Prashanth Mohan

Frugal resources

Mastodon: [email protected]

[Murtaza Syed @murtazahsyed]

Some 30 years ago, India too was on the edge of bankruptcy. In response, its Finance Minister delivered a budget speech for the ages. It changed India forever. It couldn't be more different than the budget we have recently heard in Pak. A thread on that remarkable India speech...

[Sheldon Whitehouse @SenWhitehouse]

Did you think I’d show up to the hearing on Supreme Court ethics without receipts?

[Bryan Porter @jbryanporter]

We toured an Amazon Fulfillment center yesterday and… 🤯

Incredible.

• Inventory is stored on constantly moving shelves. Robots take the shelf to the pick station.
• Inventory is randomly placed on shelves, tracked by cameras (go store technology).
• They spread inventory for the same SKU out across bins so it’s always closer to a pick station.
• Inventory counts are automated with cameras.

The computing that goes into the operation is unbelievable.

What a huge competitive advantage.

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

Trying the ban policy - @[email protected]

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

real world examples of applying queuing models. I am considering going back to the textbooks to relearn queueing theory.

[I would appreciate a boost to get as many real world examples.] (2/2)

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

I was chatting with a very senior colleague last week on improving disk IO utilisation and he modelled the system as an M/M/1 queue to evaluate the impact of the idea we were brainstorming. This was so cool and got me quite excited!

It also got me very curious about other (1/2)

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

A really cool article about the impact of solar superstorms on the Internet - https://t.co/DUQAiildve.

If you are not aware, a sigcomm paper (https://t.co/oEcpD9fs9l) on the topic got a lot of people worried.

[Matt Welsh @mdwelsh]

We're hiring founding engineers for our team at @fixieai! We're building the next computing platform using AI as a foundation. Looking for experienced frontend, backend, and AI devs. Check it out: https://t.co/W2WJPcgBo8

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

Case in point I got this error soon after I posted this thread.

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

Unpopular opinion: I don't think Mastodon will be successful in the long term.

Why? The federated nature of the microblogging system is wonderful in theory. It liberates data siloing and protects against a single person wrecking havoc (I would not have bet on this being a (1/2)

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

I saw some toots lamenting that Mastodon is not very federated because 84% of the users are on 1% of the servers (https://t.co/1gfcojTy4q). But this really isn't a bad thing. 1% of the server count is still around 80 independent servers!

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

Twitter.

The lack of dedicated support could manifest in various ways. The most problematic of this would be that the quality of each server is not going to be the same, and it would be largely opaque to the user. (2/2)

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

it would also need infrastructure on a similar scale.

Mastodon seems to have a few simplifications - for example, to see toots of a user on a different server, I need to visit the user's server - i.e., no full mirroring. (2/2)

[Prashanth Mohan @prashmohan]

since it will require coordination across multiple instances - lots of backward compatibility code will accumulate over time, resulting in code complexity. (2/2)