General Tech News

[Bluewolf]

20 minutes ago, nudge said:

I stay clear of everything else and avoid the popular interests and events discussions between regular plebs

[nudge]

2 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

 I actually put it in there just for you...  

[Azeem]

On 27/10/2022 at 23:13, nudge said:

I may be in the minority here, but I actually love Twitter as a platform. It's by far the best social network for me to follow news, research and people in specific areas I'm interested in. That said, I stay clear of everything else and avoid the popular interests and events discussions between regular plebs, so that might cloud my judgement.

 

This. It's a micro blogging platform and a more verified source of citizen journalism.

On topic I support this.

 

[nudge]

7 hours ago, Beelzebub said:

This. It's a micro blogging platform and a more verified source of citizen journalism.

On topic I support this.

 

Can't say I agree with it at all. I'd like to believe that someone who has a verification badge got it for being a publicly known personality whose identity has been verified. Making it a 20$/month subscription service for anyone really just takes away all credibility of the badge...

[Mel81x+]

The irony that you have to pay money for being you really does sum up a slew of things that will start user migration from the platform to other places. The real question now is where can they go? The answer really is nowhere. Nothing has the kind of reach Twitter does and I feel like this is all just a by-product of reactive thinking from Musk. He needs to recoup his costly investment and the only way to do that is to either shoves ads down the user-bases throats or to charge them for services. He's going for the latter and it's not going to end with the platform's users being very happy about it. 

I'd rather they crated fiscal bucket plans for advertisers to help boost revenue there and at the same time charge for metrics on the platform vs stupid things like verification, etc. A lot of marketing firms use Twitter as a litmus test for how their users are behaving or getting a general feel on how the community reacts to news. Make that a paid subscription because even if they say no they'll slowly come crawling back when they have to get the data. I'd also go so far as to completely eradicate public search functionality and force search engines to pay for the access to data either via user protection or by allowing monthly allowances on data and annual subscription costs. 

Edited October 31, 2022 by Mel81x

[Mel81x+]

@nudge

Adobe Just Held a Bunch of Pantone Colors Hostage | WIRED

I am sure you've already read this but its pretty shitty by Adobe to do this and then charge the amounts they want to.

[nudge]

10 hours ago, Mel81x said:

@nudge

Adobe Just Held a Bunch of Pantone Colors Hostage | WIRED

I am sure you've already read this but its pretty shitty by Adobe to do this and then charge the amounts they want to.

Actually haven't read it before you posted this! But yeah, Adobe has turned into a proper shitty company. Shifting to subscription-based products in general was something that pushed me away from them a while ago already, so I can't say I'm surprised...

[Dr. Gonzo]

14 hours ago, Mel81x said:

@nudge

Adobe Just Held a Bunch of Pantone Colors Hostage | WIRED

I am sure you've already read this but its pretty shitty by Adobe to do this and then charge the amounts they want to.

Adobe are cunts - charging a subscription fee for photoshop is probably just the start of them doing this with more and more things

[Mel81x+]

11 hours ago, nudge said:

Actually haven't read it before you posted this! But yeah, Adobe has turned into a proper shitty company. Shifting to subscription-based products in general was something that pushed me away from them a while ago already, so I can't say I'm surprised...

 

7 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Adobe are cunts - charging a subscription fee for photoshop is probably just the start of them doing this with more and more things

Yeah they are a bit cuntish and have been for a while now. What they did before they dropped this Pantone bomb however was scoop up Figma - Figma: the collaborative interface design tool. which was what the community wanted so this kind of makes sense because now no one has anywhere to really run and I really do hope this sparks someone to create a new set of tools to combat the issue. Lots of folks are just giving out color hex values for free and no one can really stop them.

[nudge]

9 hours ago, Mel81x said:

 

Yeah they are a bit cuntish and have been for a while now. What they did before they dropped this Pantone bomb however was scoop up Figma - Figma: the collaborative interface design tool. which was what the community wanted so this kind of makes sense because now no one has anywhere to really run and I really do hope this sparks someone to create a new set of tools to combat the issue. Lots of folks are just giving out color hex values for free and no one can really stop them.

I switched to RawTherapee and Darktable for photo editing. Both free and impressively good.

[Mel81x+]

4 hours ago, nudge said:

I switched to RawTherapee and Darktable for photo editing. Both free and impressively good.

Nice and RawTherapee is getting an update again this year. Even nicer. I'll check it out.

[Mel81x+]

In other news, watching Twitter engineers go back to Twitter posting that they've been laid is probably the heights of pure shamelessness I have ever seen. If you have any self-respect you wouldn't go back to the place that treated you poorly (I say that relatively based on what they get paid and the work they do) to sob. Most of them hopefully land on their feet but this isn't the first culling in tech spaces and really dilutes shit that Microsoft, IBM, etc have done for over two decades now. Shed a tear? Nope, you can fuck right off to the same bucket those other poor engineers went to when takeovers happened. 

[nudge]

This is arguably one of the best things to come out of the whole Musk's Twitter verification fail: 

 

 

 

[Mel81x+]

LOFL

[Azeem]

I will believe twitter is shutting down when it actually happens

[Mel81x+]

16 hours ago, Beelzebub said:

I will believe twitter is shutting down when it actually happens

It's not going to shut down. This is just a bunch of emotionally charged folks who posted on a platform that gave them a soap-box for free. It owed no one anything and the thought process of "but I have been here since it started" is really just as valid as "I started using this platform today morning".  

[Harry]

On 01/11/2022 at 03:49, nudge said:

Can't say I agree with it at all. I'd like to believe that someone who has a verification badge got it for being a publicly known personality whose identity has been verified. Making it a 20$/month subscription service for anyone really just takes away all credibility of the badge...

I agree. I'd be open to them boosting tweets from paying customers AND public figures, but it's not right to use the blue tick as interchangeable, nor force the public figures to pay for making the massive contribution they do to Twitter that is why the users are there in the first place

[Harry]

18 minutes ago, Mel81x said:

It's not going to shut down. This is just a bunch of emotionally charged folks who posted on a platform that gave them a soap-box for free. It owed no one anything and the thought process of "but I have been here since it started" is really just as valid as "I started using this platform today morning".  

What's the likely impact of reducing staff by 80-90%? 

[Mel81x+]

9 hours ago, Harry said:

What's the likely impact of reducing staff by 80-90%? 

Considering most of them wrote automated check systems its probably going to hurt somewhere around Thanksgiving when the system is overloaded but with the kind of press its getting now I'd imagine they're fine till right around February.

The kind of overinflated worth Twitter engineers are posting on the platform is not true. With things like failover, etc the site will go down temporarily till the servers get round-robined and then things come back up. As for new features? I don't think Twitter needs any right now other than a monetization engine and that doesnt need any of the engineers who were there because none of them were able to do it all this time.

They are going to be just fine, what is very funny in all of this is how folks who have no clue about infrastructure management think its just going to crumble. This isn't some personal website there are gates and those gates are controlled automatically. 

Edited November 19, 2022 by Mel81x

[Azeem]

Jordan Peterson has been reinstated on twitter and he made a controversy with the first tweet back. Lovely, hopefully Trump comes back too.

[Mel81x+]

5 hours ago, Beelzebub said:

Jordan Peterson has been reinstated on twitter and he made a controversy with the first tweet back. Lovely, hopefully Trump comes back too.

It's not a question of if its a question of when now.

[Azeem]

9 hours ago, Mel81x said:

It's not a question of if its a question of when now.

Clever of Musk to leave it to the public, not taking the responsibility

[Mel81x+]

15 minutes ago, Beelzebub said:

Clever of Musk to leave it to the public, not taking the responsibility

I feel like he would have done it anyways. While I don't like Trump they did invent this wonderful tool called "block" which does the job instead of perma-banning these kinds of folks. 

[Cicero]

On 18/11/2022 at 20:36, Mel81x said:

Considering most of them wrote automated check systems its probably going to hurt somewhere around Thanksgiving when the system is overloaded but with the kind of press its getting now I'd imagine they're fine till right around February.

The kind of overinflated worth Twitter engineers are posting on the platform is not true. With things like failover, etc the site will go down temporarily till the servers get round-robined and then things come back up. As for new features? I don't think Twitter needs any right now other than a monetization engine and that doesnt need any of the engineers who were there because none of them were able to do it all this time.

They are going to be just fine, what is very funny in all of this is how folks who have no clue about infrastructure management think its just going to crumble. This isn't some personal website there are gates and those gates are controlled automatically. 

I was reading that Twitter allegedly had nonproductive management positions in the company where these people genuinely were only “working” 6 hours a week. So basically, these people were working only 1 hour in an 8 hour work day. These were a lot of positions that Musk allegedly done away with. 
 

Any truth to that? 

[Mel81x+]

2 hours ago, Cicero said:

I was reading that Twitter allegedly had nonproductive management positions in the company where these people genuinely were only “working” 6 hours a week. So basically, these people were working only 1 hour in an 8 hour work day. These were a lot of positions that Musk allegedly done away with. 
 

Any truth to that? 

Its possible. You have to understand that after a while most tech component positions become a bit redundant and they spread the work components out to multiple people. As an example, lets say you needed 20 people to start a project to keep their servers up and 50% of those were automation engineers. The initial phases might be terribly hard so you'd spend 5 - 10 years understanding and refining your network, architecture, etc. But once you get past that first phase you may really only need 10 people, then you get into internal company politics and folks just get reshuffled and more importantly rebadged. Then there's the evolution of tech. You don't need 30 engineers for a 6000 node network. You may need 20% of that but you need some really smart ones to ensure you're up to market standards. Where Twitter, imo, really needed folks was in legal and PR because that's where most of its biggest issues are. The tech side has components that are highly robust and I of course say this as pure speculation after seeing their architecture. 

The gold standard is Netflix, that thing is a CS marvel with how it upspins components to match pressure and retain data consistency. If they can do it, I am sure Twitter isn't far behind.

If you're interested, there's a book that is sort of relevant now but not so much that I always ask folks in SWE to read its called "The Mythical Man Month"

The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia

Talks about shortening delivery blocks and not throwing more people at a problem. There's more modern literature of course but its very domain specific and further tech specific too.

If you're interested in their architecture - The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale I know its 2017 but that's some serious stuff for even 2017.

Edited November 20, 2022 by Mel81x