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492 points storf45 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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shermantanktop ◴[] No.42160502[source]
Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

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ryandv ◴[] No.42161164[source]
I've noticed this amongst the newer "careerist" sort of software developer who is stumbling into the field for money, as opposed to the obsessive computer geek of yesteryear, who practiced it as a hobby. This character archetype is a transplant, say, less than five years ago from another, often non-technical discipline, and was taught or learned from overly simplistic materials that decry systems programming, or networking, or computer science concepts as unnecessary, impractical skills, reducing everything to writing JavaScript glue code between random NPM packages found on google.

Especially in a time where the gates have come crashing down to pronouncements of, "now anybody can learn to code by just using LLMs," there is a shocking tendency to overly simplify and then pontificate upon what are actually bewilderingly complicated systems wrapped up in interfaces, packages, and layers of abstraction that hide away that underlying complexity.

It reminds me of those quantum woo people, or movies like What the Bleep Do We Know!? where a bunch of quacks with no actual background in quantum physics or science reason forth from drastically oversimplified, mathematics-free models of those theories and into utterly absurd conclusions.

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1. az09mugen ◴[] No.42163457[source]
Even before LLMs were trendy, at the time of covid 19, a lot of people surprisingly became "experts" on the matter of virology and genetics on social networks.