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usernametaken29 | on: Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts
Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it? All jokes aside this is exactly what happens as you build larger monoliths, system complexity and bug surface increases logarithmically… so in all seriousness you want to reduce LOC as much as possible. Maybe this can teach OpenAI a lesson to produce software that’s correct and adhere to established engineering standards over sensationalised “we built so much code” promotional material.
torben-friis | parent | next
Did you mean exponentially? Logarithmic increase doesn't sound too bad.
dahart | root | parent
I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric (edit: polynomial) is what actually happens, not exponential. Code complexity increases linearly when it doesn’t interact with other features, and geometrically when it does. In the worst case, complexity increases as the square of lines of code. That is still very, very bad, but it’s not exponential.
ebertucc | root | parent | next
What's the difference? From what I'm reading online geometric is just the discrete version of exponential
dahart | root | parent | next
No difference, you’re right. I meant polynomial not geometric. :P
cowlevel | root | parent
geometric/polynomial: x^2, x^3, etc

exponential: 2^x, 3^x, etc

Everything in the second group eventually grows faster than everything in the first group, no matter how small and big you make the fixed numbers, so they are two different classes.

dahart | root | parent
Geometric is exponential; I goofed above. Geometric and exponential are sometimes used interchangeably, but sometimes people use geometric to refer to discrete intervals and exponential to refer to continuous functions.
codechicago277 | root | parent
“Square of the lines of code”

Sounds exponential

dahart | root | parent | next
That’s quadratic, not exponential. 2^n != n^2
cowlevel | root | parent | next
2 is an exponent but exponential growth means the exponent grows. 2 does not grow, it's always between 1 and 3 (unless you use an AI to do maths).
teiferer | root | parent | next
And that's why sw eng interviews often have some basic math sprinkled in.
| root | parent
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Pannoniae | parent | next
it's not like microservices fare better, when you introduce them, you've traded a hard problem for a hard problem and distributed computing...
wg0 | root | parent
Our industry has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on this shit show called Microservices.

99.9% of shops need a monolith with same monolith having entry points for background workers and crons.

rglover | parent | next
I like LOEC: Lines of Effective Code.

Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.

elendilm | parent | next
Reducing attack surface is a lesson for everyone. Newcomers are impressed by massive piles of code.

Seasoned developers are unimpressed, or even disgusted, by the same massive piles of code.

someothherguyy | root | parent | next
i don't think LoC is the metric. sometimes fewer lines of code results in a larger attack surface through type coercion / widening, poor abstractions, hiding or stuffing behavior (modules that do everything), etc. to me, making code easy to understand, test, fuzz, and verify is more important. sometimes that requires more lines of code.
cowlevel | root | parent | next
More abstract code probably results in more high-abstraction-level bugs per LoC, but also less low-abstraction-level bugs so I'd guess it about cancels out to an even rate per LoC.

A single line in C++, Rust or Haskell can have a really subtle logic error. A single line in assembly can't, but it has that same likelihood of having a register allocation error instead, and when you add up all the many lines of assembly you probably still wrote the same number of logic errors as the C++ version.

brazukadev | root | parent
LoC *IS* the metric. It is obviously not perfect tho but still the best one to compare software surface. Including to compare the same solution in different languages and platforms. The less code you need to manage, the less code you need to change and the less code you need to hold in your head to understand it (or in the LLM context nowadays).
pessimizer | parent
> Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?

What's the joke? They're literally saying, every day, that this is true to a civilization endangering extent. They're making demands based on this, and politicians are taking up those demands.

And now they're paying bullshit $5K bug bounties for account-stealing exploits on their own platform. They should have paid more just the make the bug seem more grandiose; I don't know who let them get away with this - this is what happens when CEOs run their own PR I guess. It's basically an public announcement that they're total fakes.