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Month: November 2022

Covid Update

November 19, 2022
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One of the ways I knew I was getting sick was that my ability to code dropped through the floor, so I’ve been fiddling with things from time to time as a test.

I’m still veering between faint positive tests and negative tests, but I got a wild hair and wrote some Python today. Credit for the underlying text and mechanics goes to Oliver Darkshire. I have taken the liberty of skipping assassination attempts when there’s no chance of success and decided that you can’t try an assassination attempt after an ending is reached.

./ldor.py
Lions are released onto the streets in an attempt to calm the population.
Flames: 1
Desolation: 1
Relocation: 0

You might want to assassinate the emperor, but there's no chance.

<snip>

Work continues on a house made of pure gold. It keeps melting.
Flames: 5
Desolation: 3
Relocation: 3

You might want to assassinate the emperor, but there's no chance.

There are no goods at market. "If you have no bread, then eat shit" is the word from the palace.
Flames: 5
Desolation: 4
Relocation: 3

Would you like to assassinate the emperor? [y/n]: n

The emperor sits in front of the flame and commands it to obey. It does not.
Flames: 6
Desolation: 4
Relocation: 4

Would you like to assassinate the emperor? [y/n]: y

You failed to assassinate the emperor with a roll of 11, and you are dead.

Obviously my play is sub-optimal. Don’t expect too much from me yet.

Notes: 2022-11-16

November 16, 2022
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Dave Troy is still killing me.

No, actually, I would not. I would expect Elon Musk (which is who he means) to maintain Twitter (which is what he means) in a functional state no matter how much it cost so that they could pile information chaos on top of economic chaos. Why would you stagger those two things? Blow up Twitter now and the world has time to recover.

Fucking terrible. At some point I’ll write up a general debunk.

Evernote sold itself to Bending Spoons. End of an era.

Still not totally recovered, so this is kind of low volume, but I wanted to get back on the horse.

Status Update: Covid

November 13, 2022
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Well, “no big Paxlovid bounce” remains true, but last week was certainly a small one. I tested positive again on Friday and the weekend was pretty much no fun; no huge symptoms but I’ve just been tired and a bit fuzzy. Testing negative again today, which hopefully will continue. S. is still fine. We’re masking diligently, we have house zones we keep to, and we have air purifiers running.

Notes: 2022-11-08

November 9, 2022
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Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully.

This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times.

Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way!

  • Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU — India’s going to be a huge headache.
  • This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly.
  • One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly. Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic and thinks people are leaving.
  • Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range.

OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far.

If I had to choose one word to capture the difference between engineering levels, I agree that impact is a good one. But there are a lot of different ways to have an impact. I kind of want to do career progression as a spider chart.

I like this story about enclaves and exclaves but what really caught my eye is the platform — this is apparently open to anyone to write this kind of post? In my copious spare time I wanna mess with it.

This program looks like a good entrance point to New Taiwan Cinema. I’ve seen Rebels of the Neon God and I liked it, although I’m not sure I have the right flavor of patience for this particular cinematic movement.

Twitter Layoff Thoughts

November 4, 2022
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Still got covid but thanks to Paxlovid or my natural recuperative energies or something, I’m feeling much better than I did on Tuesday. Let’s see how this goes.

The report described severe staffing challenges that included large numbers of unfilled positions on its Site Integrity team, one of three business units responsible for policing misinformation. It also highlighted a lack of language capabilities so severe that many content moderators resorted to Google Translate to fill the gaps. In one of the most startling parts of the report, a head count chart said Site Integrity had just two full-time people working on misinformation in 2021, and four working full-time to counter foreign influence operations from operatives based in places like Iran, Russia and China.

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Joseph Menn, and Cat Zakrzewski: Washington Post

Elon Musk just laid off half of Twitter to save money, and he will need those lawyers and engineers if he wants to handle the regulatory challenges ahead of him. Maybe he didn’t lay off the really critical employees, like the people supporting the infrastructure. After all:

“Even a temporary but overlapping outage of a small number of datacenters would likely result in the service [Twitter] going offline for weeks, months, or permanently.”

Mudge

Well.

Elon Musk has directed Twitter Inc’s teams to find up to $1 billion in annual infrastructure cost savings, according to two sources familiar with the matter and an internal Slack message reviewed by Reuters, raising concerns that Twitter could go down during high-traffic events like the U.S. midterm elections.

The company is aiming to find between $1.5 million and $3 million a day in savings from servers and cloud services, said the Slack message, which referred to the project as “Deep Cuts Plan.”

Sheila Dang, Paresh Dave and Katie Paul: Reuters

I’m feeling like I’m recovering, but boy do I ever feel for Twitter.

It’s too late for Twitter employees who were laid off, but I strongly recommend this guide. It’s valuable any time you’re thinking you might leave a company, under your own power or not.