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Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks
Technology review ^ | 8th November 2022 | Chris stokes walker

Posted on 11/09/2022 9:16:35 AM PST by Cronos

On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.

Twitter introduced retweets in 2009, turning an organic thing people were already doing—pasting someone else’s username and tweet, preceded by the letters RT—into a software function. In the years since, the retweet and its distant cousin the quote tweet (which launched in April 2015) have become two of the most common mechanics on Twitter.

But on Friday, a few users who pressed the retweet button saw the years roll back to 2009. Manual retweets, as they were called, were back.

The return of the manual retweet wasn’t Elon Musk’s latest attempt to appease users. Instead, it was the first public crack in the edifice of Twitter’s code base—a blip on the seismometer that warns of a bigger earthquake to come.

...“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired

After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover

Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)

.... “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,”

(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy
KEYWORDS: bloggers; twitter
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The tech market in Texas is booming. These guys will find jobs. But Twitter is going to be affected
1 posted on 11/09/2022 9:16:35 AM PST by Cronos
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To: Cronos

This only makes sense if someone sabotaged the code by reverting it to a previous version.


2 posted on 11/09/2022 9:22:55 AM PST by Rightwing Conspiratr1
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To: Cronos

This doesn’t make any sense.

It’s not machinery that needs oil and maintenance. It’s code. It doesn’t degrade or ware out when someone isn’t watching over it.

Something tells me the harkonnen were busy planting sabotage devices in Arrakis


3 posted on 11/09/2022 9:23:15 AM PST by z3n (Kakistocracy)
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To: Cronos
As far as tech goes Elon is a mixed bag. SpaceX is going great. Tesla and Starlink are OK with problems. Hyperloop, The Boring Company, and that mind gadget aren't going anywhere.

It will be interesting to see into which list Twitter ends up.

4 posted on 11/09/2022 9:26:22 AM PST by who_would_fardels_bear (This is not a tagline.)
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To: Cronos

The fired twitters can always find jobs at Facebook. Oh wait...


5 posted on 11/09/2022 9:27:18 AM PST by Sirius Lee (They intend to murder us. Prep if you want to live and live like you are prepping for eternal life)
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To: Rightwing Conspiratr1; z3n
It's not just code but load management


6 posted on 11/09/2022 9:28:52 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: Sirius Lee

They’re just upset they can’t censor different opinions anymore.


7 posted on 11/09/2022 9:29:23 AM PST by No name given (Anonymous is who you’ll know me as. )
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To: Sirius Lee

Sabre technology, P&G and a host of other companies are hiring, but not in California


8 posted on 11/09/2022 9:29:51 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: Rightwing Conspiratr1
This only makes sense if someone sabotaged the code by reverting it to a previous version.

Having run SRE teams for a Fortune 100 company, this is not true. Things, even most recent builds, don't work without issues.
9 posted on 11/09/2022 9:33:20 AM PST by TexasGunLover
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To: z3n

To solve the bin-packing issues that come with RSVP auto-bandwidth, they implemented TE++, which, as traffic increases, creates additional LSPs and removes them when traffic drops off. This allows us to efficiently manage traffic between nodes while reducing the CPU burden of maintaining large amounts of LSPs.

here’s a link https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3031


10 posted on 11/09/2022 9:33:45 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: z3n
Something tells me the harkonnen were busy planting sabotage devices in Arrakis

That was my thought, as well. Someone planted a bomb that goes off if someone doesn't flip the secret kill switch.

11 posted on 11/09/2022 9:34:52 AM PST by gitmo (If your theology doesn't become your biography, what good is it?)
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To: Cronos

There is always some temporary technical pain due to the loss of “tribal knowledge” after a big layoff.


12 posted on 11/09/2022 9:36:08 AM PST by AndyTheBear
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To: Cronos

That stuff is fascinating to me.
I should have learned this stuff in the 2000s back when it would have really helped me out.


13 posted on 11/09/2022 9:36:20 AM PST by z3n (Kakistocracy)
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To: TexasGunLover

People don’t realise the extreme complexity of modern distributed microservices architecture.

My background and experience until recently was datawarehousjng then analytics and data science. But fir the past couple of years I’ve been managing programs with Java etc and am astounded by how things have changed since the last tine I looked at the transactional world (circa 2004). It’s insane. Wrapping my head around kubernetes is bad enough, but in a multi cloud environment, it’s supremely complicated


14 posted on 11/09/2022 9:37:17 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: z3n

It is fascinating. As I said above, I’m learning my way through this new world and adding in stuff like GDPR, data residency to the container world and microservices... just wow!


15 posted on 11/09/2022 9:39:19 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: Rightwing Conspiratr1

DING DING DING....

Easiest shit in the world for a code jockey to do.

F——king programmers... I remember those a-—holes in the 90’s laughing about the bugs they deliberately put into ACCOUNTING CODE to screw up sh——t and make certain they would have forever contracts...


16 posted on 11/09/2022 9:47:20 AM PST by L,TOWM (An upraised middle finger is my virtue signal.)
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To: TexasGunLover

See my post.

I know why there are “issues” with ‘even most recent builds’.

Job security.


17 posted on 11/09/2022 9:50:32 AM PST by L,TOWM (An upraised middle finger is my virtue signal.)
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To: L,TOWM

But this is about the network balancing. Not programming. Do you code?


18 posted on 11/09/2022 9:55:35 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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To: Cronos

The only way this article is correct is if Twitter’s systems are very, very badly architected.


19 posted on 11/09/2022 10:01:59 AM PST by dinodino ( )
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To: L,TOWM

Twitter runs on CentOS 7. This free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone comes to the end of its life at the end of June 2024. The leading choices for what to replace it with should be RHEL 9, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux. But instead of working on on that transition, what few system administrators Twitter has left are both trying to get the platform ready for Musk’s laundry list of new features and keeping it patched and up-to-date.

Remember also that centos needs in house linux support.

Besides which, it seems to use esoteric scaling solutions such as Apache Heron for stream processing and twemproxy for cache scaling. Granted this may be because their scaling needs are uniquely unpredictable.


20 posted on 11/09/2022 10:02:17 AM PST by Cronos (.)
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