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.
People all seem to believe Twitter is coal powered and some special magic is required to keep throwing coal into the oven. Even under such a ridiculous belief, I'm of the headspace that Elon did keep programmers in particular above all else. However if that's not the case, I think anyone with only modest programming experience can surmise that surely the Twitter source is not such a tangled and complicated mess that any new hire can't grok it in a few days and take over. Alas if somehow that also is not the case, then the ultimate failure of Twitter is the original management for letting the code become unmaintainable such that only a select few in the world can work it. And that would be zero fault of Elon's.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think you understand the fanout/fanin problems their product has.
Twitter's raison d'être 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.
I'm not saying that it's easy, just that most work could be done by much fewer people. I'm not talking out of my ass, I have been working on scalable systems for more than a decade.
I'm reminded of when, out of sheer curiosity, I once skimmed the proof for Fermat's last theorem by Andrew Willes. It was a monstrous work of which I could understand very little, but that clearly couldn't have been made by a team of a hundred mathematicians working together.
It's not that it isn't possible for a single person to do a monstrous amount of work, but that it takes an organization to do a breadth of things and maintain it over time.
I also don't disagree that some problems are self-inflicted. Large organizations breed large organization problems. But large organizations usually grow from seemingly simple requirements and compliance efforts.
My team certainly got a lot more done before we required tons of process, safety checks, data storage requirements, etc., where we now spend a non-trivial amount of HC as overhead and avoid building other things entirely.
> I'm not talking out of my ass, I have been working on scalable systems for more than a decade.
Ditto, friend. I currently work in an organization that builds a billion user product with far fewer than Twitter does. However, we also depend on a battalion of internal services, and other shared resources (HR, recruiting, PR, finance, ...). Twitter maintains their own datacenters, are among the few users of Aurora and Mesos at this point, and purpose-builds a lot of their infra for requirements we probably don't have a great grasp on.
Twitter, like many products, is like an iceberg: the majority of the complexity is underneath.
Well, I think we're pretty much on the same page regarding where the complexity comes from.
For Twitter though I'm thinking though that they should have put a lot more effort in simplifying the systems/processes/data they store. This might even mean pushing to remove some business requirements that a PM might have introduced just for a promotion to reduce software complexity.
If you don't reward people for refactoring and removing complexity, I don't think you can just blame it all on organic growth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No way. If I were a solitary hunter-gatherer I would still have the right to speak. In fact I seem to gain more rights the fewer other humans are around, so obviously those rights are not coming from other humans. That's how you know they're innate. But if I'm alone there's no one to hear my speech of course, which actually sounds pretty good right about now. I hate this "community," so why am I on here talking about Twitter, something I have never given a shit about? Well I got sucked in. I logged out of HN months ago as a "participant" for what I intended to be the last time, but then as a reader I ended up logging back in so I could use the "hide" feature (because I'm not interested in the vast majority of articles) and from there was gradually tempted into making a small comment here and there, and then today just being sick and tired of hearing about the delicate majesty of Twitter, well I guess I wanted to call bullshit. Twitter is shit and I DGAF about it or Elon. Anyway sorry I didn't read any of these replies, some of them actually look like good ones, and good-faith attempts to answer the question. All I did was reply to the shitty ones. I've asked YC to delete my account, couple times now, but they continue to not do it, so I take it that's not a thing that is done? So HN is just like any other social media site I guess - an addiction you have to break. And not enough hamsters running in the wheels that power it, to provide for an account deletion feature. Anyway I apologize for taking my hate of you guys, out on you guys. I know that sounds sarcastic as hell but I mean it literally. If I hate everybody, that's my problem to deal with. Which I will do by forgetting it all, probably. So have fun y'all and go outside.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)?
It happens quite often. I'm dealing with deprecation of db.r3 for example which will be enforced in a few months. (I easily find the public announcement - you get an alert if using it) The instance sizes don't cause that much problem as such, but you still need to spend time assessing the new performance, updating reservations, figuring out the transferability of the old ones, etc.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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. An immediate response by authoritarians is to push back against any resistance. In the USA, Republicans propose raising the voting age to 21 or even 28; in the UK, New voter ID laws discriminate against young people (old peoples' bus passes are acceptable at polling stations, but young persons' railcards are not), and in Iran we're seeing a striking display of inter-generational violence, as the ageing male authoritarian fundamentalists of the post-1979 revolution shoot young female demonstrators in the streets.
> Some years ago, when asked, SF author Bruce Sterling summed up the 21st century as "old people, living in cities, afraid of the sky". Well, Earth's human population is over 50% urban at this point, the sky is becoming bloody dangerous (climate!), and as for the old people ... the young are trying to adapt, the gerontocracy are pushing back, but eventually the current gerontocrats will die out.
Above is setting up a false dichotomy between Republican/old/white/male and Democrat/female/colour/etc (US version).
If you're voting a certain way you're rejecting white male supremacism. But, both parties are dominated by old white folks to a great extent, so, a vote either direction furthers the existing hegemony which is the Establishment Uniparty.
In recent times, the Uniparty has been weaponized against non-Uniparty of both Dissident/Populist Left & Right.
> they're voting against fascism
What a fraud! We're seeing ever closer ties between Uniparty/TheState and BigTech, and saying something like fascism is actually a cover for voting you don't like, or a non-existent enemy. But, the merger of UniParty and BigTech is alive and well, as BigTech works as the Official Censor of Record for Govt.
> 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
If anything, the trending is going in the opposite direction.
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.
Slightly offtopic and I expect to take some heat for this, but figured I'd ask:
Is it worth trying any other Stross works if I loathed Accelerando? to the point of being physically unable to finish it, which is pretty rare for me. I guess I'd say it felt overtargeted: the constant barrage of hacker culture namedrops, weebshit, BDSM, and similar make it feel like a masturbatory mary-sue fanfic, not a real novel. It's like: all this shit is theoretically right up my alley, but the presentation is so overbearing and weirdly self-serious (or did I miss the joke?) that the cringe factor was just overwhelming and I was left with the sensation that, somehow, this thing has got to be a false-flag work designed to make everything I enjoy look idiotic. I don't think I've had such a viscerally negative reaction to scifi since Honor Harrington.
I have no problems with Stephenson or other superficially similar authors.
> 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...
> 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.
Can you define “absurdly atypical” as a percentage? Because Democrats barely cleared 60-40 among Hispanics and Asians this midterm. I’m pretty sure that 40% doesn’t meaningfully care about climate change. Does it make sense to racialize an issue based on a split that’s basically dog people versus cat people?
And then there’s all the brown Democrats who don’t meaningfully care about climate change. Nearly all the brown people I know are democrats, and will say they think climate change is real (hell I would say that too) but that doesn’t stop them from buying an SUV.
The people who care deeply about climate change, enough to change their lifestyle, and vote on the issue, are overwhelmingly white. For example, this picture of Extinction Rebellion NYC has to be the whitest gathering in that city: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ce0b9b4c14cff... (I’m not cherry picking. That’s the first group picture on their website.)
It’s bullshit when white liberals try to appropriate the political capital of brown people to push issues that they care about more than any one else. It’s a form of political disenfranchisement.
"Extinction Rebellion" are a specific subgroup of environmentalists who intentionally get themselves arrested. I can see why they would lean towards paler skin.
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%).”
Question 41C. Hispanics care a bit more about the environment than white, but if you account for the median ages (28 for Hispanics, 42 for whites) and compare with the cross tab for age, the white-Hispanic gap seems mostly if not entirely age driven.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The cliché 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."
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.
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.
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.”
We can revisit this prediction in a few weeks to get a sense of how sound this author’s worldview is.