Evan Weaver

@natfriedman Test for PFAS too, especially in dairy products

I'm going to re-run all these tests on food we eat in California. Also going to test for other plastic chemicals. Let me know what foods we should test and suggestions for methodology.

@martin_casado Singularity true believers and opportunists discovered they could get more attention by preaching doom instead of salvation; it’s motivated reasoning from beginning to end, just like ID

The AI alignment discussion feels very much like the intelligent design arguments of the 90s … … no central model, a litany of arguments that take a lot of work to wade through, most of which devolve to a evidence-less ‘deus ex machina’

RIP Larry the Bird. You deserved better

In my opinion the key to restarting growth is new product lines. Focus on efficiency in the old thing and invest speculatively in new, adjacent things. Meta did this well. For whatever reason Twitter never had the resolve to see things like Periscope and Vine through.

I know the team understands this. Unclear if the new management does.

People expect Twitter to revert to the fail whale days, but the problems then were scaling problems: challenging but benign with clear success conditions. Twitter isn't growing anymore and the problems now are all adversarial: spam, hackers, trolls, competition, regulatory.

@blaine @rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman It looks like it was sometimes used for the maintenance page prior.

@evan @rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman Almost; that's probably a commit moving things around, my last day was ~May 1, 2008 and the whale had already been a thing for a while. @biz found it on a stock image site. It had a good run. 🫡🐳

Fifteen years(!) and two days after its original launch, I am re-launching istwitterdown.com Blog post with more context: theryanking.com/post/is-twitte…

@altryne @rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman It's not in the codebase anymore; somebody would have to deliberately add it back.

@evan @rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman Thank you for the 🐳 sir. You think it's still there and might show up soon?

@rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman It doesn't matter because whale is eternal but we didn't have the whale until 2008. Prior to that, sometimes the computer maintenance kitten would make an appearance for "retroactively scheduled" downtime.

@evan @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman thanks, pdated the blog post to include this!

@goldman Nothing personal, @jeremy and I ignored everyone and we were right to do so.

Lolll I don't exactly remember this but it sounds about right; def validating for my product management approach of "it's ok if you just get totally ignored sometimes."

@rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman This was the first week I joined, after various delays and uncertainty as to whether the job was real. I'm sorry you didn't get the t-shirt @rk.

@rk @bs @biz @greenberg @goldman Before I added the Apache timeout change and the whale, the site had no timeouts and your browser would just show a white page after 5 minutes of waiting.

@goldman Oh yeah I think you're right, not a ban really just not posted to the public timeline, which quickly became a statistical sample anyway instead of all tweets

@evan I believe shadowban by user agent

I mean the idea that delete tweets and ban accounts were the only tools for content moderation at literally any point in twitter’s history is wildly ahistorical.

@goldman If I remember the "algorithm" was not substantially more complex than "if tweet.include?('neko')"

@evan Exactly. Shouts to them. May they be verified in the wars to come

@goldman The neko cats!

“Hide from public timeline” existed in 2006.

@matasar @hoverbird @goldman Maybe everybody else will log off and it will be just us again, like the old times. And @aplusk or whatever

People are asking me what I’ll do if and when Twitter starts to fall apart. I am not looking for a replacement and will ride this plane all the way to the ground, at which point I’ll be free. Thank you.

@ArielWeisberg hdfury.com/product/8k-vrr…

I'm stepping back from my CTO role at Fauna: fauna.com/blog/stepping-…

@wickman @nk @marius @danluu It wasn't just making more optimal decisions, it was getting the resources to do anything at all

@evan @nk @marius @danluu many of these changes were proposed and made sense irrespective of the trajectory of the company. we’ve been doing interest-only payments on large swaths of our tech debt for years.

It's funny how wrong basically every public take about Twitter from the commentary class is, e.g., here's a blue check who's a fellow at a think tank saying that all Twitter needs to do is pay its AWS bills (serving is on prem and most cloud spend is GCP) and it will run itself,