It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter (2023)

If they keep it secret they don't get credit for it.

How do you figure? The right decision is the right decision, even if you don't tell people. (granting, for the sake of argument, that it is the right decision)

Yeah, you get the benefit of secret tech (in this case faster networking) but people shouldn't give social credit for it because that creates incentives to lie. And, sadly, tech adoption runs entirely on social proof.

When you are an outsider it's wise to take such claims with a grain of salt, because as the "secret" made its way to you, recounted by one person to another to another, there might have been an exaggeration, over-simplification or misunderstanding.

It's easy to imagine how, in the hands of tech journalists and youtubers optimising for clicks, "Google likes QUIC" and "Some ML clusters use infiniband" could get distorted into several faangs and the complete elimination of TCP.

True as far as it goes, but "they didn't actually do it" is a different story from "they did it secretly". The two claims exclude each other, so you can't really compare them in the context of "credit".

We're not really trying to allocate social credit here, not as our main goal anyway. We're evaluating raw effectiveness of the tech. So if they made an effective decision, we give them credit for, uh, making an effective decision. You don't have to love them for it.

Allow me to rephrase.

I think the statement is not true, in a literal sense. I do not think there are multiple FAANG companies with data centres where TCP has been entirely eliminated.

But the statement is ambiguous enough you could come up with true interpretations, if you diluted it to the point of meaninglessness.

Therefore, without a clear public statement of what is being claimed, it's very difficult for me to be impressed.

Very reasonable. It does seem dubious. In that case I just think my comment, itself already responding to a very different concern, was a weird place to raise that question. :)