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We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

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Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#41

Post by oceanplexian »

wredue wrote: post #28
mindvirus wrote: post #3

Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can get them way up. So much of the incentive structure in software companies is to ship new features. Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a career dead end for software engineers and managers. No wonder so much stuff is broken and slow. Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.

Dude on HN was describing the other day how they’re moving to use an AI to generate a list of cars with specific features in their inventory and how this was a great part of the AI future. But as we see frequently even on the most sophisticated AIs, they get shit wrong… a lot. So this company decided to replace an actually working, guaranteed to produce proper results filtering system with a guaranteed to not produce…

This is the real “safety” problem with AI. Since it’s so good at generating convincingly wrong answers, eventually we are going to build it into all sorts of mission critical systems and and everything from finance to healthcare will start to accumulate sophisticated, non deterministic failures over time. Like a trojan horse or a perhaps a civilization-level virus.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#42

Post by q845712 »

mindvirus wrote: post #3

Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can get them way up. So much of the incentive structure in software companies is to ship new features. Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a career dead end for software engineers and managers. No wonder so much stuff is broken and slow. Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.

I'm not sure it's exactly "what customers want" so much as it is the sweet-spot or intersection of the two curves: "what customers want" with "how much cost and risk owners and managers are willing to put in up front"

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#44

Post by [deleted] »

wredue wrote: post #28
mindvirus wrote: post #3

Those are rookie numbers. With a little Kubernetes, we can get them way up. So much of the incentive structure in software companies is to ship new features. Maintaining existing ones or fixing bugs is a career dead end for software engineers and managers. No wonder so much stuff is broken and slow. Call me cynical, but from a dollars point of view this seems to be what customers want.

Dude on HN was describing the other day how they’re moving to use an AI to generate a list of cars with specific features in their inventory and how this was a great part of the AI future. But as we see frequently even on the most sophisticated AIs, they get shit wrong… a lot. So this company decided to replace an actually working, guaranteed to produce proper results filtering system with a guaranteed to not produce…

[deleted]

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#46

Post by mdavidn »

oceanplexian wrote: post #41
wredue wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude on HN was describing the other day how they’re moving to use an AI to generate a list of cars with specific features in their inventory and how this was a great part of the AI future. But as we see frequently even on the most sophisticated AIs, they get shit wrong… a lot. So this company decided to replace an actually working, guaranteed to produce proper results filtering system with a guaranteed to not produce…

This is the real “safety” problem with AI. Since it’s so good at generating convincingly wrong answers, eventually we are going to build it into all sorts of mission critical systems and and everything from finance to healthcare will start to accumulate sophisticated, non deterministic failures over time. Like a trojan horse or a perhaps a civilization-level virus.

It's not that dissimilar to the sophisticated, non-deterministic failures already introduce over time by humans.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#47

Post by im_down_w_otp »

sempron64 wrote: post #31
IshKebab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have to really fight people when I try to write robust software. "Why are you writing a proper parser when a hacky regex that I thought about for 2 seconds worked the one time I tested it? You're wasting time." They don't understand that I'm not wasting time, I'm just choosing to spend a little bit of time earlier, because I don't like spending a lot of time later when debugging why everything broke.

The problem with a careful but non-methodical approach is that it requires the programmer to correctly determine the stability value of their design. We often overestimate the importance of architecture on stability, or worse, architect something that is harder to maintain than the naive solution. With buggy ship-it-now software you have a known bounded risk - bugs will occur in some cases but the software will ship…

The specific case of building a proper parser doesn't take that much longer if you know what you're doing, and it also enables lots of wonderful quality of life features for end users through additional opportunities for automation and contextualization that can be surfaced.

Though, given the constant incentive to never learn how to write a proper parser does mean that practically nobody knows how to do it, and so it will always look & feel like an unbounded science project, and thus rarely done.

Infinitely recursive MVP'ing is a race to the bottom.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#48

Post by pizza »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #14

Then again how much time do computers save? Washing machines and fridges freed up a ton of time for people. Maybe computers as well, then again maybe they just entertain. My personal anecdata, I was recently investigating some page load timeouts for my client and this lead me down a rabbit hole which in the end meant moving a WHERE clause from outer query to an inner one and sped up the query 100k times. Based on slo…

I have to say ChatGPT has turned a lot of micro-obstacles into problems that only last a couple of seconds. Stuff like "what's the command to turn a folder of pngs into a video" I can Just Do in seconds with a zsh alias set up to query it from the terminal.

Then there's stuff like "I don't understand this error message, give me pointers?" and it can be quite useful in that regard too. I still validate but I guess long term I can stay in flow way more consistently.

The biggest objection I hear to chatgpt as an assistant is that "you can't know if it gives you a truthful statement." That's true but it's also nowhere near a show-stopper. Just requires critical thinking in each scenario. People who don't use it have a tendency towards black-and-white thinking about its utility. I find that people who are skeptical of it initially who observe my workflow tend to 'get' what it's really useful for, after a short while.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#49

Post by samsquire »

WinLychee wrote: post #35
samsquire wrote: post #8

Finally, a chance to say what I really think about computers! I feel that the majority of time working with computers is not actually computing numbers (addition, subtraction, multiplication) but LOGISTICS. Logging into systems, Moving data around in memory and between servers, into registers for a function call, to and from a REST API, installing packages, finding dependencies, chaining together library functions.

Rich Hickey actually has spoken about this on numerous occasions! So much of what we really do in programming is move data around, why not have data as first-class citizen in your programming?

Thank you.

I am working on an idea for programming that the primitive is literally moving things around in a grid. In a spreadsheet the formula is hidden behind a cell. And in most programming languages we write instructions and the state is implied - you don't see the state unless the program writes it out. In this design you see the state and all objects at all times. The idea is that the instruction is generated from the movement.

https://replit.com/@Chronological/DynamicTables

Try clicking "100" and move it into the JSON below.

At the moment I've implemented movement and JSON -> table. You can move things between fields in the JSON. You can rewind states of the top grid by clicking the instruction.

The plan is to put operations and API calls on the screen so you can move things into them, and their results shall go back into the grid.

Re: We are wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems, says study

#50

Post by ElectricalUnion »

datavirtue wrote: post #22

Development teams, that include users, know about the issues. In the face of deadlines and budgets the team keeps opting to let little niggles slip in because they aren't a big enough deal to justify schedule disruptions or using developer time. All these little quirks add up to a shit UX. The users filed the bug and the devs recorded the story, but management shot it down. Incentives.

> All these little quirks add up to a shit UX.

Not only that, after a while those UX warts are now embedded as part of someone's workflow and can't be changed.

as usual, elevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/

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