Edit: for the record, Fuck AI
Magic elves are deterministic logical systems.
Normally I laugh at these as they have some merit, but fuck this one. The right end of the curve isn’t some Jedi understanding of things, it’s tech bros that think AI is alive and they want to enslave us.
Yes, but also as a programmer, sufficiently complex code bases might as well be magical with all of the interactions between edge cases causing some fucky behavior.
Nah man. I’ve been a programmer and it’s very much doing exactly what you told it to. The issue is you (general you) did not do a good job of telling it what to do. It’s like speaking to a five year old realizing the instructions you give it are going to be literally executed, loopholes and all.
I’ve been a profession Dev for 20+ years. I generally agree with you, but I have experienced what appears to be non-deterministic behavior. One room me it was a multi threaded algorithm and would return slightly different results each time. My theory for mult threaded apps is an environment effects each thread differently. What other tasks the user is doing effected the thread execution order and would give different results based on which thread finished.
While I still think the process is deterministic, but with enough factors it becomes indistinguishable from non-deterministic.
I don’t want to be pedantic, as I understand what you’re saying, but they way I interpret that is it’s still deterministic, we just don’t know all of the factors that are currently contributing to the outcome. It’s not magical, it’s just lack of full understanding of all variables.
I get how it can be thought of as non-deterministic, but I think the reason why that bothers me is I’ve seen it used as slippery slope territory into “see, so god must exist!”. I think I was just triggered more by the eventuality and not your specific statement.
That seams to be what I said in my last sentence.
For the record, Fuck AI and tech bros with a rusty pole.
What I mean is that computers are so complex they end up being very fragile, in a way.
A few years ago, a friend was having random issues with her PC. Random crashes, garbled data. Long story short, it ended up being a couple of faulty bytes on one of her RAM sticks.
That’s a very… unique interpretation honestly. I’ve never seen anyone associate this meme (including all the “we trapped lightning in a rock and taught it to do taxes” variants) with the fragility of complex tech, only the idea that microprocessors are such a ridiculous technology that anyone reaching expert level is back in the state of wonderment.
Yeah. The thing is, the finicky interactions between components, and the obscure bugs that may arise are reminiscent of some moody magical creature living inside, just saying “fuck it, here’s a kernel panic” out of nowhere.
Computers have daemons inside.
Only Linux!
I think all Unix variants as well. It was even the inspiration for FreeBSD’s logo.
No, but the wifi chips do. Even radio engineers who designed them will tell you they just tamed the elves, they don’t really understand how radio engineering works.
Hah, I do radio engineering and no shit wrote this in a project report back in undergrad. “Radio engineering is often as much art as science” and I got five points off for that commentary.
It’s called the Machine Spirit.
Praise the Omnissiah!
Otherwise known as “programmers.”
Seriously though we tricked metal into thinking with runes and lightning. That is magic.
well actually silicon is a semi-conductor. not entirely a metal.
Ok, we tricked stone into actually-not-thinking.
No, I don’t agree.
Every single problem can be traced to a specific source.
What a lot of people (especially in IT) determine as a glitch, is just some unexpected change that they don’t have the time/energy to deal with and can be solved by just rebooting.
Every single thing has a cause, even if the problem was a single particle of radiation from space that flipped a bit on a hard drive.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with some IT-guru that could solve every problem. They could see where this unexpected change came from and tell how to solve it so it wouldn’t ever happen again. Except maybe those bit flips.
No, not every problem can be traced to a specific cause. Sometimes the information required to do that has been lost (or never existed) and finding the root cause becomes impossible.
How would you prove some random radiation caused a bit flip to make an app crash without having equipment to detect it set up beforehand?
Bitflips are fun.
For a while, I managed a fleet of about 6500 iPod touch devices, and we would have random failures on devices where a simple re-image would solve the problem. I did a back of the napkin calculation, and our rate of those failures was almost exactly the expected cosmic radiation bitflip chance for the total surface area of all the storage chips in our devices.
