Logic guys love assigning random values to things based on gut feelings. "Everything is 5x as hard to do at scale" means absolutely nothing.
My boss does this for "estimating" software project schedules. He built a goddamned spreadsheet* where he will rate the entire project on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being trivial/quick-win territory, and 5 being extremely labor-intensive.
Two problems with this approach as used at my job:
- He assigns the ratings before requirements gathering has even started (if they ever get documented in the first place).
- He bases the final deadline around the calculator spreadsheet, and sends that date on to the business partners/project stakeholders within the company, and they usually pass it along to upper management.
So, by the time we finally get requirements together and find out, oh, shit, this is actually way more complicated than a 2.71828 or whatever, the stakeholders have already told the Senior VPs of Thought Leadering that my team will be done by a specific date. The week before that date rolls around, boss goes into a panic, demands that I work on absolutely nothing else as I'm being pinged daily to put out random bullshit fires on other projects that were rushed through implementation before I even worked here. Between that and the low pay, I start really strongly considering pulling a no-show. I stay up late a couple of nights, project gets finished. Rinse. Repeat.
I envy the dead.
*: No, it's not a Monte Carlo simulation or anything that fancy -- he just multiplies the complexity rating by a set number of labor hours, and doesn't bake in additional time for risk mitigation. They promoted his ass because this is so scientific and data-driven. Edit: and no, there isn't a more detailed breakdown/implementation milestone schedule somewhere further down in the estimate. It's literally "I feel like this is a... 2. You have a week. GIT 'ER DUN!"
My boss gives me the opposite. He asked me to give a work estimate on a year-long project, he added +25% buffer for unknowns and submitted it. When the work ended, we were so efficient that we only used 70% of the estimated budget, and this was a problem! Buddy, that's why they're called estimates, we can't make perfect guesses before requirements are gathered.
What you describe sounds absolutely terrible, but there is a way to do something like this well:
https://jacobian.org/2024/mar/11/breaking-down-tasks/
Of course, the key is to enumerate all tasks, assign complexity to individual tasks, consider likely blockers, and multiply times by an uncertainty factor.
Yes, I agree. I think it's only 3x, 4x at best according to my gut feeling
Not to mention he has failed to even outline why that's the case.
Big Yud is literally the founder of an assigning-random-values-based-on-gut-feelings religion. His essay on Bayesian reasoning has given perhaps thousands of blog-reading nerds irreversible brain damage.
These are the people that decide your wage
One "You tweet things and people see them" engineer please
Just slap some rss over that bad boy, how bad could it be? (boy I sure hope there aren't other, unstated requirements :no-thoughts:
nono he's actually a genius. Elon Musk please take notes and fire everybody except for 10 engineers
Also hire me to be one of those 10 (nothing funny will happen as I am a deeply serious person)
Outsourcing ads (their entire revenue stream) is a galaxy brain take
Scrolling through his twitter is a real trip. I'm genuinely envious of someone who is actually worried about evil AGI becoming a reality and thinking that's the most significant threat to the human species. Believing in longtermism must be such a pleasant experience. No thoughts, just vibes, pay no attention to the climate change behind the curtain.
He has to think that evil AGI is the most significant threat to humanity or he doesn't get his stipend.
don't need support staff
don't need moderators
nobody will ever do anything badas someone currently doing contracting to clean up a big database which has been mismanaged and poorly maintained this entire twitter thread gives me a professional panic attack
im breathing into a paper bag rn
Actually based
Get rid of the web interface and all the overcomplicated shit, make Twitter into a filesystem accessed over Plan 9 protocol and make everyone use acme or maybe a simple native client for the non-Plan 9-using-betas to use it
I can do it with 10 Plan 9 nerds and ~30 million dollars (we'll need most of this for writing process migration and better clustering into the 9front kernel so we can distribute the load of such a large system over many machines)
Elon, DM me if you see this, the mainstream woke computer industry doesn't want you to know about Plan 9
Here's a video by Thought Slime that sorta covered Yud and his beliefs of AI from a couple years ago. It's hilarious.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
i only know this guy as the writer of harry potter and the methods of rationality, i forgot he did stuff other than write fanfiction
CW - SA: He also wrote a short story where people in the future/aliens are appalled that we (i.e. present-day humans) considered r*pe to be a bad thing. You did not read that wrong.
He does not do anything other than write fanfiction
i forgot he did stuff other than write fanfiction
He doesn't, really. It's just that some of what he writes is openly called "fan fiction" and some of it is in disguise.
PAJAMA SAM CARROTThis guy sounds exactly like Elon. He got caught using one burner account. I wouldn't be surprised if this is another
This is a real guy, sadly. Very well known and influential in certain Effective Altruism/Pseudointellectual Silicon Valley cicles
imagine being so blessed you dont know yud
Mr. Rationality truly doesn’t understand economies of scale. Once you’re as large as Twitter, it becomes cheaper to run more and more of your own infrastructure.
is he joking or what?
Hard to say, but there's a decent chance he isn't afaik he doesn't really know anything.
I don't think he's totally wrong.
With 10 engineers one should be able to set up a Mastodon instance and scale it.
I think the issue comes when you look at all the functionality that is much more nuanced than just the bare technicals.
A good algorithm to maintain high engagement and display relevant content and relevant ads. Moderation to maintain a balance between an environment friendly for advertising without feeling censored.
And all the data analysis and UX testing to achieve that.
Building a Twitter clone is easy. Dominating the niche is hard.
I think the issue comes when you look at all the functionality that is much more nuanced than just the bare technicals.
So he's right that you could make Twitter if you just don't implement 99% of the features that make Twitter, Twitter. Not to mention all the workers that work on the non-product side... All the various infra teams, security, abuse, etc. etc.
bruh come on...
Yeah, it basically comes down to a complete lack of comprehension for how big something like twitter really is. On the surface level the functionality is pretty simple. But there's so much else going on that nobody sees, and a whole heap of it will be interconnected.
Twitter web, twitter app for ios and android, twitter api, advertising, content monitoring, content storage, caching, serving, twitter for businesses, content algorithms, accounts, privacy features, user settings, theming, ui, ux, embedded content. That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure a lot of these huge companies could be a bit leaner than they are, but usually the size is somewhat warranted.
This guys whole thing is just making stupid takes based on absolute surface level knowledge of things and sounding confident enough that people buy into it.
With 10 engineers one should be able to set up a Mastodon instance and scale it
A Mastodon instance is used by, at best, a few hundred to low thousands of people, and is going to be small and relatively obscure
Twitter is used by millions, is the preferred quick communication tool of tens of thousands of companies, and is one of the single biggest presences on the net. It'll take far more than 10 engineers to keep it running when it gets randomly DDOSed for a laugh by some bored teenagers, where a Mastodon instance either wouldn't even be a target or would just accept going down temporarily
A Mastodon instance is used by, at best, a few hundred to low thousands of people, and is going to be small and relatively obscure
Both Gab and Truth Social are Mastodon instances (albeit not federated, though if they ever enabled federation they'd be immediately blocked by a majority of instances due to a combination of anti-corp and anti-right sentiments). Gab was actually the largest Mastodon instance for a good while (unsure about currently) - if you see any Mastodon clients that have negative reviews about not connecting to the largest Mastodon instance, that's what they're referring to (several clients blacklisted Gab at the client level).
mastodon itself has like 900 contributors tho, with 23 fairly active contributors. the distributed nature of it means that rather than just having 10 engineers, they need at least 1 maintainer for every instance. there are currently ~10,000 instances. so somewhere around 10,000 or more people are keeping it running
Mastodon demonstrably does not scale to twitter numbers. Even without feature parity it would be unusable.
Granted, twitter's unusable now, but it used to be usable.
Could something written in ruby handle the amount of traffic X gets?
Shopify and Github are examples of large web apps that come to mind. Granted, they aren't the world's town square, but I remember the "Ruby does not scale" meme and I feel like it's a bit overstated.
Sure you can build and maintain a Twitter clone with 10 devs, but when you've got hundreds of millions of users you have to have several dev teams working on it. You have a resposnability to patch the hundreds of issues that come and to "develop" (read: enshittify and bloat) your platform.
Lemmy is a reddit-lookalike (although much better IMO) but it has so few users and bloated features compared to average projects that I think 10 full-time salaried devs would be more than enough, but reddit proper has hundreds of employees.
Also these are the kind of people who think they can be cheap and hire a handful of "10 x full-stack devs", pay them as much as an average programmer to save money, and then post the classic "nobody wants to work anymore" shit when they either can't find them due to shit compensation or they quit from stress due to being understaffed and underpaid.
a good rule of thumb i try to follow is don't make judgements based on numbers that you pulled out of your ass whole cloth.
