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.
Is this sufficiently advanced technology?
Submitted 2 weeks ago by diemartin@sh.itjust.works to [deleted]
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e36969e1-89fa-4c1d-91ab-3d1385987c3d.jpeg
Comments
ramble81@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
chuckleslord@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
diemartin@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
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 tech, only the idea that microprocessors are such a ridiculous technology that anyone reaching expert level is back in the state of wonderment.
apparia@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I interpreted it as about like, microprocessor design and nanometer scale electronics and shit.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Is your name Kenn Amdahl?
fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Why the hell would you equate the expert of the field with a tech bro? You don’t understand the meme.
If you want an explanation, current computer system, especially cloud systems, are so complex that even though yes, it’s all deterministic, when so many things are depending on each other, including external interference (networking issues, data syncing delays…).
At some point you start wishing i was actually elves because I don’t fucking know why lambda’s boto get item got the version of the file half an hour before the last modification, even though the lambda was triggered by the file being updated, Carlos. I don’t fucking know, different AWS endpoints might have different sync states maybe and it’s not as reliably propagated as they tell us it is, what the fuck do I know about that. I’ve spent enough time in estigating this bullshit, relaunch it and pray the elves do the thing correctly this time, leave me alone.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Because I am one of the experts. I’m not going to share exactly who I am, but I’ve been in IT for 30+ years. I’ve worked on everything from development, to infrastructure to hardware design for the Open Compute project and at major cloud companies as an architect. So no, it’s all magic elves if you understand what’s going on and I will never equate it with that.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Tech bros tend toward the left side of the curve in my experience.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Ok, but what with the magnetic flux?
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
i think it just means that once you optimize the hardware close to what physics allows, you have to consider all kinds of strange phenomena appearing. like, quantum physics, electrons tunneling around, the internal resistance value of the wire antenna, etc.
it’s not just “logic gates”, by far not.
marcos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It would be better with a charge-carrier diffusion diagram, but your computer is also full of very strong magnetic fluxes, changing all the time and interacting with each other.
JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It appears they’re discussing electron flow, which causes a magnetic field
Broadfern@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Otherwise known as “programmers.”
Seriously though we tricked metal into thinking with runes and lightning. That is magic.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
well actually silicon is a semi-conductor. not entirely a metal.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Ok, we tricked stone into actually-not-thinking.
yucandu@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
It’s called the Machine Spirit.
Praise the Omnissiah!
zxqwas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Computers have voodoo goblins inside them with the personalities of extremely malevolent genies.
Grostleton@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
👾WAGA LAKA BOODONGI NI CROPO NALINGKI👾
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
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.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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 memory chips in our devices.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
larger structure sizes can help against spontaneous bit flips, i think. at the cost of consuming more energy for each calculation step.
harmbugler@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I once had a email that crashed the network card on a windows 2000 server. That was not fun to try and find the problem. After the 3rd occurrence the network card got binned
Eufalconimorph@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Midwit doesn’t know about RDSEED, or RNDRRS . Every modern computer has a hardware random number generator built in (aka true random number generator). Since there’s a hwrng bulit in, operations that depend on it aren’t deterministic.
Not a magic elf though. Definitely more goblin.
TootSweet@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reminds me of www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
(I can’t get that link to work right now. Maybe it’s down. So here is the same story on the Wayback Machine.)
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The ‘more magic switch’ is one of my favorite stories like that, right up there with the 500 mile email.
Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Don’t forget about “race conditions”!
5ha99y@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
Youch!
lengau@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Magic elves are deterministic logical systems.
atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I still remember the time a bug was fixed by adding a comment on a previously empty line
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Computers are fucking weird.
Back in the dark ages of late 90s/early 00s computing, I figured out that I could reliably crash a computer with a c++ script that printed char 7 (system bell) in a while loop, but if I added a semicolon in the next line the system would be fine.
It was fun putting the first exe as the shortcut on lab computers, as people would be sooooooo confused when their computer spazzed out and beeped at them at an ever slowing cadence.
CADmonkey@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I thought they had angry pixies inside?
spicehoarder@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Sometimes the pipelines hicup, but that just means you run it again.
Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Be sure to leave bags of Kuai Kuai out for the magic elves.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Computers have daemons inside.
sage@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Only Linux!
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think all Unix variants as well. It was even the inspiration for FreeBSD’s logo.