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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

cacm.acm.org

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Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#91

Post by depressedpanda »

karmakaze wrote: post #20
glandium wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, macOS is the only OS to come with this sort of things out of the box (and that is supposed to work consistently across all applications; good luck with that on Linux). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(macOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript

That is what I had in mind as I wrote it. Sad that many macOS apps now are built with Electron, or we simply use web browsers to access public or internal apps.

Using web browsers to access apps is actually a boon in this regard: the whole UI is exposed via the DOM, and you can use JavaScript to interact with it for macros -- and it's cross platform as it works on any OS that can run a web browser!

In contrast Automator/AppleScript only works on macOS afaict.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

delusional wrote: post #88
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

>I helped a lady on Friday at a midsized bank whose job it was to take a set of dates in an Excel file, search each one individually into an internal search tool, then Ctrl+f the result report and verify that every code listed in the original document exists in the report. I happen to work in a midsized bank, and we have TONS of these sorts of manual processes. My favorite unintuitive fact is that 90% of them turn ou…

[deleted]

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

eru wrote: post #77
bee_rider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Look at all the other classes people are already sitting through for high school and not learning anything either. What makes you think this one would be any different? Already around the world high schools all have something highfalutin like 'teaching critical thinking' in their curriculum.

> What makes you think this one would be any different?

Because unlike almost all other classes, that one would be immediately beneficial in daily life, in a direct and apparent way.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#94

Post by auggierose »

asdff wrote: post #70
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not disagreeing with your point in general, but: Not everyone can become an architect or water systems engineer at 50, after having worked a "general assistant" type office job for many years. I think that (and its consequences) might be the biggest short term societal risk of automation in an aging society. How would you solve this problem?

Why can't you become these things at 50? Considering you can become them at 23, having worked perhaps in fast food for a few years prior?

Good question! Wait until you are 50, maybe you can answer it then ;-)

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#95

Post by danielbln »

bloak wrote: post #84
makeitdouble wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's many situations where manually dealing with 100+ records is a decent tradeoff. I feel people in our field overestimate the actual complexity of many dumb looking tasks. From your bank employee example, it looks like your solution would be to open the bank's internal tool to her excel instance, have it somewhat find the right records and inject the right value, while checking the listed codes. That looks like…

I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time without warning. A fair amount of skill and effort is required. (There is skill involved in writing the script so that it is maintainable and not too fragile but still detects when something has gone wrong.) If the script is doing a task that has to be completed…

Sounds like a good usecase for an LLM.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

bee_rider wrote: post #11
cratermoon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps some folks here are too young to remember the Pentium FDIV bug[1], but it's not complete BS to distrust the calculations. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

I’m sure FDIV-like bugs are absolutely eclipsed by typos and misclicks from doing things manually.

Yeah, but typos and misclicks don't scale. What was that saying? "To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

tuatoru wrote: post #32
radlad wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but I'm not sure everyone has the inclination to become a programmer. And the whole thread was about how computers should work for everyone, including this lady whose job could be automated. Which begs the question: do most people actually want general purpose computing? Or does the average human prefer "apps"?

Who said anything about her becoming a programmer? An interior decorator, or a gardener, or a nurse aide, or a yoga instructor, or a nail technician: they all add more to human welfare than this task. If she wants to become an architect, or a water system engineer, more power to her!

Whatever you list here, she'll be competing for an entry-level position with much younger people, who have more time, more energy, lower expenses and no obligations.

The older one is, the more time one spent in one line of work before being forced to find something else to do, the harder it hits. So sure, maybe you can switch to landscaping in your 50s, but that also means you and your family suddenly being kicked down one or two economic classes.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#98

Post by tjoff »

blueblimp wrote: post #57

I question the article's framing of CPUs as "universal" and GPUs as "specialized". In theory, they can both do any computation, so they differ only in their performance characteristics, and the deep learning revolution has shown that there is wide range of practical workloads that is non-viable on CPUs. The reason OpenAI runs GPT-4 on GPUs isn't that it's faster than running it on CPUs--they do it because they _can't…

> [...] differ only in their performance characteristics [...]

... but that is exactly why CPUs are considered "universal" and GPUs as "specialized".

The whole concept of specialized hardware is to do fewer things more efficient, and in tons of applications that means the problem suddenly becomes feasible. That has always been the case. Not sure what the deep learning revolution has shown in regards to this.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#99

Post by ffgjgf1 »

asdff wrote: post #66
userbinator wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this? To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?

She will not be unemployed in this situation, nor will her peers in similar situations. Available labor is always gobbled up and not left idle for long. Case in point: we've obviated jobs like the horseshoe maker and the stable boy and yet unemployment rate today at 3.8% or so is half of what it was in the 1900s when we had all these horse and stable jobs.

You have to also take into account income not just the unemployment rate. Growth has been close to non-existent if not negative over the last 40-50 years or so if earn below the median.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology (2021)

#100

Post by oytis »

bee_rider wrote: post #13
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

I understand this is ACM, but I would say the decline has strictly been a failure of software . Specifically, corporate IT's failure to deliver general purpose development tools usable by anyone in a company to make computers do work for them (aka programming). There's still a ton of general value that could be delivered by general purpose processors/computers. But instead, most non-programmers live in a Kafkaesque r…

It would be nice if there was a general expectation by now that people would have a sort of “intro to scripting” type class in high school. Not everyone has to be a programmer, in the same way not everyone needs to be an author, but everybody ought to be able to write a memo, email, or shopping list.

Teaching people a scripting language when the language has been already chosen for them, platform has been prepared, data preformatted etc. might be easy - a non-trivial share of my classmates couldn't comprehend a for loop though.

To have real transferrable programming skill - I am not talking about one that will get you a software engineering job, just basic problem solving - you need to know an awful lot about how computers work. Otherwise you'll quickly get overwhelmed by errors you can't comprehend at all stages , not being able to get data in right format, not knowing what tools are suitable for what problems etc.

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