This reminds me of a practical joke a co-worker and I pulled some years back, we made up a new project called the LMNOP project (just letters out of the alphabet). We used a program i wrote based on the old foggy where whenever we would see a good BS line from an email or document we put it in the BS generator DB. We had the program spit out several pages of total BS and some fake but impressive looking diagrams made up of a bunch of boxes with random letters as labels and lines between them. We did put some actual sentences of our own in the beginning and end to hype it.
Then we set the trap and left it on the copy machine half copied and walked off. Within a couple of days, bootleg copies were flying around and someone scanned it in and it was being emailed around. A lot of people in our department and even other departments were asking about it. If someone asked us we would say "sorry I can't discuss it" in a very mysterious way. Then we started hearing other people saying that same phrase when they were asked about it.
The whole things started to take on a life of it's own, we joked about how it was like a Dilbert come true and there would be an entire team headed by a director with a budget running a program that was fake.
Of course that never happened, our director called me in and had a copy of the fake document, and said "this looks like something you may have had something to do with ?". I laughed and said just having a bit of fun. She sent out a blast email telling everyone that it was a practical joke gone viral and for everyone to ignore it.
Even so, for a long time people kept coming up with conspiracy theories that was a cover story.
It just shows how people like believing stupid stuff.
You've inspired me... here is what GPT-3 has to say about Infinidash (prompt (including first newline) in italics, first take):
Introducing AWS Infinidash
InfiniDASH is a container-based, serverless, infinitely scalable, high-performance, low latency event stream processing platform built on top of AWS Lambda, Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Applications built with InfiniDASH can handle millions of events per second with sub-millisecond latency.
InfiniDASH is currently in developer preview, so you can try it out for free.
To learn more about InfiniDASH, visit the product page.
To see a live demo of InfiniDASH at re:Invent, register for a hands-on lab.
That's hilarious. I think Jeff has an account here.
Just tried with GPT-J posted here yesterday(?) Prompt in italics as well. Seems like it wants to tweak the name:
Introducing AWS Infinidashboard
What is AWS Infinidashboard?
AWS Infinidashboard is the end-to-end tool that automates dashboards generation for your AWS infrastructure.
How does it work?
1. Dashboard Model Definition
To make dashboards flexible and scalable, Dashboards defined by the user using Infinidashboard specify a logical layout with templates, graphs and widgets (common dashboard elements). It enables user-driven dashboard customization by storing templates for common dashboard elements.
Infinidashboard extracts a definition of templates, graphs and widgets from the defined dashboards and applies this template when processing a new dashboard.
You can define your own templates using the AWS Dashboards Customizable Templates.
2. Dashboard Generation
A dashboard can be defined using a set of metadata (template, graphs and widgets) and a set of metadata describing the data source(s). An abstract description of data sources (CRUD operations, security groups and subnets) is shared as a common model that ensures consistent behavior. When processing data from the corresponding data sources, the user-provided templates, graphs and widgets are automatically applied to the specified data and the resulting dashboard is saved into an Amazon S3 location.
An Abstract Data Source Model (or ADSM) is a common metadata model that describes a data source. The user creates an ADSM to describe the infrastructure and other metadata associated with the data source (security groups, subnets, RDS instance, Lambda functions, Kinesis stream) that drives the dashboard.
3. Dashboard Security
Infinidashboard uses the IAM model to ensure users' data access control and permission policies are properly applied.
Hahaha. I bet it was a shock to see your name pop up in GPT-3.
That feeling when you don't know whether you're famous enough that you were included in the training set and successfully influenced the bot, or the bot simply used a pretty common American name.
You know, I cannot tell you how many inventions I have been involved with that started out as a few of us just joking around. I bet there is a cool theory or name for this, but sometimes, humor has a way of sort of shaking loose peoples imaginations.
hahaha, you never know :)
It would be hilarious if you guys end up with something cool from it. Shug.
Reminds me of how a few places I’ve worked momentarily embraced Tableu with open arms after seeing a US revenue heat map built by dragging and dropping (carefully groomed data).
Ya, we had a VP who somehow some sales guy got to and showed him a "magical" Network Management system by showing a carefully staged demo. It took forever to talk him down.
The earlies version I saw of this was way back in my Bell Lab days, there was a program called foggy (I think it actually came with early versions of UNIX), I actually still have the original source someplace I think. It was very basic, lead ins, transitions, objects then randomness. Mine was based on that with some tweaks. But these new ones out there are AMAZING.
I tracked most of it as it was happening, and TBH the number of fairly well known people who played along was just staggering.
Although there is some flak being taken about making this "too real", I have an impression that many people played along because it was, in fact, very symptomatic of the hype-driven approach to tech the industry has these days.
So it wasn't just about recruiting, and resumé keyword stuffing (in fact, the recruiters aren't really to blame for the way job postings are written). It's more about how we've turned "lifelong learning" into "lifelong marketing" and buzzword bingo.
I still think it was worth the spoof, because, very much like a stream of consciousness Monty Python sketch, a lot of what people said immediately, without prompting (especially on Twitter spaces) was so very close to reality that the slight gap was hilarious.
Hi! I’m the tweeter quoted in this article. Love the description of lifelong learning turned lifelong marketing, that is a much more eloquent way to capture the frustration than I managed.
Totally agreed on the staggering nature of the response, it’s been a real weird couple of days. Great to see some people playing along in the comments too ;)
For me one of the joys of this, and of many Twitter jokes, is the way many people can play.
I think the Infinidash thing was especially rich because there were so many ways you could engage with it. Are we making fun of tech hype? Of recruiting? Of AWS's amorphous and ever-growing blob of offerings? Yes, yes, yes. And so much more.
Exactly. The title seems to imply "Hey, look how gullible people can be that even a non-existent product can go 'viral'", but all of the examples are people "pushing" it to go viral to see how far they can't take it.
Maybe I'm a curmudgeon in my old age, but the whole thing seems pretty lame to me.
No, they weren't. The ads listing that were clearly in on the joke (evidenced by the fact that the companies responded directly to the original joke Tweet).
Are they not worried about people seeing the joke requirement in the job spec, just not being aware of the current Twitter joke of the day, and discounting themselves?
No, it's selecting candidates who are aware of the current Twitter joke of the day. They're either unaware of how small that bubble is or accepting of the monoculture this promotes.
I'm sure people who are not aware will just search for it in their favorite search engine and find out it's a joke.
What it might filter out are people who don't find this joke funny, and might decide not to apply (and on the countrary it will catch the attention of people finding this funny and concluding Signal must be a cool place to work).
Getting devs attention on a job offer is hard these days, so I guess spicing it a bit is fair.
I, for one, wouldn't bother searching for a technology that I've never heard of if it were listed as a requirement for a job posting. I would just move on to the next posting.
There are too many jobs that I am qualified for to bother taking time for a deep dive on a job that I'm not qualified for.
To be honest I haven't ever actually looked for a job, but if I happened to read that annonce, I would absolutely check out wtf is that tech that is a requirement to work at signal, out of pure curiosity.
Also it probably depends whether you have actually used some aws services. I have searched quite a lot of aws services before, and not finding the product page straight away is a pretty good hint.
Except The Register, unless their article is the meta-joke:
> We’ve also seen reports that Infinidash has a role in the Internet of Things.
>> Just did it out first integration of IoT Kettle Manager -> AWS Infinidash -> Firehose. At scale, can now boil the ocean on demand with full observability!
Of course there will be the ones who are taken by the hype and stop short of actually caring about what that is beyond "buzzword tech". But the examples chosen for the article are the joke.
*New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral — despite being entirely fictional*
Reg chats to developer whose joke that mere mention of a new prod would appear in job ads came true and spawned books, songs, forks, cryptocoin, and more
- the title and strapline of the article you are quoting
I'm not saying The Register doesn't know the tech is a joke, just that they don't seem to realize everyone else knows too and they're in on it.
The article takes some people's obviously humorous quotes as evidence that they're falling for the scam. So even an obviously remark like "can now boil the ocean on demand with full observability!" is taken seriously as "reports that Infinidash has a role in the Internet of Things".
There's a proud tradition of this kind of parody: the Turboencabluator is one of the most famous in engineering, a joke that goes back to 1944. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator
I am not famous, but that's what I would have tweeted:
Inifidash is nice and all, but yet again there is no support in CloudFormation from the get-go, time to go all-in Terraform (which of course already supports it)?
If not, expect it to be used unironically in the very near future - gotta leverage the existing memespace momentum... (actually, even if it is already TM'd)
Kinda makes me think of all the hyped pump-and-dump cryptocurrencies with a big technowizard story behind them about how it'll magically solve world hunger while being carbon negative and wild claims like that.
Look, I've been working on infinidash PRFAQ for over 6 months and now a jokester means I need to do another renaming exercise. Product naming is no trivial business.
The video didn't even mention a dinglearm, and I watched it 7 times.
It took me one day to realize it was fake. I saw it happen and started reading and listening to the Twitter spaces after a couple beers and I was like "WTF, I don't get anything about it, I must have missed so many things lately".
And yes, having so many of the influencial people talking about it in the same room like they knew what it was really made it confusing.
I also didn't know what it was, and actually went and found a live stream product launch coverage video to watch... they actually made an entire fake live stream about it. Was confusing and felt a bit mean to waste the time of people just trying to understand what's going on.
For a small team though Infinidash works great. But once you start making serious revenue and growing the headcount you’re better off managing your own instances.
I learned the power of a fake tweet last month[1].
Some backstory: I found that Twitter’s use of emoji is not immediately recognizable because they render their own image rather than relying on the native implementation. So I tweeted what appeared to be Twitter hash flags for hex colors by using square emoji colors. I went to bed after it got 1 or 2 likes. And in the morning I found that hundreds of people thought it was real.
Been watching this whole thing happen and I agree. This feels like one of those times where a thing comes to life because you uttered its name so many times… :)
This is absolutely hysterical. For me, the best parts are the song and the explainer video that uses cats and a stuffed shark. I've been reading through all of the new ecosystem and all the tweets about certifications and experience required for job positions and laughing my rear off.
People in tech are constantly chasing the next big thing, but honestly I feel like most of the major software paradigms have been discovered , things like website UX, AI etc are already at the state of maximum effectiveness and "innovation" is basically just a way of locking in devs who want to learn something that's "industry standard." Look at all the pointless wheel spinning created by having multiple large JS frameworks. The real efficiency gains most organizations are going to see from technology is in integrating their engineering/tech infrastructure side with the rest of the organization, simple stuff like teaching people to use Ipython notebooks instead of PowerPoints and spreadsheets.
The path of discovery of new software development paradigms is far from linear but over the long term the improvements are impressive and ongoing. One of my favorite recent examples is declarative (Flutter, SwiftUI) vs imperative UI. The gains to efficiency and clarity are significant.
> The path of discovery of new software development paradigms is far from linear but over the long term the improvements are impressive and ongoing. One of my favorite recent examples is declarative (Flutter, SwiftUI) vs imperative UI. The gains to efficiency and clarity are significant.
The critical aspect of these declarative frameworks to me (similar to React) is that they automatically update the presentation of the UI based on changes to the state of the application. From what I recall Delphi did not do this for the most part (aside from database bindings)?
Though Delphi is certainly a great example of the circuitous route that good ideas take.
> The critical aspect of these declarative frameworks to me (similar to React) is that they automatically update the presentation of the UI based on changes to the state of the application. From what I recall Delphi did not do this for the most part (aside from database bindings)?
Not for all components, no. For many components it did IIRC.
What it did allow was designing the UI in a drag-n-drop editor, and easily managing the state of the visual components by double-clicking on the component and adding a snippet of code.
The UI and the UI/code interactions were effectively "declared" in this manner.
> Though Delphi is certainly a great example of the circuitous route that good ideas take.
Hopefully things advance so much in the future that you will one day be saying the same thing about React, Flutter, etc :-)
