1 December 2022* Update: Twitter | Ukraine
How Twitter would collapse // Everyday life in Kyiv
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Updates: [1] How Twitter would collapse
One of the speculations about Twitter, which I wrote about recently here, is whether the vast reduction in staff numbers will cause the site to break. Already users have noticed small degradations in how the site performs. There’s an article on MIT Technology Review discussing how this might happen:
A massive tech platform like Twitter is built upon very many interdependent parts. “The larger catastrophic failures are a little more titillating, but the biggest risk is the smaller things starting to degrade,” says Ben Krueger, a site reliability engineer who has more than two decades of experience in the tech industry. “These are very big, very complicated systems.”
(Image by © twisteddoodles)
One of the issues is that a reduced staff that’s busy firefighting technical issues is likely to burn out. And this also suggests that Musk’s plans for aggressive technical development probably won’t happen, according to an anonymous Twitter engineer:
“Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”
But if a collapse does happen, it won’t be straightaway: the expert assessment is that it might take six months to happen, although glitches would increase. But it could be sooner.
Updates: [2] Everyday life in Kyiv
There’s a long and striking thread on Twitter by a Ukrainian who had returned to the country from America shortly before the war, but—despite having a green card—has no plans to return. The reason the thread is striking is because it describes the way ordinary life has adjusted to the black-outs and shortages caused by Russian attacks on infrastructure.
One of the general beliefs these days, at least everywhere outside of the Russian military command, is that you can’t shell civilian populations into submission. I think this thread explains why. The whole thread is unrolled here.
j2t#401
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