4 ms·

the best quote I have is, a computer makes very fast and accurate mistakes. fortunately it is not as often as some think it is, but delegation of tasks still d

the best quote I have is, a computer makes very fast and accurate mistakes. fortunately it is not as often as some think it is, but delegation of tasks still does require those delegating the work to verify it is done correctly, whether by machine or man. in all cases any project should have documented means of verification anyone can act upon. what tends to break this is having too many responsible parties to where no one is responsible for any single point of failure and this insulates the the whole. (the old too many cooks)

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> the best quote I have is, a computer makes very fast and accurate mistakes. The thing is, a computer doesn't generally make mistakes. Not unless some hardware failure happens, or a photon flips some bit in an unfortunate moment. It's always humans who make mistakes - computers are just executing them blindly. They're very good and fast at it. Now I know it may sound trite, but I don't think it is. The problem isn't people thinking computers can't make mistakes. The real problem is that people are thinking that the output from the computer is something else than it is. Taking m0xte's example[0]: "Well the thing that returned the state of the asset did a SQL join on the history and returned the top row’s state without sorting by date." The mistake number one is, the function that did this was probably called "getCurrentAssetState", or something else which implied it's getting the current state of the asset. Some programmer made a mistake here. Then that description was taken at face value and the problem traveled all the way to end-user level, probably to some label with "current status" on it. But that's not the only type of mistakes that can happen. Another possible mistake: the data in the database was wrong, or stale. Another: eventual consistency. Another: configuration error. Etc. And regardless of that, the computer was always doing the thing it was told to, without any error: SELECT state FROM asset JOIN asset_history ON asset.id = asset_history.asset_id LIMIT 1;. My point is: once the discussion stops being about whether or not a computer can make an error (generally, it can't), people can start to appreciate that they're dealing with large systems designed by humans - and both in the large and in the small, these systems do something resembling what they were designed for, but never exactly that. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795557
- rrmm 7y ago
  The computer automates mistakes.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> the best quote I have is, a computer makes very fast and accurate mistakes. The thing is, a computer doesn't generally make mistakes. Not unless some hardware failure happens, or a photon flips some bit in an unfortunate moment. It's always humans who make mistakes - computers are just executing them blindly. They're very good and fast at it. Now I know it may sound trite, but I don't think it is. The problem isn't people thinking computers can't make mistakes. The real problem is that people are thinking that the output from the computer is something else than it is. Taking m0xte's example[0]: "Well the thing that returned the state of the asset did a SQL join on the history and returned the top row’s state without sorting by date." The mistake number one is, the function that did this was probably called "getCurrentAssetState", or something else which implied it's getting the current state of the asset. Some programmer made a mistake here. Then that description was taken at face value and the problem traveled all the way to end-user level, probably to some label with "current status" on it. But that's not the only type of mistakes that can happen. Another possible mistake: the data in the database was wrong, or stale. Another: eventual consistency. Another: configuration error. Etc. And regardless of that, the computer was always doing the thing it was told to, without any error: SELECT state FROM asset JOIN asset_history ON asset.id = asset_history.asset_id LIMIT 1;. My point is: once the discussion stops being about whether or not a computer can make an error (generally, it can't), people can start to appreciate that they're dealing with large systems designed by humans - and both in the large and in the small, these systems do something resembling what they were designed for, but never exactly that. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21795557

rrmm 7y ago
The computer automates mistakes.