hoarder of shiny click-clacks

Bro failure

They are trying to bake Caitlyn a birthday cake and are convinced that they both know best

bird up

LOOK THE LESBIANS

Given the blogging site’s continued financial woes, Mullenweg shifted the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at Automattic late last year and laid off others. At the time, he suggested that moving Tumblr to WordPress would be “tricky” but added that new technology like AI would make it easier.

the way you run wordpress at scale is to use it as an editor, then render all of your posts/pages out to static html and serve them through a content delivery network; this only works when you're running almost-entirely read-only because (say it with me): there are two hard problems in computer science, cache invalidation and naming things. it was literally a joke at my old job, to the point that we had "solution: static-cache the living shit out of it" permanent markered on our hosting team's whiteboard.

running tumblr on wordpress would be an exercise in cache management beyond the technical skill of automatttic. y'all still haven't fixed the postmeta bloat issue after two decades, you are not ready for the actual computer science you're going to have to do to handle caches on this scale.

that's not even mentioning the three timelines you need to dynamically generate - can't static-cache that lads.

i don't know what tumblr's infrastructure looks like now, but any savings they'd make from a skillset and work-sharing perspective would be eaten by the cost of retooling a square peg into a round hole.

about those timelines, are you serving them from the posts table? guessing you'll be partitioning or sharding that table by blog, right? cool, so you'll need to tree out reblogs which is totally doable in a single query.. hope your sharding doesn't take a performance hit doing cross-partition joins.

or are you going to build a specific service for doing that?

are you using the existing media-management system? so that's a database call or three for every embedded image, video or audio-clip.

or are you going to rebuild that system to pull from a static cache?

how are you storing likes? postmeta? cool, so that's loading a set of serialised strings every post load, that you then have to deserialise to extract a value.

or are you going to store them somewhere else? maybe adopt the eventual consistency model that just about every other social media site uses for interaction tracking?

what's the plan for the editor? tumblr's post editor isn't amazing but it's a hell of a lot easier to use than wordpresses?

see, at this point you're basically building a new platform on top of the, frankly, awful foundations provided by wordpress.

Him, replying eight months later: hey

Me: doing anything fun for the long weekend?

Him: moving to another state

every Asian they turn into looks the same

their Asian forms also have a neon hair streak for some reason

gives every form regardless of race straight hair with no texture

ashy grey picrew skin when they turn tan or darker

tried to copy somebody with dark skin but it turns out paler (it's the lighting, they say)

every form with brown skin has lighter hair and blue eyes (for contrast, they say) even if it looks bad and unnatural

finally tries an appropriate hairstyle when being Black and it's Killmonger's hair

somehow manages to whitewash their white forms