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

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

#161

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #133

globalreset wrote: post #9

Isn't that expected and natural? As performance of a system is being optimized, the relative size of un-optimizable parts goes up. Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m.

> Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m. Huh? Have ever actually paid a bill without using a computer? It doesn't work like you describe at all (unless you live in a really rural area or you're deliberately trying to make it difficult for yours…

It depends on which country you're in.

In some countries bills need to be paid at any bank or at the post office, you can't mail a check. The bill basically has a bar code that that the bank scans, and you pay in cash. (Or you can scan it at your bank's ATM and deduct it from your account).

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

#162

Post by hooverd » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #150

Forgeties79 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an excellent way of concisely expressing a major fallacy I see whenever I talk about AI/modeling/etc. (I.e. “it isn’t racist it’s just numbers” and other nonsensical takes). I’m borrowing this language for the future.

Meanwhile, human judges, juries, parole boards, etc are racist as hell and have no update algorithm...

That's a hopefully fixable organization problem. I think the closest we should let AI get to judicial decisions is suggested ranges. There still needs to be a person a decision traces back to, who's not just passing through what the computer says.

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

#163

Post by bdowling » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

brightlancer wrote: post #137

jrockway wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see. People are already involved in business-critical processes, and they have a far-from-100% success rate. You can see this with self-driving cars; 0.00001% of the time, they decide to swerve into oncoming traffic for no reason. But they can't get drunk! So whether or not that's a win is something that only time can tell. (People will be outraged, because no person would ever do what the A…

> People will be outraged, because no person would ever do what the AI did, but _what matters are the numbers in aggregate._ That is an opinion, not objective fact. If Grandma June accidentally hits the accelerator, jumps the curb and kills a kindergartener, we can throw her in prison. She is held accountable for her actions. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/01/25/Woman-83-gets-3-y... If Grandma June is sitting i…

That is a strange example, because usually we don’t put people in prison for accidents unless there is specific type of gross negligence (e.g., drunk driving) or malicious disregard for life and safety.

> Anderson decided to plead guilty to vehicular homicide because she did not want the family of Karla Campos to endure a trial.

Maybe the woman knew that it would be revealed that she was drunk or had been told that she didn’t have the capability any more to drive safely, but she did it anyway. Without knowing all the facts, pleading guilty for an accident seems like a bizarre choice.

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

#164

Post by tyingq » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

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.

Or, more mundanely, automated customer support systems that just cannot handle lots of edge cases. And they'll have shut off all the "escalate to a human" paths since most of the mainstream paths work ok-ish.

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

#165

Post by kmoser » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:08 PM UTC

> "Part of the solution may be to shield us from knowing that the computer is working to solve a problem. In reality, there is no reason why we need to look at an incomprehensible box with commands or a frozen computer. The computer could easily solve the problems without displaying this, while it provided a back-up version of the system for us, so that we could continue to work with our tasks undisturbed," says Kasper Hornbæk

Says the researcher who has no practical experience in development. While it's true that some OSes (I'm looking at you, Windows) and applications have less than stellar UIs, getting the entire stack (including hardware) to cooperate on a consistent basis is exceedingly difficult without NASA-level engineering. Given how many parts of a computer (again, both hardware and software) are churned out with an eye more towards profit than reliability, it's a miracle things work as well as they do.

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

#166

Post by febusravenga » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

tester756 wrote: post #158

narag wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically everything a few times That's a very good idea. Really. In tirannies there's only one thing of each. When that thing breaks, you're sorely out of luck. People associate diversity with justice. But diversity is in fact your plan B, or C...

I'm not saying that this is bad, just not so efficient.

diversity and redundancy are inefficient by their own nature

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

#167

Post by happymellon » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

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.

Fucking hell, I've just blown another day because I'm dealing with over engineered crap.

We are on AWS, and a Postgres database that is primarily in one region, and read only in a second? That should be Aurora, and 15 lines of CloudFormation/CDK/whatever.

But that's too easy and reliable, who would need an SRE and an architect then? Instead we have multiple RDS instances, and a regularly failing PG Logical installation which requires an engineer constantly checking in on it because it silently fails and you only find out when storage starts burning out fast.

There is no feedback loop to let leadership know that they are spending hundreds of thousands over the odds for an unreliable system, and architects who seem to fail to admit someone made a misjudged call a couple of years ago.

I don't know what the solution is, but currently it's just some shitty old boys club.

Yes, they also picked Kubernetes but decided to install their own instance on AWS. Why the hell are we in a managed eco system and trying to build it in the worst way possible? Everything crashes on a regular basis.

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

#168

Post by rmah » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

"It's incredible that the figure is so high"... lol, 20% seems incredibly low to me. The "study"'s authors must have a really low quality bar for what a malfunction or delay is.

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

#169

Post by frakt0x90 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

tivert wrote: post #133

globalreset wrote: post #9

Isn't that expected and natural? As performance of a system is being optimized, the relative size of un-optimizable parts goes up. Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m.

> Sure, your banking app crashes sometimes and annoys you. How about you delete it and instead take a bus to a postal office to pay your bills this way - no annoying apps involved, it will just take 1h instead of 1m. Huh? Have ever actually paid a bill without using a computer? It doesn't work like you describe at all (unless you live in a really rural area or you're deliberately trying to make it difficult for yours…

I live in the suburbs of a large city in the US and I have to physically go to the post office whenever I mail something. My neighborhood has a weird matrix of mailboxes with no way to indicate to the postman that he needs to take something. So I have to drive to a post office every time I want to send mail. We even tried leaving a note in the box and that did not work. It doesn't take an hour but probably 20 minutes round trip.

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

#170

Post by Etheryte » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #105

figassis wrote: post #81

I know this will get some downvotes, but I'm the IT person in my close family. Used to get calls all the time to fix slow laptops, CD drives not working, keyboard not working, system not booting, popups everywhere, apps crashing, you name it. Each would take insane amounts of time to troubleshoot. And then sometimes their machines just needed to be upgraded because they were running the new office, and the new skype…

> they just wanted a quick fix, not spend $$$. > Then I bought macs for everyone I bet you would've gotten similar results if you spent the same amount of money on Windows computers. For example, my dad is using an 8 year old Windows computer that he got second hand. It works absolutely fine because it wasn't underspecced at the time it was produced. People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware make…

The question in my opinion is not really about specs — no matter how much you spend on your hardware, you can't, pardon my French, take the shitbox out of Windows. Device manager and registry still being a thing, reboots to install software, ads in the start menu, etc are a good example of how Windows is not a system for human users. It's amazing how much backwards compatibility they've offered over the decades, yes, but it's also got them holding a lot of smelly baggage.