![Malicious Compliance [Mini Fantasy Theater]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d95c55df-2146-4236-89a3-92f16a8297dc.png){kind=link}
David Revoy | Mastodon | Bonus Timelapse
Transcript
Malicious Compliance
A comic in four panels:
Panel 1. The headmaster bursts through Cepper’s door, slamming it, furious. We see Cepper in the foreground, sitting at her desk, bored, not reacting.
Headmaster: “Cepper! I’ve heard you’re refusing to use your Avian Intelligence!”
Headmaster: “As a scholar of this university, you must! Your pay depends on it.”
Panel 2. A closer shot of the headmaster as he continues his tirade, gesturing dramatically but reading the scroll of a Avian Intelligence Parrot with a little hat and a beard with on it “HR”.
Headmaster: “We also need your Grimoire of Shadows and Fire by the end of the month!”
Headmaster: “So, use your AI! This is non-negotiable, our investors require it!”
Panel 3. Cepper turns in her chair to face the headmaster, revealing the AI Parrot on her desk. She offers a large grimoire to the headmaster (the book remains off-screen).
Cepper: “Calm down… I am using it, and it’s already done.”
Cepper: “The investors wanted high-volume output, right?”
Panel 4. The headmaster is now holding the book, and the audience can see the cover. The cover features Cepper’s face with a dramatic, clickbait-style background. The title is in bold: “Shadows and Fire: 100 Tips (Number 72 is a Game Changer!)”. There is a big arrow pointing to a fire with the word “HOW?!” in giant letters and also “WHAT’S NEXT?!”. The headmaster is surprised. Cepper She has a dark, malicious smile.
Cepper: “I’ve given them exactly that!”
Cepper: “Enjoy the 500 pages of untested slops!”
Headmaster: “?!”
If it is any consolation, in my experience no one will ever read the system architecture document anyway. So if it’s totally wrong, no one will know.
You say that until you have to come back to the project after months and completely forgot what you were doing there. In that case having good system architecture documentation is a life saver.
Guess my career has gone such that I’ve always looked to code and git history to wrap my head around, because the documentation people write is unreliable.
Particularly in enterprise, where for some reason there’s some “developer” who writes a word document and then buggers off while someone else actually does the coding and the relationship between actual code and document drift because the “architect” never had to reconcile his document with the realities.
If that’s the case looking at the code (depending in the size of the codebase and how bad the differences are) might be the better call. The only thing worse then missing documentation is wrong documentation.
Yeah, my beef was that I had to present that diagram to a review board today. So ain’t no way was I gonna present slop that didn’t make any sense.
that brings me back to the time i was phd student and my supervisor forced me to publish something that i knew to be wrong. the paper got published… but my name disappeared from it ;)