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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Launching with that bug cost OpenAI basically nothing; waiting for every conceivable bug to be discovered and fixed, on the other hand, would have huge opportunity costs. If you add a dozen layers of process to every launch, you end up... basically Google, with products delayed months or years beyond when they should have been released, with only marginal improvement on the axes the process is intended to improve.

Sure, you need to strike a good balance between speed and safety, but that bug was an incredibly embarrassing error and should have never happened with the most "skilled set of engineers ever!"

Engineers, no matter their skill level, don't spend their time inspecting the implementation of widely-used open-source client libraries (Redis!) for concurrency bugs (IIRC) when they're building something on it; it's just not what an effective engineering org does. What's proper is to choose which tools you use wisely. But using Redis isn't some wildly incautious choice; it'd be hard to choose something more well-known and supported, and it'd be really stupid and even more security vuln/bug prone to do an in-house implementation.

It does look like a concurrency bug in Redis, but it's still not a good look. And an effective engineering org should be vetting it's open-source libraries better.

Also they took 9 hours to even take it down, while social websites online had news of the leak everywhere. That's just pathetic engineering. Early morning or not, they shouldn't be shipping stuff if they don't even have basic oncall.

Also they took 9 hours to even take it down, while social websites online had news of the leak everywhere. That's just pathetic engineering.

We are in agreement there, and if I were OpenAI my first order of business at this point would be developing monitoring and an oncall rotation/system that would be able to handle incidents like this in a timely manner. It could have been much worse.

This is politician tier reasoning. There was a mistake! There should never be mistakes! If they were just a little more careful, this wouldn't happen!

An engineer vetting Redis for concurrency bugs is not an effective use of their time.

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