6 ms·

Can't Spell Chernobyl Without Elon

40 points by owlbynight 4y ago

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
Chernobyl going critical and destroying itself was a good thing?
d23 4y ago
He’s now made it clear to everyone that he’s an awful person. The stain will not be washed away. Radioactive is a good metaphor.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  People should have realised this when he called someone a pedo without any basis for it. Better late than never though!
- pencilguin 4y ago
  Last weekend, I learned that his name may be rhymed with "melon". And "felon". Not, strictly, "yellin'", except in a pinch.
vore 4y ago
I hate to nitpick but, We ditched the dial-up modem quite awhile ago, Grandpa. While yes, I guess it’s possible, the idea that Twitter is using remote procedure calls instead of REST immediately felt wrong. It also felt wrong to blame the codebase for an intermittent problem without mentioning an accompanying change. I think the author has some idea of SOAP or CORBA in mind for RPC rather the more modern Thrift or gRPC solutions that are used extensively everywhere. I don't find it that unbelievable that Twitter would do 1000s of RPCs on the backend to render the home page, but that says basically nothing about if it's the bottleneck or not, after all. I don't want to defend Elon – far from it – but I think the author doesn't have their ducks quite in a row here.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Or basically, they have a constrained and very mistaken belief that "RPC" is a specific technology. RPC literally means "remote procedure call", and it's typically used to mean just that. It's, for example, a perfectly reasonable observation (and common in HATEOAS threads) that REST APIs these days are typically just RPC over HTTP. I'm not going to defend Musk, but I find it hard to hate him either, given that every single criticism I see on the Internet is at this level of stupid, or worse. It's really hard to tease out real issues from the torrent of asinine soundbites of critics trying to one up each other.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    > every single criticism I see on the Internet is at this level of stupid, or worse. That's not at all true. There's plenty of good criticism of Musk out there. It's not hard to find valid things to criticize, from bullying behaviour to overpromising (Tesla FSD) and lots of other stuff.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I qualified it as "every single criticism I see" for a reason - if there are good, strong critical points, I haven't seen them, because they're drowned in a sea of nonsense. Honestly, even recent HN threads have been suffering from the same problem of people just repeating trivially disprovable or purposefully misrepresented nonsense without a second thought. I think we may just need to wait until Musk stops being Internet's Public Enemy #1 to see anything clear. > It's not hard to find valid things to criticize, from bullying behaviour to overpromising (Tesla FSD) and lots of other stuff. Also, I should perhaps have qualified more clearly that I meant criticism on the level justifying the current level of dislike and hatred. Of the things you mentioned: - Tesla FSD overhyping is a valid one, though it's been exaggerated by the media and then dumbed down to a simple gotcha on social media. As far as I know to date, he didn't go beyond what's common in marketing in general. - Bullying behaviour - I believe he did things that could be construed as bullying, but back when there were stories on it years ago, I couldn't dig into anything solid - everything I read had clear markings of usual journalistic misrepresentation. I'm giving it a big "shmaybe". - "Lots of other stuff" - other than that diver debacle, can't think of anything. All I see people post is trivially disprovable bullshit like "he's not an engineer" (he is), "he isn't doing engineering at SpaceX" (he is), "his money comes from his father's apartheid emerald mine" (it doesn't, the mine was in literally the most anti-apartheid country there was, and his father IIRC was an anti-apartheid activist). Or "RPC in 21st century, he must clearly be an idiot". It's an unending stream of this kind of "arguments", posted by supposedly smart people. All it makes me is to lower my opinion about people posting this stuff.
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
Twitter engineers should unionize Elon Musk would hate that
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  They should just leave the company. At this point I'm not sure why anyone would stay in such a toxic environment unless they can't get any other job.
  - version_five 4y ago
    Are there any objective employee sentiment surveys about what they think? Even after all the bad press, I can picture that many are still cautiously optimistic (or just interested to be along for the ride), especially if they previously weren't happy with Twitter's direction. There is a lot of internal rot in tech and a lot of people putting up with it because of their pay. I've worked in jobs where a lot of people would have been happy to see someone come in and shake things up, even if it was disruptive and risky.
    - pantalaimon 4y ago
      From the outside it looks like complete and utter madness. The thing is, I don’t care if he runs Twitter into the ground, it sure is a good show while it lasts. I’m also pretty certain the engineers will have no trouble finding a new job. But what concerns me is that radioactive aspect of it. If Elon has lost his mind, what does that mean for his other ventures?
      - willnonya 4y ago
        Is musl losing his mind seriously a concern? As far as the engineers go, I'm pretty sure some of them won't have any problem finding a jobs...
        pantalaimon 4y ago
        I had high hopes for SpaceX, makes me a bit worried if Elon is running rampant now. Tesla Autopilot is also concerning.

40 points by owlbynight 4y ago

Chernobyl going critical and destroying itself was a good thing?

d23 4y ago

He’s now made it clear to everyone that he’s an awful person. The stain will not be washed away. Radioactive is a good metaphor.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
People should have realised this when he called someone a pedo without any basis for it. Better late than never though!
pencilguin 4y ago
Last weekend, I learned that his name may be rhymed with "melon". And "felon". Not, strictly, "yellin'", except in a pinch.

vore 4y ago

I hate to nitpick but, We ditched the dial-up modem quite awhile ago, Grandpa. While yes, I guess it’s possible, the idea that Twitter is using remote procedure calls instead of REST immediately felt wrong. It also felt wrong to blame the codebase for an intermittent problem without mentioning an accompanying change. I think the author has some idea of SOAP or CORBA in mind for RPC rather the more modern Thrift or gRPC solutions that are used extensively everywhere. I don't find it that unbelievable that Twitter would do 1000s of RPCs on the backend to render the home page, but that says basically nothing about if it's the bottleneck or not, after all. I don't want to defend Elon – far from it – but I think the author doesn't have their ducks quite in a row here.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Or basically, they have a constrained and very mistaken belief that "RPC" is a specific technology. RPC literally means "remote procedure call", and it's typically used to mean just that. It's, for example, a perfectly reasonable observation (and common in HATEOAS threads) that REST APIs these days are typically just RPC over HTTP. I'm not going to defend Musk, but I find it hard to hate him either, given that every single criticism I see on the Internet is at this level of stupid, or worse. It's really hard to tease out real issues from the torrent of asinine soundbites of critics trying to one up each other.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  > every single criticism I see on the Internet is at this level of stupid, or worse. That's not at all true. There's plenty of good criticism of Musk out there. It's not hard to find valid things to criticize, from bullying behaviour to overpromising (Tesla FSD) and lots of other stuff.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I qualified it as "every single criticism I see" for a reason - if there are good, strong critical points, I haven't seen them, because they're drowned in a sea of nonsense. Honestly, even recent HN threads have been suffering from the same problem of people just repeating trivially disprovable or purposefully misrepresented nonsense without a second thought. I think we may just need to wait until Musk stops being Internet's Public Enemy #1 to see anything clear. > It's not hard to find valid things to criticize, from bullying behaviour to overpromising (Tesla FSD) and lots of other stuff. Also, I should perhaps have qualified more clearly that I meant criticism on the level justifying the current level of dislike and hatred. Of the things you mentioned: - Tesla FSD overhyping is a valid one, though it's been exaggerated by the media and then dumbed down to a simple gotcha on social media. As far as I know to date, he didn't go beyond what's common in marketing in general. - Bullying behaviour - I believe he did things that could be construed as bullying, but back when there were stories on it years ago, I couldn't dig into anything solid - everything I read had clear markings of usual journalistic misrepresentation. I'm giving it a big "shmaybe". - "Lots of other stuff" - other than that diver debacle, can't think of anything. All I see people post is trivially disprovable bullshit like "he's not an engineer" (he is), "he isn't doing engineering at SpaceX" (he is), "his money comes from his father's apartheid emerald mine" (it doesn't, the mine was in literally the most anti-apartheid country there was, and his father IIRC was an anti-apartheid activist). Or "RPC in 21st century, he must clearly be an idiot". It's an unending stream of this kind of "arguments", posted by supposedly smart people. All it makes me is to lower my opinion about people posting this stuff.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

Twitter engineers should unionize Elon Musk would hate that

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
They should just leave the company. At this point I'm not sure why anyone would stay in such a toxic environment unless they can't get any other job.
- version_five 4y ago
  Are there any objective employee sentiment surveys about what they think? Even after all the bad press, I can picture that many are still cautiously optimistic (or just interested to be along for the ride), especially if they previously weren't happy with Twitter's direction. There is a lot of internal rot in tech and a lot of people putting up with it because of their pay. I've worked in jobs where a lot of people would have been happy to see someone come in and shake things up, even if it was disruptive and risky.
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    From the outside it looks like complete and utter madness. The thing is, I don’t care if he runs Twitter into the ground, it sure is a good show while it lasts. I’m also pretty certain the engineers will have no trouble finding a new job. But what concerns me is that radioactive aspect of it. If Elon has lost his mind, what does that mean for his other ventures?
    - willnonya 4y ago
      Is musl losing his mind seriously a concern? As far as the engineers go, I'm pretty sure some of them won't have any problem finding a jobs...
      - pantalaimon 4y ago
        I had high hopes for SpaceX, makes me a bit worried if Elon is running rampant now. Tesla Autopilot is also concerning.