Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@drquuxum I've been trying to figure out if toot length varies based on who hosts you, and it'sa little unclear to me. I have like 65,000 characters to work with.

#riptwitter

The list of things that have gone wrong at Twitter is, well, extensive. But the simplest one happened at the very start, was exacerbated by Musk's subsequent communication, and was extremely, IMHO, predictable.

So, let's talk about the difference between startups and established tech companies.

I worked at a startup as my first job out of college. Put five years in. It was an amazing experience and I was truly fortunate to have it; I was thrown into the deep end, learned things about software architecture that would serve me well throughout my whole career, and wouldn't trade it for anything.

I also:

* broke off a date with my future wife because I was the only one of three team members who could make a demo work for the next day. We pulled an all-nighter.

* became well-familiar with the biker gang that pulled up to the bar across the street from our office every Saturday night; could set my clock by them arriving. Did often, on account of all the seven-day weeks.

* got the sickest I'd ever been, out three weeks. Week two, my CEO calls and checks to see if there's any duty I could take on because we had no other hands to do it. I wrote some user-facing documentation. Three months later, someone caught all the obvious typos and asked "What idiot wrote this?" I dead-panned that I think I missed some issues on account of all the vivid hallucinations.

* had a conversation with my doctor about the indigestion that was waking me up at night. He suggested I relieve stress. I responded "I work at a startup, so what are the options that don't require a career change?"

And eventually, I left because I was ready to stop living like that.

Here's the thing: there is *so much* of the software dev ecosystem where you don't *live* like that. You live like that because you're working on something you're willing to sacrifice yourself for it (I'm not talking about being passionate about the work---you can be passionate and have a work-life balance---I'm talking actual sacrifice; things you won't get back) or you are expecting a *huge* payout relative to the invested effort. If those ingredients aren't there? You don't take that gig. And companies that aren't willing to offer that payout or the kind of we-are-here-to-change-the-world opportunity don't get those employees.

Twitter was once such a startup. It's not anymore. It went public. Once a company goes public, it's no longer a startup; it's a place people who want a reliable paycheck and a reasonable work-life balance go to work. At Google, we were counseled to have a "startup mentality" by leadership, and people certainly tried to give it their all, but... You just don't work like you're at a startup at a 100,000-person company. You can't. The buy-in isn't there. It does you no good to pull seven-day weeks when the database team you're relying upon works five-day weeks, holds all the credentials to modify the DB, and just won't answer their email on a Saturday. What's the point then? Go home, love your spouse, work on your house, hike in the park, touch grass.

Musk tried something I don't think I've seen before: he tried taking a company that "won the game," as it were, and *roll it back to a startup.* He took a place people had a stable job making a product people use and tried to make it a place where the future was uncertain again. And then he confirmed that, yes, he *was* expecting those employees to work seven-day weeks to realize a vision... A vision he didn't even enunciate.

Twitter was a place steady hands were working to maintain a mature product for a reliable paycheck. A mass exodus is entirely expected. I don't know why *he* didn't expect it.

@lauren oh bless his heart, did he assume the people he fired wrote that s*** down somewhere?!

Design documents are for companies that didn't have to build their way out of the failwhale era.

@obi If the Mastodon federated network grows to the size of Twitter, it will be interesting to see how nations respond.

Compliance enforcement is a bit harder (of course) with a distributed network, but the laws haven't changed so they'll certainly try. The only reason, I assume, they haven't already is the userbase wasn't large enough relative to its competition for regulators to care.

(... `"withheld_in_countries": ["DE", "FR"]`)

I'll miss a few things about Twitter.

Mostly the fact that with a little sleuthing, you could find on every account which ones Twitter believed were Nazis or Nazi-adjacent. Because for German legal compliance reasons, they had to filter those accounts for German users, so there was a little metadata you could fetch via the API that told you if a given tweet or entire account was Germany-noncompliant.

@lauren Due to personal circumstances, I have become painfully aware as of late how little money rocketry-adjacent computer engineers are willing to work for.

I'd assume the wow-factor of getting to tell people your job is putting things in space makes up for some of that, but I can't take that wow-factor to the bank to pay my mortgage.

@lauren I'm getting strong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8WqLxSpOMI vibes.

(Now that you've raised the question, wow there *are* a lot that apply here aren't there?)

@lauren The hardest part of Twitter was never the technical challenge (not to minimize the technical challenge; scale was clearly something that required elbow grease).

The hardest part of Twitter is that ineffable quality that powers Facebook, regular D&D nights, and the SCA. "You rule because they believe."

@hasmis Does that grow back after the cold season or do you have to re-plant?

@rjh We had a voter come in with his hand-Chihuahua nestled in his arm at the same time as a couple of younger folk.

Dear voters: the vote should be anonymous. That's a cornerstone of our process. But when you pull stunts like this, you make it *very* hard for the people *around* you to practice proper opsec to keep your vote private. What do you expect us to do when you narrow the possible options on us this hard? 😉

We'll keep your secret. It's our duty, but *please* think about your privacy more than none.

@jleedev Yes! Frustratingly *not* a mechanism for managing your workout routine!

(Well, hm. Lemme think about that for a bit... 😆).

#frc

Control system theory is frustrating because the nomenclature is all over the map.

Sometimes you get a formula where the inventors named the important tuning parameters, which you need to understand to make the formula work, "B" and "Zeta."

And then you get the *coolest* names for relatively mundane concepts, like "control authority." "Control authority" sounds like what an anime character uses to control their magic servant, not the idea that you can't force a motor to do more if it's already doing as much as it can.

@jasonp Oh, that would be suboptimal. Users expect control-F to mean find, and it would be rough on them to have to memorize some other key sequence to do finds when 'find' starts with 'f'.

Ideally, were I king of user interfaces and redesigning modern computers from scratch to be better platforms for the web ecosystem, I would split out the meta keys that acted as accelerators for the browser itself (and operating system, because the way I use things these days those are almost indistinguishable) and content of the web page. So you'd have a control key for browser operations and operating system operations and a "webmeta" key exclusively for keyboard acceleration inside of a web app. Can't quite retrofit it on the existing ecosystem because there's too much divergence among the dominant operating systems on what those meta keys do (Apple stole an entire meta key just to extend the keyboard). Google is almost in a position to try an experiment like this with Chrome OS; they'd have to devise an RFC establishing a new API for webmeta and clarify how a user agent takes advantage of it if it's lacking that key (two-pass could work... Have one control-something sequence mean "do a webmeta" and then the next key pressed is treated as webmeta-thatkey).

But it would be kind of cool if somebody took the lead on that, and I bet if a player is big as Google did, it wouldn't be too many years before the other browsers extended their input logic to support a webmeta, with keyboard developers not far behind.

@annasomeday @rvawonk and yet it only was built because private ownership allowed somebody to take the risk.

There was no reason to believe Twitter would be valuable until it was.

@jasonp Oh, I think I follow. Your frustration is that if somebody has ctrl-F too soon they get the browser find instead of the hooked find?

That's a real problem and I don't think it's one that can be changed without a change to the browser API itself... You'd have to guarantee the relevant hook is installed before any user interaction events are processed, which means you need a way to gate user interaction on a certain minimum of the page being loaded. I don't think any aspect of the RFCs gates that and it will be necessary.

Good thing to work around is simple, obvious, and easily discovered while we wait for a better API.

@rvawonk I know that someone is making a point of archiving all the Dril memes.

@peter_ravn What is it about chicken ads and apathy to tragedy, I do not know. But I do know that someone at CNN or Applebee's grossly misconfigured their exclusion list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGuXQcv7S4

@jasonp I'm not sure how to parse "Google Docs steals control-F." It maps it to "find in doc," which is necessary because it must delegate that operation to the backend (the frontend doesn't have the whole doc resident in memory to search it; really *can't* since Docs can be an arbitrary size well beyond what's practical for most browser clients).

What do you want to ctrl-F that ctrl-F isn't ctrl-F'ing in Docs?