Sometimes Elon stans call me out on Twitter when people post the "cars and rockets" post, demanding to know what stupid things Elon says about software.
Here's a primo example.
In this exchange, Elon thinks Adam Mosseri is adding rate limits to Threads just like he added them to Twitter, and that he "copied" Elon.
Anyone who understands software knows Adam is talking about WRITE rate limits to curb spam posts. Elon implemented READ rate limits in an application that relies on ad impressions.
Adam doesn't need to specify he's talking about write rate limits, because the use case he's talking about (spam posts) is always solved by rate limits on writes (or blocking).
But because he doesn't specify it, Elon doesn't realize that's what he's talking about. Because he doesn't understand software development at scale.
He also doesn't recognize the core difference between adding limits on read path vs write path, because he's woefully ignorant about how web scale software is built.
Adam further clues people "in the know" by referring to false positives on "active" people.
Active, in this context, means people who are posting to the service, or otherwise writing data (like counts are also writes). Scrolling is not considered active, it is passive use of the application, because it is read-only aside from analytics tracking or cache-loading.
Again, everyone who reads what Adam says knows this if they know how to write software. But Elon does not. And yet remains confident.
Twitter implemented write rate limiting ages ago, in part to combat spam.
Threads, in the rush to market, skipped this & now has to implement. This will largely be invisible to all but the most active posters.
He didn't even need to announce it & likely only did so to avoid people screenshotting a "rate limit exceeded" error from Threads and dunking.
Adam tried to clarify that this would be a pointless dunk by specifying the conditions.
And Elon misunderstood it.
Because he is very stupid.
What Threads is doing is smart - rate limiting writes is a near-requirement for curbing spam.
What Twitter did was dumb - penalizing people for scrolling the app and generating a reluctance to read Twitter, a site that sells ad space based on readership potential.
Elon thinks these are the same thing.
So, you know, stay the hell away from his cars and rockets, etc.
@AndyHat Exactly!
Elon Musk has a journalist's understanding of software development. Very surface level, able to hold a conversation, but ultimately tragically underinformed about a great many things.
Combined with an arrogant confidence that he understands what he's talking about, and you have an experience that most engineers have dealt with: the new grad who comes in and says all the code is bad and it should be rewritten, or "optimizes" irrelevant codepaths.
@rodhilton I'm not convinced he's very stupid, just that there are many things he does know and he often just shoots from the hip trying to score a cheap shot. In another context remember the ridiculous "pedo boy" incident? And he just would not back down.
I'd love to know what insiders can tell us about the tech stack of Twitter which Musk famously wrote off as garbage and said it needed to be rewritten from scratch. Is he doing it all in Python and decentralizing across Tesla CPUs? /jk
@rodhilton I'm 99% in agreement, but the idea that it's malicious and intentional misinterpretation is hard to resist.
But... Hanlon's razor awards you the final 1%.
@aryounce Sure. But the thing I'm addressing here is specifically that his defenders ask me for examples of stupid things he's said about software. I think to answer that I simply have to take what he says at face value.
I mean it's easy to say "well he's only PRETENDING to be stupid because he's so smart" about basically anything.
@Seanleblanc thing I posted a while ago that periodically gets screenshotted and plastered up in various places.
Whenever someone posts it to Twitter I get a bunch of Elon stans riding my ass
@rodhilton perfect. Because the biggest problem with spam is people reading too much of it. And really if your system can't handle massive read loads utilizing things like edge caching then you're probably hosed anyway. What's the betting Twitter tried to get rid of AWS caching with massive scalability and tried to do their own thing that didn't scale? #IsItWebscale ?
Meanwhile wasn't another driver of Twitter's read rate limit to stop crawlers?
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