[HN Gopher] Decision Fatigue
___________________________________________________________________
Decision Fatigue
Author : ZeroGravitas
Score : 104 points
Date : 2022-11-19 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| paganel wrote:
| I had remember this guy as being smarter, or at least that's how
| it appeared to me. I guess I was wrong.
| revskill wrote:
| This man has no idea on cryptocurrency. It's just the chip for
| the new "casino" game.
| anthonyskipper wrote:
| He wrote all the best scifi on cryptocurrencies.
| revskill wrote:
| Except for the "casino" viewpoint ?
| livueta wrote:
| hexis wrote:
| I've enjoyed a lot of what this author has written in the past
| but honestly I can't even understand half of this blog post.
| csours wrote:
| Well, it's not very long. This is my best effort summary.
|
| Paragraph 1: There's lots of news
|
| 2: US Conservatives [*], and other authoritarians around the
| world identify with and support Putin. Further they identify
| with and support fossil energy resource extraction (PREE).
|
| 3. PREE are afraid of renewables.
|
| 4. PREE + Authoritarians are doing propaganda
|
| 5. Authoritarians don't want young adults to vote.
|
| 6. The young adults are not in favor of authoritarianism.
|
| 7; The old authoritarians will die.
|
| Eight - Elon is in favor of disruptive change.
|
| 9ine ~ The disruptive change is going to have consequences.
|
| 10: No one likes Twitter.
|
| E11even: Bitcoin is OK, right guys? (sarcasm)
|
| * Not all US Conservatives are authoritarian, just the ones in
| charge right now. If you are a US Conservative reading this,
| then you are not an authoritarian, unless you wish to be
| identified as such.
| hexis wrote:
| The blessing and curse of this website is when I make a low
| effort complaint I get a very reasonable and useful response,
| which my complaint did not deserve. Aside from any other
| details, thanks for that csours.
|
| All that said, I still find this to be the kind of thing that
| probably feels very tight and compelling if you already
| believe it (and perhaps if you already know what "PREE"
| stands for), but for someone on the outside (like me) it just
| seems like a bunch of statements with broad mood affiliation
| and then the blog post ends.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| I wrote on this topic as well -
| https://lazydevstories.com/post/decisionfatigue/
| e1g wrote:
| FYI you are describing the pop-psych concept of "Ego depletion"
| which was in vogue ten years ago and then rigorously researched
| and thoroughly debunked five years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion#Reproducibility_...
| chelical wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's thoroughly debunked or rigorously
| researched. More studies need to be done. Decision fatigue is
| also a slightly different concept from ego depletion.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| No, you didn't. Sometimes you have to read more than the title
| to know what the topic is.
| [deleted]
| rammy1234 wrote:
| I loved yours better.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Slightly off topic, this post made me realize something about the
| way I read.
|
| Apparently, I scan the article first. I assume that the initial
| bit is "context-establishing intro", which I can probably skip.
| Every new paragraph that introduces some "unrelated" topic (in
| this case, photovoltaic panels, CO2, US midterms, ...), I will
| skip assuming that it's there to add depth to a point.
|
| Basically, I look for the point, the meat so to speak, and in
| this case I was confused when I hit the end and hadn't found it.
| Maybe that was somehow the point? I will never know because I
| closed the tab, in spite of the topic being something that I am
| personally interested in (and have written about too, in the
| past).
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You didn't read it and don't know what it was about, and you
| think that's what the author wanted? Why would that be "the
| point"?
| cagenut wrote:
| its like as "seo" has forced more and more chaff my defense
| mechanisms have developed to the point where its full on
| maladaptive to things that aren't content-marketing/blog-spam.
| gilleain wrote:
| It's less than 1000 words ...
|
| How can I say this? Would it not make sense to just /read/
| things this short?
| gilleain wrote:
| Having read it I'll summarise :
|
| * There are multiple news threads at the moment
|
| * As a result it's hard to pick just one to blog about
|
| * Therefore, this post if an attempt to tackle all of them
|
| That might explain why it's hard(er) to follow - it is a bit
| rambly, but that is partly the point.
| deepsun wrote:
| I noticed that difference between US and European (eastern) way
| of writing. US articles fight for your attention, whoever keeps
| it longer no matter what. European tend to state the point
| first, and then defend it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I can't speak for the European style, but I blame the New
| Yorker and NYT Magazine for this. Everyone wants to imitate
| their wandering impressionistic style because it's considered
| literary and "good".
|
| That said, this article absolutely does not seem to be an
| example of what I'm describing!
| codetrotter wrote:
| > something that I am personally interested in (and have
| written about too, in the past)
|
| Well, you can't just say that and not drop a link to it :p
| [deleted]
| _jal wrote:
| Expectations mismatch. That post was not a single-point essay,
| it was a pastiche of current event topics.
|
| You can try to make a pie crust with a hammer, but a rolling
| pin works much better.
| rayiner wrote:
| > It's looking since the US midterms like the new hotness in
| western hard right circles is going to be the war on youth. Young
| people (especially women and people of colour) overwhelmingly
| reject white male supremacism, for fairly obvious reasons:
| they're also more inclined to be worried about climate change
|
| Charlie Stross? Sounds like a white man. (Checks.) Yup.
|
| White liberals projecting their values onto "people of color" is
| maddening. Since they coined that phrase, their margins with non-
| whites have eroded, to the point the GOP just had their best year
| with minorities in decades. In Florida, where the GOP actually
| has a ground game targeted at Latinos (the youngest demographic
| in the country) they won the demographic by double digits (and
| not just Cubans). Now maybe the author can be forgiven for not
| knowing that since he appears to be British, but over the pond a
| significant defection of Indians from Labour has helped make an
| Indian Tory Prime Minister.
|
| As a card carrying "person of color" I've literally never heard a
| non-white person (who wasn't on TV) express concern about climate
| change. I'm sure they exist. But you just have to look at the
| polling to see that it's not a top concern:
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
| random314 wrote:
| > As a card carrying "person of color" I've literally never
| heard a non-white person (who wasn't on TV) express concern
| about climate change
|
| As a "card carrying" PoC you heard it from me now. So stop it
| with your uncle tom herman cain bullshit. Your POV is absurdly
| atypical for a brown immigrant and you must really stop trying
| to mislead others into believing that you speak for all brown
| people.
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Five seconds of searching shows the opposite of your anecdotal
| experience:
|
| _"We find that Hispanics /Latinos (69%) and African Americans
| (57%) are more likely to be Alarmed or Concerned about global
| warming than are Whites (49%). In contrast, Whites are more
| likely to be Doubtful or Dismissive (27%) than are
| Hispanics/Latinos (11%) or African Americans (12%)."_
|
| https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/race-and-...
| rayiner wrote:
| The median Hispanic is a generation younger than the median
| white person. His statement that young people care more about
| the environment is accurate. But it's a youth issue, not a
| "people of color" issue.
|
| And just because people say they care about the environment
| in the abstract doesn't mean they place a high priority on
| it. You can see this in actual voting behavior. The
| candidates that focus the most on the environment, like
| Elizabeth Warren, have less support from minorities than ones
| that focus more on the economy, like Biden.
| Tycho wrote:
| _I 'm not going to recap the arguments here, but I suspect
| twitter is likely to crash hard within the next few days to week
| or two (at most) and Musk has fired most of the people who can
| fix it and keep it running._
|
| We can revisit this prediction in a few weeks to get a sense of
| how sound this author's worldview is.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >Big Carbon must be absolutely terrified of better battery
| technologies
|
| Author discredits themselves here. Big oil rules half the world.
| They are terrified of nothing. It shows a deep misunderstanding
| of the way the world runs or perhaps more accurately how it is
| controlled.
| acdha wrote:
| Big oil _has_ political clout now but that doesn't mean they
| aren't aware that power can go away. The oil companies started
| funding climate change denial in the 1970s for that very
| reason.
|
| There's are interesting splits here, too: for the 20th century
| the interests of the oil and car companies overlapped but now
| they've diverged with EVs, and there's even a market
| opportunity for EV makers to turn on their former partners
| trying to gain the environmentally conscious market. I think
| the fossil fuel industry leaders are keenly aware of those
| inflection points where partners will leave them.
| civilized wrote:
| If Big Oil / Fossil Fuels don't fear renewables, why have they
| spent so much funding climate deniers?
| narrator wrote:
| Antipope predicting the imminent demise of coal as an electricity
| source is a bit premature. Solar panels are a tiny fraction of
| global energy supply and will remain so. The scale of energy
| provided by fossil fuels is enormous. This article has a lot of
| good graphs and charts. Nuclear power is the only thing that's
| going to make a dent in coal and natural gas usage.
|
| https://bestpracticeenergy.com/2020/08/26/energy101-electric...
| martinpw wrote:
| Actually what struck me from your link is how _fast_ renewables
| are growing.
|
| Your linked article refers to the US only, but from that
| article, wind was 7% of power generation and solar was 2% in
| 2019.
|
| By comparison, in the first six months of 2022 the equivalent
| number for wind is 11.5% and for solar is 5%:
| https://electrek.co/2022/08/25/us-renewables-first-half-2022...
|
| So wind+solar have gone from 9% to 16.5% of US electricity
| production in 2.5 years? That is a fairly remarkable growth
| rate, assuming I am not misinterpreting the data somehow.
| georgebarnett wrote:
| The change will happen slowly, and then very quickly.
|
| Look to Australia where renewables are being installed at very
| high rates.
|
| There are many areas where they are dominating the power mix
| for large portions of the day.
| camdenlock wrote:
| This is so one-sided, it's practically propaganda.
|
| The author rails against but ONE of the major threats we face in
| our economic & political systems, while actively embracing the
| evil authoritarian beast just across the way.
|
| I have a hard time respecting anyone who so easily sacrifices
| individual liberty in order to chase out the bogeymen of the
| moment.
| campground wrote:
| "...the evil authoritarian beast just across the way"
|
| Can you say what this is referring to, because I've read the
| piece and I can't figure it out.
| camdenlock wrote:
| Unelected bureaus of experts imposing their own enlightened
| social vision on a captive citizenry. Doesn't get much more
| authoritarian than that.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm curious what is being enforced, from your perspective.
|
| I'm familiar with the social conservatives who believe that
| what the US gov't is doing with regards to marriage amounts
| to an infringement on their rights. Not sure if that's the
| argument you are trying to make here.
| camdenlock wrote:
| I'm broadly referring to the project of modern
| progressivism, a tidy summary of which could be: "We will
| have an ideal society when we rid ourselves of the
| unintelligent in our way."
| campground wrote:
| If by "rid ourselves of the unintelligent" you mean
| improving public education, then yes, that is a goal.
| It's a weird way to put it though.
| acdha wrote:
| Can you be more specific, in particular where you think
| he's calling for that? For example, he's praising young
| people for voting en masse which seems like the polar
| opposite.
| jefurii wrote:
| > This is so one-sided, it's practically propaganda.
|
| What's wrong with that? He's not trying to be a journalist in
| some mainstream publication (both-side-ism is suspect anyway).
| You read Stross to get his take on things, from his point of
| view.
| camdenlock wrote:
| Suspect how?
| edent wrote:
| The cliche is "Someone tells you it is raining. Someone
| tells you it is sunny. A journalist's job is not to report
| both sides; it's to look out of the _expletive_ window. "
| rootusrootus wrote:
| The idea that both sides are equally bad. That is
| demonstrably false.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > The other striking news of the week is Elon Musk's epic flaming
| death spiral at the helm of Twitter.
|
| I am old, and admittedly, my oldest grandchild cares more about
| Twitter than I do.
|
| Maybe one of you here can enlighten me. Why does Musk get so much
| attention? Why is Twitter so important? Perhaps this is
| incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let people who want to
| use Twitter use it, and those that don't, don't use it?
|
| I keep hearing about freedom of speech, toxicity on social media.
| Is it unreasonable for people who don't like Twitter to just not
| use it anymore?
|
| I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate Musk.
| And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these people.
|
| Mainly, it feels like Twitter and FB have somehow become the
| defining issues of our time. Maybe I'm just stupid, but I don't
| understand why. Why this obsession with Musk?
|
| I've gone through layoffs several times in my career. As has my
| older son, as has my sister, my wife. So Musk bought a company,
| took it private, and fired a ton of folks. Has corporate America
| never had layoffs? Have we never had layoffs where honest, hard
| working people were needlessly fired, because of market
| conditions, short sightedness and greed on part of their business
| execs, or some combination of both?
|
| I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless drama,
| and it's self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges we have
| as a society.
|
| I saw a Twitter conversation between Democrat and Republican
| House members. Absolutely shameful how these people hurl insults
| at each other, try to respond with sly, "witty" insults. Maybe
| I'm the one being the drama queen, but it feels like Rome is
| starting to burn and we have no one to blame this time but
| ourselves.
|
| End of rant from this old goat.
| EFreethought wrote:
| Given Musk's actions WRT buying and owning Twitter over the
| past few months, I think this is one set of layoffs that are
| solely due to the actions of one person. He agreed to buy
| Twitter for a high price (because he thought it would be funny
| to buy it for a price with a weed reference), and now other
| people are having their lives turned upside down because this
| guy is not as smart as everyone thought.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Musk is getting attention because unlike many people who take
| over a company he doesn't seem to have a good plan for what to
| do, or rather he had plans (charging for the verified tick
| etc.) which people told him would backfire, and they did so he
| has had to reverse them with extraordinary speed.
|
| So now he needs to work out what to do with a vastly reduced
| engineering team, and loss in confidence from some advertisers
| because of the fall out from his first plan, and his
| communication style isn't really helping him through all this.
|
| Whether Twitter is a good thing overall I can't say. It has
| many interesting groups of people on it in both my professional
| life and in my hobbies outside of that, and if it goes down I
| think it will be the first time we've seen a social network
| fail while still large and active.
| anon7725 wrote:
| > Why is Twitter so important?
|
| Despite all of the drama and toxicity, there is still no place
| like it. It's the first place to turn for realtime analysis and
| updates for unfolding events. It's the only credible global
| town square where you can see your favourite sci-fi author
| interact with an infectious disease specialist, a machine
| learning expert and an independent journalist.
|
| I have a complicated relationship with it - often leaving for
| months to years at a time, but usually coming back in some
| capacity. It's messy and reflective of the full breadth of
| human discourse, positive and negative.
| [deleted]
| jrumbut wrote:
| Musk rightly draws attention because he's in control of a lot
| of money and companies that are significant players in
| important industries (including defense). Some of the interest
| is prurient, and he plays games with it, but he is a legitimate
| subject of inquiry.
|
| As far as the members of Congress go, sly insults is an upgrade
| from a lot of what has happened the last few years.
|
| And we have a tendency to remember politics as being gentler
| than it was. Check out this absolutely childish exchange from
| the 1980s:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1985/03/06/...
|
| It's easy to dig up any number of these, which used to be
| buried in the back pages of a newspaper rather than playing out
| and being memorialized on the web.
| muricula wrote:
| > Has corporate America never had layoffs?
|
| Anyone who entered the tech industry in past decade+ has never
| experienced layoffs at this scale before. Young techies have
| experienced good times and high salaries. And the transition
| was quick -- just two quarters ago big companies were hiring
| techies by the hundred, now they're laying them off by the
| thousands. A lot of posters here assumed that in the worst case
| if their current gig failed they could go work on boring
| software for a year or so before finding something new, but now
| there's a lot more competition for that plan B job. And heaven
| help you if you're on a visa, have a health problem, or have a
| family -- could you be laid off next, and if so where do you
| go?
| dkokelley wrote:
| > Why does Musk get so much attention? Why is Twitter so
| important?
|
| I see it as an established group who mostly benefited from
| Twitter (think journalists and traditional media who had great
| reach and influence through the platform) fearing that their
| power will erode under the new regime.
|
| This is already playing out. Anyone who pays a small fee can be
| "verified" (a privilege previously reserved for the elect few),
| opposition/critical voices are returning from banishment, and
| Twitter is reconsidering which people/tweets/views are
| amplified or suppressed.
|
| The reason why Musk/Twitter are "so important" is because those
| who stand to lose want us to believe so.
|
| > I worry that this country is hyper addicted to needless
| drama, and it's self imposed and obfuscating bigger challenges
| we have as a society.
|
| Agreed. There are players and fans. The players (Musk, media)
| have stakes that matter. The fans (you, me, anyone who roots
| for one side or the other) may have ideological stakes, but
| it's mostly tabloids for nerds.
| Yoric wrote:
| Interesting point of view.
|
| I'd venture an alternative answer.
|
| > Why does Musk get so much attention?
|
| Musk is considered the wealthiest person in the world.
| Watching someone wealthy fail or perhaps pull it off against
| all odds is a pastime usually reserved to TV dramas.
|
| He's also an eccentric, with a considerable ego and a well-
| known internet troll. He's easy to make fun of. Given how
| freely he distributes insults and snipish takedowns, he's
| someone many people want to make fun of, for better or for
| worse. Oh, and his communication style, which could be
| described as straight to the point or impressively naive, has
| as many fans as haters.
|
| > Why is Twitter so important?
|
| Because a non-negligible fraction of the world gets their
| news from Twitter, directly or indirectly. Also, because
| Twitter has become a vector for propagandists of all sides
| and that this propaganda, by all signs, works very well.
|
| > Perhaps this is incredibly ignorant to say, but why not let
| people who want to use Twitter use it, and those that don't,
| don't use it?
|
| I don't think anybody disagrees with that.
|
| > I feel the loudest voices are anti Twitter. Or they hate
| Musk. And Elon Musk seems to rather enjoy trolling these
| people. > [...] > I saw a Twitter conversation between
| Democrat and Republican House members. Absolutely shameful
| how these people hurl insults at each other, try to respond
| with sly, "witty" insults. Maybe I'm the one being the drama
| queen, but it feels like Rome is starting to burn and we have
| no one to blame this time but ourselves.
|
| I don't know about other people. The reason _I_ loathe
| Twitter is exactly because of that. The medium itself is not
| the problem but the algorithms employed by the former
| direction of Twitter increased engagement by encouraging
| flamewars _and_ access to addictive content.
|
| Could Musk do something good about that? Anything is
| possible, but none of the signs are encouraging at this early
| stage.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| acdha wrote:
| Charlie Stross is not anti-white - unsurprisingly, since he's
| white by most standards[1] - and his actual statement is
| different from yours in a very telling way: he opposes white
| supremacy, as you'd expect both because he's generally decent
| but also because he's a Scot of Jewish descent whose family
| tree was brutalized by an earlier batch of white supremacists.
|
| If opposition to white supremacy makes you uncomfortable that's
| a great time to reconsider who you identify as peers and
| whether that's really the side you want to be on.
|
| 1. Look at the picture on
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| That's not really a gotcha or a surprise to anyone, most
| people preaching anti-white rhetoric are white.
|
| Do you remember all those times politicians introduced laws
| to ban encryption in order "to fight pedophiles"? If
| opposition to pedophilia makes you uncomfortable ... and so
| on and so on.
| acdha wrote:
| Again, opposition to white supremacy is not anti-white.
| Your statement relies on not distinguishing between the
| two, which I hope is unintended.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| As should have been made obvious by my second statement,
| it's quite common for people and organizations to use
| labels that are difficult to argue against in order to
| shield behaviours or beliefs that are otherwise
| reprehensible .
|
| Some examples:
|
| Governments trying to forbid consumer encryption and
| labeling their laws as "anti-pedophile".
|
| People promoting racist ideas and calling themselves
| anti-racist.
|
| People opposing white-supremacy while arguing all white
| people are innately racist and perpetuate white-
| supremacy.
| acdha wrote:
| Can you point to a specific statement where you believe
| that is happening here?
| cassepipe wrote:
| The thing is anyone can claim the views one does not like are
| the product of a propaganda machine working for the elites. The
| thing is the elites do exist and do have imho too much power,
| the one granted by big money when not kept in check by counter
| powers
|
| But truth is there are diverging views within the elites on
| what society should look like (except for the maintaining of
| the the economical system that put them in power) and they are
| ready to harness that power in order to make their views
| matter. On the side, ordinary people, (not millionaires that
| is) do also have views on what society should look like and
| when in number also try to make their views count.
|
| Now, tell me, who are the most likely to be defending their own
| interests rather than being manipulated ? People blindly
| following a billionaire that tells them everyone but him is
| corrupt and that the enemy is going to eat their babies or
| people demonstrating in the streets for the right to exist
| without being killed, violented or in order to have a wage they
| can live with ?
|
| Let me know when the next US election isn't between a
| billionaire and a multimillionaire.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Why would Twitter be constantly in danger of crashing without
| human intervention? Isn't it just a bunch of software that just
| runs? If not, why was it not properly engineered, and who needs
| to be fired for that?
|
| Musk is embarrassing as always but he's right about one thing -
| engineers are costly, and for years now, the problem with Twitter
| as a business has been the huge outlay for engineering talent.
| And for what? No effect I can discern; the platform is clearly
| not a force for good in the world, first of all, but even looking
| at it strictly as a product, the product in fact gets worse every
| year and they're constantly _discontinuing_ functionalities. So
| the whole "what has your code accomplished" show, it's inept but
| I know where it's coming from.
| sbergot wrote:
| At scale everything is more complex. The hardware that runs the
| software can fail. Ddos happen. Network issues. A building
| catches fire. Etc etc.
|
| Sometimes you have automatic recovery. Sometimes you don't.
| ineedasername wrote:
| This may come across snarky, but it's unintended. Instead I'm
| trying to set out a sort of mental framework for answering the
| question from (slightly less than) first principles.
|
| That's a bit like asking "why does any large internet service
| need infrastructure maintenance?"
|
| If you can't immediately see the answer in twitter's case, then
| you either haven't yet applied your knowledge of how large
| cloud services function and need maintenance to keep from
| cascading failures, or you don't have that knowledge in which
| case the twitter case can't be answered without explaining
| first the general case of how any large software system needs
| regular oversight. But then, I think that even if you can't
| think of an answer for Twitter, you can probably figure out a
| little of the answer for the general question.
|
| You can start with asking yourself another question: why would
| Twitter (or any very large software project) pay $Millions for
| maintenance that isn't required? Is there collective delusion
| on the topic? Or has twitter hit upon the absolute perfectly
| engineered platform ever? If the answer to either of those is
| "no" then a twitter system failure is only a matter of time.
|
| How much time is a matter of some debate. The first time
| something hits a quota or something of that sort that requires
| a human input to ensure automatic allocations don't
| accidentally get insane could be a pebble. Or maybe the first
| pebble is a minor unpatched security flaw, but twitter is a
| very sweet high profile target... whatever the first pebble is,
| it makes a slightly worse issue or multiple additional pebbles
| much easier, and you enter cascading failure. They generally
| happen slowly relative to the proportion of a total collapse,
| and then very very quickly.
|
| So another question to ask is how much of twitter's infra teams
| were pure bloat, how much were excess capacity necessary to
| cover average amounts of employee vacation/sick/leave that goes
| on at any time, etc, and how elastic the remaining staff can be
| (putting in extra hours, working in areas that are secondary
| skills because no one else is available) and for how long
| they're willing to do it before burnout or better job offers
| with less stress and overtime, whether staff losses have
| already hit a critical mass to make this inevitable...
|
| But I think this gives a general sense of why it can't tick
| over forever on its own, or at least some inroads into thinking
| about the answer.
| david422 wrote:
| > Why would Twitter be constantly in danger of crashing without
| human intervention?
|
| Kindof true. Platforms need a ton of maintenance - but usually
| the fires needing to be put out are because of other human
| changes.
|
| Stuff like disk space, certificate expiration etc etc will
| bring down a platform without maintenance though.
| acdha wrote:
| Twitter is a complex application which serves a ridiculous
| amount of traffic to people around the world. That kind of
| system is constantly changing in response to user activity -
| it's done in the same way that a garden is done. Musk just laid
| off the landscapers so what's about to happen isn't immediate
| but is inevitable.
| nilsbunger wrote:
| Technical and support teams are needed to keep a site like this
| running globally. Good examples of the work from an SRE:
| https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/15935411779656785...
|
| Other things which aren't necessarily needed to _technically_
| keep the code running, but without which you won 't have an
| operating service:
|
| * Sales and account management teams to keep and grow
| advertiser revenue, and all the support services around them
| (marketing, integration, etc)
|
| * Moderation teams to keep illegal or dangerous content off the
| platform, and implement your moderation policy which you need
| for many reasons including appeal to advertisers
|
| * Abuse teams to respond to the latest DoS / hacking /
| impersonation / harrassment / etc.
|
| * Legal and ops teams to understand and implement compliance
| with laws, regulatory filings, etc across 150+ countries, and
| in some countries like the US, individual state variations.
|
| You tell me how many people you can do this with at the scale
| of Twitter. I think > 1000 people are a skeleton staff just to
| keep the lights on.
| csours wrote:
| > Why would Twitter be constantly in danger of crashing without
| human intervention? Isn't it just a bunch of software that just
| runs? If not, why was it not properly engineered, and who needs
| to be fired for that?
|
| I can write software that runs today. I don't know about
| tomorrow. Disks crash, other services crash, networks go down.
| No matter how competent your Byzantine Generals are, sometimes
| you have to recover data that was in-flight during a crash
| because disks and networks don't just crash, they slow down and
| they lose packets and sectors.
|
| Add on security patches and changes in architecture (I'm
| looking at some Java 1.3 code that runs INSIDE an Oracle DB
| right now, ask me how I feel about not updating your
| architecture). You may say that architecture doesn't change
| that fast. If the business is successful, it will happen
| eventually.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| You need to:
|
| * Apply security patches - there's thousands of dependencies.
|
| * Manage hardware/cloud resources according to volume of data
| you need to handle.
|
| * React to the changes in operating systems/browsers you run
| on.
|
| * Fix bugs - they are there, because simply there's not enough
| time, money, and need to write "perfect" software. Competition
| will not do that and will beat you to the market.
|
| There's no internet connected software, that can "just run",
| because world around is changing and you must catch up.
|
| Fells a bit weird to explain that on HN :-|
| mihaic wrote:
| What your saying is true for almost every web app. I don't
| see any reason to justify Twitter's complexity that requires
| 1000 engineers. Scale is such a weak argument since their
| entire product paralelizez very easily.
| Xorlev wrote:
| I don't think you understand the fanout/fanin problems
| their product has.
|
| Twitter's raison d'etre is allowing folks with millions of
| follows to see their posts in near real time, then monetize
| it with ads. That means analytics, billing, and more. From
| pretty basic requirements you can create a huge amount of
| work, especially when you're managing your own
| infrastructure.
| [deleted]
| rdiddly wrote:
| If you're gonna condescend like in that last line, your
| spelling ought to be impeccable.
|
| Security patches... so 10 full-time engineers ought to take
| care of that?
|
| "Thousands of dependencies" was a mistake. The ideal is
| minimal complexity.
|
| Any browser or OS decides to commit a breaking change (rare),
| you bring in contractors.
|
| Scaling up and down (and out and in) is handled for you
| automatically by cloud services now without anyone lifting a
| finger. "Fells" weird to be explaining that on HN.
|
| Bottom line, you don't need thousands of engineers to keep
| Twitter running for "the next few days to week or two (at
| most)."
|
| When has the world NOT been changing? The leadership of
| Twitter changed also.
| MAGZine wrote:
| twitter is mostly run in their own datacenters, and does
| not have autoscaling. so capacity overall is more or less
| fixed, though how much capacity is given to each service
| seems to be human adjusted.
|
| the lack of autoscaling at twitter, imo, is worrisome as it
| sort of hints that the system might not be as mature in the
| self-healing department as compared to other large tech
| companies. time will tell.
|
| you are right though, you don't need thousand of engineers
| to keep twitter running a few weeks. you also don't need a
| driver for a car driving a straight highway (until it
| bends). how many engineers are needed for maintenance? who
| knows. I don't think we have answers, we just have what
| elon decided.
|
| disclaimer: facts based on twitter threads/online reading,
| not a twitter employee or anyone with first-hand inside
| knowledge.
| acdha wrote:
| By what I've heard from people who worked there they do
| have autoscaling but it's services running on things like
| Mesos clusters instead of someone else's data centers.
| That can lead to some real cost savings but requires
| people to run, and most of them just left the building.
| site-packages1 wrote:
| This is all needed to continue to iterate on software. It's
| not as needed for the ossified state Twitter has been in for
| many years, as the parent pointed out. Acknowledge there is
| _some_ work needed, maybe refreshing certs (though software
| systems I have built have always been set up to do that
| automatically), apply security patches, keep an eye on
| dashboards. But this is a job for a skeleton team, not 7500
| engineers or whatever. It's honestly kind of sad it took that
| many people to basically "keep Twitter up" all these years.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| I believe that 7500 is total headcount, not just engineers,
| but yeah software development can be terribly inefficient,
| when all problems are solved by throwing money at them,
| like VC funded startups like to do.
|
| We'll see what happens now, when there seems to be a
| drought.
| jrumbut wrote:
| There are also integrations with partners, new regulatory
| requirements, changes to support ownership's new priorities
| (and to undo the old priorities).
|
| I don't work at Twitter but these things happen at every
| business.
| monkeydust wrote:
| As as PM my headspace is very much split on this.
|
| On one hand I totally get your arguments, it's what I would
| expect my engineering team to say and they are often right.
|
| On the other hand I am watching this space utterly intrigued
| if somehow he manages to pull it off.
|
| If he does it might say more about the engineering team left
| than him though.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| To be clear - I don't argue that it's impossible to run
| Twitter with smaller crew. Hard to say without a look at
| the internals, but if I had to bet - yeah, probably there
| are inefficiences. But OP was coming from "you can leave it
| and it will just run by itself" angle, which is very much
| different thing.
| meaydinli wrote:
| You are making the same mistake Elon is making. You don't know
| enough about the subject to even be aware of how much you don't
| know and what you are missing. You might be very competent in
| another subject, but that doesn't grant you the right to write
| in such a demeaning tone.
| rdiddly wrote:
| I don't need to be granted that right, I was born with it,
| just like you with your far more demeaning and ignorant
| comment about things (me) you know nothing about.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Sorry, you aren't born with any rights. Those that you may
| appear to have were granted to you by a society. Never
| forget that
| briandon wrote:
| Your view on individual rights is far from universal.
| Never forget that.
|
| "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
| are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
| with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
| Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
|
| https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-
| transcrip...
|
| Or, alternatively:
|
| "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and
| rights." (from Article 1)
|
| https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-
| huma...
| [deleted]
| jimjimjim wrote:
| And if society collapses and whatever hellscape that
| replaces it withholds those "rights" from you?
| acdha wrote:
| You have a right to speak. You do not have the right to be
| taken seriously when you're speaking outside of your areas
| of expertise.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| A little shocking to see a comment saying 'why does it take
| work to keep a website running' at the top of a comment section
| here.
| vsareto wrote:
| I think people are just surprised that it takes so much work
| because we thought things would get easier as time went on.
| It's actually the opposite though as more technologies have
| been developed. There's way more things involved in the stack
| and all of those can interact and break in their own
| interesting ways.
|
| There is also just frankly more traffic to serve because of
| mobile devices, so more things break at scale.
| acdha wrote:
| I'd also note that expectations have increased, too.
| Consider for example how much people expect to just work
| when they type text into a search box, when the corpus is
| gigantic, in many languages, and constantly updating.
| kweingar wrote:
| > Why would Twitter be constantly in danger of crashing without
| human intervention? Isn't it just a bunch of software that just
| runs? If not, why was it not properly engineered, and who needs
| to be fired for that?
|
| I would encourage you to read about "site reliability
| engineers" and the work that they do, in case you haven't heard
| of them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Isn't it just a bunch of software that just runs?
|
| the fact aside that bug-free "just a bunch of software" of the
| size that serves half a billion people has yet to be invented.
| All software has the nasty habit of running on hardware and
| real infrastructure and that at the very least needs some
| serious maintenance.
|
| If your standard for proper engineering is that it runs without
| human intervention at all I can't think of any complex system
| in the world that fits that description.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Twitter is hosted on aws they don't maintain their own
| hardware. This is a cope because Elon is clearly right. An
| application where prod begins to get buggy just because it's
| left alone is poorly engineered. There should be CI/CD and
| prod should be extremely stable with the exception of non-
| trivial bugs that should not just start popping up by the
| barrel because a couple of weeks without new pushes.
| Yoric wrote:
| I work in an unrelated company. Even without new software
| pushes and even for stable code, we need maintenance all
| the time.
|
| A few examples:
|
| - security holes discovered in the OS requires an emergency
| update, which requires lots of testing because updating the
| OS has a bad tendency of breaking even stable software
| (I've encountered that issue a few weeks ago);
|
| - security holes discovered in third-party
| libraries/frameworks/..., which requires updating, re-
| testing, re-releasing stuff - and fixing whatever breaks
| because of undocumented changes in said
| library/framework/...;
|
| - security holes discovered in your own code, of course,
| which also requires updating, reviewing, re-testing, re-
| releasing;
|
| - monitoring your stack for misbehaviour, which could
| indicate a software problem (bug? license expired? SSL key
| expired?), a hardware problem, a resource problem (disk
| full?), an attack, or in the case of Twitter, one of your
| clients (the companies that build ads) misusing your tools
| and attacking you by accident;
|
| - ... and once the misbehavior is detected, actually
| investigating and fixing the issue.
|
| Sure, you can hop along for a while without anybody to
| handle these cases. But how long? Keeping in mind that
| Twitter is a high-value target for state-sponsored
| attackers (among others) all over the world, so any
| weakness will be probed and exploited mercilessly.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I run an engineering department so I'm not speaking from
| ignorance here. 0 days and bugs making it into prod is a
| red herring that isn't part of the discussion. We're
| talking about a production platform outright failing
| because it's a sinking ship being kept with duct tape.
|
| If Twitter is failing that easily, these engineers
| deserve to be laid off
| kweingar wrote:
| I would be interested to hear which web apps with
| 100,000,000+ users would run fine for weeks/months
| without hiccups if 80% of the people running it left
| overnight.
| Yoric wrote:
| Well, I can only speak from experience. I've encountered
| all of the points above just during the last 3 weeks or
| so. I've seen critical infrastructures in former
| companies being taken down by an expired SSL key or a
| full hard drive or a power outage or a DDoS.
|
| Does your engineering department have a solution to all
| these problems that does not require human beings? Or are
| we talking of different things?
| detaro wrote:
| Twitter is not "hosted on AWS". They have started to use
| various cloud providers (AWS and GCP, at least at various
| times), in combination with their own hardware.
| anon7725 wrote:
| > This is a cope because Elon is clearly right. An
| application where prod begins to get buggy just because
| it's left alone is poorly engineered.
|
| Twitter is a top-5 near realtime web property. It has an
| enormous attack surface across nearly the entire spectrum
| of cybersecurity threats. It's hosted at least in part on
| prem. Swathes of it are programmed in Scala, which is a
| minority language that is hard to hire for. It makes money
| through ads, which involves significant operational
| complexity at scale. Its recommendations and trending
| features are built on machine learning models which
| themselves require data engineering pipelines to deliver
| continuous updates. It's been in continuous development for
| 16 years, with an accumulation of accidental complexity
| (aka tech debt) in addition to the ever-expanding essential
| complexity inherent in its functionality.
|
| Those of us who have taken an oncall shift in the world's
| most complex distributed systems environments are just
| shaking our heads at some of the drivel in these comments.
| viraptor wrote:
| Even running on AWS is not completely isolating you from
| hardware related changes. For example AWS is retiring both
| old instance classes for databases and Aurora 1 soon. This
| is a multi week migration project with a hard deadline for
| me and it's not even a huge company/service. For Twitter I
| suspect that kind of deprecation would take month(s) to
| fully roll out.
| Dunedan wrote:
| That's surprising to me, given how much effort AWS put
| into emulating old instances types using newer instances
| to still be able to offer instances with the
| characteristics of old instance types to customers. [1]
|
| Do you have additional information about that you can
| share (maybe an announcement regarding this made by AWS)?
|
| [1]: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2021/11/xen-on-
| nitro-aws-n...
| analog31 wrote:
| All sufficiently complex control systems run in failure mode
| (partial or full manual override) approaching 100% of the time.
|
| For instance this is why there needs to be a multi tiered
| (culminating with HN front page exposure) process for fixing
| automated account cancellations and app store rejections.
| Proverbial wrote:
| Was never a fan of Stross. He strikes me as one of those
| extremely online types who always has something politically
| charged to say about current events. One of those ultra geeks who
| reads too much sci-fi and always has a hundred tabs open in their
| browser.
| mod wrote:
| > Elon Musk's epic flaming death spiral at the helm of Twitter
|
| I keep hearing this, but...is it true? Doesn't this viewpoint
| rely on a prediction that it's going to actually crash and be
| unrecoverable?
| wolf550e wrote:
| The system was built with the assumption that you're going to
| have SREs, lots of them, with experience babysitting the
| systems, to keep them working. SREs were cheaper than building
| a system that can handle lots of unexpected things without any
| SREs. They have lost 7 out of 8 people, and lots of systems
| have 0 remaining employees who can be usefully on call for
| them. With so much institutional knowledge lost, they will not
| be able to handle the kind of issues they used to handle before
| with merely hiccups.
| mod wrote:
| This seems like a prediction. It also seems reliant on an
| idea that he can't hire new people.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| It's certainly going to be interesting. I'm very curious about
| how this plays out. Musk has achieved a lot and his companies
| have done incredible things.
|
| If you read Reddit or ironically twitter, he is some kind of
| clueless buffon, yes I get he is making likely a lot of
| mistakes and fairly crazy things, but it requires somewhat
| crazy thinking to achieve somewhat crazy results. Of course he
| could completely crash and burn too.
|
| This is going to be very interesting if things work out for
| Musk, it will be very telling to look back at all the
| naysayers, everyone thinks they know better from the arm chair,
| lets see what results Musk is able to achieve before we jump to
| anything.
| Yoric wrote:
| Yes, on the one side, his own declarations sound absolutely
| clueless, not to mention highly self-contradictory. On the
| other side, if he does manage to turn back Twitter into a
| lean and mean startup _and_ retain the Twitter brand, he 'll
| have done something impressive. Plus Musk has somehow become
| a politically loaded name, so everything you read or hear
| could have been twisted by one side or the other.
|
| Regardless, right now, I'm having so much fun watching that
| soap opera unfold!
| bobleeswagger wrote:
| Seems like the culture at twitter has been screwed for quite
| awhile. It's not going to unscrew itself in any short time
| frame, but the mainstream view compels us to think otherwise
| for some reason.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
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