Prashanth Mohan

Some 30 years ago, India too was on the edge of bankruptcy. In response, its Finance Minister delivered a budget speech for the ages. It changed India forever. It couldn't be more different than the budget we have recently heard in Pak. A thread on that remarkable India speech...

Did you think I’d show up to the hearing on Supreme Court ethics without receipts?

We toured an Amazon Fulfillment center yesterday and… 🤯 Incredible. • Inventory is stored on constantly moving shelves. Robots take the shelf to the pick station. • Inventory is randomly placed on shelves, tracked by cameras (go store technology). • They spread inventory for the same SKU out across bins so it’s always closer to a pick station. • Inventory counts are automated with cameras. The computing that goes into the operation is unbelievable. What a huge competitive advantage.

Trying the ban policy - @prashmohan@discuss.systems

real world examples of applying queuing models. I am considering going back to the textbooks to relearn queueing theory. [I would appreciate a boost to get as many real world examples.] (2/2)

I was chatting with a very senior colleague last week on improving disk IO utilisation and he modelled the system as an M/M/1 queue to evaluate the impact of the idea we were brainstorming. This was so cool and got me quite excited! It also got me very curious about other (1/2)

A really cool article about the impact of solar superstorms on the Internet - cloud.google.com/blog/products/…. If you are not aware, a sigcomm paper (dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.114…) on the topic got a lot of people worried.

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Case in point I got this error soon after I posted this thread.

I saw some toots lamenting that Mastodon is not very federated because 84% of the users are on 1% of the servers (@manlius@mathstodon.xyz/109383028544528612" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">discuss.systems/@manlius@maths…). But this really isn't a bad thing. 1% of the server count is still around 80 independent servers!

Unpopular opinion: I don't think Mastodon will be successful in the long term. Why? The federated nature of the microblogging system is wonderful in theory. It liberates data siloing and protects against a single person wrecking havoc (I would not have bet on this being a (1/2)

Twitter. The lack of dedicated support could manifest in various ways. The most problematic of this would be that the quality of each server is not going to be the same, and it would be largely opaque to the user. (2/2)

it would also need infrastructure on a similar scale. Mastodon seems to have a few simplifications - for example, to see toots of a user on a different server, I need to visit the user's server - i.e., no full mirroring. (2/2)

since it will require coordination across multiple instances - lots of backward compatibility code will accumulate over time, resulting in code complexity. (2/2)