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New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

theregister.com

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Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#61

Post by teameat »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #36
teameat wrote: post #32

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…

> this looks like something you may have had something to do with ?". I laughed and said just having a bit of fun. Surely this would've been the best time to reply with "Sorry, I can't discuss it"

haha, I'll put that on my list of quips I wish I had thought to say at the time.

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#62

Post by teameat »

Guest42 wrote: post #57
teameat wrote: post #32

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…

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.

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#63

Post by teameat »

est31 wrote: post #49
teameat wrote: post #32

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…

See also: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_generator Example fake paper: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/rooter.pdf

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.

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#64

Post by janekm »

lelanthran wrote: post #54
janekm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Wasn't Delphi declarative enough?

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.

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#65

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

teameat wrote: post #32

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…

LMNOP reminds me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#66

Post by rcarmo »

jna_sh wrote: post #31
rcarmo wrote: post #16

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 (…

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 ;)

Hi there! We happen to have friends in common, ask the first Mono/C# person you can think of :)

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#67

Post by cddotdotslash »

arkitaip wrote: post #7
Edd314159 wrote: post #4

This looks like it went viral _because_ it was entirely fictional, not in spite of it. Everyone seems in on the joke.

The industry is already recruiting senior Infinidash Engineers, demanding 5 years of expertise.

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).

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#68

Post by NelsonMinar »

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

Bud Haggart's industrial training videos for the Turboencabulator from the 70s/80s are things of beauty. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#69

Post by egypturnash »

buran77 wrote: post #6
Edd314159 wrote: post #4

This looks like it went viral _because_ it was entirely fictional, not in spite of it. Everyone seems in on the joke.

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 "bu…

*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

Re: New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

#70

Post by robterrell »

arduinomancer wrote: post #44

I just can’t get over the pricing of Infinidash. 0.005 cents per dash FLOP? Seriously? For something you could whip together with rsync + a few bash scripts and throw it on an EC2 instance? Also no us-north-7 is a dealbreaker for our shop

Have an upvote, you deserved better for this.
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