X looks back at year of so-called 'engineering excellence' under Musk
- Reference: 1698698712
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/10/30/x_looks_back_at_year/
- Source link:
In a [1]post to X on Friday by the XEng account used by Musk's social media engineering team, a list of "the most important improvements we have made under the hood" was shared, complete with several accomplishments that, in context, aren't necessarily things to be proud of.
X "shutdown [sic] the Sacramento data center," while at the same time "optimiz[ing its] use of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem," the team said.
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XEng claims the moves freed up 48MW of electricity, got rid of 60k pounds of network ladder rack and reduced X's cloud costs by 60 percent - but it may not have made those moves willingly.
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In July, shortly before then-Twitter had a [5]chaotic weekend when Musk declared everyone on the platform was being rate-limited to some degree (based on whether they paid), it came out that the company owed tens of millions of dollars to AWS and Google for cloud services it decided not to pay for, among other [6]cost-cutting vendor stiffing . Linda Yaccarino, Musk's self-replaced Twitter CEO, was reportedly negotiating with Google in the days running up to the company's $300m annual cloud contract was due to expire, but XEng's post suggests the company decided to go in another direction.
Twitter's reported datacenter migration, which began in early 2022, also wasn't without its snafus, with [7]lots of glitches following what should have been a pretty calm process.
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XEng also suggested that X has made progress in its fight against bots. "Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate +37% greater than 2022," XEng said. "On average, we prevent more than 1M bots signup attacks each day and we've reduced DM spam by 95%."
Anyone who's continued using X knows bots are [9]running rampant over there since Musk took over, and the elimination of Twitter's verification process has done little to fix it.
Along with those questionable improvements, XEng also said it "consolidated the tech stacks for For you, Following, Search, Profiles, Lists, Communities and Explore" and "completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up," reducing lines of code from 700k to 70k. The engineering team also said it "refactored the API middleware layer … and in doing so simplified the architecture by removing more than 100k lines of code."
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Xitter API changes, for those that don't recall, didn't exactly [11]go over very well .
Everything we do, we do it for Elon's bottom line
The thread that runs through XEng's "engineering excellence" claims mostly boil down to one thing, be they shrunken code, reduced datacenter use, eliminated services or any other optimizations: Cost savings.
X is [12]still hemorrhaging cash despite not paying its bills, largely because it's chased away its advertisers in, as The Washington Post [13]describes it, Musk has tilted the site to the rightward side of the political spectrum, exchanging ad dollars for a [14]proliferation of misinformation .
[15]'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail
[16]The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue
[17]Musk, Yaccarino contradict each other on status of X's election integrity team
[18]X Corp is now suing a sublessee for unpaid rent
Speaking of [19]flagging value and problems breaking even, X announced another change it hopes will bring in some more cash with [20]three tiers of subscription pricing [21]now available .
A new reduced-price $3/month Basic plan was revealed on Friday, which allows users to write longer posts, get a "reply boost," edit posts and customize the X app. The $8/month premium tier remains largely unchanged, with the previous features and the addition of post monetization, and a new $16/month Premium+ gets rid of ads in the For You and Following feeds and further boosts replies.
Musk also reportedly said during an all-hands call, details of which were leaked to the press, that he wanted to [22]add dating app features to X . During the same meeting, Musk allegedly set a goal of having users' " [23]entire financial life " on X by the end of 2024, essentially replacing banks and [24]stock trading platforms.
"If it involves money. It'll be on our platform — money or securities or whatever," Musk reportedly said during the call. After all, handing gobs of cash over to a mercurial, profit-obsessed billionaire has [25]worked out well recently, so why not continue the practice? ®
Get our [26]Tech Resources
[1] https://twitter.com/XEng/status/1717754398410240018?t=E6LC1nm0UqxiRpRWrImCGQ&s=03
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZUA1mrQuqgCcW2SRZP9HhwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZUA1mrQuqgCcW2SRZP9HhwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZUA1mrQuqgCcW2SRZP9HhwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/03/twitter_rate_limits_itself_into/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/05/more_twitter_lawsuits/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/twitter_glitches_raises_tweet_limit/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZUA1mrQuqgCcW2SRZP9HhwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/18/twitter_not_a_bot_fee/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZUA1mrQuqgCcW2SRZP9HhwAAAQg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/02/twitter_eliminating_all_free_api/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/26/x_video_calling_default/
[13] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-x-anniversary/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/26/twitter_eu_disinformation/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/06/twitter_features_outage/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/05/twitter_adl_lawsuit/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/28/x_election_integrity/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/02/x_sues_sublessee/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/31/twitter_value_decline/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/20/x_subs/
[21] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium
[22] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-wants-x-to-be-dating-app-leaked-meeting-2023-10
[23] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-users-entire-financial-life-on-x-twitter-2023-10
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/13/twitter_users_can_now_trade/
[25] http://profit-obsessed
[26] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
X "shutdown the Sacramento data center, and began doing much more on-prem"
That tends to become necessary when lots of users have gone and all that expensive kit is now sat there doing nothing.
Shut the site down and sack everyone and they'd save even more money.
Move on already
We need to get to Wayland as soon as possible.
He's hopeful
..wanting all aspects of users financial lives on Tw*tter. After demonstrating the most crap headed managerial incompetence in running the company, who is going to be daft enough to trust him or the company with anything other than the vacuous brain farts that is all Twitter ever was? The one thing I want from my financial providers is that they are dull, the don't do exciting, or inspired, or spur of the moment stuff. They're run by suits who'd rather not make a decision if they can avoid it. There's also an essential plurality to my finances - I'll never rely on one organisation, does Elmo? Does he think other people should? I don't want the real boss of any of my financial providers to be some up-his-own-arse twerp who's all the time interfering with the person who holds the title of CEO, I don't want it to be somebody who's under investigating by the SEC and who's arrogance makes them think the rules still don't apply to them. So really, it's no from me.
Stick to what you're good at Elmo, which appears to be windbag offers to fight Zuck. Where's that gone, you chickened out again?
Re: He's hopeful
Sadly, there are probably plenty of people who will jump at the chance. Just like there were people bragging that they were on disability or something, but were still paying for Twitter's blue check even though it was a significant portion of their total income. All the kool-aid drinkers on the far political right will probably be quick to sign up, not understanding that it's not regulated in any way, and if Twitler loses all their money he doesn't even owe them so much as an insincere "sorry about that." They'll lose their entire life savings, and then the rest of us taxpayers will be stuck bailing them out for the rest of their lives.
Re: He's hopeful
Lots of crypto fans on Twitter who think Musk is some sort of anointed one - they'll trust him, though they shouldn't.
Re: He's hopeful
>After demonstrating the most crap headed managerial incompetence in running the company, who is going to be daft enough to trust him or the company with anything other than the vacuous brain farts that is all Twitter ever was?
When it comes to the majority, convenience always trumps security. A large number of people will think nothing of shoving all their personal and sensitive information into a single point of failure if it means they can save two clicks on their next Amazon impulse purchase.
Thankfully though, Elon seems to be hell-bent on making Xwitter as inconvenient to use as absolutely possible so I imagine there won't be that many takers on this little venture.
It's tax season
He's looking for a write off in the spring. All these billionaires write off their loses. How do the dumbest animals on the planet have the most wealth? They do what ever, without regard for anything else, and they stick together.
Musk, and frumpy, were both planted by putang as new oligarchs in the west. Change my mind.
Re: It's tax season
>How do the dumbest animals on the planet have the most wealth?
They either luck into a genuinely useful concept and then have just enough sense to sell it on at an inflated value to people who have the wherewithal to do something useful with it, or they manage to find a way to exploit a system they could otherwise never meaningfully participate in and squeeze as much as they can out of it before slithering away.
Unfortunately, both methods then give them the false belief that they're smarter than the rest of humanity because of this, and then they get idolized by others who hope to take the same shortcut to the top which feeds their bulbous egos even more, and that's how we get to situations like this.
Going Down (in Droopy’s voice)
Gee, paid 44b last year, now it’s value at 19b… that is probably wholly inflated too.
Monorail anyone?
So pay to play
Basically, if you don't pay for Twitter, your content is pretty much guaranteed to sink to the bottom of the cesspool it has become.
And there's just no way in any version of a horrific afterlife that I would ever let Twitter and Twitler be in charge of my financial info. Not without them being as stringently regulated as any other actual bank. That's the bare minimum for me to even consider it, and then they have to overcome the fact that Twitler is the one in charge. I won't say it's an impossible task, but it is certainly somewhere between Herculean and Sisyphean.
The one and only thing I will grudgingly give Twitler, is that I didn't think the company would survive to see this day. I figured it would be dead and buried months ago. So, by some combination of blind luck and inertia, he managed not to completely kill it... yet, and not for a lack of effort. Of course the people who are left will try to claim how they've done amazing things... their jobs literally depend on it. Twitler is known for just rage firing people who happen to cross his field of view when he's in a bad mood. If they gave an honest assessment of how bad things have become over the last year, they'd be joining the ranks of those having to sue to get any promised severance. Just look at what happened to those SpaceX engineers a while back.
I'll give the engineers a pat
Given the complete sodding omnishambles incompetence of management, all best people quitting or being fired, the toilets not working, no janitors, dealing with f@#$ing Elmo's capricious stupid whims every f@#ing day, it is kind of amazing that the thing is still even creaking along - which is probably due to the 80 hours of unpaid overtime put in every week by the H-1Bs who can't quit.
Okay, I wouldn't call it Engineering Excellence, just enough people beating their bloody heads against the wall till the wall breaks. If nothing else they get an A for effort.