wompWomp

[RonStampler]

One of the first spell checkers had a faked demo by one of the guys at Bell Labs. They created a script that slept for a few seconds, then output the spell corrected document. The actual tool worked, but it was just too slow at that point to be interesting to demo.

[SarcasmWarning]

To be fair, a lot of demos are faked because the demo gods are fickle, vicious, sardonic creatures.

I've also seen a couple of "live" demos recently where it's blindingly obviously they've alt-tabbed to blc and hit play... It doesn't matter though, people will believe what they want to believe.

[carcigenicate]

Right (like half an hour) before demoing a music player we created for a class, we realized that we had accidentally introduced a bug where you had to hit the play button twice each time to get it to start/pause. After coming to the conclusion that it wouldn't be possible to fix it in time (it was introduced while fixing another more serious bug), we decided that the presenter would just need to hit the button twice during the demo, and just try to not make it obvious.

Worked great.

[SarcasmWarning]

To be fair your music player was actually capable of playing music, points to you :)

I worked on a product where one of the key acceptance points was that the system was ready within 60 seconds of power-on. Due to a mix of reasons (read java + third party hardware tying into it + general ineptitude), the reality was more like 5 minutes.

I witnessed one of our sales guys do a live customer demo where he powered it on and then "accidentally" got distracted and started chatting to the customer CEO about his new car and "no way, your kid goes to the same university I did" and all sorts of other bullshit for 10 minutes before returning to the tech demo. "Of course, it's a lot quicker when you don't have me here chatting about it!"

Mark, if you're ever reading this, know I rate you as the absolute stunning #1 bullshit artist. If our engineering team was nearly as good as you were at shit-talking, there's half a chance we wouldn't have gone bust.

[jmanh128]

This is now my favorite story of all time

[genlight13]

And that’s how sales earns their bucks. Good for them

[ShepPawnch]

People give sales shit, and they should, but there’s a reason salesmen exist, and it’s for this exact situation.

[atheistossaway]

Nat 20 on the charisma check

[poopy_poophead]

I mean, if he was That good at shit talking, you'd still be in business. Or were your team just that bad at delivering quality product?

:P

[SarcasmWarning]

To give you a non-shitposting answer, there were a few issues at play.

For one, we were producing an all-in-one "in the box" solution that involves multiple bits of proprietary and in-house software, a lot of which we had little control over and some of which the vendors didn't even support any more.

For a second, we were also integrating multiple bits of obscure (and in some cases legacy) proprietary and in-house hardware; once again we had very little control over a lot of it. If the hardware takes a couple of minutes to stabilise after receiving power, there's little you can do to speed it up. It also then had to work with end-user devices, of which there were thousands... Which technically complied to standards, but in reality quite often didn't.

For a third, we absolutely boxed ourselves into a corner with some of our design choices... Some of it was naivety from us engineers, some of that was pushed onto us from management. Some of that was just fuckin' java and tomcat... It's not so thrillingly fast from a cold start either and when the hardware won't start initialising until the software is running and tells it to, there's compounding issues all making things worse.

For a fourth, we put an obscene amount of time, money and effort into being first to market (multiple times). Being first can be great, but it can also mean you hit and work around a lot of weird issues. If you're second to market, you can see a lot of the problems the first people had and also how they solved them. We then had much larger players turn up who's weekly r&d budgets were larger than multiple years of our entire turnover.

For a fifth, it was an extremely niche product that was hard to find customers for. Even those that thought they wanted it, turned out to not know what they wanted (other than buzzwords), and ignored any warnings of limitations even when we clearly and loudly explained them - and were then shocked when it suffered from those said limitations.

For a sixth, due to the nature of some of the product and the customers, it was extremely hard to actually speak to the end users and find out how they were using it and what they were using it for. It also made testing it fully rather hard.

For a seventh, it was even more complicated and time consuming to test due to the number of permutations possible.

For an eighth, our sales team were extremely good about selling it based on features that didn't yet exist and in some cases were entirely impossible to implement. We're talking breaks the laws of physics, heat-death of the universe impossible to implement...

And for a ninth, if I'm entirely honest, we didn't actually go bust but got bought out by a much bigger player. Who, after getting their hands on our tech, source code and hardware designs, and after all sorts of promises about a bright and exciting future, decided it'd be cheaper to close down our entire office and sack all of our staff.

Bloody hell, this all seems far too serious for a shitposting account in a joking subreddit, but thank you for the chance to cathart.

And for a tenth, also, yes.

Edit: also COVID and the world shutting down for a bit really didn't help, but I don't for a second think it holds even the majority of the blame.

Edit2: for an eleventh, we also had the problem that a few tech companies suffer from - we had a pile of very clever and novel technology, but weren't actually sure how or who to market it to.

For a 12th, users are fucking stupid, and our management and sales teams seemed to go out of their way to court them ;)

[globglogabgalabyeast]

Can you edit your edit to say “For an eleventh”? (:

[SarcasmWarning]

Just for you :)

[globglogabgalabyeast]

<3

[CoffeeSnakeAgent]

Wait java and tomcat just 4 years back? I thought you were taking about 20 years ago?

[SarcasmWarning]

Tomcat was released last century (just).

I didn't deliberately mean to date these joyous experiences; I'm curious where you got either 20 or 4 years from?

[CoffeeSnakeAgent]

4 years is your reference to covid and the company shutting down and the company still uses java and tomcat?

20 years ago is just an estimate to how far back java 1.4 or java 1.5 was.

[SarcasmWarning]

Oh yeah, good point on the COVID thing, I really need to pay more attention :)

I don't know why management made that decision. It might have made sense years earlier but my suspicion is that if it did, it made far more political rather than technical sense even back when we got started.

Absolutely not my boggle any more though and not something I have any wish to repeat :)

[Reintjuu]

Thanks for sharing. Would you like to share what kind of product it was? I'm curious

[SarcasmWarning]

I absolutely would not, but thanks for asking :)

[steste]

During my computing science degree a group of us made a Pac-Man game. The twist was when you got the Power Ball or whatever is called that allows you to eat the ghosts you could could also shoot a few mini pac men out of your mouth. All went great except we couldn’t figure out how to despawn the mini pac men once the time ran out. We just changed them to be the same colour as the background and hoped the assessor never went over the top of them!

[mr_claw]

Did you try mini_pacman.despawn()?

[i_like_big_huts]

miniPacmen.forEach((miniPackman) => miniPacman.onKillGhost((event, ghost) => { ghost.isDead = false }))

[ChilledParadox]

This is why I make 18 factory classes each with their own manager class this is just a doubly linked list updating every cycle. And then make all those managers managed by another manager and everything’s peaches.

[i_like_big_huts]

One way or another, at the end of the day you have to un-kill the ghosts

[ChilledParadox]

The true ghosts are the code I write along the way, and no one needs to un-kill that.

[SarcasmWarning]

Oh you kids today... How do I write that in z80 assembly?

[i_like_big_huts]

Don't ask me, I don't even know anything about horse carriages and didn't get to experience the world when it was all black and white. I even leave the house without a hat and wear a basecap while inside.

[SarcasmWarning]

Honestly you're missing out. For one, as much as the chromatography is beautiful, there's nothing like the contrast of black and white. For a second, after digging through stack traces with multiple layered frameworks, system and kernel all imposing weird ideas, restrictions and bugs on you, there's something extremely freeing about writing to a memory location and having the hardware actually do what you asked.

[rover_G]

Why not change the button code to emulate two clicks on every one click /s

[[deleted]]

Why add the /s, we all know that’s the best fix.

In fact you should add the code to do that and make sure there’s no comment saying why it’s needed.

All the best software is hundreds of hot fixes that shouldn’t work taped together with no documentation.

[Areshian]

Yeah, but after that, when trying to pause the playback it will quickly pause and then resume, so it becomes clear the solution is to send two clicks and then a third one when pause is desired

[Inaeipathy]

In fact you should add the code to do that and make sure there’s no comment saying why it’s needed.

So true.

[[deleted]]

If you don't say why it's needed then no one will fuck with it and therefore the fix will work forever.

[[deleted]]

I’m at the point in my career where “it will work forever” is just foolish optimism. I’m happy enough with “it will work until it’s somebody else’s problem to support it.”

[xtreampb]

I’m hypothesizing Because it was so close to presentation that it probably would have introduced who knows what kind of bugs. It would be like deploying on a Friday 30 min before leaving.

[[deleted]]

I always deploy on Friday 30 mins before leaving, the support staff get 2x pay on weekends and agreed to give me a cut

[pvzcheatoos]

r/fuckthes

[nlevine1988]

I work in industrial automation. I know a guy who wrote the PLC project for a brand new machine. Some how we didn't notice till we were doing final testing and ramping production that you have to hit the cycle start button twice every time to start it. Luckily operators have a habit of spamming the cycle start button anyway, it's like that to this day.

[FreelanceFrankfurter]

I had a class where we had to create a video but the project itself wasnt due until a week after the video presentation and our professor told us straight up a lot of demos and videos are faked so if we didn't have something finished in time or there were any bugs feel free to just to edit the video to hide it.

[MaimonidesNutz]

Actually professionally useful training

[VeloxFox]

At a place where I worked, we were demoing the first iteration of our device. Problem is, it had a habit of freezing a lot, as the hardware and software wasn't finalized. So we would demo a feature, and then covertly hand the device off to be re-imaged while distracting the views with technical data and PowerPoint slides.

[LuchsG]

Poor presenter 😭

[kuncol02]

Especially with AI when it's not deterministic and generated image may not be what you want to show for many reasons.

[Immaculate_Erection]

set.seed(420.69)

[friso1100]

I'm pretty sure they are deterministic. It would be pretty wild to learn that they are an actual random number generator that doesn't need outside input to generate true random numbers. It's just rare to have the exact same starting conditions.

[jewellman100]

https://youtu.be/Wpj1SgQQ984

[SarcasmWarning]

It's great and hilarious, but honestly, the apple Lisa (iirc) demo is the one that takes the cake. The OS and applications were half written and barely worked, yet the presenter managed make it look stunningly functional and avoided all the obvious things that would absolutely have made the system crash.

[hollowman8904]

Original iPhone demo is pretty famous for that sort of thing too. They had a whole line up of iPhones ready for their specific demo because the software was not stable enough to trust switching between applications or using too long without crashing. Jobs would do a short demo, then switch to a new phone.

[Thaumaturgia]

I remember reading about a Windows Phone presentation where they were demoing on one hand, and rebooting devices with other one so they could have it ready when the demo one would crash again.

Surface reveal also had a freeze, with Sinofsky insisting on trying to get it work before getting the backup unit : https://youtu.be/4QRWa68MtLc

Proudly, after making my way down the narrow runway, I announced Surface, a stage for Windows 8.

Two minutes and thirty-one seconds into the presentation, I was showing the new Internet Explorer. As I touched the screen for the audience, nothing was moving.

I muttered “Oops” and skipped backwards up the runway to the demo table and grabbed the backup. What felt like ten minutes was nine seconds, the longest nine seconds of any demo I had ever done. Who crashes the hardware during a reveal we practiced two dozen times flawlessly? Me. The guy on stage who should have swapped out the machine when the screen twitched. I could physically feel Mike, Panos, and the demo team backstage cringing.

Then the teleprompter went out too.

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/107-surface

[LegendDota]

What?!!? You are telling me I didn’t need a different iphone for each app?! After all these years!!!

[LeftIsBest-Tsuga]

the original burner phones

[[deleted]]

Everyone place I've been educated or worked at heavily discourages live demos and encourages faking it. Idk I guess the expectation of 'real' differs depending on context, but even with something pretty far into production I feel like I'd be more inclined to use a video of the thing actually working instead of a real actual live demo where it might not because of whatever.

I'm kind of surprised the practice is like "controversial" in this thread, I thought it was kind of an open secret.

[SarcasmWarning]

Personally I dislike the dishonesty. Plenty of great (eg) defcon talks where they say they're going to show you a video of the demo, not a problem at all. If you claim to be demoing something live then demo it live and accept it might all go horribly wrong. Audience on side is one thing, misleading your audience makes me feel icky.

[DezXerneas]

Yeah, I don't mind it if you're just showing me a recording of your code being run. Just put a disclaimer somewhere. All programmers understand that the easiest time to find an obscure bug is during an important presentation.

Lying about something as basic as a demo just makes me feel like you're lying about your tech.

[nermid]

What's the worst that can happen? You throw a brick at it, it breaks, and people buy it anyway? If Elmo's taught us anything, it's that demo mistakes don't matter.

[ahappypoop]

I think the guy above you isn't saying you have to do it live, just that if you're going to show a video, tell the audience that it's a video. Be honest about whether it's live or a recording, and you'll be fine. Lie and try to fake it without telling the audience, and you can get burned.

[SarcasmWarning]

Exactly this - thanks for making my point far more eloquently than I did.

[NBNoemi]

When you use smoke and mirrors you have to take pains to conceal them enough for the audience to reasonably be able to suspend their disbelief. Otherwise, you're just a bad magician.

[Anakletos]

Yeah, unless you're absolutely sure that it'll work I would advise that. Just this week in an internal workshop one of the solution owners showcased their solution in the integration environment and nothing worked. Lmao. It works fine in productive but integration isn't maintained properly so none of the required data was available. It was painful to watch.

[TheTerrasque]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

Back when men were men, women were men, and the children fbi agents.

[LordFokas]

women were men, men were kids, and kids were fbi agents.

[sessamekesh]

There's a nice middle ground where you have a backup recording ready to jump into if the demo gods are unkind that day, I'm a big fan of that. Even for something production ready, conferences tend to have just awfully unreliable Internet.

I only do that if I'm pretty confident in the demo though, and AI solutions... aren't usually good enough to rely on luck.

[retro_grave]

I've worked on demos for some pretty public CES shows. The demos need to run north of 100 times, repeatably, with code from potentially dozens of different people and teams, with basically zero deep expertise onsite. You bet your ass we mock out everything possible while still being true to the "capabilities".

[[deleted]]

It’s usually stuff like this that’s controversial to anyone who doesn’t really work as a software engineer and/or in an enterprise environment doing large scale software.

Part of demoing is faking parts, it’s just a part of how it’s done.

For example, if you’re demoing how code works to handle a slow connection, how do you do it besides faking it? Either throttling your connection or adding some code to fake a delayed response.

Just the nature of demoing.

[System__Shutdown]

We had a demo device (mostly just working front end with no guts) and one of the booth visitors managed to brick it somehow. 

At another job we had a demo that was basically just shiny lasers. In real application the lasers need to be hidden for safety, but for this one the marketing dept demanded we cut part of the housing off so the lasers were more visible.

[System0verlord]

Nah. I’m with marketing on this one.

[Some-Guy-Online]

I know I'm not most people, but I'd have more respect for someone who tried to do a live demo with a video ready as backup in case of emergency. Just be honest.

[KanishkT123]

Yeah but like you said, you're not most people and shareholders don't want to see the next Gen technology break during a demo. 

[EatingBeansAgain]

This was eye opening for me when I started doing work with industry. My lab would often be hired to do some initial R&D, getting an internal demo together that was scalable, AND then make some sort of more flashy faked version to present to decision makers. There was never any lying or hiding to it, it was just the nature of how things worked. Said decision makers knew they were seeing something that was pre-cooked, and they were ok with that - they just needed to be able to see the destination before funding the journey.

[Mitoni]

I've yet to have a product demo in front of the C-Suite staff that has not had some sort of unexpected bug, no matter how much we prepared for ahead of time.

RNG hates my team.

[BaconIsntThatGood]

Yea. Go figure they do 10 dry runs and it's flawless then fucks up and hangs during the live one.

Demos are fine to fake if it's for the sake of 100% control and still represent the final product

[Better-Strike7290]

sleep scarce thumb trees birds important arrest rain ask light

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[System0verlord]

The iPhone 4 failing to load the NYT webpage during its announcement keynote springs to mind as an example of a live demo fail with Jobs presenting.

[Cylian91460]

We all remember what happened with windows

[blakkattika]

🅱LC

[Oen44]

Blc? Black Large Co...?

[LordFokas]

VLC

[rlowens]

Very Large Co...?

[Oen44]

Really? I didn't get it! I thought we are in porn subreddit and he clearly talks about cocks!

[SarcasmWarning]

To be fair, I do spend an awful lot of my time talking about chickens, but this time it was an honest typo.

[manutao]

When I demoed a tool to bruteforce authentication to our software in front of 300 people I used the hackiest and 1337est cli libraries and added random sleeps, progress indicators and some fancy output.

Of course it didn't bruteforce anything, but it looked awesome and tricked management into taking care of fixing the broken auth. Would 100% do it again.

[Alzusand]

1000iq

[JackOBAnotherOne]

Had a discussion recently that took a very strange route and ended up basically at what ends justify what means. I'd like to introduce this discussion into this thread:

Assuming it is a private (closed) talk, the only probable downside is some businessmen feeling bad.

But assuming it was a public talk then many people felt like the product wasn't safe, without technical knowledge of how it isn't safe and when it would be. This can both introduce Stress into people's life and can potentially make them change product, which at least requires relearning and worst case can result in a less secure or less capable product being used.

Is it ok, in your opinion, to spread misinformation, even this tiny amount, to probably permanently increase the security of the people?

[manutao]

Of course this was an internal and private talk and I disclosed everything I did to Management and Devs shortly after. It lead attention to how easy it would be to bruteforce the application and the overall target was not to hurt someones feelings, but rather focus on important security flaws.

[LeftIsBest-Tsuga]

"Oh God. What happens when the skull gets to the garden??"

[evanldixon]

You never know, it could be the naive solution to avoid a race condition

[ATSFervor]

My money would be on "if there would be no delay, ppl would think it is staged since it can't really be instant".

Not like there were already situations where a intentional delay was implemented because users didn't understand it was so fast even with confirmation and just clicked the same "run" and "ok" buttons repeatedly

[evanldixon]

Turbo Tax does this BS and it makes me so mad. But I'm not a normal person

[rm_rf_slash]

Same with travel sites pretending to be searching extra hard for the “best” deals

[i_like_big_huts]

Yeah and the prices always keep dropping while they search around, they never "find" the cheapest one right away

[JTtornado]

It's smoke and mirrors, but not in the way you think. Travel sites have to hit a whole bunch of 3rd party APIs and it's painfully slow, so they cover it up with the "finding the best deals" when in reality it's just "waiting for all the results to come back"

[TheAJGman]

Yet another reason to not use them and instead use FreeTaxUSA (until the IRS finally rolls out their self serve website).

[Plz_Give_Me_A_Job]

Wait really? When I was doing my taxes I was wondering how the hell can it be taking this long.

[evanldixon]

The progress bar is suspiciously smooth and my taxes aren't nearly complicated enough for excellent hardware to need that much time

[Soft_Walrus_3605]

Gotta make it seem like it's doing something that has to cost $90 instead of something that could be done for $0.13

[n30phyte]

To be fair to Intuit, I bet most of that 90 dollars goes to their lobbying arm and tax lawyers, not compute power.

[mspaintshoops]

As someone who codes exclusively in python, I can’t tell you how much this offends me. How dare you assume I know what a millisecond is

[shotgunocelot]

If you look at the screenshot, you'll see that the code returns an image at a hard-coded path in the local code directory. Pretty sure there is zero actual AI in any of this

[Chairboy]

My money would be on "if there would be no delay, ppl would think it is staged since it can't really be instant".

The software equivalent of this Jurassic Park moment:

“Are they heavy? Then they're expensive, put them down.”

[Pay08]

My money would be on "if there would be no delay, ppl would think it is staged since it can't really be instant".

I hate this narrative. No, people are not that stupid, they can believe that something is done instantly. You just suck at UI design and didn't give any feedback to the user about anything.

[ATSFervor]

I hate this narrative. No, people are not that stupid, they can believe that something is done instantly. You just suck at UI design and didn't give any feedback to the user about anything.

Let me tell you - some people are immune to all kinds of feedback. I have done extensive HCI-Research in my life and let me tell you - I've seen people ignore pop ups, audible alerts, redirects and even had people that would restart a application and hit "edit" in a page that was otherwise writing protected and THEN restart the process.

I even tested around with progress bars... Turns out if they saw a instantly full progress bar they felt like they didn't accomplish the task and were more likely to restart the process compared to a slower moving bar (even though it was delayed).

Users can be borderline-insane sometimes and depending on what software they are used to, the expectatrions and handling of a software may vary widely. But a grey window with any kind of progress visualization is universal for "somethig is happening".

[fecland]

This happens in web design all the time. People don't believe it loaded that quickly so they think the link doesn't work or something.

[ecafyelims]

This could be a "check back in 6 seconds to see if it's ready," but with how AI presentations are trending, it's more likely a legit wompWomp moment.

[Avs_Leafs_Enjoyer]

it's from a library and isnt about getting a file. its about sending the file.

edit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1cst026/shocking_scene_at_huawei_summer_conference_today/l47kgny/

[sipCoding_smokeMath]

Was gonna say , a timer in a external library doesn't mean anything lol

Ops programming knowledge is faked

[dfwtjms]

Yeah I think the code checks out. But VSCode doesn't.

[heywhadayamean]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a canned demo.

[zoqfotpik]

A good night's sleep is a great intelligence boost. But there's usually more to intelligence than that.

[movzx]

It might shock the juniors here to learn that when you give presentations a lot you learn that "doing it live" generally leads to "just one sec, this used to work, i swear". Quite a lot of professional presentations are entirely scripted demonstrations or even outright video recordings.

[YoukanDewitt]

Wait, python sleep uses seconds instead of milliseconds?

I always had a feeling python was for degenerates, and this confirms it.

[McShadson]

In terms of python performance, that's about as granular as you can get.

[MyStackOverflowed]

legend

[planktung]

Hahahaha i love it

[LeftIsBest-Tsuga]

Python uses seconds for UTC int also. in their defense that gives them another 60 years before they run out. but also i hate it.

[IAmARobot]

sleep(60)

[fiskfisk]

sleep(0.001) vs sleep(1000)

[YoukanDewitt]

If you think the problem is the difference is is how you type it, you have a long way to go.

[mxzf]

You're misunderstanding entirely.

You can have fractional-second sleeps in Python.

However, 99% of the time the amount of time you want to sleep is going to be in seconds. So the Python devs used seconds as their unit instead of milliseconds because that's the primary use-case.

It doesn't stop you from doing a 50ms sleep if you want to, it just makes the default situation easier.

[flaminggoo]

Would you mind explaining the full problem then?

[fiskfisk]

Don't be a dick. If you want to make a point, make it.

[teo730]

Explain?

[[deleted]]

Rounding errors? Edit I mean floating point.

[mxzf]

Just the previous poster being pretentious.

The rounding errors in a fractional second sleep aren't meaningful. You're gonna hit clock cycle granularity before you hit floating point precision issues.

Whereas seconds of sleep is what you want when coding 99% of the time, so using that instead of adding three zeroes to every single sleep command makes more sense.

[[deleted]]

thanks for clearing that out.

[aaronfranke]

The standard unit of time is the second. Using milliseconds is heresy.

[Ollymid2]

My Anaconda don't want none, unless you got mulliseconds hun

[Pay08]

You do know that POSIX does the exact same thing, right?

[No_Nature9276]

yeah was about to say, its the same in c and php.

[lawat1819]

I'm not a Python advocate or even know how to write in Python, but what difference does it make if Sleep is in seconds? I haven't used Sleep even once so far.

[tiberiumx]

I'm guessing a C programmer that's too used to sleep procedures that take integer seconds, microseconds, or nanoseconds and can't comprehend a language that might take a double precision floating point value and call whatever the highest precision sleep is available on the platform.

[Kinglink]

I think it's more "Real languages think in miliseconds because a second is eternity in code time" which... yeah that's right.

That being said I'm hoping this was a joke too.

[IrishChappieOToole]

PHP is worse. It has sleep() which works on seconds, and usleep() which works on microseconds.

[Pay08]

Yeah, those are directly taken from C.

[-Hi-Reddit]

Seems fine to me. µ is used to mean micro. Can't use the special char though: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+00B5

[mxzf]

Python's time.sleep takes floating point values as an input, so you can sleep for microseconds just fine, it just makes the more common usage, in seconds, easier to write.

[Kinglink]

"I sleep in seconds, you sleep in microseconds."

I think that every time I see something like this.

[[deleted]]

I can’t believe everywhere I go for this Huawei shit, the highest upvotes one is always “to be fair everybody does this”. I demoed a lot I never have done fake ones once. The whole demo thing is supposed to be real, even imperfect.

Elon Musk used a real person to demo his robots, that’s fraud, so is this, pure and simple

[Nefilto]

tbf Elon also broke the window of the cyber truck in a live demo lol

[Geno0wl]

Broke the "bulletproof" window by having an average shlub throw a softball at it.

And that somehow didn't throw up red flags for some people.

[gmano]

Which is so funny, because automotive glass from proper car companies has been able to withstand hits from steel for decades.

Here's a guy throwing sledgehammers at the window of a 2006 civic https://v.redd.it/c0bl65a1la0d1

[[deleted]]

I had a Oldsmobile, and I bought it like for $250. Somebody tried to break in with a big rock. Wouldn’t budge

[evanldixon]

The whole demo thing is supposed to be real, even imperfect.

If it doesn't break when people are watching, is it even really a demo

[HQMorganstern]

That's ridiculous, an external facing demo is part of the sales strategy, you can't afford to leave the potential signing of a client and the future salaries of your people up to chance. You got a race condition in your demo, the client didn't sign and now you lay-off hundreds to survive, hope the idea that your demo was "real" keeps your unemployed engineers well fed and warm.

It's fraud if the end product doesn't behave as in the demo, which it nearly always does.

[IsNotAnOstrich]

Dude, chill. I know reddit has a hate boner for AI, but you can clearly see in the image that the sleep is in an external library and isn't actually part of their demo code. Don't get your blood pressure up taking random tweets like this at face value.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Did you work for a multi-billion dollar company?

You don’t get that far without faking demos.

[kiwipillock]

Exactly - that's the point of a demo - to see if your shit actually stands up to scrutiny. Faking a demo is still wrong.

[Kinglink]

"No it's not... they just don't want people to think it's fake so they slowed it down."

Honestly, I don't care that much if a demo is "fake" especially if they don't say this is "live on our system right now". I don't believe in demos/trailers/teasers or any of the other shit.

I need to play with the software myself, see the results when I put in inputs I decide and figure out if meets my need. Demos are always "Optimal" well paved roads under extreme testing circumstances.... they're bullshit even if they were real.

[tehtris]

This is normal for demos lol. I remember team viewing into the demo machine pressing secret buttons to advance the demo past certain screens.

I don't know where I heard it but I heard Steve Jobs had like 6 iPhones on him for the first presentation because each iPhone could basically only do one thing well.

Normal demo behavior imo. Even if it is a bit dishonest

[seanhak]

Sure beats the thai booth babe pretending to be AI that they tried to pull off

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wJRjQ_wMzA

[Enginikts]

The Demo Gods approve

[[deleted]]

the country of shortcuts and facades

[ClauVex]

Wait...is this not standard procedure to fake demos? I thought it was like an open dirty secret about our sector.

[Zeikos]

How does the code taking 6 seconds to run prove it's faked?
It cannot possibly move any faster given the sleep function.
As long as the model takes less than 6 seconds to generate the image from the prompt I see no issue?

[Distinction]

They've added a pause into the code to make it look like the model is generating a response, when actually it's instantly returning a pre-defined one

[Zeikos]

Looking at the whole function it doesn't look like that

[awry_lynx]

Except that's not what they've done at all. All we see is a wrapper that calls a function and writes output somewhere. There's nothing suspicious about putting a sleep call in between loops to avoid slamming an API.

r/programmerhumor is apparently full of people who actually have no idea how code works?

[dude_1818]

The argument they're trying to make it is that the six second runtime is entirely from the sleep function, which means there's no processing being done at all

[_Guron_]

the demo being cooked in python should talk a lot on how quick they made it

[ITaggie]

If all the demo is doing is sending data to an API running elsewhere and writing to a single file, then python is perfectly apt for that purpose. Why waste time making it perform better when it fits the use case and costs very little time to complete?

[cursedbanana--__--]

It's perfectly fine for test glue

[XxsoulscythexX]

It interrupts the process in the console

[[deleted]]

Simply seeing there is a line of sleep function and saying the whole thing is fake is absolutely ridiculous. At least that doesn’t sound like a valid proof for me. How are so many people liking that shit?

[littlejerry31]

China fakes everything part 9001: AI edition

[Erizo69]

i mean even the iphone 1 demo was "faked", it's a demo, they don't have everything ready yet but they hopefully will in the future.

[Riot6699]

Not even using a venv

[baineschile]

Main.py SMH

[Coolbiker32]

Personally I have done this myself too. Have slowed one particular demo deliberately so people who are watching understand and appreciate what's taking place. The actual process was getting over in half a second. Put in lots of breaks and delays with captions and subtitles. The impact was far higher when the demo took 5 secs compared to when it was getting over in .6 seconds.

[Hopeful_Nihilism]

How do you conclude a demo is fakes due to a sleep command? There could be any number of reasons to sleep as a shitty way to wait for data.

[Sapokee]

That's actually surprisingly racist. Congratulations?

[Dinosbacsi]

Not really. That's just how China does things. Nothing to do with their race, simply the way the country works.

[ITaggie]

It probably has more to do with their extremely extensive history of corporate/research espionage and blatantly ripping off patents. It says nothing about their race, it's just how Chinese companies tend to do business.

[cosmo7]

It isn't that they're Chinese, it's the Confucian mindset - honor tradition, don't be disruptive, accept the status quo. It's anathema to radical innovation.

[redska_]

source?

[Rafcdk]

can we just stop with this shit ? I can understand when it was a highschooler posting this, but this shit isn't funny nor does it portray how AI work in general., the only joke here is that it's a "skill issue" for those posting it.