(cont.) furthermore, while I understand that tumblr's architecture makes efficient post lookup by ID impossible without a blog name or reblog key, couldn't you run a backfill process that took a very long time but repaired those broken URLs by very slowly searching for the unique post ID and replacing the URL with a uuid-based one? This may take a very long time to finish, but it would reduce the set of posts with broken trail items to ones that have been hard-deleted from the database.
This is a great follow up question! First of all: this is definitely in the realm of possibility and it’s something we’ve thought of before. At Tumblr, we’ve done some absolutely wild things at scale. When it comes to Posts on Tumblr, that’s where our scale gets really mind-blowing.
In order to process something that could affect almost every Post record on Tumblr, we’d need to walk through billions of Post records. At our current resource capacity, this kind of operation can literally take weeks or months of real time, depending on what we need to change. When we start considering a process that would not only have to step through each individual Post record, but also reach out to other Post records for each record (sometimes thousands of other Post records if we’re talking about reblog trails), that’s when months can become a year or more of processing time. That’s how big Tumblr is.
Would it be worth doing that to fix an edge case? Maybe. That’s the tough part, and it’s something we struggle with internally. This is usually also when we start trying to come up with other, more clever ways of tackling the problem. In this case, maybe we could kick off an asynchronous task any time we encounter one of these broken trail items, so the next time it’s viewed, it might be fixed. But that won’t be perfect either, as you pointed out, because we’d need to begin tracking which records were really lost versus just changed.
“I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past. The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.” - Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“It is no doubt difficult to give a definition of inwardness. At this point, I shall say that it is earnestness.” - Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
SEOKJIN AND NAMJOON COWROTE A SONG AND ITS NAME IS MOON IM- | Cr twt seokjinnier
Team Coder Girl FTW 🏈📣
“He is a man of sense who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has.” - Epictetus, Fragments
In Roman mythology, the god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief. It was only Jupiter’s wife, the goddess Juno, who could peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature. Our @NASAJuno spacecraft is looking beneath the clouds of the massive gas giant, not seeking signs of misbehavior, but helping us to understand the planet’s structure and history… Now, @NASAJuno just published its first findings on the amount of water in the gas giant’s atmosphere. The Juno results estimate that at the equator, water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter’s atmosphere — almost three times that of the Sun. An accurate total estimate of this water is critical to solving the mystery of how our solar system formed.
The JunoCam imager aboard Juno captured this image of Jupiter’s southern equatorial region on Sept. 1, 2017. The bottom image is oriented so Jupiter’s poles (not visible) run left-to-right of frame.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill
Corfu - Greece (by Anna Jewels (@earthpeek))
https://www.instagram.com/earthpeek/
A raft on the Yellow River near Zhongwei, Ningxia
Wade is in shock because he is not used to sudden kisses. Yet.
I think I can help cheer people up better because I’ve been sad, not because I’m really happy. It’s never great when you’re sad, and I don’t romanticize it at all, but it’s kind of encouraging to me to know that some good can come out of my sadness. ;u;
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