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> Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. Is this a good way of reasoning? If someb

> Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. Is this a good way of reasoning? If somebody said "frankly, if Bob stops wearing his seatbelt and doesn't die, a lot of people will look pretty stupid" we'd push back. Now the opposite is also not true, where if things go fine Musk is still an idiot. Only the people who know the internals of the system can really say with confidence. One thing I am sure of is that Musk is not one of those people.

tenpies 4y ago
The analogy you're using is binary (seat belt on or off), whereas an infrastructure cut is more like reducing your thermostat by a couple of degrees, then concluding that no one froze to death, therefore it was an acceptable cut. Many parts of Europe will be running this experiment, in fact.
- fragmede 4y ago
  more like, cutting off heating to the building, telling everyone to wear sweaters, and just wait and see if anyone has a serious medical emergency.
kevinventullo 4y ago
Except Twitter going down is not as serious as death. The answer to “How much $ is it worth to get an extra 9 of reliability?” is never “Infinite”. So, I agree with OP, if they can save a big chunk of their opex with a negligible decrease in reliability (measured by something like, how much user churn are we seeing as a result of the downtime), then it’s a good call. I don’t know enough about Twitter’s internals to guess whether this is a good call. A bit off-topic, but having worked at Meta I think it would probably not be a good call there. Infra engineers are already directly incentivized to find fractional-percentage wins, because the savings to the company are often greater than their total comp, and that’s a pretty straightforward way to justify a high performance rating.
- metadat 4y ago
  For Twitter, outages are serious business and definitely a threat to the organism. As users on the outside maybe we don't care so much, but internally Twitter has invested tremendous amounts of energy and brain power to make the service resilient and scalable over the past 12+ years. When Twitter is down, it was taken quite seriously by those who worked there. I'm sure they did the blameless postmortem culture, the whole none yards. Too much downtime and people will stop using it and / or migrate to a competitor, and then the service will be dead.

tenpies 4y ago

The analogy you're using is binary (seat belt on or off), whereas an infrastructure cut is more like reducing your thermostat by a couple of degrees, then concluding that no one froze to death, therefore it was an acceptable cut. Many parts of Europe will be running this experiment, in fact.

fragmede 4y ago
more like, cutting off heating to the building, telling everyone to wear sweaters, and just wait and see if anyone has a serious medical emergency.

kevinventullo 4y ago

Except Twitter going down is not as serious as death. The answer to “How much $ is it worth to get an extra 9 of reliability?” is never “Infinite”. So, I agree with OP, if they can save a big chunk of their opex with a negligible decrease in reliability (measured by something like, how much user churn are we seeing as a result of the downtime), then it’s a good call. I don’t know enough about Twitter’s internals to guess whether this is a good call. A bit off-topic, but having worked at Meta I think it would probably not be a good call there. Infra engineers are already directly incentivized to find fractional-percentage wins, because the savings to the company are often greater than their total comp, and that’s a pretty straightforward way to justify a high performance rating.

metadat 4y ago
For Twitter, outages are serious business and definitely a threat to the organism. As users on the outside maybe we don't care so much, but internally Twitter has invested tremendous amounts of energy and brain power to make the service resilient and scalable over the past 12+ years. When Twitter is down, it was taken quite seriously by those who worked there. I'm sure they did the blameless postmortem culture, the whole none yards. Too much downtime and people will stop using it and / or migrate to a competitor, and then the service will be dead.