[HN Gopher] New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral desp...
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New mystery AWS product 'Infinidash' goes viral despite being
entirely fictional
Author : rcarmo
Score : 194 points
Date : 2021-07-05 11:27 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| renke1 wrote:
| 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)?
| arduinomancer wrote:
| 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
| robterrell wrote:
| Have an upvote, you deserved better for this.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I wonder if this will end up entering the lexicon like
| Turboencabulator.
| nkssy wrote:
| A perfectly cromulent word.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Soon we will see scientific papers on the cogno-intellectual
| effects of excessive Infinidash use.
| harshaw wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| rizky05 wrote:
| There is no instance, it is AWS Proprietary Intelectual Cloud
| Property.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm expecting someone to actually make an Infinidash product now.
| drvdevd wrote:
| 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... :)
| Edd314159 wrote:
| This looks like it went viral _because_ it was entirely
| fictional, not in spite of it. Everyone seems in on the joke.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| *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
| arkitaip wrote:
| The industry is already recruiting senior Infinidash Engineers,
| demanding 5 years of expertise.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Those were joke ads that were literally a reply to the
| initial thread (that underlined that it was a joke) on
| Twitter.
| arkitaip wrote:
| I was just joking around, hadn't even seen the joke ads...
| [deleted]
| cddotdotslash wrote:
| 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).
| solarkraft wrote:
| How cool, I happen to be one!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Do you have a link? Like, are they hiring unironically?
| igorhvr wrote:
| AFAIK folks are adding this as a joke. Example: https://web
| .archive.org/web/20210705124241/https://jobs.leve...
| pvsnp wrote:
| Haha
|
| > Must include considerable time spent within the
| Infinidash lifecycle (OpenDash acceptable). Infinidash is
| at the core of everything we do.
|
| Why yes, I have exactly this skill set
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 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?
| admax88q wrote:
| This is an archive.org link, presumably they have changed
| it back.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's still there.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| forty wrote:
| 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.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| 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.
| forty wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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.
|
| No they'll find more and more examples of the joke, and
| so keep thinking it's real, but never any explanation.
| forty wrote:
| I tried searching it, the original tweet is pretty high
| in the results. And the other results really don't try to
| hide to hard it's a joke :)
| forty wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| Mostly because of people referring to it when talking about the
| very real Google Cloud Predictive autoscaler:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27719071
| jmacd wrote:
| I saw this as it was happening and my imposter syndrome kicked in
| and I just stayed quiet, but was totally confused.
| [deleted]
| toss1 wrote:
| Is the name trademarked yet?
|
| 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)
|
| good fun, and on point
| [deleted]
| teameat wrote:
| 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.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| LMNOP reminds me this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
| est31 wrote:
| 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
| teameat wrote:
| 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.
| colanderman wrote:
| 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.
|
| -- Jeff;
| jcims wrote:
| 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 Infinidash_ board
|
| 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.
| jeffbarr wrote:
| > That's hilarious. I think Jeff has an account here.
|
| I am 100% sure that I did not write that, and I am 100%
| sure that this comes across as far too Jeff-like for
| comfort!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.
| colanderman wrote:
| Aha nice; good advert for GPT-J. Actually I included a
| newline in the prompt; I'll edit to make that clear.
| jcims wrote:
| That came across in your original post, I tried to do the
| same but GPT-J doesn't like whitespace at the end.
| pram wrote:
| This is pretty much Kinesis Data Analytics lol
| bpodgursky wrote:
| So... now I'm wondering whether this actually should be a
| thing. That sounds pretty slick.
| Guest42 wrote:
| 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).
| beckingz wrote:
| The perfect demo.
| teameat wrote:
| 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.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| > 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"
| teameat wrote:
| haha, I'll put that on my list of quips I wish I had thought
| to say at the time.
| darkerside wrote:
| Catch-22 vibes
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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 resume 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.
| seidoger wrote:
| At this point it's like if AWS services are spread so thin so
| they can come up with new names (and sub-sub names, see:
| SageMaker).
|
| i.e. https://twitter.com/wrongservices
| jna_sh wrote:
| 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 ;)
| jensgk wrote:
| Thanks! That was really funny (and still is). Great idea :-)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Hi there! We happen to have friends in common, ask the first
| Mono/C# person you can think of :)
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kulor wrote:
| How long until AWS releases Infinidash as a self-defeating
| prophecy?
| moontear wrote:
| This would be the right thing to do from AWS. Would be the
| perfect April fools day joke.
| rizky05 wrote:
| Until it's not a joke anymore.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Would be amusing if it became a shibboleth to the extent that
| adding it to your resume in a clearly joking way would help you
| get an interview.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| jlengrand wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thanks Ian for calling it BS the day after
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 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.
| styfle wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1401002863787192322?s=20
| question000 wrote:
| 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.
| janekm wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > 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?
| janekm wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| > but honestly I feel like most of the major software paradigms
| have been discovered...
|
| Do t worry: I felt that way in the 80s before, say, the
| introduction of the Macintosh (which was merely a small,
| crippled version of my lispm)
| recursive wrote:
| Software ux is generally terrible. Reliability is part of that.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Highly recommend watching the video explanation linked in the
| article.
|
| https://twitter.com/tartanllama/status/1410959645238308866
|
| Lost it at "if you come from a functional programming
| background..."
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| ehayes wrote:
| Reminds me of Jabberwocky episode of Better Off Ted
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas
| Aeolun wrote:
| This is tech at it's finest. Also why I come to HN.
| RotaryTelephone wrote:
| Is it, though?
| lelanthran wrote:
| Also, the Jabberwocky project, Better off Ted.
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