Observed again: Google didn’t test Gemini

My deal has been, not that ‘Gemini is exceedingly woke because DEI’. But that Google didn’t test Gemini, because it walks like a duck and I know what I know yo. Sergey Brin:

"Speaking at San Francisco’s AGI House over the weekend, Brin said the company had "definitely messed up on the image generation." He added that the historically inaccurate images generated by Gemini were likely due to a lack of thorough testing."

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-gemini-definitely-messed-up-images-ai-model-2024-3

For 30 years I’ve been a bit self conscious of ‘inadequacy’ as a SW engineer that doesn’t code. Ya know, not one of the brainiac cool kids (although I am a brainiac ahem). What I am is a pro tester.

Yeah well… cool coder kids always (often) think they can get by without testing and paying for testers. AND….. ya can’t, bitches. Cuz it’s just as important or so close to ‘just as’ as to be indistinguishable. So testing requirements for function and all that goes with it is a professional skill, and ya know, coders lack it…

Ya gotta test. Reason 1 is it saves money finding bugs in development. Reason 2 is embarrassment when something is deployed and doesn’t work.

I knew they didn’t test this jalopy

Cuz if they would have tested it, they would have found the bugs.

Some decent, interesting snippets from terrible, lowest common denominator Time Magazine. The thing about how the program changes the user’s query instructions before the AI processes it is… interesting.

Also, fun and literal example of the ‘conservatives pounced’ genre if one is a fan of that.

I, a SW test engineer, would have sussed out the Google Gemini bugs in 0 time flat

For whatever they pay testers there in Palo Alto, $265k a year or whatever. I would have been worth the $ in minute 1.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-tools-like-google-gemini-are-tailor-made-for-culture-war.html

And yes, it’s a bug. I assume Google is trying to program its AI to strike some sort of realistic balance, with the realism going properly both ways woke and un-woke, to a point.

So…. IDK how it gets released this way having by all appearances not been tested. I think that’s the answer, they actually don’t spend a lot of staffing $ on testing. Which is a kind of IT budgeting arrogance.

Ya gotta…. Rule 1: software has bugs.

The Bug Whisperer

This morning ebay is afflicted by an outage where you can not key text into the big description field in a listing.  In edit listing mode, the field won’t take the cursor for entry, won’t display existing text if there is any.

So I knew this, having encountered it.  I called into support, I dunno, because I guess I was curious about ebay “process” in a holistic sense.

Well the process is, the IVR tells you to expect a 6 minute wait.  It’s actually a half an hour.  You tell them they have an outage.  They tell you, yes, we have an outage.  A ‘site issue’.  So there’s that.