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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

#251

Post by Miraste »

jeroenhd wrote: post #135
deathanatos wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My MBP is currently running at ~800 MHz; it will be until about October or November, when I feel the coming chill of winter upon my skin. macOS thermally throttles the chip down, even if the chip is not actually that hot: the CPU is only ~65℃. But the surface temp on the keyboard is 109℉. All I can guess is that even though there's plenty of thermal headroom at the chip, you'd roast the user's hands if you attempted…

Macbooks had absolutely atrocious performance once the CPU heated up, masked by turboing extremely quickly to make short bursts of performance feel responsive. This was made worse by Apple's absolutely terrible cooling design. Their user-hostile form-over-function designs are also typically Apple. They made great devices for quick demos, but terrible professional workstations. I actually suspect Apple sabotaged their…

Intel deserves a lot of blame for the last few x86 MacBooks too. The TDPs on those i9s are completely imaginary. Out to lunch. If one were to, say, design a cooling system based on the specs and then receive a production sample that ran twice as hot at half the speed, one would have to do things like downclock it below a gigahertz to avoid burning the user's hands off. That entire generation of Intel chips was a trash fire that demanded a whole car radiator to stay cool just to provide two hours of battery life if you were lucky.

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

#252

Post by otter-in-a-suit »

WinLychee wrote: post #207
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what OOP is? Methods contain code, objects contain code and data, and invocations of code are primarily in reference to data.

Well, in Clojure at least, data is a generic thing you structure your program around, and is not hidden inside a class coupled to behavior. This is safely enabled by immutable values as a default. The standard library and ecosystem consists of generic functions operating on that immutable data. This is very liberating as you do not run into a combinatorial explosion of incompatible types that need to be marshaled to…

I think you’re describing FP in general here.

I, too, am a fan, especially in data intense applications, where a clear / decoupled data model and aggressive compiler solve many headaches.

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

#253

Post by polyterative »

The problem is that we think that developers make software to be useful, the truth is that developers make software because their companies need to make money. It was really hard to accept this as a developer when I started to do this as paid job

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

#254

Post by salawat »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #115
hooverd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the great part about AI, because computers don't make mistakes, you can launder whatever biases you want through an objective and rational computer.

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.

Look up the term of art "mathwashing".

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

#255

Post by makz »

mrweasel wrote: post #66
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.

Your thinking reminds me of the work of a friend of mine. He's an AWS consultant and builds thing like AWS thinks you should. Some of the things he comes up with, chaining services together, with a sprinkle of lambda functions, it's Rube Goldberg machines all the way down. A user logs in to a javascript app, hosted in an S3 bucket, authentication is handled by Cognito, the user gets a upload form, once their files is…

Modern civilisation is just a giant Rube Goldberg machine made of smaller Rube Goldberg machines which in turn…

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

#256

Post by yodelshady »

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've spent the last two days working with (not-Kubernetes) virtualisation software that has serious, workflow-breaking bugs from... uploading and removing regular files, of a format it expects. In some random-aaS frontend I could expect that, but this is systems stuff.

:(.

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

#257

Post by yodelshady »

hooverd wrote: post #162
sdenton4 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There should absolutely be a human where the buck stops. But... "fixing an organisation" involves calling people racist. Then screwing their careers. That should carry a heavy emotional burden. It should involve anger and pushback.

"Some weights in an algorithm are wrong" seems a much less fraught problem.

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

#258

Post by CatWChainsaw »

TheCapn wrote: post #89
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…

>Then again how much time do computers save? This is honestly a good question to ask at times. I remember back when I was trying to get into weight lifting. I was searching for apps and tools that would help me track milestones and progress, setting up routines and all that. I remember going through some options, then making a spreadsheet, and refining the spreadsheet and just hating the whole process. So then I open…

Keep It Simple Stupid seems to have been forgotten with everyone salivating for "cutting edge technology".

It's called cutting edge because when you use it you bleed.

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

#259

Post by the_overseer »

figassis wrote: post #241
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would not. I never bought laptops under $1000. I know what to buy and I'd almost always customize specs for the person that needed it (spend more on ram, graphics, cpu, cooling for my architect sibling). Still, 3 year expiration. Starts with fragmentation (you end up having to defrag more and more frequently), every app you install makes the system less stable (messes up the registry, add/removes some random and cr…

Defrag in 2023? On a SSD? Really?

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

#260

Post by jeroenhd »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #129
jeroenhd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> People underestimate the difference investing in good hardware makes. Yes, but ... > Getting mad at a "broken" computer is easier than admitting you messed up and made a terrible investment. Mid take. Windows still sucks on $1200 hardware, just faster. You still get the same crappy UI that shuffles around every couple of updates just because, dangerous legacy stuff like ActiveX, SMB1, and IE lurking just beneath th…

I agree that Windows sucks. I also think it sucks less than macOS, but Microsoft is working hard to change that. Linux sucks less in some ways but sucks a lot more in many others.

None of the operating systems seem to want to support you as the user anymore, they're all part of a ploy to buy more hardware, rent more software, and move everything to some kind of cloud solution you'll never be able to get rid of.

However, ActiveX, SMB1, and IE11 haven't been an issue since Windows 11, and you need to go out of your way to find them in Windows 10. IE has been dead for over a year. Even before that, Microsoft received widespread criticism when they hid IE11 by default, because users didn't want to change away from IE for some godforsaken reason.

The Windows kernel is a software engineering marvel and Windows has become incredibly stable on modern hardware. The shell on top of it has become a victim of terrible enshittification that started in Windows 8, or maybe 10.

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