Facebook innovation is their ads algo. They copy existing consumer success (which is incredibly difficult to create), and then execute it incredibly well.
Facebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system.
Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.
People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.
And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
She basically ran the firm whilst Zuck thought about who to buy to secure a monopoly position. He got lucky more than anything else - had the instagam guys not given in, meta would not be worth anything close to what it is today.
yup! When i did an analysis last month, GitHub is up 89.3% on weekdays and 96.5% on weekends. Incidents touch 62% of weekdays and 11% of weekends. Claude shows the same pattern: 92.5% weekday, 97.8% weekend. Tuesday through Thursday is the danger zone. Sunday is practically a different service.
I had an occasion recently where I was working a lot of late nights/early mornings with AI use. And I'd be getting these instant, beautiful responses, and then, as soon as the sun started coming in the windows, it would take longer and fail more, and by the time the clock struck 9 AM, every LLM had turned back into a pumpkin.
Which service(s) were you using, if you don't mind sharing?
I'm curious if most of the big players including eg Google do this thing of nerfing models or it's limited to more "smart" (read: black box models like ChatGPT.
Inference results for Copilot are also a lot better during weekends than workdays. Its my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt, but I work on personal projects only on weekends mostly due to that brain drain mon-fri of copilot.
There are so many failures in microservices that just can't happen with a local binary. Inter-service communication over network is a big one with a failure rate orders of magnitude higher than running a binary on the same machine. Then you have to do deploys, monitoring, etc. across the whole platform.
You will basically need to employ solutions for problems only caused by your microservices arch. E.g. take reading the logs for a single request. In a monolith, just read the logs. For the many-service approach, you need to work out how you're going to correlate that request across them all.
Even the aforementioned network failures require a lot of design, and there's no standardization. Does the calling service retry? Does the callee have a durable queue and pick back up? What happens if a call/message gets 'too old'?
Also, from the other end, command line utils are typically made by entirely different people with entirely different philosophies/paradigms, so the encapsulation makes sense. That's not true when you're the one writing all the services, especially not at small-to-mid-size companies.
Plus, you already can do the single-concern thing in a monolith, just with modules/interfaces/etc.
One strategy to convince is to get someone less technical than you to sit by you while you try and trace everything from one error'd HTTP request from start to finish to diagnose the problem. If they see it takes half a day to check every call to every internal endpoint to 100% satisfy a particular request sometimes that can help.
Also sometimes they just think "this is a bunch of nerd stuff, why are you involving me?!" So it's not foolproof.
Oh, my non-technical boss agrees with me already. It's actually the engineers who've convinced themselves it's a good setup. Nice guys but very unwilling to change. Seems they're quite happy to have become 'experts' in this mess over the last 5-10 years. Almost like they're in retirement mode.
The real solution is probably to leave, but the market sucks at the moment. At least AI makes the 10-repos-per-tiny-feature thing easier.
how do you test for allergens? i did 5 years of immunotherapy shots, twice weekly at a doctors office and i had to stay 30 minutes after each shot for the anaphylaxis risk. it worked quite well but it was really inconvenient.
my allergy is triggered by dust mites and pollen. Not sure what the anit-mites component is in a healthy sinus cavity, but i'm sure I'm missing it. I think essentially the equivalent of wax in our ear canal. As for pollen, go figure on that one, boost my testosterone levels? I don't know.
We're working on getting there. What got us out of our seats to build this was realizing that LLMs still struggled with the fairly basic data modeling and distributed systems problems that existing payments providers pose. Any solution they came up with was only ever narrowly correct, brittle, and a nightmare to maintain
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/planes-control/id1015114550 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rarepixels...