Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.

We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).

The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.

We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.

So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.

And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.

Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and--by the looks of it--he's chosen a bad one.

(In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he's good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America's EV standard bearer. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)

He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society.

I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.

From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.

Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).

Sure. I don't think he's a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that's in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.

Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we're seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk's deteriorating influence.

The reason I moved country is because woke politics is making life worse. Crime is through the roof, kids can't go out in the cities by themselves because it's too dangerous. They started doing mandatory "gender identity" education in school, teaching crap to my kids.

I'm still in Europe and observing a progressive decline so I'm ready to move to Asia, the Caribbean, South America (Argentina maybe?) or maybe switch to the enemy and go to Russia or China, depending on how the situation evolves.

Dictatorship for dictatorship, I just want a low tax, safe place and governments to bother me as little as possible.