this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024 (awful.systems)
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 20 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:

We're also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

Firstly, if this is literally true they're completely fucking cooked.

Secondly, if it isn't, what version of it is?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 18 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

from someone on Mastodon:

Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.

If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.

I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I half want to jest "PDD strikes again" but honestly it feels like only half the explanation

(promotion driven dev)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.

[–] self@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

that's quite appealing to me ngl

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

God knows I like a good DSL, but "complexity over drudgery" just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they're coding that's supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Boss needs you to find the contiguous subarray with the maximum sum. Says he needs it by EOB Friday.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago

Here ya go boss, a 80% prototype solution.

/* TODO: support other element types */
unsigned int * maxsumsubarr(unsigned int arr[], size_t len, size_t * sublen) {
        *sublen = len;
        return arr;
}
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 14 points 3 weeks ago

Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.

Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.

I totally believe it. Y'all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.

The reason I think it was a freebie is:

  1. Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
  2. Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
  3. Cyberpunk ~~2022~~ 2077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch

It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn't seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck "like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works" subscription model, always gets me.

Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻‍♂️

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity

honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics

to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base

iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it'd be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn't work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn't

it'll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday

[–] mlen@awful.systems 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

If the purpose of a metric is to show adoption, the metric can be defined in a way to show adoption. Could be just an effect of promo driven culture, AI push and good'ol Goodhart's law.

Like, how do you even measure when code is ai authored and when not. If you insert 25% of a variable name and the autocompleter guesses the rest of the name correctly, are the remaining 75% AI generated?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 3 weeks ago

appparently this is use of code-complete as well