want to be a part of it. That suits him, he needs to be the smartest person in the room, and absolutely no one can tell him what to do or not to do. He bought Twitter because the board told him what to do. He also moved Tesla's headquarters to Texas for the same reason. It's a pattern with him.
Apparently he is the sole software genius at a company filled with lazy millennials, so he will now single-handedly rebuild the platform, starting with throwing away 80% of the microservices and seeing what happens.
That's also how I repair my computers, so that checks out.
I not one for keeping stuff, so it's the keyboard I use, made by Codegen in 1986 with Futaba clicky switches. It doesn't have a Windows key, but you can choose between an XT or AT modes, and I use it with an AT to PS/2 passive adapter. The keyboard is not rare or valuable, but I adore the switches, they remind me of IBM's beam springs from the 70's. One day I shall build a new keyboard with these switches.
Cloudflare Pages is pretty good, it's for server-side rendering as well, and have things like Durable Objects that no one else have, and D1, which is built on SQLite. Sending emails is also free with Cloudflare Workers. No egress fees. Best of all fully-local development and testing is supported with an open-source runtime you can also deploy on your own, albeit without Cloudflare's edge-first infrastructure.
Many software are like that, especially those that have been around for some time. You don't see the CEO of Microsoft spewing nonsense about Windows publicly, and then punching down on an employee for correcting him. There is no need for the circus. Technical debt is a fact of business, it can be dealt with professionally. It's not a reason to treat people badly.
The product is especially bad. The new CEO is trying to reform it. Eric is saying "spend more," which is the refuge of bad architecture. That's not the answer. And instead of privately working together to review it, he's publicly arguing. I wouldn't accept that either.
He called Musk's public statement out, because it was wrong. Twitter shouldn't be the place for this, but it's on Musk for creating such unprofessional atmosphere in the first place.
Imagine the same thing with Microsoft. We all know Windows is held together with scotch tape, not to mention that 7 years after Windows 10 they still haven't quite manage to unify the old and the new interfaces, not that Windows 11's new interfaces are any good. What a mess. Except it's not, it's business as usual. Big software projects are messy and hard to manage, but these issues are unimportant when you get the bigger picture right. For Windows the bigger picture is that it runs all your application. This is what makes Windows a good product, the rest is details and can be fixed over time. Preferably in a professional manner.
How is Musk trying to 'reform' it when since he's owned it Twitter has had worse performance than ever, degraded features due to his bull-headed decisions and is literally burning money because he's chasing advertisers?
And the only one that started a public argument was Musk by making an incorrect claim and defacto blaming the engineers for something he clearly doesn't understand. He's trying to pull another Paypal and it's blowing up in his face now like it did then.
Eric Frohnhoefer may not have a job at Twitter anymore, but him fact checking dear leader constantly spewing nonsense about things he doesn't understand was a sweet moment.
Elon was talking about internal RPCs. Eric was talking about client side requests, as though that was a dunk. Eric was both wrong and attempted to insult his boss in public at the same time.
Take into account that between the two of them Eric is the expert.
It was Musk who failed to keep things professional. His first post was literally humiliating his own employees for writing bad code. It's his own company, he may not have been around, but it's his people now. Even if Twitter's Android client is not the best, playing the blame game is callous and petty. There is no point to trying to show that you are better than your employees either. It's the opposite of what a functional CEO should do.
It was callous and petty, and I can't imagine how frayed the nerves are of current employees. Almost every higher-up I've seen come into a company has done this to some degree, and it's always annoying, but to do it actually on the product to 100mm+ followers is a new level of cruel and spiteful.
"I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong.
Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low."
There is no way to tell if this is right or wrong, we are not engineers at Twitter, and I suspect that no engineer there would dare to correct him. I'm pretty sure Twitter has an API gateway of some sort, it doesn't make sense that it's a batching issue.
But it doesn't matter who is right or wrong. The unprofessional atmosphere, the callousness, the one-upmanship is the problem. He is the CEO for God's sake. This is a PR nightmare. I know that it worked for Trump, but it isn't working even for him anymore.
I honestly don't understand what remote procedure calls have to do with the client. Surely the clients wouldn't interact in such a way with the microservices, there would be some sort of API gateway, maybe even one for each platform or service, like the backend for frontend pattern.
It's probably more complicated than this, and you can't exactly put it into a few words, but he tried, and it didn't make sense, but he still managed to call his employees idiots.
> An interesting thing about this claim is that not only is the implication wrong, Twitter probably has better evidence of its wrongness than any other company in its size class could have.
> There are very few companies that have a better distributed tracing setup w.r.t. getting actionable insights on the backend and the ones that have a better setup are much larger (Google, FB, etc.)
> Twitter client tracing also punches above its weight.
> Of course, the key people who did that work left or got laid off, but it's clear from the data that, if you're looking at why Twitter is so slow in, e.g., India, Uganda, etc., esp. on slow devices, tail latency comes from the network due to unreasonably large payloads + client.
> When leadership wanted to drive growth in India, they were into "visionary" stuff, e.g., "add features cricket watchers would like" when the app was unusably slow [on] a low-end device and the client performance team had been disbanded.
Older people are horndogs, they just have many age-related issues, and not everyone is able to overcome them or the stigma, since we tend to idealize the elderly, like they are supposed to be pristine and wise, when the evidence is to the contrary on both counts.
> they are supposed to be pristine and wise, when the evidence is to the contrary on both counts.
The brain elasticity of an 80yo might not always be up to learning the JS framework of the week (though perhaps that is a wisdom in itself...), but I find, when talking to older folks, that their years of experience offer an irreplaceable perspective. That I would consider to be a form of wisdom.
Its not that they know everything about everything or that being old makes them automatically smart, but experiencing the world through a much longer lens of time (then my lens) can change how they see things and in particular can allow them to recognize patterns that younger folks would miss...
(None of this should be construed as me advocating for a geritocrasy, but just as a reminder to take the time to listen to the older folks around you. You do not (and probably should not) take what they say at face value as given facts, but listen, consider, and test their perspective as you form your own opinions of the world...
The current solutions on the market don't scale, some key innovation is still missing for full self-driving. It might be a new kind of machine learning, or something very different, I don't know.
What I know is that it's disgusting to pretend that we are about to have full self-driving, and already market cars with it. Nobody does it more than Tesla, since the company's entire valuation rest on it, even if they are currently technologically behind other companies with partial self-driving features. Tougher regulations are needed to curtail Tesla's snake oil salesmanship, both for the sake of safety and the market.
ARK's projections allocate about 60% of Tesla's market cap to robo taxis. That implies self-driving. But a robo taxi is a different product from full self driving. I wonder where they get the idea that it will come so quickly.
Didn't we already conclude that big data is not that useful if we can't make sense of it? Which is why AI is cool or will be. Quality, not quantity, and all that.
It's board members, not CEOs. Women do 1.1% better for DAX (40 large cap companies), 0.1% better for SDAX (70 small cap companies) and 4.7% worst for MDAX (60 mid cap companies).
So the few women that are board members in average are compensated 1.1% better at DAX companies, that's the story.
