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I have seen this pattern multiple times: (1) tell client completely underdefined problem can be solved automatically, (2) tell developer to implement it, (3) de
by lqet 6y ago
I have seen this pattern multiple times: (1) tell client completely underdefined problem can be solved automatically, (2) tell developer to implement it, (3) developer spends months trying to automate it, (4) days before the deadline the code does something that would barely count as acceptable, (5) an intern is hired last-minute to solve the problem manually, (6) "we will do it by hand until we have fixed the code".
The client will never know (5). The intern will eventually do it manually full-time. The code is of course never fixed.
Months later, the developer finally has enough understanding of the problem to find out that it has been a research topic for decades, with no satisfying results so far.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m463 6y agoThere's that xkcd... https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/ They're going to have to update the comic, since the GPS tech tree that enabled the first one can not be combined with the AI tech tree to make the second one simple.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoThe simplest solution to the problem presented in xkcd 1425 is to assume every photo is a photo of a bird, and just let billions of users be mildly annoyed / extremely frustrated by that assumption. Then we can write thousands of blogs posts titled like "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Photos".
- m463 6y agoSo you're saying "everything is a bird" + https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ = training data :)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI'm not a software developer by any stretch of the imagination, but from an outsiders perspective: That does appear to be the AI / Machine Learning approach ;)
- k_sze 6y agoYep. This has already happened. iNaturalist has an auto-identification function that can identify pretty accurately down to the genus level most of the time and some times species level.
- cosmodisk 6y agoSome years ago,a guy started what later became a successful startup selling tickets to events. Obviously now the software does all the magic but it wasn't th case in the beginning,so the founder was making physical trips to ticket offices and purchasing tickets so he could then send to the app users.
- koube 6y agoThis is actually directly advocated in The Lean Startup book, with the example of a shopping app where the employees would go themselves to pick up food before building the actually shopping app. This sounds great for when the products works in the end, but I always wondered if this is really what we should be doing if we find out later that something actually can't be done or scaled well.
- cosmodisk 6y agoIn situation where automation is 'just round the corner+ $1B budget' it's probably better not to do but if the solution is know and can be realistically created,then why not? I use this at work quote often when people ask for automations: send couple of emails each day first to see how it works,and if it does, I'll then make an API for it.