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Maybe he’s deliberately learning/teaching how to change things arbitrarily. He senses the organization would have a lot of trouble making a button red or changing a vendor, he demands it, just to shake all the rust off.

Later when he’s got control, he can supposedly add every feature back. Maybe he’s visualizing his boondoggle as still worth $44 billion any time he chooses to restore the way it was.



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And destroying other software that increased productivity using pretty shady methods.

But it's interesting to see that his "old image" already almost vanished. His strategy to "do things that look good" seems to work. Humans have very short memories after all.


From my look at his article, he's doing everything clientside, which is causing him the extra headaches about restoring stuff.

Frequent changes mean his shit doesn't work.

He is causing harm through deception. The bugs he produces as a ruse have to be checked for and repaired by other employees who might not need to check the output of a well tested automated solution at all.

Given that he has the source code to the controlling software it's probably a home brew system.

He's no doubt learned some important lessons, but I can't find destroying $12 million in equipment in any way funny. [c0deporn has updated his original to the more accurate and appropriate "interesting".]


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Um, so doesn't his workflow buy an essentially infinite maintenance problem with all his containers? This sounds like tomorrow's Node left-pad debacle in a different form.


I suspect it's more of a know-how issue. Any changes means the guy will probably need to get up to date with new tech. Mainly a waste of time for him if every thing is working fine.

You are correct, but I think it’s still a valid point. The way to demonstrate to the world that it is broken would have been to break it, and if you even skim over his bonafides it seems like something he is 1) an expert in and 2) would have the resources to demonstrate, even if not programmed by himself (grad students, perhaps?).

He’s also older and retired and could simply have the attitude of “F it, I’ll leave this here, mic drop”, so who the hell really knows.


Do you think he had to recreate blockbuster's central servers from scratch or did he get the blessing to maintain the old software?

Did he also teach him how to sell outdated internals in a pretty package at a 300% markup?

What would he have wanted it for then? Just a toy to mess around with and annoy people as it fails? Or he's burning it down as part of some as-yet-unrevealed long term strategy?

I have to think Hanlon's razor applies.


If he was going full scratch everything, why didn't he make a new markup and styling that would fix everything the web is wrong about instead of reinventing a jaggy wheel? That would've been a revolution.

Maybe he's had more problems from botched updates than he ever had from exploits.

It could be an awful way of saying he prefers maintenance to new development.

So why does he worry about advertisers and bills? Why did he fire most of the employees? Why is he pushing changes to production without testing?

Why rush things when you can fail 5 times and still try again?


I wonder if he knows that he can write a loader to fix all this stuff.

I'm guessing he didn't think the company wouldn't fix such a huge issue...

I wonder if he doesn't mind using it because damaging it would give him a reason to build a new one?

Wouldn't it have been more effective for him to have just closed it on day one? Why leave it around for years, and have 75% of the users still there? That's being pretty incompetent at destroying it.
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