Erik I

I'm at the train.

Have had two nice weeks off, went to visit the west coast of Norway with the familiy for the first time in a while.

I also managed to finish 3 audio books on Audible. One weird observation, audio books seems to keep me more awake and alert while driving than music or even talking do.

I'm feeling ready for work, not so much for the commute, it is now

• bus-train-bus-train-walk on my way to work and
  
• walk-train-long bus ride-long walk on my way home from work

This year however it has been a bit less chaotic than it used to be, at least this had been my experience.

As far as I'm aware this will be going on every summer the next few years so I'm wondering if it would make sense to get a motorbike at some point :–)

#commute #holiday

... and yes, I am a programmer

I think there are a number of reasons why we think the code we are maintaining is often so crazy, and I’m trying to summarize it for a blog post, but for now:

• survivorship bias: a number of the teams that kept arguing about the perfect way to solve the problem never shipped, meaning no one needs to maintain their almost perfect code. The code that survived is the code that was shipped in time -for some definition of “in time”.

• the code that was actually flawless of course doesn’t have to be maintained.

• I think we programmers are way to full of ourselves when it comes to judging other peoples work. We can nitpick about code lines or code style in code that has run more or less flawlessly in distributed systems for years or even decades, instead of seeing the beauty of someone being able to achieve that with 80ies technology.

Filed under #programming and #perfectionism

Inquirer writes:

If you scan a banana on the self-checkout tills, it requires the approval of a shop assistant. So I input them as carrots to save time and money. And today, in my boldest move yet, I didn't even pretend they were carrots. I scanned the rest of my shopping, paid for it, then simply picked up the banana and left the store.

It is funny how far companies go to incentivize people to do the wrong thing.

Filed under #observations

So this got discussed on HN. The title is “AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking”.

The results are interesting enough but the write up and discussion is what prompted me to write about it.

Maybe I’ve just been somewhat daft when it comes to Artificial Intelligence; I studied Computer Systems Administration, not Computer Science, so AI wasn’t part of my curriculum – and while I can enjoy good Sci Fi – I haven’t been very interested in the technical implementations of AI.

However – as presented – I think the way the article presents it it is more or less at the level where you could follow up with calling a special chiseled rock for AI. To continue on someone’s example, say you created a coin sorter from a rock for example:

Blimey, this is really stretching the definition of AI, surely? It’s a piece of glass that has been designed by a lot of trial and error to perform one specific task. It sounds like humans were analysing the fitness and making the modifications. I wouldn’t call it “unpowered AI” any more than I’d call a coin sorter that.

silveroriole, 2019-07-13

to which atoav replies

Because it uses glas as a substrate and light as a information carrier? Most of what we call “AI” today also uses prelearned weights for their neural networks and in many use cases these weights are not touched after deployment. I don’t see why a neural network encoded in glas should not be an AI while the same neural network on a computer is one — either you have to call both AI or neither.

atoav, 2019-07-13

At this point I realized I agree with atoav that we either have to call this an AI or stop calling other systems AI, and of those alternatives, at least for now I’ll choose the one that means I won’t end up having to call a block of rock or a slab of glass with no moving parts for an AI, meaning I think a stand alone feed forward neural network cannot be an AI.

Recurrent neural networks however might cut it for me, again for now, and, I guess: so might about anything containing enough memory and feedback loops, if implemented correctly.

If you read the rest of the discussion here and the linked article you might find some interesting thoughts but you might also like me come to the conclusion that there’s more buzzword abuse than you’d thought before.

Warning: the rest of this post is more or less a collection of small rants.

1. I should point out that while I think the word AI is abused we might not be far away from some sort of seriously useful and/or dangerous implementation.

2. For now however I see mostly artificial stupidity. Even the devil learns from his mistakes the saying goes, Google however didn’t for 12 years many times I clicked I wasn’t interested.

3. If someone still thinks the “AI” mentioned in the article is an AI I have a self driving car concept to sell, carved from pure rock, to be adapted to any modern car by just strapping it to the top of the existing accelerator. Same goes for my first foray into finance AI: a physical neural network that sorts coins based on value by inferring value from size.

4. If you just want to throw around fancy words, xkcd has some good ideas:

source: https://m.xkcd.com/2173/

Comments welcome on my mastodon account or write your own post, prove me wrong and let me know. Edit: I also posted it to HN, so you can leave a comment there as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432302

Filed under #ai #artificialintelligence #discussion and #hn