Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The end of classical Computer Science is coming

mdwdotla.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#61

Post by RomanPushkin »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #55
uup wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation isn’t for translating literature at the moment. Maybe that’s why you’re feeling it falls short. For conversational vernacular or straightforward instruction, it’s great. I can’t remember the last time I used pork-pie hat in a conversation, for instance. Perhaps you could qualify your initial statement that we can’t translate literature in a way that isn’t ugly. That would be true. But machine tran…

Yes, it is for trivial conversations. I could give you few more examples, technical book - you would say "ah, and it isn't for translating technical books", and so on. And this is the reason why I'm not buying "the end of classical Computer Science". AI doesn't work with text very well (reference to your comment "Machine translation works pretty well" - no, it isn't), and often can't even translate/recognize conversa…

> But look at Stable Diffusion. If you had taken a GAN a few years ago and looked at its generative art potential.

Art is a little bit different, since it's subjective, and artist can say "oh, I just see things this way". Fluctuations in an artwork can be always seen as features, not bugs.

With translations you have to be more precise. The same for Computer Science, you often need to understand nuances to do the precise work.

You're saying "few years", but I've started using auto-translating software at least 15 years ago, maybe even more than that. We had this progress 15 years ago: yes, we were able to auto-translate simple conversations.

It's constantly improving, but at the same time there is no breakthrough, and machine translation still sucks.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#62

Post by uup »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #61
RomanPushkin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is for trivial conversations. I could give you few more examples, technical book - you would say "ah, and it isn't for translating technical books", and so on. And this is the reason why I'm not buying "the end of classical Computer Science". AI doesn't work with text very well (reference to your comment "Machine translation works pretty well" - no, it isn't), and often can't even translate/recognize conversa…

> But look at Stable Diffusion. If you had taken a GAN a few years ago and looked at its generative art potential. Art is a little bit different, since it's subjective, and artist can say "oh, I just see things this way". Fluctuations in an artwork can be always seen as features, not bugs. With translations you have to be more precise. The same for Computer Science, you often need to understand nuances to do the prec…

ML has shown more promise in MT than any classical algorithm. Unless you believe there is a fundamental limitation to ML, or a new frontier on the horizon in classical CS, I don’t see a path for classical CS to hold a candle to ML in the machine translation domain.

Also, I disagree that translations need be precise. I read a collection of short stories recently called the Icarus Gland. I highly recommend it, especially if you can read it in the original language (Russian). The translation was simply comical. Probably it mostly translated via MT. Yet, it was an amazing book.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#64

Post by brundolf »

capitalsigma wrote: post #44
brundolf wrote: post #36

I agree with the gist, and I actually just started doing a course on AI today as a result of not wanting to get left behind However, this bit reads as needlessly hyperbolic to me: > The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and them some), ready to be given any task required of the machine.…

Excited for squishy logic to calculate the balance of my PayPal account and enforce GDPR compliance

> calculate the balance of my PayPal account

Yeah, fair. Maybe we'll have to change the level of abstraction to where the neural net determines a math equation, instead of openly translating to and from different numbers?

> enforce GDPR compliance

I actually think this would be an excellent use-case because it's such a sprawling problem (and because law is already "squishy" in this sense, because it has to be, because it's all about the messy real-world). Imagine watchdogs being able to hand companies a neural-net that continuously audits them for compliance, which works across different companies and systems (you'd probably have a human make the final ruling once a company is flagged, but still)

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#66

Post by worthless443 »

palata wrote: post #22

Feels like the typical extrapolation: "Look how fast we've done the 80%! It is only a matter of time until we reach 100%". Except that it never works like that, does it? The further we go, the harder it becomes. It's impressive how fast they went from nothing to almost-fully-autonomous cars, but actually-fully-autonomous cars may never happen, who knows? As a developer, I honestly feel more threatened by the energy c…

I hope people understand that this process is non-linear.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#67

Post by osigurdson »

jmfldn wrote: post #2

This keeps me awake at night I must admit. How do I best future proof my career? I was sceptical about this until I started playing with GPT 3 and has it not only writen code for me, but also "explained" code to me. Sure, it's kind of limited right now, but it can only be a matter of time now before this all radically improves. Maybe I should focus on system design and translating the messy real world into systems. T…

Don't stress. Do what you enjoy.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#68

Post by StanislavPetrov »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #15

When the full car auto-pilot is getting released you said? Oh, I forget about foreign language translation. As a person who speaks multiple languages, we still cannot translate from one language to another so it doesn't look ugly.

>When the full car auto-pilot is getting released you said?

The cold-fusion-powered, fully-automated car.

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#69

Post by huijzer »

As a great example of what "classical" computer science can do, take a look at the driverless metro introduced in Lille in 1983 [1]. Researchers in France have used formal systems to prove system correctness and this shows in the reliability and safety of the metro. I like to think that this is a better way to handle complex problems than to just throw data and algorithms against and hope that it will work correctly for new data.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lille_Metro

Re: The end of classical Computer Science is coming

#70

Post by shakow »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #16
shakow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is making stride in comparatively easy environments, i.e. highways and squared suburbs – when they don't crash into white trucks. Now, what tends to be forgotten is that there AI-average vs. human average is that humans can also drive e.g. in Turin or Paris at rush hour, on mountain roads under the snow or in the Cornwalls roads while under tempest rains. It's not that I believe that self-driving AI will never pro…

> humans can also drive e.g. in Turin or Paris at rush hour, on mountain roads under the snow or in the Cornwalls roads while under tempest rains. I'm not sure the median human driver can do all that.

If you're trying to sell me that all drivers in e.g. European or Asian cities are above average humans, I am not buying it.
Post reply on HN