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It sounds like cherry picking bad examples to me. Likewise you could say "programming's foundations are crumbling" by citing all sorts of programming projects t

It sounds like cherry picking bad examples to me. Likewise you could say "programming's foundations are crumbling" by citing all sorts of programming projects that use bad or faulty code. Meanwhile, speech recognition seems to work extremely well by now (I am a little bit older, so I remember when it didn't work so well). I am also not aware of any real world cases of AI being used to detect Corona, so that seems to be an example in favour of AI. People tried to use AI, but it didn't work out. So it isn't being used for that purpose.

wnoise 5y ago
> programming's foundations are crumbling That's also correct, and has been for some time (it got worse on each tech boom). This may just be a special case of that.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  What do you mean? At least from the point of view of the end user, apps seem to become better over time.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I was tempted to just downvote this, but I thought I'd reply instead: No, they do not. An existing version of an app may get better over time, but unfortunately it then gets replaced with a different version, which starts from the position of extreme bugginess. In the case of Microsoft Office apps, for instance, one could easily argue that they are steadily getting worse as more and more features are added. Google Chrome is pretty clearly getting worse in terms of the amount of memory it uses. I could go on.
    - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
      So why not go back to some old version of it? I don't think "memory consumption" is necessarily a good indicator, because sometimes using more memory is a sign of good optimization. Also how is the memory consumption if you turn off all modern features?
      - fake-name 5y ago
        > So why not go back to some old version of it? Because the old version doesn't work due to DRM/it depending on a remote API version that's no longer available/it's just flat out unavailable/etc... > Also how is the memory consumption if you turn off all modern features? It's cute you think you /can/ turn off the modern features in a lot of today's garbage.
        notanzaiiswear 5y ago
        Pretty sure you can turn off a lot of things in modern browsers, if you find the hidden settings menu. For sure you can turn off things like JavaScript or video.
        AlbertCory 5y ago
        Pro tip: In fact, turning off JavaScript on a specific site is often a good way to get past their paywall. On other sites, it just makes it not work. YMMV.
      - AlbertCory 5y ago
        I hadn't used Word/Excel for many years, and was f*cking appalled to discover that they have TWO levels of menus now. This comes from generations of PMs and engineers who need to add features to justify their existence. No one has any incentive to keep things simple.
  - iamcurious 5y ago
    For some features, like autosaving and cloud sync, sure. Others like doing things in bulk, macros, plugins, not seeing ads, control over updates, all that stuff is vanishing.
qayxc 5y ago
> Meanwhile, speech recognition seems to work extremely well by now (I am a little bit older, so I remember when it didn't work so well). *provided you speak English or Mandarin, the former preferably of a continental US variety It's astonishing how bad things get again once you mix in an accent, local dialect (e.g. Swiss German) or a less frequently spoken language (like Croatian).
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  Nevertheless, the huge jump is from "does not work at all" to "it works". It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. As for Chinese, it is also pretty amazing that you can visit a Chinese website, click "translate" in your browser's menu bar, and get a reasonably readable translated version. I wonder if people just take too many things for granted. Or internet search - they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so with being able to find information on the internet. That is AI as well.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. It won't for the foreseeable future. Not for technical reasons; it's just that other languages are usually not handled correctly because most companies think they can just use the exact same approach as in English and they're done. Until they realise that non-English native speakers also use English words and abbreviations to some degree, both in IT-related contexts but also in everyday life. Now it doesn't just need to handle that one language but also English with an accent. If they're lucky it'll work reasonably well in most cases despite variations depending on the region. Right now even keyboard completion suggestions struggle with mixing languages and become completely useless in some cases. As English words may be mixed in at any location (and in wildly different frequencies depending on the user) the software now has to guess the language for every single word. The results are not great. > they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so As long as Google continues with blunders like showing wrong pictures of people in infoboxes they'll keep failing hard. Their amazing AI shows wrong pictures for serial killers, rape victims and more, which already led to consequences for those people. What makes it much worse is that when someone complains about such a case Google will just replace that picture with another wrong portrait - if they react at all. It would be helpful if those big tech companies would for once trust in human intelligence instead of throwing larger models at the problem.
wffurr 5y ago
The infosec meltdown sure seems to indicate programming’s foundations are crumbled. All of the unsafe C library code underlying nearly ever modern system is unsafe at any speed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

wnoise 5y ago

> programming's foundations are crumbling That's also correct, and has been for some time (it got worse on each tech boom). This may just be a special case of that.

notanzaiiswear 5y ago
What do you mean? At least from the point of view of the end user, apps seem to become better over time.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I was tempted to just downvote this, but I thought I'd reply instead: No, they do not. An existing version of an app may get better over time, but unfortunately it then gets replaced with a different version, which starts from the position of extreme bugginess. In the case of Microsoft Office apps, for instance, one could easily argue that they are steadily getting worse as more and more features are added. Google Chrome is pretty clearly getting worse in terms of the amount of memory it uses. I could go on.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    So why not go back to some old version of it? I don't think "memory consumption" is necessarily a good indicator, because sometimes using more memory is a sign of good optimization. Also how is the memory consumption if you turn off all modern features?
    - fake-name 5y ago
      > So why not go back to some old version of it? Because the old version doesn't work due to DRM/it depending on a remote API version that's no longer available/it's just flat out unavailable/etc... > Also how is the memory consumption if you turn off all modern features? It's cute you think you /can/ turn off the modern features in a lot of today's garbage.
      - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
        Pretty sure you can turn off a lot of things in modern browsers, if you find the hidden settings menu. For sure you can turn off things like JavaScript or video.
        AlbertCory 5y ago
        Pro tip: In fact, turning off JavaScript on a specific site is often a good way to get past their paywall. On other sites, it just makes it not work. YMMV.
    - AlbertCory 5y ago
      I hadn't used Word/Excel for many years, and was f*cking appalled to discover that they have TWO levels of menus now. This comes from generations of PMs and engineers who need to add features to justify their existence. No one has any incentive to keep things simple.
- iamcurious 5y ago
  For some features, like autosaving and cloud sync, sure. Others like doing things in bulk, macros, plugins, not seeing ads, control over updates, all that stuff is vanishing.

qayxc 5y ago

> Meanwhile, speech recognition seems to work extremely well by now (I am a little bit older, so I remember when it didn't work so well). *provided you speak English or Mandarin, the former preferably of a continental US variety It's astonishing how bad things get again once you mix in an accent, local dialect (e.g. Swiss German) or a less frequently spoken language (like Croatian).

notanzaiiswear 5y ago
Nevertheless, the huge jump is from "does not work at all" to "it works". It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. As for Chinese, it is also pretty amazing that you can visit a Chinese website, click "translate" in your browser's menu bar, and get a reasonably readable translated version. I wonder if people just take too many things for granted. Or internet search - they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so with being able to find information on the internet. That is AI as well.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. It won't for the foreseeable future. Not for technical reasons; it's just that other languages are usually not handled correctly because most companies think they can just use the exact same approach as in English and they're done. Until they realise that non-English native speakers also use English words and abbreviations to some degree, both in IT-related contexts but also in everyday life. Now it doesn't just need to handle that one language but also English with an accent. If they're lucky it'll work reasonably well in most cases despite variations depending on the region. Right now even keyboard completion suggestions struggle with mixing languages and become completely useless in some cases. As English words may be mixed in at any location (and in wildly different frequencies depending on the user) the software now has to guess the language for every single word. The results are not great. > they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so As long as Google continues with blunders like showing wrong pictures of people in infoboxes they'll keep failing hard. Their amazing AI shows wrong pictures for serial killers, rape victims and more, which already led to consequences for those people. What makes it much worse is that when someone complains about such a case Google will just replace that picture with another wrong portrait - if they react at all. It would be helpful if those big tech companies would for once trust in human intelligence instead of throwing larger models at the problem.

wffurr 5y ago

The infosec meltdown sure seems to indicate programming’s foundations are crumbled. All of the unsafe C library code underlying nearly ever modern system is unsafe at any speed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]