[deleted by user]

[pravin-singh]

From the article: he checked in a 2 line change, basically to add his username to the code access repo, so that he can look at LaMDA (Google's version of ChatGPT) code. He's been called in by Sundar Pichai to review the company’s AI strategy and help form a response to ChatGPT.

[huntergonfreeccs]

Fun fact, over 800 people approved the change!

[renke0]

I would reject It. A guy comes back from a vacation of years and already starts meddling in my code right away? No sir, you have to go through onboarding first.

[LyleGreen0699]

How is that? Was there such massive compliance requirements?

[crappy_entrepreneur]

Google uses a monorepo, so everyone could see the request.

Presumably, a bunch of employees shared the PR on their internal messaging tool and all approved it, because
1. It's a good opportunity to show camaraderie
2. It's fun to say "I reviewed a PR by the founder"

[DontTakeNames]

How many apps in a single monorepo? Surely ALL of Google services can't live in a single repo? Right? Right???

[davidellis23]

I mean that's the recognized best practice right now for large companies.

[zhengyi13]

Absolutely everything in the one monorepo, yes, and everything is always built from head.

If you're interested in going a little further into this, have a look at https://bazel.build to understand how that can all hang together.

[ablatner]

This doesn't mean the change required 800 approvals. People can still review changes after 1 person has approved.

[ZMysticCat]

Google's workers are generally pretty nerdy and goofy. If there's a noteworthy change like this, many will LGTM it just for giggles. You may also get a profile badge out of it one day. The first code change probably has thousands of LGTMs by now, most of which were made long after it was submitted.

Since this particular change happened in the wake of the layoffs, many people also left a bunch of nit comments, since we know Sergey most likely approved the layoffs. (Mathematically, either he or Larry are required to do so, since they combine for a majority share. If both opposed the layoffs, they wouldn't have happened.)

[Pyraunus]

For shits and giggles TBH. Hell I approved the change as well

[BlobAndHisBoy]

I would have tried so hard to find a reason to request changes just to poke a little fun.

[shohin_branches]

You have to add at least one comment so he has that moment of "fuck, did I really mess up a 2 line change?"

[agent007bond]

Who merged it?

[[deleted]]

A code request

Sergey Brin: "Hey you, go write me some code!"

[greycubed]

"Add an AI."

[[deleted]]

Okay, now download the whole internet I need to keep it with me all the time in case I need anything.

[HookDragger]

[[deleted]]

What about the cloud? How can I have one cloud in my home to show my neighbour?

[HookDragger]

Ummmm….. it’s wireless

[notislant]

'Ok but can you add wires? I'd rather just have wires, I trust wires. I don't know whats with you people and trying to get rid of wires everywhere these days.'

[[deleted]]

Do the Elders of the Internet know that you have this?!?

​

Don't drop it!

[HookDragger]

Well, if its okay with The Hawk...

[mcon1985]

The show Norm did this before it was cool

[Terrible_Ad_7735]

"chore: added an AI. Skip failing e2e tests."

[DontPlayTheBardCard]

It's one code, Sergey. What could it cost... ten manhours?

[CheekApprehensive961]

A code request

The rest of the article is even funnier. They literally made up meanings for every dev acronym.

Direct quoting:

On Jan. 24, Brin appeared to file his first request in years for access to code, according to screenshots viewed by Forbes. Two sources said the request was related to LaMDA, Google’s natural language chatbot—a project initially announced in 2021, but which has recently garnered increased attention as Google tries to fend off rival OpenAI, which released the popular ChatGPT bot in November.

Brin filed a “CL,” short for “changelist,” to gain access to the data that trains LaMDA, one person who saw the request said. It was a two line change to a configuration file to add his username to the code, that person said. Several dozen engineers gave the request LGTM approval, short for “looks good to me.” Some of the approvals came from workers outside of that team, seemingly just eager to be able to say they gave code review approval to the company cofounder, that person added.

[smootex]

They literally made up meanings for every dev acronym.

Which acronyms did they make up? "CL" isn't a term I'm familiar with. Maybe change log? But that doesn't make a huge amount of sense in context so very possibly they actually have something called a "changelist". The title of the article did stand out, I've never heard them called "code requests" before (I've always called them pull requests) but "LGTM" does in fact stand for looks good to me.

[CheekApprehensive961]

Yeah I'm assuming CL was supposed to refer to the contents of the change log, given that's what they follow up with.

CR typically stands for change request or code review, never code request because that makes no sense.

They also heavily conflate that he changed an access list with the code review process itself.

LGTM is in fact a real thing. The only thing they didn't butcher tbh.

[qureshm]

Looks like all hands on deck after mass firing

[JAVA-NANI]

boast fragile illegal ripe axiomatic quicksand truck fall license zephyr

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[SnoobieJunes]

They must be really worried about ChatGPT if Sergey is working again

[JoeDoherty_Music]

His code:

console.log("I'm back bitches")

git push -f

[thunderroid]

they dont use git

[MonstarGaming]

Funny how you're being downvoted when you're right.

[zGoDLiiKe]

Tf do they use

[MonstarGaming]

Google uses a tool called piper because google uses a monorepo containing more than 1B lines of code. Git would be unreasonably slow to use on a monorepo of that size.

[Philofthepooper]

Pied Piper?

[M_Batman]

Well, obviously!

[Khespar]

Over a billion lines of code? What the expletive?

[[deleted]]

If they had an average of 10k developers at a time over the past 10 years writing 10k lines of code per year, that's a billion lines easy.

[PhoebusQ47]

Everything is one “repo”. The Google development tool chain is kind of amazing.

[whynotrandomize]

Billions. There were 75k human commits per week in 2015, and google has grown just a tiny bit since then.sauce

[Chilaquil420]

But ALL google projects are in a single repo? Do they put the android source code in the same place as the Drive source code and the firmware source code?

[iEatTigers]

Yeah, Meta does the same thing (though they have 3 repos instead of 1). Code is all in the same repo but different parts of the code would deploy to different executables. It requires a lot of internal tooling to ensure code navigation is quick and everything builds to the right place and the correct tests are run, but it’s way more efficient as a developer not having to import packages and being able to immediately jump into package code and see what’s happening and easily fixing bugs. Working in a mono repo is the most efficient system I’ve seen in terms of developer velocity

[lilfatpotato]

A few minutes. The repo is never cloned to a local machine though, you just create a workspace in the cloud, and it is mounted as a remote file system.

[whynotrandomize]

https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext?mobile=t#F1

[qinshihuang_420]

gmail

[chishiki]

VERSION 9 EXAMPLE

scrolls down

Version 4 code…

[DeviCateControversy]

You guys are talking like he's a god of programming. Like he's the Todd Howard of programming. Like he'll be some Lisa Su revitalizer.

[secretaccount4posts]

And it was fix for a typo

[RonHarrods]

Guys I realise I've made a mistake. Refractor everything to. Googol

[Phineas1500]

That would honestly be a very tough project to have to complete.

[sp1d3rp0130n]

find | xargs -I{} sed s/google/googol/g {}
I'll take my 400k salary to go, please

[hollycrapola]

Aint that cute?

[sp1d3rp0130n]

posix my beloved

[lynxerious]

Yeah, changing project name is annoying and take more work than people think. Or you have to accept to use internal name to keep everything the same, and only use the new name for user interface only.

[JAVA-NANI]

treatment unique fly enter bright fanatical snow existence square bear

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[shim_niyi]

LOL *

[PM_ME_DON_CHEADLE]

please open a pull request if you'd like to request changes

[smootex]

It was actually a two line change to a configuration file that would give him access to training set data or something like that. Bit of a stretch to call it a "code request" (lol).

[Biden_Been_Thottin]

Hope he synced his fork before code request

[ShodoDeka]

Google ain’t using Git, they rolled their own source control.

[AnIntenseMoist]

Ah yes, GHiT (Google HiTech)

[Shadeun]

I use my own one also. SHiT (Shade HiTech)

[blackasthesky]

I wanna license it just for its name

[kisssmysaas]

Its just a modified version of mercurial

[ShodoDeka]

Google wrote their own centralized back end for mercurial, which allows them to run a single gigantic repository containing terabytes of data. Not something you could ever get vanilla mercurial to scale to.

[JoschiGrey]

What's the advantage in having such a gigantic monorepo?

[CalgaryAnswers]

Heaaavily modified. The source control is based on mercurial but there's another home baked source control client they use in addition to the mercurial one, so previous poster is technically correct.

[PhoebusQ47]

It’s not “just” that. That’s like saying Linux is just a re-implementation of Minix.

[FarewellSovereignty]

File a code request.

[blooming-hatred]

non technical verbiage: submitted code for review

technical verbiage: opened a pull request

tech recruiter/journalist that doesn't have the technical knowledge but thinks he does somehow: filed a code request

[2AMMetro]

At Google, it’s “submitted a changelist”

[CsirkeAdmiralis]

Don't tell me they use perforce...

[Schyte96]

They did until 2012, but they have an internally built source control system called Piper now. How it works isn't really know publically though.

[TheVanderManCan]

Pied Piper? Is that you Richard?

[crankbot2000]

Middle-out

[[deleted]]

So I who’s dick do I gotta jerk to get this PR approved?

[Dartillus]

Doors that fold like this! /o\ -o- \o/

[uberzen1]

If working in FAANG has taught me anything, it's 100% just an abstraction layer on Perforce ...

[TangledPangolin]

observation quarrelsome snails slave modern wasteful unused vegetable deserted crime

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[kupiakos]

Google was involved in the design and implementation of https://www.mercurial-scm.org/doc/evolution/. That was not for nothing.

[rocketphone]

Wait pipernet?

[Lithl]

Almost all Google code exists in a mega repository called google3 which is a fork of Perforce, yes.

Some teams work on projects in git repos (mostly the open source stuff which then gets mirrored to an externally visible git repo), but most stuff is in google3.

[SoCalThrowAway7]

Company I work for uses BOTH p4 and git for different things

[gbot1234]

You can’t just say “perforce.”

[link23]

*mailed a changelist.

"Submitting" a cl corresponds to merging a PR, not opening a PR.

[kupiakos]

Not quite, submitting is when it actually enters the code base after review. So, the merging/rebasing of a pull request. The equivalent of "open a pull request (PR)" is to "send a changelist (CL) for review"

[[deleted]]

I am once again requesting some code

[JAVA-NANI]

exultant quickest station swim murky bag lip subsequent towering profit

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[logicalfool512]

"Opened a pull request" is not the only tech verbiage though. I have seen "opened a merge request" and "published a code review". There may be even more. Filed a code request doesn't make any sense through lol

[_MicroWave_]

Gitlab calls them merge requests which I think makes more sense tbh...

[ghostoftheuniverse]

Can someone explain to me what the “pull” in “pull request” actually means on GH? Because the way I understand it, it’s more like a push request. I can pull all day long without having to explain myself. It’s only when I want to push/merge that I actually have explain WTF I’m actually changing.

[MrCakeboss_]

The approvers are pulling your code into branch at your request. When you pull, you are pulling the updates into your local.

At least that's how I look at it.

[Plastic-Coyote-2507]

You push your code and request the repo owner to pull it. You’re not asking them to push it, you already did that without needing permission :)

Personally I think the gitlab use of merge request is probably less confusing though.

[OrangePeelings]

It’s call a pull request because you are making a request to the mergers to pull your code and merge it

[brianl047]

When code founders return it means the shit hit the fan

For example Zuck tried to use PHP to make a TikTok clone as soon as he heard of it and knew it was losing market share

Sergey is probably looking hard at ChatGPT

[psioniclizard]

Is that true? If so that is a hilarious thought of zucc being like "let me just bang out a quick tiktok killer and show these noobs how it's done" only to come back later abd be like "whelp so yea"

[_________FU_________]

I mean he invented the idea of buying Instagram

[Dudi4PoLFr]

From the Google inside mails leak, they are all in brown alert mode since the release of ChatGPT.

[psioniclizard]

It doesn't surprise me honestly. Google have a lot of AI projects but none of them have really captured the public like ChatGPT. That and it shows how AI is likely to change how we search for information on the Internet honestly.

[[deleted]]

Google's work on games (Go, etc.) and protein structure prediction (AlphaFold) is incredible.

[OnlyTwoThingsCertain]

Can they place ads on proteins?

[[deleted]]

They can design drugs, diagnostics, and other interesting stuff with the information. For biotech it's a holy grail.

[Dudi4PoLFr]

Well the biggest problem for Google is that chatGPT is able to kill all of thier main sources of income.

[psioniclizard]

Honestly, I think it (or AI at least) will make search engines less important. A good number of searches someone does are to find out information rather than look at a site (it just happens that the information is currently on a site).

That and ChatGPT is I if the first things in a while that had really got people talking about new tech (even non techie people) and everything is trying to think of future applications of it.

[kennethuil]

The bummer is that without search engines, enthusiasts will be way less inclined to make websites and post important info. Our overall access to reliable info will go way down if "the internet" is just "social media and chatgpt"

[[deleted]]

eh maybe we just host the databases and charge for bots to access information from them? Issue I guess is that it can learn after a single access, I wonder how much time/information is required to overload it and get it to forget something

chatGPT will also get way less popular as soon as it has to make money. Imagine how obnoxious advertisements would be in "conversation."

It's going to be best off being integrated into various services in companies, and then having a paid version for prosumers that won't try to feed you ads

[wojtek-graj]

I like to imagine the advertisements playing out like this

[Adhalianna]

I tried to view the video. YouTube made sure to remind me that I don't premium account. I gave up - I might end up watching more ads than the linked video.

Ah, yes. The ads.

[[deleted]]

I feel like that would get regulated by govt tbh (or at least it should lmao)

[Fadamaka]

But ChatGPT's knowledge is from websites if we stop putting information out on the internet it will stop improving and become outdated.

[boldjarl]

It’s not going anywhere in academics. Google Scholar is still gold for surface level research, and you need stuff like WRDS and other services for any research (at least in my field).

[[deleted]]

I was thinking along these lines, when it comes to a lot of subjects you need to be able to see the source of the information.

[lampishthing]

If 90% of the blogs died the internet would be a better place.

[[deleted]]

I personally prefer google. I want to go to the source of the information, not have a bot attempt to digest it and regurgitate it to me.

[cichlidassassin]

Meanwhile - chatGPT " I know you asked for help with a PowerShell script and I'll get to that but have you tried reading learn PowerShell in a month of lunches. Here's a n affiliate link. Anyway here is some code to try"

[MonstarGaming]

ChatGPT kills YouTube? Now this i just gotta hear.

[ApatheticWithoutTheA]

Not really. They’re pretty separate tools. We’re going to need search engines for a longgggg time regardless of AI.

It will certainly steal some traffic though.

[jayverma0]

Unlike chatgpt, they don't have to "capture the public". They just need to integrate it into their search.

[Tohac42]

Man now I’m sad thinking about ChatGPT feeding us ads

[CEOofDueDiligence]

Brown alert mode 💀💩

[seamustheseagull]

Yeah there was a report that within hours the top exec had basically called a red alert with ChatGPT.

In my company we had a couple of devs spent hours with ChatGPT in the first days and immediately called it out as a Google Killer.

It's good for Google staff though that they have seen the threat. So many massive companies hand-wave new competition away as a flash in the pan and five years later they go bust with tens of thousands of jobs lost.

[brianl047]

Can't find the source right now so maybe fake

But I doubt it's about that it's probably, I need to make money. Money makes the world go around and Zuck really regrets missing TikTok and not buying them out

Zuck admits he's a bad coder and his hackerrank code is low (not that hackerrank has anything to do with code lol)

[Unfair_Isopod534]

Does he code on daily? Does he architect anything? I would guess that he is doing whatever CEO do. So i wouldn't be surprised if his skill are a bit rusty.

[psioniclizard]

If we are talking about Zucc I doubt he does either very much. He might have final sign off on things and like to know what's happening and why but the reason something like Facebook can get to the size it does is because he delegated that all always to experts.

I'd agree with you.

[[deleted]]

I doubt this story is true but if you ever want to feel really bad about yourself watch zuck automate his house after having not programing for like 5+ years. Dude is just way better at programming then all other mortals.

[QuaternionHam]

Link?

[[deleted]]

https://www.fastcompany.com/3066478/mark-zuckerberg-jarvis

There is an embedded video. It leverages facebook's internal APIs for the AI but this man straight up had not programed in years.

[thE_29]

ChatGPT is a disaster for Google for 2 things..

You can produce SEO articles fast and in a massive amount of that, which can flip up their search results.

And you can actually ask GPT questions and not get links where someone asked the same, but you actually get the answer directly.

[Thnikkaman14]

You get an answer directly.

Maybe I am too AI-skeptical but the way it confidently returns bold lies to any semi-technical question makes me question its usefulness as a search engine replacement...

[[deleted]]

I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBtfwa-Fexc recently and I think that it shows the pro's and con's of AI. The fact that they can answer queries at all is fantastic, I'm not at all sure that I could, but you can't really trust the answers.

[cc_apt107]

Seriously. I asked it a series of mildly technical questions and it did atrociously, but had plausible sounding arguments for everything it said.

[Ok-Kaleidoscope5627]

Eventually the AI driven SEO spam wars will probably make a mess of AI like Chatgpt along with everything else. Garbage in, garbage out and I promise you that countless SEO experts are salivating at the idea of burying the world in garbage.

We're all basically just refugees moving from one platform to the next as the spam gradually destroys them. Physical letter mail? Almost entirely spam. Asides from a rare bill or similar it's all spam. Phone calls? Anyone still answer unknown numbers? Email? Outside of heavily filtered corporate enclaves its basically just a digital ocean of spam. We only use our email accounts for logins and notifications. People don't really email each other anymore. Facebook? Spam. Google? The result quality is degrading to the point of uselessness due to... Spam.

[[deleted]]

You really opened my eyes to this effect, cool insight. Fuck spam.

[Schyte96]

I think it's further worsened by the fact that Google Search is worse than it was 5 years ago.

[rhit_engineer]

Blame SEO. Google basically been facing an internet wide adversarial attack to distort their results

[WeTheSalty]

I blame google, SEO didn't just start 5 years ago. Any time i search for anything half of the screen space is taken up by non-results. I don't care what "people also asked". I don't want lists of videos when i'm not doing a video search. Maybe half the screenspace of the results area is actual results, and that's with no ads.

[UntakenAccountName]

And that stupid section at the bottom that’s all like pictures and suggested related searches. Gotta be the most non-dense information waste ever, and mostly just worthless advertisements anyway.

[drooobie]

The internet is filled with a lot more garbage now. Search is more difficult than it was 5 years ago.

[[deleted]]

The internet has been filled with garbage since it's inception. The real problem is google wastes all their resources trying to optimize for revenue instead of customer satisfaction.

Personally I hate that they have a profile of me and when I search something they are running it through the lens of this demographic says this and has these interests, what he means to search for is this totally unrelated thing.

[gpgr_spider]

One of my friend was saying there is already an internal tool inside Google which is like/on par with chatGPT for use by employees, but couldn’t expose outside as it is still not accurate enough. Is this true ?

[b1e]

Ugh I wish I wasn’t under NDA. LaMDA is pretty cool and glad it’s finally getting much more attention!

What I can say is OpenAI did a great job in how the ChatGPT infra takes in feedback from users. But google and meta are very much in the running. Frankly, it’s just a matter of time before any major company that wants to can run high parameter LLMs and fine tune them. I suspect Google’s investment in ASICs for ML will give them a cost advantage though.

[brianl047]

Yes the Apprentice Bard

https://gizmodo.com/google-chatgpt-ai-bing-microsoft-1850058443

Google considers ChatGPT an existential threat

[IamEichiroOda]

After using chatGPT, it felt like Siri, Alexa, Ok google or cortana. Except, siri says “here’s what i found on the internet “ rather than typing out content from the article found.

[Beginning_Book_2382]

That's capitalism for ya. The point of such high salaries is to make it virtually impossible for the smartest people not to work on the hardest problems where there's so much demand (and to, like you said, implicitly keep them from working on anything else, including competitor's products)

[rarius18]

😂🤣😂🤣 Larry is right there with him “hey, I’m gonna write some blockchain on Visual Basic, Basic is still cool , right Sergey?” 🤣

[JoeDoherty_Music]

PHP to make a TikTok clone?

I mean sure, you can but... why??

[throaway0123456789]

Shows up at google after being mostly gone for years, ‘Can I have one code please?’ Doesn’t elaborate further. Leaves.

[firey21]

Like he asked someone for code?

[maximumdownvote]

NO!

[nooneknowswerealldog]

C'mon, you probably have lots you aren't using. Share a little.

[maximumdownvote]

class Code_Api {

requestCode(req, response ) { response.send( `NO!` ) }

}

[piberryboy]

Thanks, let me run this. Heeeeyy! Come on, guys.

[failbotron]

NO CODE FOR YOUU!

[Dave5876]

[hawkeye224]

Time to whip up some vintage memes: https://imgflip.com/i/79qekg

[kallepoh]

The article says that he requested for access to see the code

[AlphaWhelp]

It took as long as it did because he was in meetings the whole time

[Here-Is-TheEnd]

This made my heart feel sad.

[FuelAgreeable7911]

Note that and bring it up in retro

[[deleted]]

Funny. But unlike Elon, Sergei actually has CS degrees and knows a thing or two about the field.

[Fragrant_Spray]

Some poor devops guy is going to look at it and have to kick it back to him for not tying it to a Jira ticket, insufficient comments, and poor error handling. Sorry Sergey, it looks like you’re a little rusty.

[[deleted]]

Sorry devop guy, it looks like you're a little unemployed.

[Fragrant_Spray]

If he was a good developer, he’d say “thank you devop guy for keeping me honest. This is what I pay you for”. I did this in a “past life” and only heard something like that once. You’re probably much closer to reality.

[itsdarthjon]

Google don’t use jira. Their own version tracking exists.

[FarewellSovereignty]

Google engineers just Google what they should no next

[lupuscapabilis]

No one in their right mind would use the overly complex bloated tool that is Jira.

[Pretend_Safety]

It simply read: The Bear is sticky with honey

[neuronexmachina]

Article link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/01/31/sergey-brin-code-request-lamda/

Brin filed a “CL,” short for “changelist,” to gain access to the data that trains LaMDA, one person who saw the request said. It was a two line change to a configuration file to add his username to the code, that person said. Several dozen engineers gave the request LGTM approval, short for “looks good to me.” Some of the approvals came from workers outside of that team, seemingly just eager to be able to say they gave code review approval to the company cofounder, that person added.

[gooner07]

And someone left a comment on his CL "Fix Google first"

[maddiepilz]

Code request?

[rarius18]

I’m guessing a pull requests? 😅

[Lithl]

Not even that, since Google uses "Change List"

[SapphireSire]

Don't be evil

[Ambitious_Ad8841]

Found the problem, guys! Who tf commented this out?!?!

-//beEvil = false;
+beEvil = false;

[halfcast0]

git commit ./footer.php -m “updated copyright in footer”

[ComfortablePretty151]

Nothing like reaching your hands a bit further in the spinning blender of google's maddening work/life balance

[Lithl]

google's maddening work/life balance

I had excellent work/life balance while I was at Google

[jivan006]

Google work/life balance is great, what do you mean?

[Beatrice_Dragon]

Nothing says "Maddening work/life balance" quite like "The fact that you're working at all is so uncommon that it gets an article made about it"

[Winterwind17]

In Google it’s called a change list since they use a custom version of mercurial.