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raison de arizona
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#1801

Post by raison de arizona »

RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:07 pm
Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter's data-access tool had caused the problem. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said.
Did you touch it? Everyone knows not to touch it, especially when you've fired everyone that understands it. :mrgreen:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
qbawl
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#1802

Post by qbawl »

raison de arizona wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:14 pm
RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:07 pm
Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter's data-access tool had caused the problem. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said.
Did you touch it? Everyone knows not to touch it, especially when you've fired everyone that understands it. :mrgreen:
Back in the day (late '60s) I was a computer operator running an IBM 7074. Fast forwarding many years I was then a mainframe (IBM 360 - 370) systems programmer with a much fancier title and was part of a 'swat' team chosen to read the old 7074 code for a system that needed to be converted to COBOL before the 7074 emulator reached EOL. (very little doc available and much of the documented code had been superseded with patches). Our task was to read the code and produce 'Pseudo Code' for the Cobol programmers.
It was me, a director, a systems manager, and a senior programmer analyst. After a couple of weeks reading the 7074 AUTOCODER manuals and poring over the code and doc the concencus opinion was "Here be Dragons". The system ended up being rewritten from scratch.
Moral of the Story?
1. If it aint broke don't fix it!
2. If you gotta change it you need people who know what it does.
3. Sometimes the only way to fix it is to blow it up and Start over.
$. Elmo is an idiot, albeit a rich one.
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#1803

Post by Jim »

Do not change code until you're sure of all other systems that use that code and are expecting certain things to happen in certain order.

It will be interesting to see if he's willing to pay the extra $$$ it would take to do a complete re-write, testing, and roll-out when hiring all the staff he fired would cost him around 10-15% to upkeep the current system and have it run smoothly. Someone should mention this to Musk's financiers.
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#1804

Post by Slim Cognito »

qbawl wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:32 pm ...
1. If it aint broke don't fix it!
...
In Musk's case, it's: If it ain't broke, you ain't tryin'.

(h/t Red Green)
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neeneko
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#1805

Post by neeneko »

RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:07 pm
Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter's data-access tool had caused the problem. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said.
No good reason? Sounds like someone who just doesn't know why and is not interested in learning.
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#1806

Post by RTH10260 »

neeneko wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 6:16 pm
RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:07 pm
Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter's data-access tool had caused the problem. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said.
No good reason? Sounds like someone who just doesn't know why and is not interested in learning.
Lets me wonder how "brittle" the code stacks of the Tesla cars are, or how SpaceX reached past the outer atmosphere :think:
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#1807

Post by MN-Skeptic »

How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday
The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited outside researchers’ ability to study the network. The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with.

But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.

Elon Musk was furious, we’re told.
And with few knowledgeable workers on hand to restore service, it took Twitter all morning to fix the problem. “This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company,” another current employee says.

Inside Twitter’s HQ, however, the mood was almost light. “We’re laughing all the way down,” says a different current employee.
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#1808

Post by MN-Skeptic »

One of the posters on the Washington Post site, in response to an article about Twitter and Musk, pointed out that if Musk thought the computer program was so bad that it had to be completely rewritten, he could have saved his billions and just started a new company which would then write the perfect code from scratch.
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neeneko
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#1809

Post by neeneko »

RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 6:53 pm Lets me wonder how "brittle" the code stacks of the Tesla cars are, or how SpaceX reached past the outer atmosphere :think:
I could see Musk catering to the 'code reviews are nerd cancel culture!' people.
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#1810

Post by Foggy »

He just learned to say code stack this week.

Next he needs to tell us about data mining orecar optimizers and the code spiraling vortices. :mrgreen:


... and gosh, if the code stack was brittle for no good reason, maybe it wasn't really worth forty four billion dollars. :think:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
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neeneko
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#1811

Post by neeneko »

Foggy wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 7:21 pm He just learned to say code stack this week.

Next he needs to tell us about data mining orecar optimizers and the code spiraling vortices. :mrgreen:


... and gosh, if the code stack was brittle for no good reason, maybe it wasn't really worth forty four billion dollars. :think:
Maybe he should invite someone from Rockwell to give a twitter exclusive ted talk about their retro encabulator and its many applications to software development.
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#1812

Post by Foggy »

Or the iRack!

The iRack is the latest wave that's sweeping the oceans!



Out from under. :thumbsup:
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raison de arizona
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#1813

Post by raison de arizona »

Twitter refused to pay AWS bill, so Amazon refused to pay for ads
Musk's Twitter is still $70m behind on payments

Since Elon Musk acquired the company, Twitter has begun to not pay landlords, cleaners, and software companies for services rendered.

Now, The Information reports that the company has for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills, despite using the cloud service for key aspects of the social media platform.

This lack of payment caused Amazon to threaten retaliation, with the corporation saying that it would not pay for the advertising it runs on Twitter - thought to be around $1 million in the first quarter for retail, and more when Amazon Studios is taken into account. This may have had some impact, with Twitter paying $10m in AWS costs a few weeks ago.

But The Information reports that there is at least $70 million still outstanding, and AWS is not willing to renegotiate the five-and-a-half year contract it signed with Twitter in 2020.

That contract required Twitter to pay $510m over that period. It was signed when Twitter was expecting to move its main timeline over to AWS, but that never occurred (instead it hosts Twitter Spaces and other services), meaning that Twitter is not fully making use of the contract.
:snippity:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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#1814

Post by RTH10260 »

you called - I retrieved it...


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raison de arizona
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#1815

Post by raison de arizona »

Twitter employees feel like it doesn’t engender an atmosphere of trust.
A Twitter engineer says at least 2 bodyguards accompany Elon Musk around Twitter HQ — even to the restroom
  • Elon Musk is accompanied around Twitter HQ by at least two bodyguards, an engineer told the BBC.
  • The engineer said the bodyguards are "tall" and "bulky" and like they're from a "Hollywood movie."
  • The bodyguards even accompany Musk to the restroom, the engineer added.
:snippity:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bodygua ... ort-2023-3
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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#1816

Post by keith »

qbawl wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:32 pm
raison de arizona wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:14 pm
RTH10260 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:07 pm
Did you touch it? Everyone knows not to touch it, especially when you've fired everyone that understands it. :mrgreen:
Back in the day (late '60s) I was a computer operator running an IBM 7074. Fast forwarding many years I was then a mainframe (IBM 360 - 370) systems programmer with a much fancier title and was part of a 'swat' team chosen to read the old 7074 code for a system that needed to be converted to COBOL before the 7074 emulator reached EOL. (very little doc available and much of the documented code had been superseded with patches). Our task was to read the code and produce 'Pseudo Code' for the Cobol programmers.
It was me, a director, a systems manager, and a senior programmer analyst. After a couple of weeks reading the 7074 AUTOCODER manuals and poring over the code and doc the concencus opinion was "Here be Dragons". The system ended up being rewritten from scratch.
Moral of the Story?
1. If it aint broke don't fix it!
2. If you gotta change it you need people who know what it does.
3. Sometimes the only way to fix it is to blow it up and Start over.
$. Elmo is an idiot, albeit a rich one.
I have a similar story.

My first real world programming job was programming on an IBM 360. My first programming task was to convert a program from using direct access IO to using ISAM. If I remember rightly, it was a labor distribution program. The program was written in Assembler, but its history went back to IBM 1401 Autocoder (I did know Autocoder from high school days but that is irrelevant here). It had been converted from Autocoder to Assembler by IBM contractors (probably 5 or 6 years before, whenever they had upgraded to the 360, I dunno) and then in the meantime it had been modified at least a half dozen times by various programmers.

So cool. I dived into it and thought I knew what I had to do for the conversion, but there was a lot of code happening in there so I started flowcharting it on my deskpad to see what it was doing. I was sitting there staring at the flowchart one day when the boss walked by and asked how I was doing. I told him "I've flowcharted the program and think I know what its doing and how to patch it, but 80% of the code in this thing is completely inactive. Previous programmers just branched around the code they were changing and wrote completely new routines and left the old code behind. Some routines have been modified this way 4 or 5 times. Can I just rewrite it in COBOL and throw away the old one?" He couldn't say yes fast enough. I suspect he had tried to modify it at some point himself. I seemed to be his golden boy after that. Even the accountants that got the reports came down to me and asked if we could run the new version off the old data because all of a sudden they are getting the right numbers on the report so something I did accidentally made it work properly (unfortunately we no longer had the input data).
Has everybody heard about the bird?
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noblepa
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#1817

Post by noblepa »

keith wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 11:40 pm
qbawl wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:32 pm
raison de arizona wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 3:14 pm

Did you touch it? Everyone knows not to touch it, especially when you've fired everyone that understands it. :mrgreen:
Back in the day (late '60s) I was a computer operator running an IBM 7074. Fast forwarding many years I was then a mainframe (IBM 360 - 370) systems programmer with a much fancier title and was part of a 'swat' team chosen to read the old 7074 code for a system that needed to be converted to COBOL before the 7074 emulator reached EOL. (very little doc available and much of the documented code had been superseded with patches). Our task was to read the code and produce 'Pseudo Code' for the Cobol programmers.
It was me, a director, a systems manager, and a senior programmer analyst. After a couple of weeks reading the 7074 AUTOCODER manuals and poring over the code and doc the concencus opinion was "Here be Dragons". The system ended up being rewritten from scratch.
Moral of the Story?
1. If it aint broke don't fix it!
2. If you gotta change it you need people who know what it does.
3. Sometimes the only way to fix it is to blow it up and Start over.
$. Elmo is an idiot, albeit a rich one.
I have a similar story.

My first real world programming job was programming on an IBM 360. My first programming task was to convert a program from using direct access IO to using ISAM. If I remember rightly, it was a labor distribution program. The program was written in Assembler, but its history went back to IBM 1401 Autocoder (I did know Autocoder from high school days but that is irrelevant here). It had been converted from Autocoder to Assembler by IBM contractors (probably 5 or 6 years before, whenever they had upgraded to the 360, I dunno) and then in the meantime it had been modified at least a half dozen times by various programmers.

So cool. I dived into it and thought I knew what I had to do for the conversion, but there was a lot of code happening in there so I started flowcharting it on my deskpad to see what it was doing. I was sitting there staring at the flowchart one day when the boss walked by and asked how I was doing. I told him "I've flowcharted the program and think I know what its doing and how to patch it, but 80% of the code in this thing is completely inactive. Previous programmers just branched around the code they were changing and wrote completely new routines and left the old code behind. Some routines have been modified this way 4 or 5 times. Can I just rewrite it in COBOL and throw away the old one?" He couldn't say yes fast enough. I suspect he had tried to modify it at some point himself. I seemed to be his golden boy after that. Even the accountants that got the reports came down to me and asked if we could run the new version off the old data because all of a sudden they are getting the right numbers on the report so something I did accidentally made it work properly (unfortunately we no longer had the input data).
I, too, began my professional career as a 360 Assembler programmer. The "technique" of branching around code, rather than deleting it was very common. It usually arose because the programmer making the modification didn't really understand the code and was afraid that, after the change was in production, it would be found that the old code was needed, after all. To restore the old code would be an easy task, but, if it were deleted, it might be difficult to recreate it.
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#1818

Post by Suranis »

A Twitter engineer explains the Twitter server to Musk. Musk nods along, and tells the guy he is brilliant.

Hic sunt dracones
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#1819

Post by qbawl »

Off Topic
Keith, did you ever use a utility for the 360 called DEBE (Does Everything But Eat)? I worked with the CSE that wrote it. He was our CSE for many years and when he retired he came to work for the company I worked for.
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#1820

Post by keith »

qbawl wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:44 am
Off Topic
Keith, did you ever use a utility for the 360 called DEBE (Does Everything But Eat)? I worked with the CSE that wrote it. He was our CSE for many years and when he retired he came to work for the company I worked for.
No. Never saw DEBE. Was that for MVS maybe? I ran DOS and VM.
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#1821

Post by qbawl »

keith wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 4:54 pm
qbawl wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:44 am
Off Topic
Keith, did you ever use a utility for the 360 called DEBE (Does Everything But Eat)? I worked with the CSE that wrote it. He was our CSE for many years and when he retired he came to work for the company I worked for.
No. Never saw DEBE. Was that for MVS maybe? I ran DOS and VM.
It definitely pre-dated MVS and VM not sure any more but must have been DOS. It was running on a Mod 30 we used to emulate 2 1401s. Knowing the guy that wrote it it may have been ML. He liked to run ‘close to the metal’ JJ wrote it for himself to replace a bunch of stand alone utilities (card to tape, tape to tape, tape to card, tape to print and a ½ dozen other permutations plus core dump formatting stuff). People saw it and wanted a copy and it spread around the country. Eventually the local IBM office made him stop sending it out. It was almost exactly a full box of cards (2000 cards). I think a few years later it appeared as an official IBM utility under an assumed name.
Oh I should mention this about pronunciation it was named after a family member Debbie or maybe the snack cake.
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#1822

Post by keith »

qbawl wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 6:17 pm
keith wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 4:54 pm
qbawl wrote: Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:44 am
Off Topic
Keith, did you ever use a utility for the 360 called DEBE (Does Everything But Eat)? I worked with the CSE that wrote it. He was our CSE for many years and when he retired he came to work for the company I worked for.
No. Never saw DEBE. Was that for MVS maybe? I ran DOS and VM.
It definitely pre-dated MVS and VM not sure any more but must have been DOS. It was running on a Mod 30 we used to emulate 2 1401s. Knowing the guy that wrote it it may have been ML. He liked to run ‘close to the metal’ JJ wrote it for himself to replace a bunch of stand alone utilities (card to tape, tape to tape, tape to card, tape to print and a ½ dozen other permutations plus core dump formatting stuff). People saw it and wanted a copy and it spread around the country. Eventually the local IBM office made him stop sending it out. It was almost exactly a full box of cards (2000 cards). I think a few years later it appeared as an official IBM utility under an assumed name.
Oh I should mention this about pronunciation it was named after a family member Debbie or maybe the snack cake.
Sounds like the utility we knew as Ditto
Has everybody heard about the bird?
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#1823

Post by Gregg »

Jim wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 5:38 pm Do not change code until you're sure of all other systems that use that code and are expecting certain things to happen in certain order.

It will be interesting to see if he's willing to pay the extra $$$ it would take to do a complete re-write, testing, and roll-out when hiring all the staff he fired would cost him around 10-15% to upkeep the current system and have it run smoothly. Someone should mention this to Musk's financiers.
Who does he get to write it?

He can't hire new employees, who in their right mind would go work there?

He can't hire outside contractors, if they're smart enough to do the work they're also smart enough to doubt they'll ever get paid. If he doesn't go full Trump an say "I ain't paying, sue me" he'll go full Trump and declare bankruptcy.
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#1824

Post by Gregg »

MN-Skeptic wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 7:05 pm One of the posters on the Washington Post site, in response to an article about Twitter and Musk, pointed out that if Musk thought the computer program was so bad that it had to be completely rewritten, he could have saved his billions and just started a new company which would then write the perfect code from scratch.
He could call it "Truth Social"
Foggy wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 7:21 pm He just learned to say code stack this week.

Next he needs to tell us about data mining orecar optimizers and the code spiraling vortices. :mrgreen:


... and gosh, if the code stack was brittle for no good reason, maybe it wasn't really worth forty four billion dollars. :think:

To be fair, it was only worth $27 billion. When he bought it, it's down to about $8 billion now.
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#1825

Post by Dave from down under »

Me: Elon is a psychopath.. but we all knew that.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-08/ ... /102069040

If you're not told you are fired, are you really fired? At Twitter, probably.

Key points:
Twitter CEO Elon Musk became embroiled in an "exit interview"-style argument with a former employee seeking information
He called into question the employee's work output and disability, based on what he later called "untrue" information
The employee, Icelandic tech worker Haraldur Thorleiffson, says it was a "surreal" experience

Haraldur Thorleifsson, who until recently was employed at Twitter, logged in to his computer last Sunday to do some work — only to find himself locked out, along with 200 others.

He might have figured, as others before him have in the chaotic months of lay-offs and firings since Elon Musk took over the company, that he was out of a job.

Instead, after nine days of no answer from Twitter as to whether or not he was still employed, Mr Thorleifsson decided to tweet at Mr Musk to see if he could catch the billionaire's attention and get an answer to his "Schrödinger's job" situation.

"Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?" he wrote on Monday.
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