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by tgsovlerkhgsel 1304 days ago
I will openly admit that I did believe that he managed to do enough damage with his firings that the remaining engineers won't be able to keep it running because some critical teams and their institutional knowledge have been completely lost. I'm still surprised it's running so smoothly.
2 comments

Based on what I've heard from former engineers there, there are still plenty of opportunities for things to go very wrong. Maybe not this week or this year, but the sheer amount of lost knowledge means they're really skating on thin ice right now.

If they were to have a seriously catastrophic incident, it's conceivable that they might not have anyone left who knows how to get things back online. It's not inconceivable that they could eventually figure it out, but without that essential knowledge, who knows how long that could take? I imagine it would be pretty bad for Twitter's future if the site were unavailable for days or weeks on end.

I'd put all my chips on George Hotz, but he's got a lot of work to do because he'll only be there for 12 weeks.
George Hotz is asking on Twitter for people to solve his problems for him, because he is incapable of doing basic web development things like removing the login pop up: https://twitter.com/corg_e/status/1595287073547862018
Probably just that he doesnt want to waste time on it. He's been shown to be a powerhouse problem solver. Since we're posting tweets:

SpaceX Dragon: https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1593133313484787713

Optimism: https://twitter.com/jinglejamOP/status/1310718738417811459

Perhaps the above just goes to show what an immense mess that modern web development is if a reputed genius has to farm out React work.
I really think you are vastly underestimating George. He's clearly a brilliant programmer.
A brilliant programmer isnt asking on twitter for ''a oneliner i can paste in the console'' to fix something that is basically not much harder than a take home assingment for a job interview.
George Hotz is an amazing technical person but you are putting him in a pedestal of Saviour that... Isn't really how technical stuff works.

Twitter is a quite complex distributed system, as good as geohot is he's just a guy, with one brain, capable of holding a limited amount of information and context at a time. There's no way that one guy, no matter how good, can actually completely reason about all aspects of a complex system.

Even less in 12 weeks, that's actually absurdly preposterous.

i get a million crypto dms now, thats pretty annoying