This issue really separates the wheat from the chaff. The dirty secret is that a lot of academic published work contains errors but the authors also have fragile egos. It reminds me of when Data Colada exposed someone for fraud and they accused the exposers of "methodological terrorism" (something in psychology or social science). Just imagine what happens once papers get exposed at scale.
Now here there was no fraud just genuine error, but it will annoy people nonetheless and scrape their ego that someone uninitiated can just type some stuff in a magic box and conclude that they, the established published, tenured mathematician with awards and medals can be wrong.
There's going to be all kinds of weird stuff like this surfacing everywhere until after the mid-term elections in November. Youtube is full of it right now, it's just going to get more ridiculous and crazy for the next several week.
My grandfather was like this, grew up in the depression and fought in the pacific during ww2. His garage was full of coffe can after coffee can filled with random nuts and bolts. When I was a kid every meal with my grandparents was 50% leftovers and they had a giant garden. Waste not want not indeed.
> Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.
i'm in the midst of a very large global roll out of a new system including about 24 separate erp integrations. My team's system is dependent on another system coming online first then we go then the integrations come online then a massive data migration happens and ends with all the associated testing. So like a huge number of dependencies and I'm second in line. Today we get word that the first system is having issues with a vendor and will not come online as scheduled (our dry run deployment is tomorrow and spans all next week as each dependency gets their turn. Week after next is PROD.
We're not heavily integrated into that first system but we are in spots and so there's a reason why they go first. Writing around that system is feasible but we're looking around 5k lines which isn't a lot but there's still testing and sign off. My offshore team is in bed, meanwhile they, and onshore, all have other shit to do anyway so pulling them just puts everything else behind.
I tasked an agents to make the changes as soon as i woke up to the news, they got it mostly right. It took two rounds of fixes with some offshore testers who stayed up late but the PR got in and merged. We just did (literally like 5min ago) a validation run against our target system and we're green for tomorrow. I told the testers to goto bed and then i pulled up HN and opened a coke.
There's no way in hell that would have happened without the coding agents we had on tap. So, yeah, i find a lot of value in the rate at which AI can work on code even if it's not perfect every time.
True, it would not have happened back in the day. But oftentimes what would happen is that sane, sensible leadership would have a talk about delays on the critical path and adjust the schedule accordingly.
Maybe not as satisfying to people who enjoy being heroes. But it would not have been an automatic disaster.
> “…talk about delays on the critical path and adjust the schedule accordingly.”
And self-imposed deadlines are the worst—not saying that’s the case here. And when your leadership sets the goals, you do your best. But fast, good, cheap; pick two.
And if the deadlines really are hard, then you should be actively managing the critical path from the get-go. The very existence of upstream critical path dependencies that, as the parent poster’s story demonstrates, weren’t even necessary in the first place. Which suggests that this heroic agentic quick fix was the proverbial pound of cure.
I’d even go so far as to speculate that perhaps agentic coding also steered people away from the ounce of prevention in the first place. Humans aren’t perfect either, but over the past couple years I’ve had to spend increasingly much time asking, “Why again are we creating all this unnecessary complexity?”
This is partially driven by the good old enterprise game of not being at fault when things go wrong and being able to communicate that to the stakeholders
It's not fancy but it's necessary in a lot of enterprises
I don't want to deny that. I mean I am using it. And if works well it's great. If it doesn't though it's exhausting. And if it produces bad code, it can do that at a speed that is overwhelming.
Ah yes complex global rollout being forced to production on an arbitrary rapid deadline is exactly the time when more code of unknown quality should be added to the system at the last minute.
They say "some" data, i wonder what percentage that really is. I haven't seen pictures but I find it hard to imagine all of me-south-1 was completely leveled to the point where's there's just nothing left. On the other hand, if you have 100 rows of racks and then randomly take out a contiguous 10% across both rows and columns it may be functionally equivalent to taking out everything.
I wouldn't be surprised if the engineers said "we can probably recover between 20-30% of the data but it will cost 200 hours of engineering and the data will be 7 months old by then" and the beancounters said "we'd rather have one news cycle rather than the news watching what we can and cannot recover + save those 200 hours, we'll just say it's all gone".
> to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.
I toured a datacenter once back in the early 2000s and they showed me 30 days of generator fuel storage. When i asked them why 30 days and not 35 they replied "we're such a major customer of both electricity and fuel that if we don't get electricity or fuel for 30 days there's way bigger problems than your website not being online" hah.
I had a similar discussion in the low 1990s at a large electronic manufacturer that had a pair of Unisys mainframes, one in São Paulo and another in Manaus, in the Amazon region communicating over a satellite link (two large 3m dishes on both places). There was one question of what happens if both fail at the same time, and I pointed that anything that takes out São Paulo and Manaus at the same time is a civilisation ending event, and we shouldn’t worry too much about that.
Anyway, we had a load shedding agreement with a large bank across the street from São Paulo and we could switch over to their Unisys mainframe in a matter of minutes, and vice versa.
Large storms regularly result in some customers with lack of utility power for more than 7 days for some customers. When storms take out major transmission lines and roads and bridges, you can end up with some pretty lengthy outages, and fuel deliveries will also be difficult.
Look at data center responses from Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. This guy [1] was onsite for Katrina. Lost utility power on August 29. They did have some access to fuel on Sep 1, but pretty spotty until maybe the 3rd. Looks like power started coming back in some places Sep 8, and maybe widely restored on Sep 14th.
I would say, by 7 days in you'll probably have a good idea of if 30 days might not be enough.
i don't think it's that normal which is why it's newsworthy. I'm a father of a 16 and 14 year old. The 14 year old had a youtube channel when he was 9 or 10. I helped him set it up, he was making Minecraft tutorials which I thought was pretty cool.
i agree. if my kid would actually make the effort to make videos i'd fully support him. even with ads if that was something that makes sense. the mistake was letting the kid manage the account with the credit card on file. that's where i would have drawn the line.
titties-club is a little passé these days (in my industry anyway) but yeah if you're with a group that represents 7 digits then spending 5 to show them a good time is still pretty common.
> Do people legitimately make this mistake? “oops, I put it on the company cards”?
i've done this with like a cup of coffee but not something like a game for my kids! What happens in my case is the charge is not approved for reimbursement and it's up to me to pay the bill. I feel bad for that father.
edit: it's a corporate card but it's in my name so I can actually charge whatever i want but the company only reimburses approved charges, whatever is left over is up to me to pay. As a sibling comment said, what everyone does is use their regular personal cards for the rewards/loyalty points and then submit receipts for reimbursement manually. In consulting where you travel a lot this can be thousands per month in rewards.
That was always my situation. Many of us didn't actually like to use corporate cards because we got a few percent back on our personal cards on probably tens of thousands of dollars of reimbursable travel expenses per year. Credit limits weren't really an issue--the banks didn't care as long as they got paid and we had high credit limits if we were spending that much. As far as I was concerned, corporate cards were basically a headache that cost me money.
It doesn't matter who found the error nor how it was found. An error is an error.
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