New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional

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.

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 resumé 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.

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

This looks like it went viral _because_ it was entirely fictional, not in spite of it. Everyone seems in on the joke.

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

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)?

Reminds me of Jabberwocky episode of Better Off Ted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spyJ5yxTfas

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

How long until AWS releases Infinidash as a self-defeating prophecy?

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.

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.

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

I wonder if this will end up entering the lexicon like Turboencabulator.

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…”

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.

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

I'm expecting someone to actually make an Infinidash product now.

I saw this as it was happening and my imposter syndrome kicked in and I just stayed quiet, but was totally confused.

This is absolutely hysterical. For me, the best parts are the song and the explainer video that uses cats and a stuffed shark. I've been reading through all of the new ecosystem and all the tweets about certifications and experience required for job positions and laughing my rear off.

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.

Mostly because of people referring to it when talking about the very real Google Cloud Predictive autoscaler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27719071

Also, the Jabberwocky project, Better off Ted.

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.

This is tech at it’s finest. Also why I come to HN.