I guess now we finally know why Babbage never finished building the Analytical Engine.

  • Deebster@programming.dev
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    24 hours ago

    That’s a good point, but a few decades of talking to clients has led to a number of conversations like this where they want it to “just work”, even if they’ve input the wrong information.

    • Sc00ter@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      Clients? Shit happens in my house.

      “My monitor keeps turning off.”

      “Ok next time it happens ill look at it and see if i can figure out what is going on.”

      “Cant you just fix it?”

      “Fix what? I dont know whats wrong yet.”

      “Just fix the monitor.”

      • socsa@piefed.social
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        17 hours ago

        Legitimately, about 1/3 of the time my mere presence seems to magically fix the issue.

        • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          There was a thread on Reddit where people likewise noted that having another person try problematic software solved the issue. So one commenter regaled how a dude sidestepped the whole rigmarole by saying to his colleague “look, this thing’s broken again”, and then before the other guy could step in, he clicked the thing himself, and it worked.

      • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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        18 hours ago

        I’ve started defaulting to just saying “yes” with my family and pretending to fix it. I’m actually thankful for the laptop revolution, cause I can just say “it’s fucked, buy a new one.”

          • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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            16 hours ago

            I have like a dozen old laptops with various flavors of Linux on them because of this. Can’t give them away cause apparently Linux is a scary word in this part of the country.

      • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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        21 hours ago

        One time my boss asked me to basically solve the Travelling salesman problem.

        My first pass at ot was a simple grab closest neighbor solution, but that left a slightly unoptimal path and my boss asked me to “fix” it. I explained to him why, no, I can’t make it both fast amd accurate, pick one, while also showing him that wikipedia page. I was so mad when he said just make it more accurate ignoring now it takes hours to run sometimes only to save 10 seconds of a machine moving.

    • tomiant@programming.dev
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      22 hours ago

      This is how I expect AI to work. I will silently think of a thing, and the AI must make it perfectly in one go. If it doesn’t, I have just lacked in describing in detail what it should do. And that takes thousands of lines of code.