6 ms·

To me the analogy here is that the new boss rolled in and sold all the fire extinguishers. That by itself doesn't set the building on fire - it doesn't even inc

To me the analogy here is that the new boss rolled in and sold all the fire extinguishers. That by itself doesn't set the building on fire - it doesn't even increase the chances of a fire occurring on any given day. But when one does...

wardedVibe 4y ago
Definitely stealing this as the right way to frame the issue. What would normally be a small kitchen mistake turns into no longer having an apartment complex.
cratermoon 4y ago
He also sold all the smoke detectors.
- dcow 4y ago
  Credit where it’s due though: he did supply a spare sink.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    You should generally ignore sunk costs.
quickthrower2 4y ago
My analogy. Someone purchased some land for $1. Built a house for say $100. And now spends $100,000 a year making it the perfect place to rent, receiving $100,000 a year in rent. Someone comes along and borrows $1m to buy that house. They feel ripped off but eventually are force to go ahead with the purchase. As a result they have to pay $100,000 a year in interest. They need this thing to be profitable! To do this they need to cut back on the $100,000 a year spent. They decide go go in quickly and so email all the services saying "go hard or go home". So the plumbers, tradie, cleaners etc that don't like it leave. As a side hustle also charge visitors to the house $9 to be allowed to wear their bowtie they used to wear for free. Some of the people do maintenance jobs and improvements. They keep the termites out, fix subsidence issues, and so on. And the house didn't fall down within 3 weeks of it being purchased.
libraryofbabel 4y ago
Every SRE knows that the leading cause of outages by far is someone making a change to the system. Twitter isn’t shipping many new features right now or even doing much maintenance. But eventually they will have to. So the analogy becomes, the new boss sold all the fire extinguishers and also placed a short temporary ban on cooking in the building. But eventually people are going to start turning on stoves again… and then…
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is correct, but also: a sudden decline in maintenance is a kind of change in its own right. Even automated processes have humans in the loop and manual sign-offs; there's always some cronjob or short-lived certificate somewhere that a human was dutifully maintaining. Those things aren't going to fail any sooner than they would have anyways, but they're going to fail a lot harder due to the loss of institutional knowledge.
  - RijilV 4y ago
    Welp, their TLS cert expires second week of the new year. I really hope for them that’s an automated process.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Except that he at the same time demanded that people invent an entirely new dish by the end of the week, and now they are scrambling to try to figure it out. Already the DMCA auto-takedown bot is apparently broken and people are posting entire movies on Twitter. I would expect other peripheral systems to start breaking down as nobody is maintaining them even as other parts of the system are being changed.
  - bboygravity 4y ago
    oh noes! Not the DMCA auto-takedown bot! Said no-one in the entire world except a hand-full of Hollywood studio owners. That bot shouldn't have existed in the first place, but I know that that falls under "just world fallacy" and is a naive thought.
inferiorhuman 4y ago
He rolled in, sold most of the fire extinguishers, and made a big show of trying to make cherries jubilee while shoving his dick in one of the few remaining fire extinguishers. Let's be clear, it isn't just the erratic layoffs it's Musk's incessant meddling that's going to be Twitter's downfall. He literally took down SMS based 2FA because "microservices bad". He fired the payroll and tax departments (HR too?). He's scared off Twitter's main source of income while saddling it with significant debt. As an SRE I would have been shocked if Twitter failed catastrophically (well moreso than broadly disabling authentication) in short order. However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point given the damage that E-Lon is actively doing. Whatever. Twitter and Musk deserve each other.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  > However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point I'm pretty sure there will be no failure at all, and Twitter will work just fine.
  - afavour 4y ago
    There have already been failures. If I recall the system for sending two factor auth codes via SMS was down for the best part of a day. Not the end of the site by any means but cracks are showing.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
      Well, define 'failure'. Minor outages like the one you are talking about were happening from time to time long before Musk bought Twitter, and it even suffered long outages frequently - remember all those fail whales? I meant that there will be no catastrophic failure that will permanently (or even for a few days) stop Twitter from working at all.
      - fatneckbeardz 4y ago
        failure. noun. with no security team, hackers are able to get in easily. everyone's DMs leak, all the anonymous accounts have their identity revealed, and all Twitter's clients (advertisers) have their bank account info made public.
jonas21 4y ago
Perhaps a closer analogy would be that the new boss rolled in and threw away 80% of the fire extinguishers. Whether that will spell disaster when there's a fire depends on whether the building had too many fire extinguishers to begin with and whether the boss can buy new, better fire extinguishers to replace some of them before there's a fire.
- fenomas 4y ago
  > Perhaps a closer analogy would be that the new boss rolled in and threw away 80% of the fire extinguishers. If we're deep-diving it'd be closer to say that he rolled in and sold 80% of the stuff, largely sight-unseen, and if a fire breaks out he'll find out how much of that stuff was fire extinguishers.

wardedVibe 4y ago

Definitely stealing this as the right way to frame the issue. What would normally be a small kitchen mistake turns into no longer having an apartment complex.

cratermoon 4y ago

He also sold all the smoke detectors.

dcow 4y ago
Credit where it’s due though: he did supply a spare sink.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  You should generally ignore sunk costs.

quickthrower2 4y ago

My analogy. Someone purchased some land for $1. Built a house for say $100. And now spends $100,000 a year making it the perfect place to rent, receiving $100,000 a year in rent. Someone comes along and borrows $1m to buy that house. They feel ripped off but eventually are force to go ahead with the purchase. As a result they have to pay $100,000 a year in interest. They need this thing to be profitable! To do this they need to cut back on the $100,000 a year spent. They decide go go in quickly and so email all the services saying "go hard or go home". So the plumbers, tradie, cleaners etc that don't like it leave. As a side hustle also charge visitors to the house $9 to be allowed to wear their bowtie they used to wear for free. Some of the people do maintenance jobs and improvements. They keep the termites out, fix subsidence issues, and so on. And the house didn't fall down within 3 weeks of it being purchased.

libraryofbabel 4y ago

Every SRE knows that the leading cause of outages by far is someone making a change to the system. Twitter isn’t shipping many new features right now or even doing much maintenance. But eventually they will have to. So the analogy becomes, the new boss sold all the fire extinguishers and also placed a short temporary ban on cooking in the building. But eventually people are going to start turning on stoves again… and then…

woodruffw 4y ago
This is correct, but also: a sudden decline in maintenance is a kind of change in its own right. Even automated processes have humans in the loop and manual sign-offs; there's always some cronjob or short-lived certificate somewhere that a human was dutifully maintaining. Those things aren't going to fail any sooner than they would have anyways, but they're going to fail a lot harder due to the loss of institutional knowledge.
- RijilV 4y ago
  Welp, their TLS cert expires second week of the new year. I really hope for them that’s an automated process.
jandrese 4y ago
Except that he at the same time demanded that people invent an entirely new dish by the end of the week, and now they are scrambling to try to figure it out. Already the DMCA auto-takedown bot is apparently broken and people are posting entire movies on Twitter. I would expect other peripheral systems to start breaking down as nobody is maintaining them even as other parts of the system are being changed.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  oh noes! Not the DMCA auto-takedown bot! Said no-one in the entire world except a hand-full of Hollywood studio owners. That bot shouldn't have existed in the first place, but I know that that falls under "just world fallacy" and is a naive thought.

inferiorhuman 4y ago

He rolled in, sold most of the fire extinguishers, and made a big show of trying to make cherries jubilee while shoving his dick in one of the few remaining fire extinguishers. Let's be clear, it isn't just the erratic layoffs it's Musk's incessant meddling that's going to be Twitter's downfall. He literally took down SMS based 2FA because "microservices bad". He fired the payroll and tax departments (HR too?). He's scared off Twitter's main source of income while saddling it with significant debt. As an SRE I would have been shocked if Twitter failed catastrophically (well moreso than broadly disabling authentication) in short order. However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point given the damage that E-Lon is actively doing. Whatever. Twitter and Musk deserve each other.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
> However failure is pretty much inevitable at this point I'm pretty sure there will be no failure at all, and Twitter will work just fine.
- afavour 4y ago
  There have already been failures. If I recall the system for sending two factor auth codes via SMS was down for the best part of a day. Not the end of the site by any means but cracks are showing.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    Well, define 'failure'. Minor outages like the one you are talking about were happening from time to time long before Musk bought Twitter, and it even suffered long outages frequently - remember all those fail whales? I meant that there will be no catastrophic failure that will permanently (or even for a few days) stop Twitter from working at all.
    - fatneckbeardz 4y ago
      failure. noun. with no security team, hackers are able to get in easily. everyone's DMs leak, all the anonymous accounts have their identity revealed, and all Twitter's clients (advertisers) have their bank account info made public.

jonas21 4y ago

Perhaps a closer analogy would be that the new boss rolled in and threw away 80% of the fire extinguishers. Whether that will spell disaster when there's a fire depends on whether the building had too many fire extinguishers to begin with and whether the boss can buy new, better fire extinguishers to replace some of them before there's a fire.

fenomas 4y ago
> Perhaps a closer analogy would be that the new boss rolled in and threw away 80% of the fire extinguishers. If we're deep-diving it'd be closer to say that he rolled in and sold 80% of the stuff, largely sight-unseen, and if a fire breaks out he'll find out how much of that stuff was fire extinguishers.