meshko

fixed, i think.

part of the 2001 charm?

yeah this is what happens when you let LLM design the UI. The whole flow needs to be updated.

WebSockets.

yup, this is the original website. The domain kept auto-renewing I guess :)

yeah, that's the original. It is better than this remake but no multiplayer.

you probably got damage. If stuck like this, go to menu and select "mass kill"

yup, it was a java applet. Stopped working when Java in the browser died.

for the 25th anniversary (approximately) I vibecoded what i wanted to do for years -- port of the original remake (yes) to JavaScript. Alive again.

I so hate it when people fill these postmortems with marketing speak. Don't they know it is counterproductive?

to be fair, they needed to scale to roughly a thousand concurrent users (where concurrent is used very loosely here). so I wouldn't say that scaleability was really a requirement. 1000 users is nothing.

You think I was rude asking you about your experience. Now think how rude this unsubstantiated allegation of obvious simplicity of the code in question is to the person who wrote it -- with the weight of hundreds of lost lives on their shoulders. These control systems can get arbitrary complex. We don't know anything about the hardware this runs on and what it has to interface with. We don't know the constraints and age of the codebase. Nothing. To assume that this boils down to a simple if statement is something I would expect from a recent college graduate, or someone who has only worked at a web startup, not a person with 5+ years of real world experience building complex systems. I agree about all the points about testing and business processes. We have enough evidence to conclude that unforgivable mistakes were made there (and I point to that in my original comment).

"The technical implementation can be roughly inferred by any programmer", "such a foreseeable failure state"... how many years of experience do you have?

All the talk about how crappy Boeing engineering here was is bullshit and speculation and I am surprised PG participates in it. What we can discuss objectively here is incident response in which Boeing allowed the situation to continue after the first crash. How did they not run hundreds of hours of simulations, code reviews etc, etc on the system assumed to be at fault? How did they not immediately change the safety features associated with MCAS to be free and mandatory for everyone? Engineering mistakes happen and are hard to prevent. Business mistakes like this are a sign of terrible culture, lack of priorities and are an existential thread to the company.

how about they just use ML for once and detect the typist and mute her automatically?

Meh, it is not as hard as it seems. Just get yourself 2 kids in quick succession. Adding second one will be both easier than getting first and it will highlight how silly it was to feel that it is difficult when it was just one. Also they will play with each other while you watch TV and drink beer.

Dude I lost 10 pounds and keeping that is constant work. You go!

I agree. I know some doctors and while they do tell stories about the patients (obviously completely anonymously) and sometimes have a laugh about them, you can always feel certain base level of respect, love and care, not unlike someone telling about their kids doing something silly. Good doctors don't dehumanize their patients, ever.

I wonder if it would be possible to design a system which would power down some of the memory when not plugged to a power source. I do all my dev on an MBP and would be more or less fine if the memory-intensive things were only available when plugged in. That said, I don't really feel like 16gb limits me in any way except for doing data processing, but that should be happening on the cluster anyways.

Oh man, I don't care (as much) about typewriters but yeah, what a happy story. It's like visiting a town for a day and learning by accident that the band you've loved for years but never seen live is playing there this very night.

I've interviewed probably dozens of people who couldn't code, but never worked with one. I've had plenty of bad coworkers, but all of them could write code to a degree where they would pass basic coding interview. I assume there is just a large population of people who can't do anything at all, and they just migrate from one company to another, coasting there w/o doing anything for a couple of years, because firing is hard. I keep remembering this story i heard from a co-worker. He worked at a giant laptop repair shop. There was a guy there who didn't know how to fix anything. He stayed for a year or so, and then finally was let go. They found dozens of spare parts in his drawers -- he would just order random parts from the warehouse to imitate work, and leave them in his desk. This is part of the unspoken dues that corporations pay to the society, creating this hidden safety net for people who are just not good at what they do, or perhaps just can't do anything. It is both good and terrible. I am glad that this safety net exists, but it is really disparaging to these people. I wish society had a better way of helping them.

wait, but what is it that you do? If you are getting hired to write code, you should be ok demonstrating that you can code in the interview. If you are interviewing for an architect position, or a manager, I guess. Whether a not coding architect/manager is a good idea is another question (I personally think that the answer is no, any good sr person will have to do _something_ hands on, up to the C level).

Thanks, nice job. I must say I am more saddened by the way Google chose to word it than by the fact that they are killing it.

I am a bit paranoid about disclosing details, but basically our SAML IDP was down, so the sales person couldn't log in at all. I was messing with the demo server to convince myself that it is 100% IDPs fault and we can't do anything about it, and discovered to my surprise that the form-based authentication was not disabled on it (normally our servers are in one mode or the other, but not both, even though this is an artificial separation). So I gave them the direct link to the form based entry point and most of the demo could be done.

So if you encrypt your data with both only people who have access to backdoors from both sides will be able to decrypt it!

Yup. We have officially ran out of words.

Well, the parts that relied out outside services hooked up via SSO were not demoed, but majority of it worked fine because demo server was misconfigured to not actually rely on the external services. It is pretty funny.

Very funny guys, can you stop now? We have a demo in 4 minutes.

Here's what I don't understand -- every discussion about static typing is full of people saying static typing is so good and useful. Everyone i talked to, everyone i work with, we all prefer static typing. And yet... Javascript and all that.

these are just lack of good product management, nothing to do with engineers. I do suspect Google's PM culture is... lacking.