Maybe it's just my lack of reading comprehension but some of the wording in this report feels off:
> this code change came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path.
> the root cause was identified and the red-button (to disable the serving path) was being put in place
So the red-button was or wasn't in place on May 29th? The first sentence implies it was ready to be used but the second implies it had to be added. A red-button sounds like a thing that's already in place and can be triggered immediately, but this sounds like an additional change had to be deployed?
> Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash
This is the first mention of null pointer (and _the_ null pointer too, not just _a_ null pointer) this implies the specific null pointer that would have caused a problem was known at this point? And this wasn't an early issue?
I don't mean to play armchair architect and genuinely want to understand this from a blameless post-mortem point-of-view given the scale of the incident, but the wording in this report doesn't quite add up.
Hey now, at least the dictionary has keys that _could_ hint at the contents (or be completely misleading). What about the tuple with just positions?
image.size
ndarray.shape
Are the image sizes (width, height) or (height, width)?
Trick question of course, it's (height, width, channels) for numpy. numpy is fairly well known though and sort of gets away with it, but when your never-seen-before internal company starts doing this, well...
Serious question, but what is the best practice for keeping n-dimensional arrays organized/labeled? Pandas? Xarray? Converting everything to netcdf before using it?
> A skilled team of five can make content on their own
And a skilled team of one can also make good, creative and unique content by themselves (I'm thinking mostly of the kind of things that end up on YouTube, Nebula, etc.)
> Hollywood is switching to AI rapidly.
I'm curious as to what people think the long term prospect for this really is. If it's true that the number of people involved in the creation of this content goes down then does it get cheaper and more available? Faster to create? But to what end? Who's even paying to engage with it? Presumably not the people that used to work in the production of those things, because they've been displaced by the content generation machines. More and more content will be sold to people that are perhaps less able to afford it.
Somehow I've never made the connection before until your comment, but perhaps DFW imagined the contents of the video tape as essentially the combination of YouTube Shorts and TikTok, an endless stream of tiny dopamine-spiking sensory inputs.
I always imagined it as a single media item with one theme that itself was so ridiculously compelling that viewers couldn't look away (more like a film, perhaps something analogous with the size of IJ itself), but now imagining that it was a practically-infinite stream of short-form content that you didn't even find truly valuable but were compelled to keep watching anyway makes it seem much scarier.
> We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests.
This isn't inherently a bad thing but I don't believe it's without its costs, one of which being that with everyone watching (potentially) completely unique media there'll be no shared cultural artifacts to communicate with others about.
VivziePop may have started as a small creator but the recent creations such as Hazbin Hotel have now become things where the enjoyment can be shared with other fans, which in some ways is the secondary purpose of all media. Media enjoyed alone can still be rewarding, media enjoyed with others can be much more than that (except for going to the cinema with strangers, that can disappear immediately).
It seems like a common idea that if we can just generate a practically-infinite stream of media then we've solved some kind of problem with there just not being enough "content" (I hate using the term in this way but it's concise), and while I do sympathise with the points of view from people that can't find things they like, I also don't really believe that "Content is a problem".
More variety itself isn't a problem, but I'm not convinced that in general there's a _lack_ of content. Humans have already reached peak saturation in terms of
the sheer amount of text, audio and video that's created every day. No single item of media is itself a problem, but perhaps the total aggregate of everything isn't helpful.
Replying to add Deckset (https://www.deckset.com/) as a (non-FOSS) option. Deckset and other content-based approaches with automatic layout always seemed like a good way to orient slides around the content instead of futzing with slide transitions for hours.
Earlier this week ChatGPT found (self-conscious as I am of the personification of this phrasing) a place where I'd accidentally overloaded a member function by unintentionally giving it the name of something from a parent class, preventing the parent class function from ever being run and causing <bug>.
After walking through a short debugging session where it tried the four things I'd already thought of and eventually suggested (assertively but correctly) where the problem was, I had a resolution to my problem.
There are a lot of questions I have around how this kind of mistake could simply just be avoided at a language level (parent function accessibility modifiers, enforcing an override specifier, not supporting this kind of mistake-prone structure in the first place, and so on...). But it did get me unstuck, so in this instance it was a decent, if probabilistic, rubber duck.
> we can't abstract away everything we do multiple times
I think there's a fundamental truth about any code that's written which is that it exists on some level of specificity, or to put it in other words, a set of decisions have been made about _how_ something should work (in the space of what _could_ work) while some decisions have been left open to the user.
Every library that is used is essentially this. Database driver? Underlying I/O decisions are probably abstracted away already (think Netty vs Mina), and decisions on how to manage connections, protocol handling, bind variables, etc. are made by the library, while questions remain for things like which specific tables and columns should be referenced. This makes the library reusable for this task as long as you're fine with the underlying decisions.
Once you get to the question of _which specific data is shown on a page_ the decisions are closer to the human side of how we've arbitrarily chosen to organise things in this specific thousandth-iteration of an e-commerce application.
The devil is in the details (even if you know the insides of the devil aren't really any different).
> Once you get to the question of _which specific data is shown on a page_ the decisions are closer to the human side of how we've arbitrarily chosen to organise things in this specific thousandth-iteration of an e-commerce application.
That's why communication is so important, because the requirements are the primary decision factors. A secondary factors is prior technical decisions.
There are a lot of terms in software development that have been co-opted from other disciplines and misrepresent a lot of development work, including 'engineering' and 'architecture'.
I think it's helpful to think of engineering as a _process_ instead of a role, and the reality is that a lot of development work doesn't necessarily rely on the strong engineering methodology (e.g. measurement, material properties, tolerances, modelling, etc.) that the people developing the software might imagine just based on the number of job adverts for 'engineers'.
This isn't a bad thing. There are hundreds or thousands of different but equally valid solutions to getting a program to do a thing, but not recognising that most code writing is somewhere between a art and engineering and is neither a purely artistic discipline but also rarely a purely engineering one is useful.
The kinds of engineering and architecture that people think of in software development only really represent common practices and shared language (e.g. design patterns, architectural patterns) and not a strong engineering practice or any kind of truth about how software actually runs.
(Unless you're writing software for launching rockets, in which case the engineering _process_ porbably should be strong).
> the reality is that a lot of development work doesn't necessarily rely on the strong engineering methodology (e.g. measurement, material properties, tolerances, modelling, etc.)
It's probably true that a lot of development work doesn't rely on those. It's probably also true that the work other kinds of engineers do also don't.
That said, when engineering software systems, those are very important. Measurement: resource sizing, observability; tolerances: backoffs, back pressure, queues, topics, buffers; modelling: types, syntax, data analytics...
There's a whole class of developers out there that are not aware or very good at those. And that's fine. There's a place for them in the market. You don't need an engineer to work on your floor joists or your plumbing. Sure you can have one, but you can also hire a builder or DIY it all yourself.
If you were that rich wouldn't you just hire someone to drive well for you? But if you liked driving for the sake of it would it not be part of the enjoyment to learn to handle different vehicles well?
I'm sure it varies, but personally I have a very prosaic reason that I would still drive myself in most scenarios: If someone else is driving I tend to get motion sickness.
Expense? Just hiring a car would not be much more expense but would require more logistics, as you would have to manage scheduling and calling cars. To get a dedicated driver, or team of drivers (to cover 24 hours) and vehicle would be significantly more expensive than a couple extra vehicles. Plus handling the logistics of setting them up to be ready and waiting for you each time you travel would be something else to manage, or would be something to pay a personal assistant to manage. Plus you could still use car services as needed whenever you didn’t want to drive.
Unless you had reached a level where you were having almost everything in your life managed by assistants, and you were the type of person that wanted to give up all that control, then have “your car” ready to go whichever house you were at would be the lower mental overhead solution.
As people are discussing there are different level of rich. At some level one want to reasonably good car that they drive themselves. At another level maybe people send advance team to setup before owner reach their vacation mansion and drive them around, cook their meals, etc once they are there.
> maybe people send advance team to setup before owner reach their vacation mansion and drive them around, cook their meals, etc once they are there.
I can readily believe this does happen at the right level of wealth, but there's something deeply absurd and humorous about someone sending a vanguard to their second or third home before they arrive.
I mean the level of conveniences in developed world are already much much higher even for middle class that we don't even think of them as luxury it would be for > 90% of world population.
My very typical American suburban home on a 0.2 acre lot is better built, has better views, parking, heating, cooling and so on than a 3 generation rich (from my standards) cousins' home in India. However they do have half a dozen servants at home and I have obviously none here.
So it does sound weird that people seek even further from developed world middle class point of view.
Most people don't really like it, but find it to be the best option to go from A to B quickly. If you involve other people, be a driver or a renting business, you add complication and cost.
> this code change came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path.
> the root cause was identified and the red-button (to disable the serving path) was being put in place
So the red-button was or wasn't in place on May 29th? The first sentence implies it was ready to be used but the second implies it had to be added. A red-button sounds like a thing that's already in place and can be triggered immediately, but this sounds like an additional change had to be deployed?
> Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash
This is the first mention of null pointer (and _the_ null pointer too, not just _a_ null pointer) this implies the specific null pointer that would have caused a problem was known at this point? And this wasn't an early issue?
I don't mean to play armchair architect and genuinely want to understand this from a blameless post-mortem point-of-view given the scale of the incident, but the wording in this report doesn't quite add up.
(Edit for formatting)
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