For those who are curious (since we don't want to trample curiosity), Eoghan McCabe is a known abuser -- and has even apologized for it in the past -- and he attended David Sack's Trump fundraising event for the Trump 2024 campaign, including getting a photo with the man. He has reversed his stance on immigration (favoring the current admin's policies and ICE expansion), although it was likely the case that he attended as a pro-crypto pusher more than anything else. Whether or not he has significantly invested in crypto is speculation.
I'm not sure "he supports the PayPal/Yammer/Zenifits guy and protecting the US border" was the massive expose you thought it was. Half of the country does that, it's not remarkable at all.
I did not write an expose. I replied to a VC who went out of his way to congratulate the CEO, who is a known abuser and man with openly awful politics that contradict the values of those who he purports to lead. Not unlike my own CEO, for what it's worth, except for the abuser part.
Appropos of nothing, snowboarding is so unbelievably fun once you’re past the immediate beginner phase of painfully flip-flopping down a slope, that it’s very reasonable to be a tad angry at not being able to live that dream.
I mean, that says a lot about the kind of crisis out current economy is in. How much longer can the United States Be a world leader when it’s primary function is social media and advertising
Advertising is huge because it's backed by a ton of very real products that people go and buy. It matters because people don't automatically have awareness of things they could find useful.
And writing code is one of the most economically productive activities you can do. Why is it controversial that a technology is good at this?
That value for advertising goes negative on a marginal basis.
The first time (or few times) you saw an advert, you were informed of the product's existence. I now know the Hyundai Elantra exists and could potentially be suitable for my vehicle needs. Mission accomplished.
The next 10,000 times it's just fighting over share of a finite market. I am not expecting to buy another car for another few years, so reminding me that I can choose an Elantra instead of a Corolla at all times is just vapourising cash. In fact, there's a chance that you do something obnoxious in your ad and actively burn brand reputation.
You could argue it's a take on the "everyone uses a different 5% of the features" problem-- that advertisement is going to be within the first "informational" window for someone, but maybe there are more efficient ways to not blast it at uninterested audiences.
One other angle might be asking if we still need some markets to be competitive in the first place. You don't need ads if it's a "when you need X, you'll know where to find it" sort of product. If we nationalized the insurance industry alone, we'd probably eliminate a detectable percentage of ad volume.
> When you search for something, you're usually not looking for a sentence. You're looking for evidence.
There is a long and storied history of Google offering more than just a list of links to go search for, since at least 2012, because a massive amount of people literally are looking for the single answer to a question, whether stated explicitly or implicit in the search term.
Yeah, I didn't really like this post much. I agree the UI is bloated. But there's really two big factors here the post either ignores or doesn't empathize with, which I don't like:
1. The rise of Claude Code is what pushed this behavior, not GitHub and Microsoft's own actions. It is not because they shoved Copilot buttons everywhere, it is because a ton of people worldwide are autonomously pushing commits from Claude Code, and automated PRs/commits kicks off tons of other compute work that highly stresses a system that was never built for this scale.
2. The timeline is extremely compressed. Claude Code did not take off until late last Winter. So in one season they went from being able to mostly handle the volume of activity on their backend to an explosion of activity that shows no signs of slowing down. There is not a team on this planet earth who could foresee this circumstance and reimplement a massive distributed system like GitHub to handle the load gracefully in just a few short months. The writer of this post seems to think very highly of themselves as an engineer and my money is they would also be absolutely crushed by the nature of this challenge.
Absolutely huge news for OpenAI. Unimaginable amount of enterprises picked up Claude just because it was available in AWS, and now there's serious competition.
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform...
...you need quite a lot of devs for that, even if you freeze all feature development forever.
> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters. It has not panned out in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or site stability metrics. The President (another terminally online man), who he even helped elect, still posts on Truth Social instead.
> Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform...
Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
Is the user count and message rate growing so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?
Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?
As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.
> It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters.
I suspect this was the goal all along. Twitter didn't have to grow revenue/profit-wise; those two metrics could even decline, and Musk would be happy. He just needed to find a side-business for Twitter to get into (which turned out to be AI datacenters) that could make some cash to help keep the lights on. The point of owning Twitter wasn't the business; the point was for Musk to be able to control discourse in exactly the way he wanted.
> Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
> Is the user count and message rate growing so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?
> Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?
> As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.
IMO based on working on not-that-large-or-high-revenue systems, but ones where these things already applied, a bunch of it is probably a combination of three things:
* You're doing enough total revenue that a couple million a year to fund a team of engineers to try to make tiny marginal improvements in ad revenue through targeting, or new features on how to present ads, etc, can still easily pay for itself.
* You're running at a high enough scale / spending enough on resources that you can similarly justify spending millions on teams to knock more millions off your infra costs.
* You've got enough usage/users that making tiny improvements in bug rates/crashes/etc similarly results in more usage that more-than-pays-for-itself. (And the list of bugs to squash is possibly never-ending if those other groups keep changing things!)
"Why make 30M profit on 100M revenue when you can make 35M profit on 115M revenue" sorta thing.
> Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
It “works fine” precisely because there’s a lot of engineers pounding the enter key.
This is really just basic stuff, when you serve literally billions of users worldwide, you need a lot of people just to keep everything going smoothly as more and more people adopt it. Software doesn’t just magically scale to arbitrary usage and what made sense to build 5 years ago may no longer be the correct architecture today.
...because the absolute numbers are incredibly low. And I say this as a fan of DDG! It's just the reality we live in; those who are negatively polarized against AI enough to make this sort of change are just very small in number.
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