National Posting Service, Part 1 (feat. Mike Isaac)
It's the free one!
This week, we're talking to Mike Isaac of the New York Times about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. And, let's be real, his desire to be loved, his insane right wing tendencies, the slow grinding of the platform into the ground, and the bizarre tech-libertarian freak thought undergirding all of the PayPal Mafia's conception of the world. This is part one of two!
Comments (19)
Elon musk tulpa is too fuckin cursed
Twitter is no longer written in Ruby as it was difficult to make it scale. Nowadays, AFAIK, most of the back end is written in a language called Scala. For all the site’s faults, the Twitter engineering team have done some impressive work in keeping a site that gets circa 500 million new tweets per day usable
I've also heard that it's one of the few big Scala projects, with the implication being that they're not going to be able to easily replace all the people they just fired with equally skilled people.
Regarding the conversation about Twitter’s & other tech companies’ tendency to fix problems in the short term, this is indeed an industry-wide problem and there’s even a name for it: technical debt. Every decision to fix a problem in the short term at the risk of future problems down the road is akin to taking a loan that must be paid eventually. If the decision is made with that in mind, it can work, just as taking out a loan judiciously can help a company; but if the first instinct always is to favour the quick & dirty solution, eventually the technical debt becomes unmanageable and the code becomes impossible to to fix bugs or extend without the risk of introducing more bugs
Remarkably, we can say that a lot of tech companies treat tech debt exactly like they treat real debt: they don't think it actually costs anything until reality reasserts itself and everything is completely fucked. I suppose there might be an interesting question in whether the metaphor of 'debt' ended up backfiring in an era of free money. Beyond that, there's a deep well of content to draw upon in the realm of how Agile development practices create a self-reinforcing culture of rushing and how the profit imperative renders tech debt an inevitability. Every moment of dev time spent on development that isn't absolutely necessary is viewed as lost profit. There are development practices that try to position themselves as opposed to this tendency, but the truth is that once they hit the ground in development, those practices become subject to the same constraints. CAP theory be damned, there's four options: fast, correct, consistent, and profitable and while you still get to select two, you're always selecting profit first.
oh yeah I remember forever ago when twitter had problems with their Ruby on Rails being too hard to work on and slow and started porting services to Scala and it made their stuff even more slow and hard to work with and had to scale it back. the programming language landscape of 10 years ago was pretty weird
Re the discussion around 42:00 -- keep in mind that no small part of the software developer workforce comprises young, middle-class, socially awkward, politically illiterate white men who spent their teens and twenties socializing primarily with other computer nerds on usenet/slashdot/4chan/hackernews etc. The big players in tech have pushed _hard_ in the past five to ten years to distance themselves from that image in favor of Corporate Social Responsibility Black Lives Matter, but those guys are still there and they've got a persecution complex to boot. Elon Musk could staff Twitter twice over with Hacker News brain posters alone.
The rejects or people who feel like rejects need two things. Validation and opposition. Real or perceived. The first comes from the forums and places you mention, but the opposition became as much real too. There was a lot of inflammatory media by drama agitators coming into a lot of niches, to proclaim the "new word". It didn't matter it wasjudt the regular agitators trying another social ladder ( wannabe developers or now we would call them influencers). Both got what they wanted. One got insulted and felt validated to be racists and shit heads, the other got prestige and jobs. Both of them with some real spooky skeletons on their closets. As for me... I just grew up and my medical diagnostic of autism on my thirties. It fucking sucks man. But at least I'm not a poster or an ally. I'm just a doomer with a job and some cool podcasts to listen to.
If Hancock ends up getting a twee reality show I will only ever refer to him as straight portillo
It's the SCP one! If you mention him you will propagate his reach and extend the curse.
Consider: Seth green as American Hancock
Tech CEOs are the living Skinner meme: "Am I out of touch? No it's the [Cathedral aka normal people] who are wrong"
As someone who sort of did the "rich people flock to bunkers during the apocalypse" thing during the COVID-19 portion of 2020 (I'm just a flunkie), please do not ever accept this invitation in an actual apocalypse situation. The dumbest thing will get you killed.
This is the content I've been craving.
Musk entering twitter and waiting for the cutscene has eerie parallels to Jan 6 I feel
I appreciate you releasing a double-episode for me while pneumonia kicks my ass. Very thoughtful!
You know you can get a one off vaccine that protects against the 23 most popular flavours of pneumonia?
Once dreamt of Alice. I was standing on the street near my house and she was riding by on a bike and flipped me the bird.
It's always amazing the people y'all manage to get to come on the show despite it's...silliness. Awesome combo of informative and gut busting content