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Programming is Terrible

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Re: Programming is Terrible

#71
post #58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you have black box abstractions in things that "have to work"?? And even "has to work" can be relative, as if you can prove that something will work for a p value small enough to guarantee risk of failure is small enough in the next 100 years for a device/system that will at most stay in use for 10 it good enough... And if you're not constrained by power use or computing power, you can also use redundant su…

Yeah 'cause instead of buying a reliable japanese car, you bought an unreliable swarm of american scooters. This probabilistic stuff is academic nonsense

point taken, the "p value" way of talking is confusing when talking to people doing real work and not reading articles, you're right (I was with my mind deep in reading some medical research articles actually so my mind "stuck" on this wording...)

but it's just about: probability of scooter A and B failing at the same time is their probabilities of failure multiplied and for a "swarm" the probability of everything failing at the same time decreases exponentially with the swarm size - eg. the probability of 10 scooters with a 50% each probability of failure failing at the same time is less than 0.01% ...thinking probabilities is what you end up doing even if you do smth like devops and try to do a good job at it when stretching resources thin :)

Re: Programming is Terrible

#72
post #71
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 'cause instead of buying a reliable japanese car, you bought an unreliable swarm of american scooters. This probabilistic stuff is academic nonsense

point taken, the "p value" way of talking is confusing when talking to people doing real work and not reading articles, you're right (I was with my mind deep in reading some medical research articles actually so my mind "stuck" on this wording...) but it's just about: probability of scooter A and B failing at the same time is their probabilities of failure multiplied and for a "swarm" the probability of everything fa…

> eg. the probability of 10 scooters with a 50% each probability of failure failing at the same time is less than 0.01%

And then you do billions of trials per second...

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