Not an SRE but I admit to saying that I expected Twitter to have some serious outages in the coming months after firing all those people. Honestly, how did the remaining engineers at Twitter pull it off? I can't really imagine losing more than half of my coworkers and not having the wheels fall off pretty quickly.
Twitter was overstaffed, but much of the "extra" staff the elon fired weren't SREs keeping the systems running, they had to do with things like moderation. Elon doesn't believe in moderation, so out they went, and the skeleton crew was able to keep the site running, for the most part, but now the user experience has gone to hell unless you're a right-wing nutcase, so everyone who isn't is fleeing, as well as advertisers who Twitter even threatened to sue because they weren't buying advertising (!).
a lot of what made X worse since Musk is not easily quantifiable. fewer high-quality posts, much higher spam, next to zero moderation, more misinfo - while it's possible to get some data on this, it's subjective enough that the fans will wave it away.
the problem is that Twitter has been such an invaluable part of the daily doomscroll that i suspect even those who have 'left' it for BlueSky or Threads are still opening X a few times a day - keeping those MAU numbers up.
Twitter for what it is had too many engineers. I think part of the problem was the fad of more workers more hiring will generate more revenue but that was not true and just was a way to prop up the stock value.
Your first paragraph is condescending and unnecessary.
Can you cite any sources that confirm that "governments, researchers and medical professionals worldwide claimed they did test effectiveness against transmission"? I haven't seen any, and a cursory Google search reveals articles like this [0] which confirm my memory that this was never claimed by the vaccine researchers. Independent research after the vaccines were released did find they reduced transmission significantly (for the early variants).
This reference to the Pfizer "admission" seems way more like a gotcha tactic. Pfizer never made the claim, nor was it necessary to show the vaccine was safe and served its primary objective.
No. What is condescending and unnecessary is the claim that "They did test that the vaccine reduced risk of transmission", when even the Reuters "fact check" confirms that they did not [0]
Gaslighting the HN audience into questioning our memory that we were forced to take an untested vaccine will be met with immediate and sharp reprimand. If you feel it is condescending -- then stop gaslighting. You lied, and people were forced to take a wildly experimental, potentially dangerous, untested product. Unacceptable.
Thousands of my fellow citizens were forced to leave their jobs for refusing this. Our government officials are on video claiming they had solid scientific reasons to do so, to "protect grandma". It was all lies. And you know it.
The commenter you originally replied to was wrong. Pfizer (and other vaccine researchers) never did research on transmission.
But again, can you cite any sources saying that at one point they [Pfizer and other vaccine researchers] did claim that?
The answer of course is that no, you can't, because they didn't. They didn't lie and neither did governments and health organizations. But because we were asked to vaccinate to protect ourselves and others (which worked, and was quickly backed by independent scientific research after vaccines were offered to the public), it sounds like a big gotcha lie if Pfizer says they specifically didn't research that.
Note there are ways you protect others by vaccinating other than reducing transmission. By significantly lowering your chance of hospitalization, you ensure there are more free hospital beds for those that need it (due to COVID or not).
Do you mind sharing some links to back up these claims?
Just watched a video [0] where he clearly comes across as being pro workers rights, and against passing prop 22 in California. He seems to be generally pro-union while still trying to point out some general issues with them. He also says he would be "offended" if his employees unionized at LMG, which while maybe is a bit stupid to say, I don't think counts as anti-union.
People should also understand why he said he would be offended. He would be offended because it meant they didn’t talk to him and work with him - and that he did such a bad job as a manager that they decided to unionize.
He’s pro-union - he just hopes he is a good enough boss that his employees don’t feel like they need to unionize. He clarified his viewpoint in later videos. Offended was probably not the best choice of word - and he admits that too. I don’t recall the video but someone can find it. (I’m on mobile and on vacation - idk why I’m even here)
Anyone who is truly “pro-union” would recognize that seeing yourself as a good manager/boss doesn’t mean you don’t take advantage of your employees. Furthermore, there is ALWAYS a power dynamic at play that makes it difficult for individuals to speak up about their concerns or ideas for improving working conditions — even “nice” managers will disagree or see certain things as pointless / unnecessary / frivolous. Not to mention, Linus is both the owner AND the manager of LMG, making the relationship between employer / employee even more complex and unbalanced.
Unions are a tool to give individual workers more leverage in negotiations that almost always favour employers / managers.
A side note: Linus could be a great day-to-day manager, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a bad “ceo” if that’s what he calls himself. He can be incredibly personable and kind and supportive, but also have unreasonable expectations about work hours, employee’s social media activities, compensation, etc.
Do you have a source for the work hours? I had the impression that he very much tries to not ask for more then he pays for. Do you have a source that the compensations at LTT are somehow unreasonable?
As for not having a YouTube channel, i find that a reasonable demand for employees of a company running YouTube channels. They are allowed to do game streaming stream on Twitch and stuff like that.
No, that would mean you support each woman who wants to have one and you probably shouldn't tell them it offends you if they do. Especially if they depend on you financially and you can break up with them without consequence.
I interpret it closer to being pro-choice while hoping to not personally need an abortion. Unions form when workers feel they aren't being heard and aren't being properly represented. Having a union form at your own company is an indication that you failed your employees in one way or another. You can be pro-union while hoping to personally never need one or have to sit across the table from one.
> Having a union form at your own company is an indication that you failed your employees in one way or another.
This is absolutely untrue. A kind of propaganda talking point that paints unions like some kind of vicious weapon that you want workers to have if they absolutely need to defend themselves against assault, but you'd rather not have the assault take place at all.
Unions give workers concentrated power to balance against the concentrated power of corporations. That's it. They are one side of the scale.
That's a wrong way to view unions though, a propagandized American way. Unions should really be default and not imply some sort of moral failing about the employer. Sadly they are viewed as such.
Yeah, pro-choice but hoping not to have an abortion is probably a lot of people's position. But then telling your partner who depends on you financially that it would disappoint you if they had one sorta changes things, dont you agree? Especially if theyre already pregnant.
As for unions, everyone should unionize. It's literally the only way to even out the power dynamic. Good companies, bad companies - it makes no difference. There goal is to pay you as little as they can, so yours should be to get paid as much as you can. Unions make that process easier for the majority of people.
Pro-choice means every pregnant woman should have the choice and a real chance to abort their pregnancy if they choose. It's kind of right there in the name.
This is an extremely American -- and misinformed -- view of unions. Where I'm from unions are the default, not formed as a last resort to unjust treatment but a natural counterbalance to corporate/institutional power.
Someone saying they'd rather not have their workers form a union is not pro-union. That's like saying you support workers sharing information but you would be offended if your workers talked about their salaries because that would infer that they don't trust you to be fair.
What is the vagueness present in a basic credit card transaction? (Not saying there isn't any, just curious what you mean)
Not every transaction needs that level of customer protection, but it's very nice to have. Currently, banks that provide consumer protections are motivated to hunt down fraud, which helps everyone, not just credit card users. It keeps the level of fraud overall low.
And while I do agree some transparency would be gained through smart escrow contracts as opposed to credit card transactions, I disagree it's any more "sovereign". For the system you're describing to function, you need established third parties that both you and sellers trust. These third parties may choose to revoke your access, restrict your purchases, etc in the same way banks do now. In short, crypto still has not solved the trust problem.
(Also, while smart contracts do work for cancelable contracts, being able to "issue" a new credit card for each company as a consumer and then cancel it whenever solves it better and without any blockchain this or that)
As Ar-Curunir mentioned, you can use a technique called non-interactive zero knowledge proofs (NIZKs). Usually in ZKPs the prover will go through a part of the proof, send it to the verifier, the verifier will then send back a challenge, and the prover will reply with the final part of the proof based on the challenge. The basic flavor of NIZK I've seen is that instead of getting a challenge from the verifier, the prover simply does hash(prover id | first part of proof) and uses the result as the challenge. The `prover id` part is there such that they don't have complete control over the input to the hash. Doing it this way allows the prover to do the entire proof on their own and then send the whole thing to the verifier who can check the proof without any further interaction, saving network costs in exchange for a single hash.
It seems like their modification to Aaronson's algorithm would also work for Yao's garbled circuits, i.e.
1. Alice generates a long random bitstring s, and publishes hash(s)
2. Alice crafts a garbled circuit with just one AND gate, where the false output is 0+s, and the true output is 1. Alice sends the circuit and her input to Bob.
3. Bob gets his input from Alice using oblivious transfer. He evaluates the circuit, publishing the result.
4. If the result starts with 0, Bob verifies that hash of the rest of the string matches the hash published by Alice. Alice also checks to make sure the rest of the string matches her original s.
The idea was that, for the lowest common denominator of "hmm, what was your GPA/degree/whatever?", it's easier to give bits of more-or-less secret information than to do a challenge response on the spot.
Everything was about leaving the institutions granting credentials / third parties who consume the blockchain data to handle the technical bits, while an employer or potential employee only had to know where to go and what secret values to use.
I suppose this could be wrapped up in a simple app or something, but I was going for bulletproof-ish. It's easy to remember a social security number, full name, etc. It persists through broken laptops and smartphones.
I agree. It's very hard for me to believe that he can both have been so clearly well-versed in crypto and with its beauty, enough to create a masterpiece like bitcoin, and at the same time hesitate to just sign a message. Not only is signing something convincing and easy, it's taking advantage of that same beauty of crypto that he should appreciate so much.
It seems backwards to me that someone like Satoshi who obviously does value privacy and anonymity would get on BBC and declare "I am Satoshi, and I want to be left alone" and yet at the same time not take the cleanest, least extravagant option of just signing something.
