[zokier]

> this person has never programmed on windows in their lives

https://nitter.poast.org/da_wamwoowam/status/182487490957266...

How about some fucking empathy? Yes, maybe the dev isn't a windows expert, but I'd guess most devs aren't. Most people don't have the luxury of pulling in a specialist to do every little feature, nor the luxury to do a deep dive to figure the absolute correct way. Such is the reality of (commercial) software development. I don't think we need to have snarky attacks on the front page of HN for that.

[Hizonner]

I have also never programmed on Windows in my life. Seriously, not so much as a trivial script.

But I would look up the right way to find the system installation if I were writing production code, or even personal-use code, that needed to know where it was. I also wouldn't walk the filesystem looking for a program I was relying on (and assuming filenames and installation locations, but evidently not with a definitive standard location in mind). If I had to do that, I would know there was something horribly wrong with my own design. Although I should probably already be clued into that if my chat program is having to fool with GPU arcana like that.

Either some programmer has put thousands of other people's reliability and resources at risk by intentionally taking on something they're unqualified for and don't have the time to do right... or some manager has pushed somebody into that position.

If you mean that the reality of commercial software is that it's written by half-qualified people under unreasonable time pressure, why should we have "empathy" for the people who make it that way?

[nemetroid]

So what's the enterprise-quality solution for querying the GPU for the information they need?

If I search Google for "nvidia-smi.exe", one of the top results is a Stack Overflow answer with 70 upvotes, describing exactly the approach taken by the linked code.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/57100016

[jasomill]

Sounds like, at best, a great way to find obsolete copies of nvidia-smi.exe shipped with installed but inactive driver versions.

On all my Windows/Nvidia systems, the current version of nvidia-smi.exe is present in %SystemRoot%\System32.

OTOH, …\FileRepository*\nvidia-smi.exe matches anywhere from one to eight versions, dating back to 2023.

Perhaps this is only true because I use official Nvidia mechanisms (.exe installer from Nvidia Web site or Nvidia-supplied app) to install drivers, rather than Windows Update or INF install?

Incidentally, the wildcard …\FileRepository\nvdm* suggested in the Stack Overflow answer returns zero directories on my systems, as all Nvidia driver repository directories start with either nv_dispi (GeForce) or nv_dispwi (workstation).

Which makes sense, because obviously the INF file name used to generate these directory names is subject to change without notice.

In any case, per "nvidia-smi --help":

  Note that the functionality of NVSMI is exposed through the NVML C-based
  library. See the NVIDIA developer website for more information about NVML.
  Python wrappers to NVML are also available.  The output of NVSMI is
  not guaranteed to be backwards compatible; NVML and the bindings are backwards
  compatible.
  
  http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-management-library-nvml/
  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/nvidia-ml-py/

[FreakLegion]

From the repo:

> This is amazing. Started as a small project just for myself, it now has > 15,000 lines of code, > 600 versions published, up to 8 mio downloads per month, > 300 mio downloads overall. #1 NPM ranking for backend packages. Thank you to all who contributed to this project!

It's fair to blast Discord here, but not the library's authors. When you want "production code", maybe do better* than npm-installing a project with lifetime donations of, let's see, $624.

* Like donate, audit and upstream improvements, or build it yourself from scratch.

[soraminazuki]

I don't have empathy for corporations and neither should you. Discord shows absolutely no empathy for its users anyways.

> Discord Applying Forced Arbitration - opt-out before it is too late!

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40252525

We're talking about a corporation handling our private communications, not a group of unpaid volunteers. Corporations act out of greed. That's the way capitalism works and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Two decades ago, there were lots of empathy for the company that promised to "not be evil" and just look at how well that went. Accountability is what we should be pushing for, not empathy for those who abuse us.

The code in question supposedly gathers system information to send back to Discord. It's sensitive information gathered for Discord's own sake. Maybe, just maybe, they should be more aware of what their own code is doing at the very least when doing such things.

[thefz]

Whoever wrote this twitter post is irritating beyond my will of reading their rambling. Closed the window real quick.

[sheepo39]

Yeah, the real cringe here is how the Twitter user chose to communicate this

[Brian_K_White]

Ok this particular piece of garbage software is not the crime of the century, and we all have dirty underwear, but there is nothing about this that deserves the tiniest bit of empathy. This is not an empathy situation. This is an atrocious job full stop.

Anyone attempting, or purporting to do this job should know this, and if they don't know this, then that very fact is the unforgivable thing.

I say this as someone who has barely programmed anything for windows. I managed to make a custom version of putty for work that replaced the registry for a text file for settings, and made it lauchable to make saved sessions portable. And I managed the amazing engineering feat of producing a .exe that wraps a twain scanner library. No ui, just a cli that copies argv to the library calls. And I wrote a powershell script that talks to a device over rs232.

Thats about it. More than my mom could do but all in all essentially nothing.

The criticism of this utter shit is not elitism.

When I first had that work project to hack on putty, at first I took a look just to see if I could figure it out. I immediatly decided I could not figure it out in any reasonable time.

So I tried to hire a freelancer to do it. Pay someone who actually does this, right?

You know what they did? For $3k usd in 2005 or so? They fucking called regedit. As in they executed the regedit exe in a system call to import a text reg file. The settings are still stored in the registry, and I already knew how to run regedit to export and import .reg files. I could have done that much by just wrapping my exe in a bat file that runs regedit before launching putty, and that would have been a better engineered result than putting it in a system call, because it would be more flexible since the bat could be modified infinitely later without recompiling.

They were working on c code that already had code examples in it for working with the registry directly, and for reading and writing files, and yet when they needed to read a file to load settings, they ran an external executable that reads a file and puts the contents into the registry.

And putty actually has a fairly modular settings module! The registry stuff isn't baked in all over the place. There is a single c file that does all of the settings storage and retrieval. You can essentially swap the whole file out with anything else.

Am I some supergenius just because I knew enough to not try to do a job I didn't know how to do?

Am I a supergenius just because I was able to at least read code even if I couldn't write it, enough to see what it was doing and that it was a shit way to get the outward appearance of what I asked for?

How come you aren't completely offended and scandalized by solutions like these? What code that I rely on are you writing right now?

We do indeed all have dirty underwear but this is not a case of "not an expert". That is inexcusably misrepresenting the essence of the criticism here.

[ChocolateGod]

I believe they're referring to the tone of language used, which is IMHO just unnecessarily rude.

> THIS is why your software is slow. it's not "web tech" or "electron" or "JIT compilation" or any fucking sorting algorithm

> it's boneheaded _design decisions_ made to avoid doing things properly in packages with 1,600,000 weekly downloads.

> :DDDDDDDDDD this is why everyone hates nodejs developers

Yes, you can criticise a piece of software for doing something X way, but you don't have to shit on the people who made it in the process. Imagine being the person who implemented this waking up and seeing that.

[Brian_K_White]

They deserve all of it.

The entire point everyone is making is that this ISN'T about some fine point. This is a completely stupid approach. It should offend anyone on first sight or thought. There is no valid way to think up this idea for this way to get this result, and not immediately discard it as ridiculous.

If you're brainstorming initially for possible ways to get from your house to the one across the street, sure maybe one of the possible ways is to give yourself some minor injury, call an ambulance, go to the hospital, and then give them the other address when they take you back home (setting aside thatthey don't take you back home, let's pretend they do). But you don't actually do it. You reject that idea as outlandish and crazy.

Even IF it worked fine. Maybe you can't actually successfully get an ambulance to function as a taxi, but Uber will just fine. It would outwardly function just fine to call uber to take from one address to another. Yet you still do not use that approach to that problem. You consider it for one second and conclude that that would be outlandish and crazy. Just utterly gross and stupid and fucking inexcusably so.

[wamwoowam]

hi op here, there's a bit to this that's missing

the bit about web tech and electron is a direct response to a common criticism i see about software written with these frameworks, they have a reputation for being slow and bloated and from experience i know it doesn't have to be that way, what makes web apps bloated and slow is usually poor design choices. the point i was trying to get across here is that this code written this way would've been slow if it was C too, it's not always about the tech stack. same goes for the comments about nodejs, i love node, but some of the packages in the ecosystem really let it down, and it means node devs get a bad wrap.

i know my general tone isn't great, i do feel for the package maintainer and tried to get in touch to get ahead of this but didn't find a way to do so. though in my defence, this is far from the first time i've tweeted about discord bogging down a system and 99.9% of the time they've gone nowhere, let alone reached hackernews, i've never had "a platform" so i've never had the need to worry about things like this before, it's something i've noted for the future, so i hope that makes things a little more understandable.

[ChocolateGod]

> i love node, but some of the packages in the ecosystem really let it down, and it means node devs get a bad wrap.

I think you'll find that for any environment that promotes package use and has a large following, I don't think its down to inheritably down to something node is doing wrong.

> so i've never had the need to worry about things like this before, it's something i've noted for the future, so i hope that makes things a little more understandable.

part of the reason I left Twitter (or X now?), Mastodon, Threads etc. The platforms promote people posting things without thinking them through first and you never know what's going to come bite you in the arse later.

[Sirizarry]

Honestly I think your tone was fine. People need to get over themselves because you said nothing wrong. If someone does something stupid I wholeheartedly believe they should be called out for doing something stupid. It’s how we learn