Twitter C/D

yeah usually this shit annoys me but it’s actually cracking me up today, idk, it’s like the gong show or something

I was hoping that was Slade the band.

Has this been posted yet
https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/what-will-actually-happen-when-the

today in “the internet is physical and also you can’t just accumulate infinite data and expect it to always be available” https://t.co/JL5c8PxQcu

— Talya Cooper (@talya_cooper) September 12, 2022

absolutely no idea what that tweet means.

the server farms are in danger of overheating

today in server farms are real farms

xp i'm talking about the retweet. i work at twitter. i understand the story. i worked on the outage all last week.

It is the equivalent of every time someone on ilx says, "That's why I'm glad I still purchase physical media."

so they're saying "don't forget twitter.com is not a big book"?

i think its saying people think the internet is some magical always on thing but really its subject to the physical world, which is maybe true but doesnt really warrant the sage insight tone, i mean who gives a shit if twitter goes down really, except for caek who has to do some prob annoying work on it

I dunno. Maybe they mean climate change could wipe out the vast store of valuable tweets just like the Library of Alexandria was destroyed.

I think they mean that data doesn't float around in an actual magic cloud, it lives in servers that are subject to environmental impacts just like everything else.

the one area imho people should think more about this is photographs, if theyre purely digital theyll be gone sooner than later, print them out if you want future generations to be looking at their great great grandmother

it's nothing to do with climate change fwiw.

the headline says it is, the story doesn't, and the story is right.

the story says:

"Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers"

So the extreme heat has nothing to do with climate change?

the failure of an air conditioning system (that every data center needs, even if you put the data center at the north pole) is nothing to do with climate change.

don't put data centers at the north pole btw

Are we reading a different story?

“On September 5th, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) datacenter region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in the total shutdown of physical equipment in SMF,” Carrie Fernandez, the company’s vice president of engineering, said in an internal message to Twitter engineers on Friday.

like I know you have inside knowledge, but the story does talk about weather and extreme heat

Ultimately: were climate change conditions responsible for the cooling system failure or did it just fail regardless

ah, yeah sorry, skipped the quote from comms. "due to extreme weather" is ... arguable. can't say more. anyway yes, it's an interesting story! it's not interesting because “the internet is physical and also you can’t just accumulate infinite data and expect it to always be available”

i think its saying people think the internet is some magical always on thing but really its subject to the physical world, which is maybe true but doesnt really warrant the sage insight tone, i mean who gives a shit if twitter goes down really, except for caek who has to do some prob annoying work on it

― lag∞n, Tuesday, 13 September 2022 bookmarkflaglink

I get the sense from tech people that data will always be safe and available until the end of time (or the end of twitter).

So here we have a story where climate change is saying nope.

i don't think anyone in tech thinks that.

I do.

tech is full of the weirdest long termist / thought experiment / prepper people. these people are mostly insane, but you can't accuse them of blithely assuming that datacenters will never go down. they worry about a list of thing that includes asteroids.

if they had a magical belief that all data was safe then twitter would be down right now, and when it came back up it would be missing data.

That's what I'm saying, they have magical beliefs. There is definitely no logic to it.

this reminds me, do we have a thread about the long termist/effective altruism movement?

Recent discussion here - rationalism AI cultist creeps

don't put data centers at the north pole btw

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, September 13, 2022 12:06 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

too late im doing it now

thank you xp

if you run a/c systems a lot more than usual they're likely to wear out, but sometimes they just... do that.. regardless. or break

one of those thing where I'd almost trust someone with an hvac background to manage a group of people administering a data center than I would some software developer who has worked their way up, because one group understands the rate of mechanical failure, and the other has a lot of weirdos who have brain holes

one interesting thing about this has been seeing the order in which they're letting people bring systems back up, which is very highly correlated with the amount of brain holes one associates with that subgroup of engineers. i.e. the less you know about software, the sooner you get back in.

and if you know anything about machine learning you're at the back of the line, which is 100% fair enough.

machines should not be allowed to learn

another reason “the internet is physical and also you can’t just accumulate infinite data and expect it to always be available” is dumb is its use of the word "infinite" tbh

one of those thing where I'd almost trust someone with an hvac background to manage a group of people administering a data center than I would some software developer who has worked their way up, because one group understands the rate of mechanical failure, and the other has a lot of weirdos who have brain holes

I have visited a large data center and this is close to the truth. One of the guys managing the data center talked about a certain piece of software for distributing work across machines as being rated to XX megawatts, which kinda floored me.

Maybe ‘the Internet is not eternal’ is a shock to people too young to have lost their Geocities pages.

they are amazing places. wish i'd gone into hardware tbh. i'm not sure if it's a problem or not that building them in a way that is truly resilient is beyond the abilities of everyone (including nation states) except aws, gcp and azure.

Print out your tweets, people!

i actually do run https://github.com/dogsheep/twitter-to-sqlite as a daily cron job

Perhaps compile them into a book… about hipster puppies.

i needlepoint all my tweets

You know--if there was a printer that was continuously printing out all the tweets ever tweeted on a single piece of paper, that paper would be long enough to... (1/18)

probably belongs on our tech jobs thread but since it's topical --

one of the data science/machine learning leads that left my employer earlier this year, along with everyone else who knew it was arriving, bought some machine learning in a crate hardware stack that's full of Nvidia A100s and it has two 3000W power supplies plus redundancies, so four power supplies total

it's been sitting in the crate outside of the data center in another state for a while. right now, they're trying to figure out how to plug it in to the grid in a way that can actually power the damn thing

ha yes, one downside of the crash in gpu prices is that it makes financial sense to own them rather than rent them again, but owning them is hard.

oh, I am guessing they ordered this thing before the prices dropped. it was like $250K

but if you look at, say, AWS gpu compute bills, you can still come out ahead

tbf "hey yall, the internet isn't immaterial, it depends on physical hardware" was a significant enough academic trend in the mid-2010s for a few scholars to make their reps on it—I'm not dissing those people, that work is all pretty good—but condescendingly chiding people about it in 2022 is silly. I met a cartoonist making a book about internet (and other) infrastructure a couple years back, but his book is for younger readers.