Gregory's Server@rodhilton You obviously know nothing about software. Elon will show the world his true genius as soon as he single-handedly rewrites entire Twitter stack... in PHP...
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110 comments
@hu_logic @rodhilton @dhepworth - Obviously you know nothing about modern management techniques. @craignicol @hu_logic @rodhilton not only did they write their site in PHP but they converted that PHP into C++. In the words of the poet, Peter Andre, it’s insania. @jonhendry @hu_logic @rodhilton Don't be silly, Excel is best used for really large databases. @jonhendry @hu_logic @homeindorset @rodhilton Like Public Health England's COVID-19 tracking. @homeindorset @jonhendry @rodhilton @homeindorset @jonhendry @hu_logic @rodhilton if you get more than one user, it's easy to convert it to Access, but only highly skilled engineers can handle that @hu_logic @rodhilton ...just as soon as Elon learns how to program anything. He says he does, but Elon still hasn't printed out his code to show me, so I think he's just copying other people's work and should have his degrees rescinded since they're basically fake. Elon read a blog from 10 years ago where someone claimed to write Twitter in a weekend as a side project, and got all excited that he could rewrite Twitter quickly.  @nobodyzhome It's a distributed systems design interview question, meant to be solved at a high level, in the abstract. I think he literally thinks the implementation is therefore that easy.... 😂🤷 @hu_logic @rodhilton @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Twitter had to optimize and prioritize network routing between its DCs in order to scale properly. That's the kind of problems such implementation would have to solve at the grunt level. To get it done right takes time, money and quality engineers. Elon thinks he can do it with twenty sleep-deprived "10X Hardcore 2.0 SWEs" in 6 months on a shoestring budget... while shutting down several DCs in January. @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Imagine you're part of 10X Hardcore 2.0 skeleton crew and have been troubleshooting Sev1 production issue for a week. As a result, you haven't had any time to write any "code" so Elon fired you... Then, it turns out that Sev1 was caused by Elon randomly unplugging shit in the DC... @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Somewhere, some CTO talking to his VP of infrastructure: "Sure, we have DR plans and architecture. But do we have Musk-proof DR plans and architecture? Make it happen!" @hu_logic @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Your screenshot was so ridiculous I just wasted time going to confirm that it was real. @nparikh @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton NGL, I lost some braincells and faith in humanity reading his Tweet - "Twitter stack is so shit that I've unplugged half of its nodes and it still works! See? Total rewrite!" @hu_logic @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton It is *literally* what a chaos monkey is. Usually the idea is the chaos monkey is a concept or tool, not an actual guy let alone the CEO. The line about Rube Goldberg is a pretty strong hint about what he doesn’t know about engineering, too. @nparikh @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Some people have a gift of taking a failing startup and turning it into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Elon has a gift of taking a $44B enterprise and turning it into a failing startup... @hu_logic @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Somebody trying to be *reverse* Steve Jobs is definitely a new thing to witness. @hu_logic @nparikh @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Yeah apparently the self-proclaimed “smartest person in the world” has never heard of redundancy or failover clusters. @MGoCoder @hu_logic @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Somehow he also doesn’t connect it to why it can feel like a bunch of Rube Goldberg machines. It’s like Lewis Black’s bit on “if it weren’t for my horse” — if you spend too much time thinking about it you’ll get an aneurysm. @nparikh @MGoCoder @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @rodhilton Somebody tried to explain "systems integration" to Elon. That person has been fired. @MGoCoder I mean, where would he have? For real making cars is all low-latency on-prem automation and MechEng, a lot of factories are deeply bad at BI data and observability, even newer ones. Same with rocketry. He also hasn't had people at Twitter whose job it was to explain this shit to him and steer him away from the worst ideas (or just ignore him/lie to him and do what should be done despite him), like in his other companies. @reneestephen @hu_logic @nobodyzhome @rodhilton I'm actually shocked nothing substantial hasn't happened to rock that system. Clearly, the team did a good job designing and building it out. But if he keeps messing with the system here and there, he's bound to crack it in half.  @reneestephen @nobodyzhome @hu_logic @rodhilton yeah it's fairly similar to a design question I got at my Google interview. Any engineer who works on or just understands robust distributed systems should be able to *sketch out* what Twitter's infrastructure would look like. (I'm primarily an application/library/tools person so for me it's actually a kind of spicy problem. I still answered well enough to get the job.) @nobodyzhome @hu_logic @rodhilton @hu_logic @rodhilton I guess that’s why he’s got software programmers working for him. Your view of him and his abilities is way overrated. @KristiL Correction: he *had* "software programmers" working for him. He fired them all. The ones kept were based on sycophancy skills, not development ability. Turns out the only ones left are a bunch of newbs who don't even know CSS. They also broke search the other day and most of the SSO services 😂. @hu_logic @rodhilton @reneestephen @KristiL @rodhilton Didn't he have some l33t hacker interning at Twitter and solving problems of [checks notes]... actually, never mind... @hu_logic @rodhilton in plain HTML with NO CSS. Just ugly tables and iframes. @dyslexxicon @rodhilton I shit you not - I had an SWE with "pentagon cyber experience" develop just that - plain HTML with 36 iframes that pinged corporate firewall endpoints... "It's easy", he said, "just hit refresh every 30 seconds or so". We let him go two days later, after he suggested we yolo firmware upgrade on all corporate switches with no backups or contingency planning...  @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton Ask anyone who has worked on govt. projects about how "bleeding edge" the tech stack generally is. I'm sure there is some scarily advanced stuff in the deepest depths of Langley or Ft. Meade, but the people working on it won't talk about it. If someone has a govt. job on their resume, they probably have held together systems written in a mix of VBA, COBOL, and Frontpage. /1 @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton My prior job, until 2019, was with a bank that dealt with tax return processing. They had to maintain a 5.25 floppy disk for some requirements until about 2017 or so, and the data we got was mostly plaintext, length-delimited files. @LizardSF @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton though you do get some good software in that space that you can look at https://github.com/alphagov @LizardSF @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton until not so long ago, the master key for the mainframe crypto cards had to be kept in three 3,5 floppy disks, handled by three different people (who should not know each other) in different safes. @LizardSF @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton My mom was a computer operator for a large bakery and all she did was every 4 hours save a file from the as400 to a floppy, type some command and then move floppy to the Univac (or whatever). She did that for *years*. @LizardSF @dyslexxicon @rodhilton Frontpage, thanks for making me feel old... @hu_logic @dyslexxicon @rodhilton My first web coding was using PERL, written in a text editor, and stored in cgi-bin. :) @hu_logic @rodhilton everything that you wrote in this toot is making my graphic designer soul scream in terror  @dyslexxicon @hu_logic @rodhilton Hey, it's a good thing if User CSS gets an opening again. @joehalfmen @hu_logic @rodhilton he would have you believe that this is the case for Twitter as well. Comparing it to a Rube Goldberg machine, and how “disconnecting one of the sensitive server racks” didn’t stop it from working @hu_logic @rodhilton I mean… all of Facebook is PHP, it’s not really the language that’s the problem @mattdkerr @rodhilton Facebook had to fork its own PHP, for many reasons, which then forced PHP-Actual to modernize and still be a thing in 2022. My point being - I doubt that Facebook would still pick PHP/Hack if it was forced to "rewrite entire stack" today. @mattdkerr @rodhilton Sorry to pick on PHP, but it's was the least appropriate, yet plausible, modern language I could come up with. Normally I'd pick on COBOL but even Elon is not that stupid. @hu_logic @rodhilton I think the fact that the non technical CEO thinks he could do it himself, or that an intern could do it, speaks for itself - regardless of language (but yes COBOL isn’t a web language AFAIK)   The world is waiting with bated breath for Musk to improve Twitter. |
@hu_logic @rodhilton Are you referencing this conversation on Twitter Spaces? https://twitter.com/iamraisini/status/1605533081665945601