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Garbage article, quote from it: "They aren’t worried about it — not because this is a disaster they are trying to cover up, but because this is a routine bug t

Garbage article, quote from it: "They aren’t worried about it — not because this is a disaster they are trying to cover up, but because this is a routine bug that doesn’t really affect anything important." If you have a bug you can never know the side effects that it can be causing. So neither the article author nor the guys who wrote the covid sim understand complex systems. It would do them much good to read a few works by Taleb. Their problem is that they don't know what they don't know, they think they know what they don't know, but they don't. Also saying that it's "ok that scientific code is crappy formated/strutured" clearly demonstrates that these people, neither the author of the article, truly understand intuitively how quickly things can (and always do) go wrong with programs because they are complex beasts. This reads as an acadmic without truly intuitive knowledge of how things can go badly defending other academics. If a product is meant to put millions into quarantine it must be damn well tested and not a quick demo playground. A good product can obviously evolve from a quick academic playground, but academics seem to finish a product fully so rarely that they don't understand that unless they test it severly thourougly that it will have bugs.

stmfreak 6y ago
But I just read that your opinion isn’t valid because you are a software developer and not a scientist. The deity doesn’t speak through you! /s
- OneGuy123 6y ago
  Yes indeed, I apologize and prostrate myself in front of the all-knowing gods of academia who never do anything wrong. /s
matthewdgreen 6y ago
Most scientific software developers have been developing and working with enormously complex codebases for years. You're clearly starting from the perspective that they're eggheads who have no experience with this area; that assumption is almost certainly wrong.
- OneGuy123 6y ago
  "Working with and enormous codebase" and "actualing ensuring it works" are two very different things. Academic "scientific software developers" (lol) never have to prove anything works in production long term in majority of cases. They make a one-off project and never touch it again. So this generlization stands. And yes, I am saying that they are eggheads. Because this article and the covid sim clearly shows that "scientific software developers" (lol) must not be trusted with real world-affecting systems without some other real world developer checking it. The fact is that the covid sim is garbage and anyone who tries to defend it does not understand programming and complex systems well enough.
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    Scientists have to undergo extremely rigorous peer review from other experts who are massively incentivized to challenge them and show that their results are wrong. The individual code may not be reviewed, but spurious results will be noticed and called out. The closest thing we have to this in industry is bug reporting and software security evaluation, and this is sporadic at best. Most commercial software developers keep their code closed source and do everything they can to stifle public knowledge of bugs, even after they've been fixed.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Why are you defending this work Matthew? You have your own reputation to defend as well. This code has never been peer reviewed, ever. That is indisputable because Ferguson has claimed multiple times that the code is/was entirely undocumented, and nobody outside him and his few colleagues understands how it works. The moment it started being actually reviewed, people found a breathtaking number of bugs like out-of-bounds reads, typos in random number generator constants etc. Broken RNGs! Of all things I'd hope an expert in cryptography would be very worried by, a missing digit in an RNG constant should surely be one of them?
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Most scientific software developers have been developing and working with enormously complex codebases for years. I've spent many years of my career working on highly technical software. I've worked in offices full of professional programmers where many also had postgraduate qualifications in STEM subjects. Those teams did indeed work on quite complex codebases for years. Do you know what else they typically had? Testing infrastructure that was ahead of its time, careful validation of the mathematics being used before it was implemented, a reasonably clean and systematic software design, and good traceability from the mathematical code back to the underlying mathematics. This is not rocket science. This is not even unusual if you work in this field. It's just what happens when you let professionals with an appropriate skill set do the job: programmers with technical backgrounds implement models constructed by subject matter experts. Having one set of skills without the other is not a recipe for success.

stmfreak 6y ago

But I just read that your opinion isn’t valid because you are a software developer and not a scientist. The deity doesn’t speak through you! /s

OneGuy123 6y ago
Yes indeed, I apologize and prostrate myself in front of the all-knowing gods of academia who never do anything wrong. /s

matthewdgreen 6y ago

Most scientific software developers have been developing and working with enormously complex codebases for years. You're clearly starting from the perspective that they're eggheads who have no experience with this area; that assumption is almost certainly wrong.

OneGuy123 6y ago
"Working with and enormous codebase" and "actualing ensuring it works" are two very different things. Academic "scientific software developers" (lol) never have to prove anything works in production long term in majority of cases. They make a one-off project and never touch it again. So this generlization stands. And yes, I am saying that they are eggheads. Because this article and the covid sim clearly shows that "scientific software developers" (lol) must not be trusted with real world-affecting systems without some other real world developer checking it. The fact is that the covid sim is garbage and anyone who tries to defend it does not understand programming and complex systems well enough.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  Scientists have to undergo extremely rigorous peer review from other experts who are massively incentivized to challenge them and show that their results are wrong. The individual code may not be reviewed, but spurious results will be noticed and called out. The closest thing we have to this in industry is bug reporting and software security evaluation, and this is sporadic at best. Most commercial software developers keep their code closed source and do everything they can to stifle public knowledge of bugs, even after they've been fixed.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Why are you defending this work Matthew? You have your own reputation to defend as well. This code has never been peer reviewed, ever. That is indisputable because Ferguson has claimed multiple times that the code is/was entirely undocumented, and nobody outside him and his few colleagues understands how it works. The moment it started being actually reviewed, people found a breathtaking number of bugs like out-of-bounds reads, typos in random number generator constants etc. Broken RNGs! Of all things I'd hope an expert in cryptography would be very worried by, a missing digit in an RNG constant should surely be one of them?
Silhouette 6y ago
Most scientific software developers have been developing and working with enormously complex codebases for years. I've spent many years of my career working on highly technical software. I've worked in offices full of professional programmers where many also had postgraduate qualifications in STEM subjects. Those teams did indeed work on quite complex codebases for years. Do you know what else they typically had? Testing infrastructure that was ahead of its time, careful validation of the mathematics being used before it was implemented, a reasonably clean and systematic software design, and good traceability from the mathematical code back to the underlying mathematics. This is not rocket science. This is not even unusual if you work in this field. It's just what happens when you let professionals with an appropriate skill set do the job: programmers with technical backgrounds implement models constructed by subject matter experts. Having one set of skills without the other is not a recipe for success.