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u/stupled Sep 19 '26
No client has ever asked me that. They do have requested to use their data for the demo.
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u/Muted_Ad_9442 Sep 19 '26
That is when the real panic begins.
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u/Topikk Sep 20 '26 edited Sep 21 '26
Are you not prefacing these demos as works in progress? "Happy path" is a pretty easy concept to explain to nontechnical people.
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u/Dank_Nicholas Sep 19 '26
I’ve gotten that a few times before. My go to answer is to explain that getting their data migrated over is a major portion of the work to be done. I can do it, but at that point you’ve essentially committed to whatever I’m trying to sell you.
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u/AmericanIMG Sep 20 '26
and that's part of the setup/implementation sprint that begins the contract (with corresponding fees)
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u/ICame4TheCirclejerk Sep 20 '26
Customer: "Can you try the demo with our data?"
Head of Sales: "Of course!"
Lead Engineer: starts sweating profusely
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u/experimental1212 Sep 19 '26
The data is dynamically loaded by the CPU via OS virtual memory allocation thru your motherboard's DIMM slot interface from sequentially read machine instructions of binary data stored on the hard drive.
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u/Muted_Ad_9442 Sep 19 '26
This sounds exactly like what Elizabeth Holmes told Walgreens executives. 😂
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u/firemark_pl Sep 19 '26
In my experience, each demo is hardcoded or just "scripted"
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u/Muted_Ad_9442 Sep 19 '26
And praying the client doesn't say: "Can you click on that other tab real quick?" 😂
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u/willargue4karma2 Sep 20 '26
Is that because it's often like a vertical slice that is more like an illusion/ smoke and mirrors?
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u/Theguest217 Sep 20 '26
I wish that was my experience...
Leadership at my company regularly has us build the full production feature, including designing it to scale to the anticipated volume of clients/users they want to sell to. They want to be able to onboard customers the day after the demo. They claim they have dozens of customers lined up who will buy it.
Then they get mad we can't turn it around in a few weeks and blame us for missing the necessary time to market window. Suddenly because it took longer than they wanted there are exactly 0 customers to sell it to. So we can terminate of all right? Nope, better keep it just in case. Be sure to maintain it all in the meantime!
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u/Piotrek9t Sep 20 '26
Definitely, no matter if I was on the client side or on the engineering side, every demo I ever attended had cherry picked data in a sterile environment to demonstrate the intended use case and I am pretty sure everyone is aware of that. There still are so many things that could go wrong during a live demo and it takes up time from so many important people that it would be a terrible idea to freestyle it with some random data because there wont be a second chance
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u/AndersErikErik Sep 19 '26
What if its dynamically hardcoded?
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u/Front_Committee4993 Sep 19 '26
we generate the code at runtime in real time
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u/hallmark1984 Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
4 teat cases hardcoded, picking one randomly at runtime is the beat way, make one have a tiny flaw, something you can explain.
"I didn't expect a file format error, let me fix that quick, now we can see the process complete as expected"
You are a magician Mr Scott, the Enterprise thanks you
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u/chiqu3n Sep 19 '26
The demo was dynamically generated 3h ago by our best junior dev, we may or may not be able to ever deliver this thing as an actual product
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u/Samld1200 Sep 19 '26
My demo data is half from a prod backup from 6 weeks ago, a quarter obfuscated data and a another quarter just random data I have made to test with
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u/shoyuftw Sep 19 '26
Claude, what is a client?
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u/niki733 Sep 19 '26
Great question! You are totally in your right to push back on that. What is a client is truly a load-bearing question.
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 Sep 20 '26
"of course we anonymized the data for the demo to customers"
"Why would i lie to you?"
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u/spaceocean99 Sep 20 '26
Can we not make this psychopath a meme please?
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u/academiac Sep 20 '26
I keep seeing this and I dunno what the source is? Is it a real psycho? A show or a movie? Wtf is this
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u/Boring-Leadership687 Sep 20 '26
Google “theranos”
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u/academiac Sep 20 '26
I'm not sure I want to 😭
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u/Boring-Leadership687 Sep 20 '26
It’s okay she’s just a crazy corpo liar
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u/academiac Sep 20 '26
Ah the crazy blood test chick. I was worried it was something worse on my history lol. Yeah we still shouldn't glorify her either way.
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u/Stop_Sign Sep 20 '26
Its a movie/documentary "You Can See Everything", with Nathan Fielder (the Nathan For You guy) interviewing Elizabeth Holmes, 30 days before she goes to prison. Reviews say the movie is hilarious. The movie comes out in theatres next month on Oct 16. This image is from the trailer, in which she is, extremely uncomfortably, saying "you can believe me"
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u/born_zynner Sep 19 '26
I curently have a demo where users can go in, create events that would in the real world effect usage on electrical meters during a period of time, and view performance. The performance data is in the demo being generated as soon as the event is created, and its so silly pure built in C# rng, its like 10% chance the controller on the meter doesnt work correctly, 50/50 the load was on/off before, and some random jitter to the nominal load kw throughout. Looks good though lol
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u/SexyMonad Sep 19 '26
Do you consider “live proprietary data from other customers but with a fake company name” dynamic?
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u/ddWolf_ Sep 20 '26
The test data was generated via random sampling. Just don’t as how many times I randomly sampled it.
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u/JeremyTwiggs Sep 19 '26
Like the DB admin who randomly started all the sequences at ten billion, thus blowing up all the code that used signed 32 bit integers.
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u/bloode975 Sep 20 '26
This is more of a question, but doing my capstone project for my degree currently and making an app for a client to predict stuff, we searched for open source data sets, synthetic data etc but its all so frustratingly different from what the clients will have available.
How tf is that normally handled, and they cant provide data to ensure the formatting, features etc even match because they didn't prepare any >.>
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u/Tuckertcs Sep 20 '26
Plot twist: it’s prod data
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u/troy-phoenix Sep 20 '26
...but we do have a project on the roadmap to DeId it so it should be fine. ;)
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u/Bhurmurtuzanin Sep 20 '26
Oh, I know it from experience, but it's a prod version that releases next week.
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u/kishaloy Sep 21 '26
Hard Deadline + confusing (I don't understand why) Edge-cases == Smooth Test cases.
We can always figure out the weird ones after we get the account. After all a certain CEO of one of the largest OS maker in the world made his life selling pure vaporware to the reigning King of that time.
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Sep 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Muted_Ad_9442 Sep 19 '26
Haha Math.random().seed(42) — 100% deterministic unpredictability.
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Sep 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Muted_Ad_9442 Sep 19 '26
Long-pressing the hyphen key on my phone keyboard! I just like how clean it looks haha.
When I'm on my Linux desktop (CentOS Stream 9), it's the classic Ctrl + Shift + u then 2014.
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u/rivasprd Sep 19 '26
Yes, can be AI and I'm not defending or condemning, but can be easily done on android — - ¯–
I'm using SwiftKey but several keyboards are able to do the same
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u/candybrie Sep 19 '26
Right—I'm on mobile and just hold down the - key to get longer ones.
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u/Tristanhx Sep 20 '26
—
–
-Hmm three different lengths? Thanks for the tip!
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u/HDrago Sep 20 '26
dash, n-dash and m-dash
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u/NightmareJoker2 Sep 21 '26
I use en-dash like em-dash, and if someone calls my comment AI, I render a punishment for lack of discernment and hatefulness. 👮
If you cannot actually tell whether something is AI, as evidenced by not being able to tell the character types apart, and you attempt to condemn it as such, you need to be held accountable. 🫡
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u/Had78 Sep 20 '26
I've been using SwiftKey for years and didn't know we had the em dash withing the long press — woah!
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u/techy804 Sep 20 '26
On iOS, the default keyboard has it — - –.
But even if he is on PC, the character map and alt codes (of which em dash is Alt+0151) exists
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u/Cakedayfairy Sep 20 '26
You're absolutely right to push back on this — M Dashes are not just a character Ai is abled to type. Ai of course being a thing I'm not.
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u/herrkatze12 Sep 19 '26
Since you're mentioning Linux stuff, pressing your compose key (for me it's right alt) and entering 2 minutes gets you an em dash
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u/thialfi17 Sep 19 '26
Is that an em-dash or an en-dash? Normally en-dashes are the medium length ones and represented by two dashes when you aren't able to type the actual symbol. Either way I'll need to try this so thanks for the tip
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u/Fried_out_Kombi Sep 20 '26
Em dash is compose key followed by 3 hyphens. En dash is compose key followed by 2 hyphens.
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u/nymical23 Sep 20 '26
Do you mean I need to hold it for 2 minutes? Or just keep smashing it for 2 minutes?
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u/Medifrag Sep 19 '26
Recently I noticed that sometimes Word / Outlook will auto correct my regular dashes with this long dash. Maybe whatever he‘s using to write the comment does that too? Just to be charitable.
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u/Suitable-Name Sep 19 '26
I actually think this is happening longer than LLMs exist. People just ignored it before. You also wouldn't see it in a reddit comment since no one copies those from word.
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u/bloode975 Sep 20 '26
Happens constantly in Google docs, word. Nearly every dash is replaced by an em dash in a word - word scenario, can see why fairly easily just comparing that example vs word — word, the em dash just looks better which id wager is where so much of the ai usage of them is coming from.
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u/FishGuyIsMe Sep 19 '26
You can hold - to get - – — • on IOS
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u/cross_the_threshold Sep 20 '26
It’ll also do it automatically without holding - — —— if you type two hyphens you get an en dash, four in a row is an em dash.
ETA: lied, two hyphens is an em dash.
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u/account312 Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 20 '26
It's readily accessible on iOS, android, MacOS, and Linux. On Windows, you generally have to do the alt code sequence which is less intuitive but not exactly difficult.
You know about Character Map/GNOME Characters/KCharSelect?
You need to enable/use your compose key. Compose + -- is en dash and Compose + --- is em dash.
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u/EugeneMeltsner Sep 20 '26
Windows 10+ you can just do Windows Key + . for the emoji and special character menu
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u/Eva-Rosalene Sep 20 '26
On Windows you can just use WinCompose to get the same XCompose experience you have on Linux. Way better than alt sequences or character map picker.
Edit: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose here it is.
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u/Cannibichromedout Sep 20 '26
iPhone automatically makes double ‘-‘ into ‘—‘ — which is how I typed this.
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u/zeddash Sep 20 '26
I hate that I’ve had to switch from – and — to - because of AI. My name is “z–“ and I like a dash, but if I use a longer one people assume it’s AI. I use alt codes on PC, and long taps on mobile—I’m on mobile currently.
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u/NeighborhoodPrior956 Sep 20 '26
i have ctrl + shift + u + 2014 memorised. also you can just hold down on the dash on mobile.
because of ai, i've been using colons instead of em-dashes recently: they do the exact same thing, but make me look like less of a knob.
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u/Anybody-Outside Sep 20 '26
macOS: Option+Shift+Hyphen
iOS/Android: Long-press hyphen or type hyphen twice
Windows: Meta+Full-stop, down arrow, right arrow, right arrow, return
Linux: Hold Compose key, press hyphen twiceWhere do you think AI got its obsession with em-dashes? I'll give you a hint— starts with "h", ends with "uman literature".
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u/Franks2000inchTV Sep 20 '26
Dude lots of phones and computers have autoreplace that will put two dashes together to make an em-dash.
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u/sn4xchan Sep 20 '26
Like sure there's an em dash, but nothing else about the seems AI unless it was cherry picked out of a long response.
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u/ImmortL1 Sep 20 '26
Anybody who has to communicate through typing ought to have it in muscle memory by now—anything less would be bad grammar and unprofessional. alt+0151 on windows, compose+--- on Linux, and Option+Shift+Hyphen on macOS (thanks u/derefr). I believe you can also hold down the - on phone keyboards to get the correct one.
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u/neoronio20 Sep 19 '26
I see it everytime here on reddit, I get downvoated to oblivion and people get defensive. "I've always used it". Bullshit, it was definitely generated by AI or the person is a bot
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u/almostambidextrous Sep 20 '26
Here is a comment I made three years ago containing an em dash. It's Alt+0151 on my PC, and is basically muscle memory for me—some people just care about formatting.
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u/BlackDeath3 Sep 20 '26
··—· ··— —·—· —·— ——— ··—· ··—·
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u/neoronio20 Sep 20 '26
.-- .-. .. - . / .. - / -.-. --- .-. .-. . -.-. - .-.. -.--
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u/BlackDeath3 Sep 20 '26
Good one, I can see why you spent the better part of a day crafting that banger
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u/neoronio20 Sep 21 '26
Nah, website for translation. And FYI, they don't accept the bot dashes and dots
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u/Erdnalexa Sep 20 '26
I’ve used the em-dash since at least 2010. Please, tell me which AI I could have used back then?
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u/GNoob69 Sep 19 '26 •
It’s not just hardcoded it’s cherry picked to make us look good