The article doesn't really do this justice, it's not really "opting to leave" it's that entire divisions inside the Science side of NASA have had their projects defunded and so all the work the people in those labs were doing is now gone. They're being asked to leave voluntarily so they don't have to be "fired" but all their work and resources are gone and they couldn't stay if they wanted to.
A friend of mine had her division's headcount cut by >80% that was all research focused and building instruments for deep space observation. No one is hiring people to do that in the private sector. Dozens of astrophysics PhDs in that division alone are now without work and with no real prospects doing anything related to what they've dedicated their entire lives to (and accepted modest salaries as civil servants to do).
Pardon my ignorance. But isn't it better to be laid off or fired than to resign, since the former entitles you to a few months of severance pay? Or is it different somehow under these circumstances?
I’m not sure about this round but I know someone that resigned out of the DOGE wave in Homeland and she got 9 months severance. I would assume something relatively similar.
In the US, there is no general entitlement to severance beyond a specific employer's policies, a worker's or union's contract (if any) with that employer, or any one-time offer (usually called a voluntary layoff or voluntary resignation) from that employer.
I'm not familiar with the US laws. But I have seen a few cases where the terminated employee sued their former employer for not giving them the severance pay they were owed. That's why I made that (possibly wrong) assumption. So, how does that work?
If you mean how does that lawsuit work, the only way the employee wins is if there's some type of agreement that says they should get paid. That agreement could be employer's written policy, an individual or union contract, an email from someone with authority, or so on.
(Or the lawsuit could be a hail-mary on its merits, hoping the employer will settle rather than air dirty laundry in court.)
There may be state-specific laws (in a small number of states for limited circumstances) and there is the WARN Act (but any court payout there would be a penalty on the employer and much delayed for the workers, while it only requires advance notice rather than being like severance -- and also limited by more conditions), but still "no general entitlement to severance" for the vast majority of workers no matter the reason for their separation.
> Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
This is basically the mantra of every platform team I've worked on. Your goal is to make the easy and obvious solution to engineers' problems the "right" one for the sustainability of software and reliability of services.
Make it easy to ship things that are reliable and manage distributed state well and can scale well and engineers will build better muscle memory for building software in that shape and your whole org will benefit.
> Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.
> Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
> Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
This is probably what we'll end up with in the long-run. Things have been fast enough without it (aside from this issue) but there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Timelines architecture updates. We're spread pretty thin from a engineering-hours standpoint atm so there's a lot of intense prioritization going on.
Just to be clear, you are a Bluesky engineer, right?
off-topic: how has been dealing with the influx of new users after X political/legals problems aftermath? Did you see an increase in toxicity around the network? And how has you (Bluesky moderation) dealing with it.
I understand why some people vote for some parties and why they’re “voting on inflation” or “right to abortion” but I guess, for me, keeping checks and balances and democracy is the one value above ALL for me.
In the span of human history, not a lot of countries and civilizations have lasted long, marked by constant instability and uncertainty for the future. We have a boring and imperfect political system created by our founding fathers but at least it’s been stable for nearly 250 years. A lot of people have tried standing up their own political system… most fail and everyone suffers. Even the founding fathers completely failed once first.
I know times are tough now but, in the context of history, they can be much worse and I rather not lose what good we currently do have.
We may have arguably recovered from it, but we rather famously did not get 250 years without the union violently fragmenting. (Our best record on that is right around 160, currently.)
While it’s true we came close during Civil War, we still decided to keep the same system of government. In the end, while the Civil War did result in some constitutional crises, the root of the problem was more that one half of the country completely disagreed with the other half… I don’t think any political system can really work with that level of division and yet we kept the same one. Obviously the Civil War did very much bring into the question of states’ rights but, for better or worse, the founders were a little vague on that so we can still keep most of the same system and quabble over the details for the rest of eternity…
Trump refusing to accept the 2020 election results should've been the line for many voters, but sadly it wasn't. And the potential crimes he and some of his allies may have committed while trying to overturn it will now never be prosecuted.
2024:
> More than 155 million people cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. It's second only in U.S. history to the 2020 election. Turnout in 2024 represented 63.9% of eligible voters, the second-highest percentage in the last 100 years, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. The only year that beat it – again – was 2020 when universal mail-in voting was more widely available.
2020:
> More than 158 million votes were cast in the election
So 3 millions of Democrats suddenly decided to not go out to vote "to save democracy" against "fascism"?
The simpler and much more likely answer, my friend, is that people didn’t vote from a combination of disillusionment, assuming Kamala would win, and likewise factors.
I saw many people close to me not bother voting because they didn’t enjoy Biden’s presidency, despite voting for him in 2020.
So, I find that FAR more likely as a reason than supposed election fraud.
I'm really confused how tech people shifted from "voting machines are inherently insecure" to simply ignoring the issue despite many political connections between Democrats and voting machine vendors. I'll stick with the results of my research into the matter. If you think you're well enough informed and that your sources actually care about the truth, let's agree to disagree.
This is one of the most investigated issues in American legal history. There was absolutely no indication of fraud. You've fallen for a conspiracy theory. It's now Pizzagate-tier.
(I still argue with Pizzagate adherents on a monthly basis. They think it's perfectly logical.)
Oh fully agreed. But there's a large contingent of folks that are well represented here who think that it's inherently more intelligent to act like/be a centrist, that "both sides have something to offer," which isn't strictly untrue, but in practice especially with American politics just results in mealy-mouthed acceptance of pretty brutal status quos.
Like even left and right in terms of the mainstream here is nonsense. We don't have a left party at all, we have a conservative party, and we have an authoritarian fascist party. As a lefty none of my values are represented at all, I just get to vote each election for the conservative party that doesn't want my friends dead.
Yup. This is a well-tread philosophical problem: the Paradox of Tolerance. Greater minds have concluded "to protect tolerance, one has to be intolerant of intolerance."
And, as always, bsky is a place of business - it is not a public venue. They can decide not to admit individuals who would threaten their business.
I have heard it much more aptly described as “enforcing the social contract”.
You agree to uphold the contract of tolerance with everyone that participates. If someone refuses to uphold the contract with others who do, then you have no obligation to uphold the contract with that individual.
Funny how you call trump administration fascist. (theoretically its anti fascist but its still bad ,
Taking from the description of the video since this was what immediately ringed when you said trump===fascism
The liberal theory of the rise of Trumpism and its supposed fascistic features is inadequate in both effectively analysing and offering solutions to the present situation. Liberals often personalise or individualise people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, casting them as deviations, as opposed to manifestations of class society. Class analysis suggests that fascism was a unique response to growing anti-capitalist organisations, socialist and/or anarchist, gaining prominence and posing threats to the economic base. The owning class required a mass movement which enveloped otherwise disillusioned people into a political project which had the collectivist, anti-free market appeal that socialist and anarchist organisations had, but nonetheless committed to solidifying and strengthening the economic base and profit motive. In modern America, no such anti-capitalist threat exists. Neoliberalism has created significant disillusionment with mainstream social and political institutions and systems, but this disillusionment hasn’t been captured by anti-capitalist forces, but rather by the populist right. As such, the populist right doesn’t need to give up the economic game, i.e. free markets, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, etc (with the exception of tariffs), but can purely rely on minorities as scapegoats in a constructed culture war, such as immigrants, ‘wokeness’, transgender people, etc. Therefore, capital doesn’t need to be subordinated to the nation-state, like pursued by contemporary fascist governments. Rather, in this ‘inverted’ fascism, capital takes over and exploits the state in a rather oligarchic manner.
I find communist analysis tiresome, especially when in this case the populist right under Trump seems to be motivated in part by anti-free market ideas. The communist kneejerk reaction to every single situation is "this can be explained by class analysis". It's them trying to shoehorn their pet theory into everything.
Did you guys end up redesigning the partitioning scheme to fit within Scylla's recommended partition sizes? I assume the tombstone issue didn't disappear with a move to Scylla but incremental compaction and/or SCTS might have helped a bunch?
Nope. Didn't change the schema, mainly added read coalescing and used ICS. I think the big thing is when Scylla is processing a bunch of tombstones it's able to do so in a way that doesn't choke the whole server. Latest Scylla version also can send back partial/empty pages to the client to limit the amount of work per query that is run.
Oh that's pretty neat. Did you just end up being okay with large partitions? I've been really afraid to let partition sizes grow beyond 100k rows even if the rows themselves are tiny but I'm not really sure how much of a real-world performance impact it has. It definitely complicates the data model to break the partitions up though.
ScyllaDB scales horizontally on a shard-per-core architecture with a ballpark throughput of 12,500 Reads and 12,500 Writes per second per shard. If you're running Scylla across a total of 64 cores (maybe on 4 VMs with 16 vCPUs each), you can get up to 800k Reads 800k Writes per sec of throughput with P99 writes of <500us and p99 reads of <2ms.
You will not be able to get that performance out of Postgres and the write scaling will also be impossible on a non-sharded DB.
If you're a company like Discord and are running dozens (70-something?) of ScyllaDB nodes, likely each with 32 or 64 vCPUs, you've got capacity for 50M+ reads/writes per second across the cluster assuming your read/write workloads are evenly balanced across shards.
Fwiw the benchmarked numbers are for writing very small rows. When doing the messages migration, with no read traffic, and the cluster/compaction settings tuned for writes we only managed approx 3m inserts/sec while fully saturating the Scylla cluster.
Interesting, we've got to 5M+ reads/sec in realistic simulated benchmarks and ~2M reads/sec of real-world-throughput on our clusters that are <10 nodes (though really high density). I don't think I've pushed writes beyond 1M QPS in real-world or simulated loads yet though. Thankfully our partitioning schemes are super well distributed though and our rows are very small (generally 1-5k) so I don't think we'd have a problem hitting some big numbers.
How about per-node memory pressure, did it change in favor of Scylla? I ask because I would legitimately expect that GC-based system would have a larger pressure on the memory subsystem.
Scylla just eats all the ram it can with cache. So it's hard to say really. On Cassandra we allocated half the ram to the JVM which it gladly used up and left the other half to the OS for disk cache. On Scylla, since it uses direct io, there is no need for OS disk cache.
Okay but this is where I get confused. Why does Discord need a single database system when discord servers are independent, right?
And the volume of traffic per Discord server must be human-processable or what would the point be? A Discord server doing 800k writes per second makes no sense.
So why not a RDBMS per Discord server, and if you want to ship all that out to a warehouse for analytics you do that as a separate problem?
Or is it that spinning up a Postgres instance per Discord server ends up being significantly more expensive than these mega distributed database systems?
There are ballpark of a few hundred million discord servers... do you really want to run that many Postgres instances? And even so what do you do about DM/GDMs? Easier to just run one big mega cluster for messages.
Okay so the latter then - economies of scale. Surprised to hear that few hundred million figure - I thought it'd be 1/10th of that at most! Wow.
Although I did expect there'd be a very long tail, and you might choose to host a bunch of servers on a single RDBMS, at that scale yeah it wouldn't solve much.
The funny part is ScyllaDB still uses tombstones for deletions, though they do have configurable compaction strategies and iirc Discord uses Scylla's Incremental Compaction Strategy that I suppose solves the specific issue they were dealing with. iirc that compaction strategy will trigger a compaction once a certain threshold of a partition is tombstones and then the table is rebuilt without the tombstoned content (which effectively pauses writes on that specific node and that specific table and partition for the duration of that process). Compacting a massive partition is really expensive. Scylla defaults to warning you that a partition is too large if it has at least 100,000 rows in it. My guess is when they moved to ScyllaDB they also adopted a new strategy for partitioning messages in a channel that keeps partition sizes reasonable so compactions don't take a super long time.
The current relay firehose has more than 250 subscribers. It's served more than 8.5Gbps in real-world peak traffic sustained for ~12 hours a day. That being said, Jetstream is a lot more friendly for devs to get started with consuming than the full protocol firehose, and helps grow the ecosystem of cool projects people build on the open network.
Also, this was a fun thing I built mostly in my free time :)
Also, being some sort of streaming firehose with the same data for everyone (if I understood what this is in a quick read) I guess if it makes any sense to do any kind of P2P/distributed transfer of it to ease the load...
Yes the actual record content on the network isn't huge at the moment but the firehose doesn't include blobs (images and videos) which take up significantly more space. Either way, yeah it's pretty lightweight. Total number of records on the network is around 2.5Bn in the ~1.5 years Bluesky has been around.
A friend of mine had her division's headcount cut by >80% that was all research focused and building instruments for deep space observation. No one is hiring people to do that in the private sector. Dozens of astrophysics PhDs in that division alone are now without work and with no real prospects doing anything related to what they've dedicated their entire lives to (and accepted modest salaries as civil servants to do).