You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL

What was the Twitter thread/HN thread referenced about using "boring" approaches to solving problems?

I like to think I'm not too nitpicky about fonts, but that st ligature is incredibly distracting.

It's the second article I've seen here that uses it over the last few days, but I'm not sure if it's the same site or not.

Maybe I'm niave, but are there really people who want to hop on the AI bandwagon just to do mundane lookups like this?

When I worked with machine learning many years ago, we learned that it was no better than the heuristics already in place. The thing is, it's much easier to diagnose a well written and understood heuristic than a machine learning model.

Nice post,

Here's a different way to think about the situation with current AI/deep-learning; if the current upsurge of methodologies was getting close to general AI, it would be getting closer and closer to a hammer that really did let you treat everything as a nail. IE, it would be general purpose.

But I think I can say we're not seeing that even though deep learning seems to be continually expanding the domains that it can operate on. How is that? This Open AI is very eye-opening; "We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period)." Essentially, as a rather brute-force-y method, we have shown we can expand deep learning's impact to a larger and large domain but not at all in the fashion of human learning tricks (where the new isn't that much harder than the old trick).

Maybe, in this process, a better algorithm that adjusts to new situations without increased costs will surface. But until then it seems new and old methods will need to coexist.

https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/?

But you don't gain ML/AI know-how by doing SQL, nor you discover previously unknown potential about your product buy sticking to your usual toolset.

Not that I necessarily disagree with the OP but I find it deeply uninspirational.

What's the difference between using ML/AI for problems traditionally solved by some other tool and using any other tool to solve the same problem unconventionally? Both can be "hacking". I guess my issue with this is the word "need", don't do what you need to do but what you want to do if you are looking for inspiration. After all, mankind never needed to leave the garden of Eden but left it anyway.