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Let's skip over to a real example, it's better. If you start designing hardware for AI, together with AI designed to run just on that hardware, and tie those d

Let's skip over to a real example, it's better. If you start designing hardware for AI, together with AI designed to run just on that hardware, and tie those design cycles together, you'll get a design by commitee. It is very likely that requirements will make an overall bad hardware (but slightly better for AI), and an overall bad AI (but slightly better in some hardware). Eventually, these shortcuts lead to huge commitees. Sometimes they're not even formally defined. The screw company should make good screws, not good screws for a specific desk lamp model. A good designer then _chooses_ to use those screws _because they are good_, not because they can make specific design requirements to the screw company.

kragen 1y ago
My left femur is a good femur for my specific height and species. It would be a lot worse if I had to use the same femur as the pit bull next door. Why are desk lamps different? I conjecture that it's only because of the cognitive limitations of the designers.
- alganet 1y ago
  I am sorry that you do not see yourself as different from a desk lamp.
  - kragen 1y ago
    On the contrary, my comment was all about the difference! I see my body as far better designed than any desk lamp I have ever heard of. So I am puzzled as to why you count the characteristics that give rise to desk lamps' deficiencies as advantages on the side of the desk lamp.
    - alganet 1y ago
      Your comparison with natural organisms _brightens my day_, but it is irrelevant for the context we're discussing.
- eternityforest 1y ago
  Because you weren't designed on a CAD app. The desk lamp can be designed around common parts to reduce the total number of unique parts in the world, so everything is reusable, replaceable, manufacturable in larger quantities so there's more resources to optimize the process, etc.
  - kragen 1y ago
    It sounds like you agree with me?
    - alganet 1y ago
      The problem is that you used vague sophist dialogue that could turn either way. You could say that T G A C are the designed parts, or any kind of bullshit honestly. It's bad communication. You need to follow up the vague analogies with real examples to make a message stick. If you don't, people have no idea what you are saying.
      - kragen 1y ago
        I can assure you that both my leg and desk lamps are perfectly real examples. There is a common kind of desk lamp that is even fairly mechanically similar to a human leg, with a knee , tension springs, and a ball-and-socket joint to permit free repositioning in multiple degrees of freedom, and about the same size. But the different design processes involved have resulted in very different designs, and a major reason for that is precisely the use of standardized parts in the desk lamp, but not in my leg, which results precisely from the kind of specialization we have been talking about. I don't see how much less vague I could have been. Are you being sarcastic?
        MRtecno98 1y ago
        A human leg isn't designed to be repaired from the outside, it doesn't need replacement parts, it doesn't need external maintenance. It's designed around the maintenance and repair procedures of the human body which are able to fix it in situ and produce new parts on the fly. That allows it to have more freedom of design than a mechanical part that needs to be made from standardized parts in order to be serviced and manufactured. The limitation is not cognitive, it's a matter of efficiency. We could, if we wanted to, make a lamp with all custom parts with the maximum efficiency possible in the design, but those efficiency gains would be at the cost of extremely difficult manufacturing. It's a tradeoff that the human body can make because it needs to produce only one (or two) legs, while us humans mass manufacture the stuff we make.
haveyoucinsdrd 1y ago
Look at the HN committee…community… perfecting the semantic design of reality. All I see in the words is algebra where concrete terms authors use that refer to others, are variables that could sometimes be set to you.

kragen 1y ago

My left femur is a good femur for my specific height and species. It would be a lot worse if I had to use the same femur as the pit bull next door. Why are desk lamps different? I conjecture that it's only because of the cognitive limitations of the designers.

alganet 1y ago
I am sorry that you do not see yourself as different from a desk lamp.
- kragen 1y ago
  On the contrary, my comment was all about the difference! I see my body as far better designed than any desk lamp I have ever heard of. So I am puzzled as to why you count the characteristics that give rise to desk lamps' deficiencies as advantages on the side of the desk lamp.
  - alganet 1y ago
    Your comparison with natural organisms _brightens my day_, but it is irrelevant for the context we're discussing.
eternityforest 1y ago
Because you weren't designed on a CAD app. The desk lamp can be designed around common parts to reduce the total number of unique parts in the world, so everything is reusable, replaceable, manufacturable in larger quantities so there's more resources to optimize the process, etc.
- kragen 1y ago
  It sounds like you agree with me?
  - alganet 1y ago
    The problem is that you used vague sophist dialogue that could turn either way. You could say that T G A C are the designed parts, or any kind of bullshit honestly. It's bad communication. You need to follow up the vague analogies with real examples to make a message stick. If you don't, people have no idea what you are saying.
    - kragen 1y ago
      I can assure you that both my leg and desk lamps are perfectly real examples. There is a common kind of desk lamp that is even fairly mechanically similar to a human leg, with a knee , tension springs, and a ball-and-socket joint to permit free repositioning in multiple degrees of freedom, and about the same size. But the different design processes involved have resulted in very different designs, and a major reason for that is precisely the use of standardized parts in the desk lamp, but not in my leg, which results precisely from the kind of specialization we have been talking about. I don't see how much less vague I could have been. Are you being sarcastic?
      - MRtecno98 1y ago
        A human leg isn't designed to be repaired from the outside, it doesn't need replacement parts, it doesn't need external maintenance. It's designed around the maintenance and repair procedures of the human body which are able to fix it in situ and produce new parts on the fly. That allows it to have more freedom of design than a mechanical part that needs to be made from standardized parts in order to be serviced and manufactured. The limitation is not cognitive, it's a matter of efficiency. We could, if we wanted to, make a lamp with all custom parts with the maximum efficiency possible in the design, but those efficiency gains would be at the cost of extremely difficult manufacturing. It's a tradeoff that the human body can make because it needs to produce only one (or two) legs, while us humans mass manufacture the stuff we make.

haveyoucinsdrd 1y ago

Look at the HN committee…community… perfecting the semantic design of reality. All I see in the words is algebra where concrete terms authors use that refer to others, are variables that could sometimes be set to you.