Tesla Engineers Visit Twitter Office to Review Code for Musk(bloomberg.com)
bloomberg.com
Tesla Engineers Visit Twitter Office to Review Code for Musk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-engineers-visit-twitter-office-to-review-code-for-musk
138 comments
It probably wasn't a "code review", it was probably a technical architecture review - docs, diagrams, slides, conversations. And then maybe the journalist (or some non-technical source they are using, such as some PR person or executive) doesn't understand the difference between a "code review" and "architecture review". Or maybe the journalist actually does understand, but they called it a "code review" (or maybe even the editor changed it on them) because they think that's easier for an uneducated general audience to understand.
> This is absolutely ridiculous.
Asking people whose work you trust to evaluate something you can't evaluate yourself is ridiculous now?
EDIT: however, it does leave a bit of a bad taste in Twitter employees mouths, in that it basically indicates that Musk doesn't trust them. Hmm, that's not optimal.
Asking people whose work you trust to evaluate something you can't evaluate yourself is ridiculous now?
EDIT: however, it does leave a bit of a bad taste in Twitter employees mouths, in that it basically indicates that Musk doesn't trust them. Hmm, that's not optimal.
Exactly! The thing is about trust. And I would even add that in this case here, due to ideological differences between both Elon and Twitter employees, there is more space for distrust to happen and it justifies even more Musk calling people he knows and who have a general idea of what is going on the code and notice some weird red flag.
Well, in this case there is sound reasoning for that lack of "trust".
You can support Twitters past actions and disagree w/ Musk but does anyone dispute that he bought the platform because he thought their practices were unethical, and the internal culture has been openly hostile to his purchase.
You can support Twitters past actions and disagree w/ Musk but does anyone dispute that he bought the platform because he thought their practices were unethical, and the internal culture has been openly hostile to his purchase.
Yes, I dispute that. He bought it out of spite. Just like he called the hero cave diver a pedo out of spite. He's a genius businessman - I judge him so because he has somehow figured out how to sell electric cars to conservatives, but he is a flawed as fuck human.
> the hero cave diver a pedo out of spite ... he is a flawed as fuck human
Wow! You went from a 10 word tweet to "a flawed as fuck human"! I guess you've never said or written anything bad about another person given the angel that you are.
Oh btw, did you hear Musk won the case because the diver was trying to make some bucks off of an angry response, claiming it was "defamation"? Maybe not a "pedo-guy", whatever that means, but certainly a petty opportunist who received a nice basket of egg on his face.
Wow! You went from a 10 word tweet to "a flawed as fuck human"! I guess you've never said or written anything bad about another person given the angel that you are.
Oh btw, did you hear Musk won the case because the diver was trying to make some bucks off of an angry response, claiming it was "defamation"? Maybe not a "pedo-guy", whatever that means, but certainly a petty opportunist who received a nice basket of egg on his face.
backs slowly away
I bet you are just a much better person, sitting on Hacker News and judging others harshly for one angry tweet. A real angel!
> it basically indicates that Musk doesn't trust them. Hmm, that's not optimal.
I don't read it like that. The most anti-Musk people have likely already left. But with Peiter Zatko alleging serious security breaches, dysfunction, and cultural issues at Twitter, it's likely a good idea to get a few independent eyeballs on whatever problems there may be.
I don't read it like that. The most anti-Musk people have likely already left. But with Peiter Zatko alleging serious security breaches, dysfunction, and cultural issues at Twitter, it's likely a good idea to get a few independent eyeballs on whatever problems there may be.
I disagree. If I was a trustworthy employee at Twitter, I would be glad to finally have all those ideologists be found and removed.
Which ideologists are those?
The ones who have been striking down conservatives, christians and every one else that does not agree with California-level progressive values.
That's going to be hard work Musk owning the company now.
He’s going to fire most of them. Many will quit fast as they can.
Being “nice” is not a goal.
Being “nice” is not a goal.
I translate this as "Musk sent his crack team of engineers to Twitter to assess the engineering culture at Twitter. He needs to find out which engineering department is weak and needs attention"
On the contrary, this is the most sensible and efficient approach to solve one of the main problems Twitter has.
I’m surprised not surprised Musk didn’t request access to code for due diligence review prior to closing.
The contract Musk signed relinquished any right to diligence.
>It added another degree of uncertainty to whether Mr. Musk would complete the deal, even though he had waived his rights to do due diligence on Twitter when he bought it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/technology/elon-musk-twit...
>It added another degree of uncertainty to whether Mr. Musk would complete the deal, even though he had waived his rights to do due diligence on Twitter when he bought it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/technology/elon-musk-twit...
Elon don’t care. I don’t say that in a good way.
As Matt Levine said, “Musk did not become the world’s richest person by always honoring the letter and spirit of his commitments.”
As Matt Levine said, “Musk did not become the world’s richest person by always honoring the letter and spirit of his commitments.”
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30 years ago he would subpoena Twitter and have lawyers review the mountain of printed code books.
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If your logic made any sense, then how would anybody ever change jobs? It’s really funny when people just become so stupid to try to make a political point. You also act like Twitter some really complex architecture it’s a freaking message board.
> Twitter’s engineers can no longer make changes to code as of noon in San Francisco, the people said.
I'm quite curious about the
- Structure: Deployment freeze VS full-on halt of development on feature branches
- Enforcement: Mere policy VS technical block via permission revocation (what happens if an urgent hotfix is required?)
- Communication: Did anyone see this coming? Was it communicated in a respectful manner?
Any Twitter engineers here who are able to talk about any of this?
I'm quite curious about the
- Structure: Deployment freeze VS full-on halt of development on feature branches
- Enforcement: Mere policy VS technical block via permission revocation (what happens if an urgent hotfix is required?)
- Communication: Did anyone see this coming? Was it communicated in a respectful manner?
Any Twitter engineers here who are able to talk about any of this?
Enforcement: I would imagine that there is a way for hotfixes by a small group of trustworthy employees. That would be the common sense approach.
Communication: yes, this is the obvious cautious first step. There seem to be many ideologically driven people at Twitter and those kind of people can become dangerous very quickly. The big first task will be to find them and remove them from their positions, so that the rest of the employees can continue with their jobs.
Communication: yes, this is the obvious cautious first step. There seem to be many ideologically driven people at Twitter and those kind of people can become dangerous very quickly. The big first task will be to find them and remove them from their positions, so that the rest of the employees can continue with their jobs.
This is basically the "seize the telephone exchange and TV station" phase of a coup, where ideologically driven people can be replaced with different ideologically driven people. Musk himself has described his ideological motivations.
What are those motivations you claim he described?
Sounds more like an absence of ideology and the desire that diversity of opinion returns to the virtual town square.
No, we just want people to stop censoring the other side. It doesn’t take a genius to see where that road leads. Only one party, uses their feelings as justification for silencing dissent.
> It doesn’t take a genius to see where that road leads
https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1585808070466076673 (screenshots of racial slurs and calls for mass murder)
https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1585808070466076673 (screenshots of racial slurs and calls for mass murder)
All those accounts are now suspended or removed, one is private; what was your point again?
Is walking in with a sink and saying "let that sink in" a respectful manner? No, respect isn't his style.
How does this work?
The engineers work for Tesla, but Tesla isn’t buying Twitter?
I was assuming Elon was, perhaps it’s a favour?
The engineers work for Tesla, but Tesla isn’t buying Twitter?
I was assuming Elon was, perhaps it’s a favour?
SpaceX uses some Tesla parts (such as electric motors and batteries). Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers as consultants regarding those parts.
Legally, Tesla isn't allowed to do "favours" for Musk's other businesses. From what I understand, SpaceX/etc pay Tesla the fair market value of all assistance received (both goods and services). And the cooperation has to (at a high level) be approved by the respective boards (both Tesla's and SpaceX's) while Musk is not in the room. Whatever assistance Tesla may have given Musk regarding Twitter would be subject to the same legal requirements.
Legally, Tesla isn't allowed to do "favours" for Musk's other businesses. From what I understand, SpaceX/etc pay Tesla the fair market value of all assistance received (both goods and services). And the cooperation has to (at a high level) be approved by the respective boards (both Tesla's and SpaceX's) while Musk is not in the room. Whatever assistance Tesla may have given Musk regarding Twitter would be subject to the same legal requirements.
Twitter signs an agreement with Tesla’s new software consulting division!
So siphon Twitter revenue to boost Tesla profit and its share price. Not a bad idea.
How much annual revenue does Twitter generate compared to Tesla?
https://companiesmarketcap.com/twitter/pe-ratio/
Last P/E was -160. Which is really bad.
Last P/E was -160. Which is really bad.
Internet suggests ~10% in 2021 (Twitter $5bn, Tesla ~$53bn)
You can't compare software services revenue to cars. COGS model is totally different.
I wasn't, I was just providing the numbers that GP asked for.
He's likely paying them a contracting fee.
It seems unlikely that the Tesla employment contract would allow outside consulting. But I could be wrong.
Most likely, the contract is between Tesla and Musk’s Twitter acquisition vehicle (“X Holdings”), so it isn’t moonlighting, it is their day job.
But, even if it is moonlighting - all employment contracts allow moonlighting with approval. Many firms are rather sparing in granting that approval - but it is a lot easier to say “yes” to an employee request if you know that’s what the CEO wants you to say.
But, even if it is moonlighting - all employment contracts allow moonlighting with approval. Many firms are rather sparing in granting that approval - but it is a lot easier to say “yes” to an employee request if you know that’s what the CEO wants you to say.
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He is paying Tesla.
Or both companies have accounting departments with experts who figure out the details, eg. what’s the amount in consulting fees that Tw pays to Tesla for this.
Isn’t that obvious?
Isn’t that obvious?
You do what the boss says.
Of course, these are the engineers that can't even program a car to drive by itself.
Of course, these are the engineers that can't even program a car to drive by itself.
Can't the dude afford to hire his own independent contractors? Why bother Tesla employees with this?
Trust. He probably has a few engineers he trusts.
And what “trust” probably means here is that they have technical chops but can also be relied on to tell Elon what he wants to hear.
Well they’re either on company time or being paid separately, either way I doubt they’re doing it for free!
It's easier to reach out to one of your VPs and say "hey, I need a few folks"
Whether they come from Tesla or are hired, Musk doesn't care. He just wants some DD
Whether they come from Tesla or are hired, Musk doesn't care. He just wants some DD
Money is easy. Finding trustworthy people is hard.
oh sure, the problem is in "the code".
just need to fix the code and then twitter will be all set.
just need to fix the code and then twitter will be all set.
If you have some vision about what to do with Twitter it would probably help to understand the code base.
Why? Do you think Pichai or Cook/Jobs read the code? They hire engineers to build.
In this context we are talking about Musk using developers he trusts to review Twitter's codebase. Isn't that exactly the same thing? Musk wants an understanding of Twitter's code, so he brings in people to establish that knowledge and convey it to him.
Will he try to migrate twitter to windows server again?
I’ve heard the Tesla architecture is a hot mess. Maybe it’s more for the benefit of Tesla.
Tesla architecture might be a mess (very likely), but I bet a lot of money that among car companies that make billions in revenue their architecture is not that messy in comparison. If you consider the horror stories you hear from other car companies and their attempts at software.
From my prior experience in a big car company. A lot of us are getting better as well, remember that there is baggage accumulated over the years. Like most things, this takes time. This bureaucracy be shed overnight, it is a painful metamorphosis. I know of systems of record where developers are close to retirement, devices which are fabricated by vendors. Every CIO change swings between "we are a car company, outsource" vs "software is eating the world, insource". Sure enough things are changing for the better.
I bet most other car companies do very little software dev in-house. Just tons of outside vendors all providing different pieces.
I have a friend who's contracted to write some code for Tesla and can confirm. They have certain things that are built well, but sooo much is spaghetti on spaghetti.
Tesla and Twitter programmers have opposite goals.
A Tesla programmer wants the car to minimize interactions with the world, and avoid collisions.
A Twitter programmer wants the feed to maximize interactions with the world, and avoid misses (aka boring content)
A Tesla programmer wants the car to minimize interactions with the world, and avoid collisions.
A Twitter programmer wants the feed to maximize interactions with the world, and avoid misses (aka boring content)
I don't understand Musk infatuation with twitter, is just another social virtual pool with some interesting posting but also a ton of toxic comment and useless discussions. It's true that it has hundreds of millons of rabid users but so had mySpace at its prime, but hey what do I know...
It's become quite influential in the worlds media. Back in the Trump days the world's headlines used to be "Trump tweeted <x>". Not that I miss the Trump stuff but the same goes for a lot of influential figures.
It was interesting in covid times that a lot of the newspapers had headlines "University x finds so and so about covid" but you could go on Twitter and read the tweets from the Prof of Virology at said university and get a much more accurate version released about 12 hours earlier. It put me off the MSM a bit to see how much they span things. It can be a superior source of info as long as you are careful to follow the real experts and not the cranks.
It was interesting in covid times that a lot of the newspapers had headlines "University x finds so and so about covid" but you could go on Twitter and read the tweets from the Prof of Virology at said university and get a much more accurate version released about 12 hours earlier. It put me off the MSM a bit to see how much they span things. It can be a superior source of info as long as you are careful to follow the real experts and not the cranks.
This is obviously a ploy to get an immediate rebate on the 44 billion dollar price he just paid.
Musk's technical team was an easy choice for an internal fraud bounty program to split the difference from any fraudulent misrepresentation by the original twitter management.
Musk's technical team was an easy choice for an internal fraud bounty program to split the difference from any fraudulent misrepresentation by the original twitter management.
Congrats to Parag Agrawal on getting 42 million.
Can't wait for the moment when my text cursor does a phantom braking while I'm writing a tweet.
I wonder how having engineers running errands at the boss's side-hustle benefits TSLA shareholders.
Tesla definitely benefits from its relationship with SpaceX - the Falcon Heavy maiden launch, Bob and Doug riding Teslas to the launch pad - those are the kind of positive brand stories that money can’t buy.
Nobody knows how Twitter under Musk will turn out. Some critics predict it will soon be a far right swamp no advertiser will want to have anything to do with. If they are right, Tesla’s association with Twitter stands to do it great harm. But if they are wrong, Tesla could benefit from its association with Twitter, much as it does from SpaceX. Musk is (surely) telling Tesla’s board and execs that having just paid billions for a firm, he isn’t about to alienate all its customers (the advertisers) - and the Tesla team is going to take his word for it.
Nobody knows how Twitter under Musk will turn out. Some critics predict it will soon be a far right swamp no advertiser will want to have anything to do with. If they are right, Tesla’s association with Twitter stands to do it great harm. But if they are wrong, Tesla could benefit from its association with Twitter, much as it does from SpaceX. Musk is (surely) telling Tesla’s board and execs that having just paid billions for a firm, he isn’t about to alienate all its customers (the advertisers) - and the Tesla team is going to take his word for it.
We always seem to forget that the majority of US citizens identify as conservative or moderate. Personally, I'm middle-left and found the endless hordes of far-left mobsters to be as equally unappealing.
It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it.
It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it.
Conservative Moderate LiberalWhat does "moderate" mean in this context?
From an outside perspective both Biden and Obama have felt extremely moderate for instance.
From an outside perspective both Biden and Obama have felt extremely moderate for instance.
Great reply from someone else around generational shifts. That essentially answered this for me.
To give a troll response:
In the current context, I guess it means someone who doesn't live on the internet complaining about issues they do nothing about as if it does something tangible to change the real world.
To give a troll response:
In the current context, I guess it means someone who doesn't live on the internet complaining about issues they do nothing about as if it does something tangible to change the real world.
Political labels only have meaning in the context of a given time and place. What’s moderate in one place and time can be extreme in another. What’s right-wing at one place and time can be left-wing at another. (And in both cases, the converse is also true.) Obviously the person you are replying to meant those terms in a contemporary US-centric context - a “moderate” in the US is likely to be a fair way to the “right” by the standards of some countries, and a fair way to the “left” by the standards of others.
It simply means the respondent checked the "moderate" checkbox when asked.
Both Obama and Biden (and Bush) delivered a couple of wars to the military industrial complex to make trillions of dollars on. If you don’t deliver wars, the media will punish you. That’s what I learned from the past 20 years of U.S. politics.
The public definitely wanted a war after 9/11. Being anti-war could get you cancelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy
Indeed, the public did/does want war...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Just like today if you advocated for peace in Ukraine.
Advocating for surrender in Ukraine will, because that will get a lot of civilians killed, but withdrawal of the aggressor won't. And yes, this is consistent, the US should never have fabricated its pretexts for the Iraq war.
Or publicly stated that it “would depend” on how much the U.S. will help Ukraine. Only a week or so before the Russian invasion.
Reminded me of the statement that “the U.S. wouldn’t intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait” 30 years ago. Again only weeks before the invasion that then gave the reason for the first invasion of Iraq by the U.S.
Amazing how often these same tactics work and reliably lead to big sales for the military industrial complex.
Reminded me of the statement that “the U.S. wouldn’t intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait” 30 years ago. Again only weeks before the invasion that then gave the reason for the first invasion of Iraq by the U.S.
Amazing how often these same tactics work and reliably lead to big sales for the military industrial complex.
Both are radicals trying to pose as moderates.
Biden is just a puppet these days. Saying whatever’s he’s told to by handlers. That’s been his entire career. How he makes his money.
Biden is just a puppet these days. Saying whatever’s he’s told to by handlers. That’s been his entire career. How he makes his money.
Leveraged side hustle. I bet Tesla charged Twitter consulting fee. This is how you extract value from leveraged takeover.
Yes let's have engineers that work on an in-car OS and a website that could be created on WordPress assess another company's product that is globally distributed and one of the most highly trafficked sites in the world.
Edit: Didn't mean to downplay the tremendous effort that goes into Tesla's driver assistance features. Just that the architecture, codebases, and problems addressed are so wildly different between the companies.
Edit: Didn't mean to downplay the tremendous effort that goes into Tesla's driver assistance features. Just that the architecture, codebases, and problems addressed are so wildly different between the companies.
I had a similar thought as whilst the technology might be similar in some ways the context, the history, the use cases and the driving principles are different. Anyone who has started a development job working on an established architecture and codebase should know that it takes months to begin to understand to a good level what's going on and why.
Opinions can be given but should not be taken as gospel over the opinions of the existing developers. But a lot of the time a new owner will take the opinions of their trusted sources (whose paycheck depends upon validating their boss' opinion) versus established experts. Good solutions come from discussion between these two opinions.
Opinions can be given but should not be taken as gospel over the opinions of the existing developers. But a lot of the time a new owner will take the opinions of their trusted sources (whose paycheck depends upon validating their boss' opinion) versus established experts. Good solutions come from discussion between these two opinions.
Not to interrupt your rant but, Tesla might just also have a distributed backend for their cars to communicate with, that might even be globally distributed. And I would even say that it probably processes more data/sec than the Twitter “product”.
are you aware that all vehicles from Telsa, are permanently "tweeting" huge telemetry data to an amazon cloud infrastructure managing those petabyte of data to for analysis, training AI, and whatever a fucked brain could imagine.
So basically, there is not difference between "hi im having a pizza with friends at this new restaurant at the corner of my street" and "hi im item #12314 and i just turn left at 50mph speed on a busy road"
Telsa and Twitter are both very mainstream business at acquiring huge amount of data, So intuitively they would share the same similar issue and challenge...
So basically, there is not difference between "hi im having a pizza with friends at this new restaurant at the corner of my street" and "hi im item #12314 and i just turn left at 50mph speed on a busy road"
Telsa and Twitter are both very mainstream business at acquiring huge amount of data, So intuitively they would share the same similar issue and challenge...
I'm not sure how much telemetry Teslas actually send (do buyers really tolerate their absurdly expensive car reporting their every move back?), but in any case I would assume it all gets stored for bulk processing. Twitter's pretty different; when [insert celeb with 100m followers here] tweets, that tweet should show up for anyone who's looking at their profile, immediately. And the like and retweet counts should update for everyone looking at the tweet that just went out to 100m people (actually, it would be possible for Twitter to fudge this bit, but they don't seem to).
These might seem on the face of it similar problems, but really they're not at all. Ingesting lots of data is ~trivial; dealing with lots of data in realtime somewhat less so.
These might seem on the face of it similar problems, but really they're not at all. Ingesting lots of data is ~trivial; dealing with lots of data in realtime somewhat less so.
similar workload is live update trafic monitoring. collect data from all agents, and redistribute aggregated/processed data to all agent, and update route to optimise time or length or both of travel.
collecting data, ingesting data, redistributing ingested/processed data.
I remember back on 2015, there was an AMA on reddit from a former engineer from Telsa.
I remember clearly how he explained how Telsa struggled to update thousand of car's firmware with legacy RH5 vm running on amazon and openssl 0.98 incompatibility with upper version.
I found it very amusing, cause at the same time, i was working at one of the leader of payment industry and POS maker. And we where exactly struggling with the same issue updating firmware of hundred thousand POS terminal in the wild (except that our servers where on premise and not at aws)and dealing with this openssl issue.
And i didnt claim workload are identicals, but i just claims that workload are very similar, leading to the fact that 90% of the solution might be common.
I remember back on 2015, there was an AMA on reddit from a former engineer from Telsa.
I remember clearly how he explained how Telsa struggled to update thousand of car's firmware with legacy RH5 vm running on amazon and openssl 0.98 incompatibility with upper version.
I found it very amusing, cause at the same time, i was working at one of the leader of payment industry and POS maker. And we where exactly struggling with the same issue updating firmware of hundred thousand POS terminal in the wild (except that our servers where on premise and not at aws)and dealing with this openssl issue.
And i didnt claim workload are identicals, but i just claims that workload are very similar, leading to the fact that 90% of the solution might be common.
Twitter at scale is far more complex. With Tesla's telemetry it's just writing to a datastore, with less fuss around latencies, data duplication or consistency. There's no need for millions of clients to then get updated, as there is on twitter. Musk tweets and 110M+ users (+thousands of API clients) need to receive that almost immediately. Twitter has figured out how to do this in a very scalable fashion. Once you know how it's done it's not all that impressive on its own but when you take into account the littany of other features twitter has to maintain at scale you start to realize how many unique problem domains there are within the org.
You realize that the car stuff is only a small part of the entire infra and stack right?
My point was just that neither company's engineers has the necessary knowledge to make any meaningful assessment of the other company's architecture and codebases. Both sides are the result of years of iterations to address very unique problems.
Bullshit. That's like saying one company's financial team cant assess another's finances and structure. Happens all the time.
Agreed. If someone has a deep enough understanding of engineering fundamentals, moving bits is moving bits. It doesn't matter what use case is sitting on top of it.
Also - Let's not act like Twitter is absurdly complex. Handling that amount of traffic was hard in 2008, yes. It's not hard in 2022. The app itself is what? CRUD with stream processing? Some complexity with scaling that, but it's not self-driving... that's for damn sure. Even if they haven't reached L5 yet, L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
Also - Let's not act like Twitter is absurdly complex. Handling that amount of traffic was hard in 2008, yes. It's not hard in 2022. The app itself is what? CRUD with stream processing? Some complexity with scaling that, but it's not self-driving... that's for damn sure. Even if they haven't reached L5 yet, L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
> L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
It is but it's a different problem. Solving Fermat's last theorem is an infinitely harder problem than, say, speedrunning Minecraft in under 13 minutes but you won't see Sir Andrew Wiles doing the latter - because they are different skillsets.
edit: No idea why I typed Simon Wiles, I know full well his name is Sir Andrew!
It is but it's a different problem. Solving Fermat's last theorem is an infinitely harder problem than, say, speedrunning Minecraft in under 13 minutes but you won't see Sir Andrew Wiles doing the latter - because they are different skillsets.
edit: No idea why I typed Simon Wiles, I know full well his name is Sir Andrew!
> Agreed. If someone has a deep enough understanding of engineering fundamentals, moving bits is moving bits. It doesn't matter what use case is sitting on top of it.
VERY few developers are at this level, though. Most (>99%) are stuck in some paradigm associated with their typical tasks.
VERY few developers are at this level, though. Most (>99%) are stuck in some paradigm associated with their typical tasks.
You don't just get a CS degree and just magically understand everything there is to know about software engineering. There are specializations just like in the medical field and many others.
Tesla engineers working on AI have their own domain specific knowledge they likely spent many years to get a PhD for. The same goes for Twitter engineers working on natural language understanding AI to detect certain types of posts. By your logic there is just one broad category of AI researcher and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Scratch that.. there's just one broad category of computer engineer and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Twitter or Tesla engineers could easily do a code review of Space X's code base right?
Tesla engineers working on AI have their own domain specific knowledge they likely spent many years to get a PhD for. The same goes for Twitter engineers working on natural language understanding AI to detect certain types of posts. By your logic there is just one broad category of AI researcher and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Scratch that.. there's just one broad category of computer engineer and they're all the same and have the same expertise. Twitter or Tesla engineers could easily do a code review of Space X's code base right?
You might not know how to make a sophisticated ai for censorship, but looking at the code and infrastructure, you are likely to figure out where is the blackbox/political censorship is. And since it seems that Musk is going to get rid of most of censorship(or rebuild it in his favor) that's most likely what he's asked trusted engineers to look at.
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He has to start somewhere.
Are you serious? do you know how software development is done? do you know what a repository is? Do you know how to look through repository to find code changes? Any computer scientist can do that there’s nothing special about Twitter I don’t know why you think that. Twitter could be created by an undergraduate CS major.
There is a reason the best practice is not to do huge PRs because it's very difficult to review. Now imagine one person has to review all the code generated by a company such as Twitter with 3k+ Engineers across multiple years. Is that even possible given the cognitive load? If so how long would it take to produce anything meaningful?
> Twitter could be created by an undergraduate CS major.
All the codebases will look like they were created by an undergrad CS major and then have accumulated 16 years of edge conditions. And if you pull it all down and try to rewrite it because it is all overly complicated and everyone who built it was wrong: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
All the codebases will look like they were created by an undergrad CS major and then have accumulated 16 years of edge conditions. And if you pull it all down and try to rewrite it because it is all overly complicated and everyone who built it was wrong: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Oh, please there’s not that many edge conditions to Twitter for God sakes. It’s not Google.
It sounds like you have at least an undergraduate CS degree. Go ahead and recreate Twitter and share your GitHub repo for us to review. No need to rush. I'm happy to wait several decades for you to complete the project.
I mean how hard could really be since nobody really has access to the fire hose and only gets showing a little bit at a time which is really horizontally scalable. I mean let’s do the math when NVME Drive can write at 4gbps so scale that to match the influx of data rate with room to spare. The point is Tesla engineers are going to look for nefarious action, not to worry about corner cases. what a non sequitur argument that is
And the code is not the hard part it’s the scaling in the architecture to handle the rate at which the data will flow.
Design principles are all the same, no matter what product you are building. Besides that you just bought a "cat in a bag" with very ambitious goals of redesigning it, don't you want your smartest engineers to look at it first? Or what would be your plan if you were in the Musk's shoes right now?
Are you for real bro? they’re gonna go look through that git log and find every instance where Twitter did something shady. I’m betting the farm that they did.
I'm also reasonably sure they're making sure that they're backing up all git repos, to make sure no such commits are tampered with.
Even if your tamper with one repo, you have to basically kill all clones of the repo to get rid of all the evidence
Did they bounce any pull requests?
"ok guys make me a regex that replaces @realDonaldTrump with @BillGates. make it global and multiline"
""" Earlier Thursday in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, product leaders showed Tesla engineers the company’s code, so they could assess and explain to Musk what the company needs, according to one of the people. """