cletus

6 ms·

1.
by cletus 2mo ago
I worked on Google Fiber's TV distribution system so know something about this although GFiber's TV offering was IPv4 multicast not IPv6. For anyone unfamiliar, modern video codecs tend to break up a video into a group of pictures
2.
by cletus 3mo ago
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google). WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided w
3.
by cletus 4mo ago
If I were the CTO of any of these companies I would be working my butt off to be making an internal version of Claude. Let me explain my reasoning using Google as an example (disclaimer: Xoogler). Google has a lot of systems to make a very
4.
by cletus 4mo ago
There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more compli
5.
by cletus 6mo ago
I worked at Google a long time ago now during the whole Google+ fiasco. One thing that was super controversial internally was the so-called Real Names policy. For those who don't know or remember, it was Vic Gundotra's idea that p
6.
by cletus 6mo ago
Story time. I used to work for Facebook (and Google) and lots of games were played around bugs. At some point the leadership introduced an SLA for high then medium priority bugs. Why? because bugs would sit in queues for years. The result?
7.
by cletus 8mo ago
So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advic
8.
by cletus 9mo ago
I'm going to pick out 3 points: > 2. Being right is cheap. Getting to right together is the real work > 6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do > 14. If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resist
9.
by cletus 9mo ago
The mistake was not having nullability be expressed in the type system. At Facebook I used their PHP fork Hack a lot and Hack has a really expressive type system where PHP does not. You can express nullability of a type and it defaults to a
10.
by cletus 9mo ago
As an early user of SO [1], I feel reasonably qualified to discuss this issue. Note that I barely posted after 2011 or so so I can't really speak to the current state. But what I can say is that even back in 2010 it was obvious to me t
11.
by cletus 9mo ago
Imagine you're testing a service to creates, queries and deletes users. A fake version of that service might just be a wrapper on a HashMap keyed by ID. It might have several fields like some personal info, a hashed password, an email
12.
by cletus 9mo ago
My second project at Google basically killed mocking for me and I've basically never done it since. Two things happened. The first was that I worked on a rewrite of something (using GWT no less; it was more than a decade ago) and they
13.
by cletus 9mo ago
Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story. I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't bl
14.
by cletus 1y ago
People should go to jail for this. Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this: 1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system; 2. Verify the outp
15.
by cletus 1y ago
I realize scale makes everything more difficult but at the end of the day, Netflix is encoding and serving several thousand videos via a CDN. It can't be this hard. There are a few statements in this that gave me pause. The core proble
16.
by cletus 1y ago
The key part here is "machine utilization" and absolutely there was a ton of effort put into this. I think before my time servers were allocated to projects but even early on in my time at Google Borg had already adopted shared ma
17.
by cletus 1y ago
So I've worked for Google (and Facebook) and it really drives the point home of just how cheap hardware is and how not worth it optimizing code is most of the time. More than a decade ago Google had to start managing their resource usa
18.
by cletus 1y ago
Sure. First you need to separate buffered and unbuffered channels. Unbuffered channels basically operate like cooperate async/await but without the explictness. In cooperative multitasking, putting something on an unbuffered channel is
19.
by cletus 1y ago
Google has over the years tried to get several new languages off the ground. Go is by far the most successful. What I find fascinating is that all of them that come to mind were conceived by people who didn't really understand the spac
20.
by cletus 1y ago
A lot of the time, a lack of bugfixes comes from the incentive structure management has created. Specifically, you rarely get rewarded for fixing things. You get rewarded for shipping new things. In effect, you're punished for fixing t
21.
by cletus 2y ago
Xoogler here. I never worked on Fuchsia (or Android) but I knew a bunch of people who did and in other ways I was kinda adjacent to them and platforms in general. Some have suggested Fuchsia was never intended to replace Android. That'
22.
by cletus 2y ago
You're alluding to the double taxation problem with dividends. This is a problem and has had a bunch of bad solutions (eg the passthrough tax break from 2017) when in fact the solution is incredibly simple. In Australia, dividends come
23.
by cletus 2y ago
Reinvesting in the company is the one thing we should absolutely subsidize. That goes to wages, capital expenditure and other measures to sustain and grow the company. Paying out dividends and doing share buybacks just strips the company fo
24.
by cletus 2y ago
I'm all for root cause analysis. A big part of that is that large companies become extremely risk-tolerant because history has shown there is little to no downside to their actions. If the government always bails you out, what incentiv
25.
by cletus 2y ago
[flagged]
26.
by cletus 2y ago
Speaking as a former Google Fiber software engineer, I'm honestly surprised this is still around. In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included). I can't speak to the timing or rationale but
27.
by cletus 2y ago
Sorry but this is just incorrect on many fronts. I can speak to this issue as a former engineer on Google Fiber so I got to see just how the sausage was made. Existing national ISPs just have inbuilt advantages that a newcomer cannot replic
28.
by cletus 2y ago
Network protocls are slow to change. Just look at IPv6 adoption. Some of this is for good reason. Some isn't. Because of everything from threat reduction to lack of imagination equipment at every step of the process will tend to throw
29.
by cletus 2y ago
> no object allocated as part of a request should survive longer than the request itself So I've spent a lot of time doing Hack (and PHP) as well as Java, Python and other languages. For me, as far as serving HTTP requests goes, Hac
30.
by cletus 2y ago
This mentions Jupiter generations, which I think is about 10-15 years old at this point. It doesn't really talk about what existed before so it's not really 25 years of history here. I want to say "Watchtower" was before

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