681–690 of 793 posts
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I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
It was just one off task and I already had agent doing categorising with the same data so I just asked it. Otherwise I agree.
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Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.
Maybe they are former AWS employees for a reason and now want things to go better than they were at AWS.
Every once in a while (~1:12) you get one that sounds like a Mormon missionary praising how its not that way and AWS is perfect.
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But these aren't the right services where the test should be, right? There's another service that says "ok we take the 100 bytes from A, and we take the $17 SKU from B, and this should equal $X". It's the third service that multiplies these things that failed. Where are the tests for that?
To me this sounds like a human-or-LLM-driven error. There must be a pretty limited set of factors that determine a pricing unit: I’m not really sure how a deterministic system could do that infrequently enough to not be a bigger story. Maybe a reeeeaaaallly rare race condition or something like that? To me this smells like having enough manual work involved in the process to fuck something up, but not nearly enough e…
In a computer system, dont those categories cover pretty much everything except a meteor strike?
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This isn't a flippant comment. Imagine though, being presented with this. Imagine having some underlying health problem (e.g. cardiovascular). Do not be surprised if real people actually die from this mistake, from the anxiety, the surprise, the helplessness.
its so far out as to be obviously not real a smaller error by say, just one or two orders of magnitude are much more believable as a reader
Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after. Services emit metering values that arent directly tied…
The sudden loss of working capital while awaiting a refund would be extremely disruptive for even large businesses.
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No tests? Just mess up some mundane detail [1] and voila! Wake-up calls and heart attacks for 100,000s of administrators? 1: "Oh, well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
>no tests? Earlier this week my slopservant implemented several comprehensive changes to a codebase. It also wrote extensive tests to verify the correctness of the changes. A few days later I was working on something else and realized, everything had been implemented backwards, in a way that was nonsensical and also completely pointless. The many tests it had written were just confirming the LLM's idea of correctness…
The more features I add now will likely make the inevitable refactor much harder, but adding new features is so easy that I want want extend this illusion of productivity just a little bit longer!
Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after. Services emit metering values that arent directly tied…
Was this the day that gp3 EBS volumes came out by any chance?