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My mom taught programming in the 80s, and the first thing she told students was: "Computers are stupid. They only do exactly what you tell them to do." People h
by analog31 5y ago
My mom taught programming in the 80s, and the first thing she told students was: "Computers are stupid. They only do exactly what you tell them to do." People have to get over the misconception that computers can think.
Maybe it was easier in the days of DOS, because merely using a computer required the same precision.
- Ericson2314 5y agoSo much of the ML hype is business people wanting something that everyone can operate equally poorly. The fact that so much of ML is inscrutable alchemy and a guessing game is a feature not bug.
- kthejoker2 5y agoBut ML (from a pure programming perspective) is just a lot of mathematical functions being strung together, usually as part of high level libraries. If you truly have good data, approximating a signal from noise is trivial. It's way less complicated code than, say, your bank's web app and payments system.
- amalcon 5y agoSo is everything else in software. Literally everything a computer can do is a form of math; it only seems like you're ever doing something not-math because we've made some very good abstractions over the math.
- bitwize 5y agoComputers do appear to think more and more these days, what with the tracking and targeted ads and so forth. To which your mom might say: Computers still aren't thinking; someone else -- someone at Google or Apple or Microsoft -- told them to do that. Maybe that would help bring the privacy implications into clearer focus.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 5y agoI occasionally teach programming love this line. It's doing exactly what you're telling it to do.