Month: September 2022

LIMITS OF HUMAN COMPREHENSION. "Does anyone still really believe that all computer systems they use today are perfectly comprehensible to the humans who work on them?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

JERRY RIGGED CODE. "Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a working whole. It would be like taking apart a brand-new 747 and discovering that the fuel line is held in place by a coat-hanger and the landing gear is attached with duct tape.”  (Ben Cherry). https://lnkd.in/dKSjpup View in LinkedIn

HUGE AND MESSY. "Poorly defined criteria are already the bane of any programmer's existence. Does anyone in the world, outside of a few aerospace projects, have a 100% consistent and unambiguous specification to work from? A Boeing 787 has around 10 million lines of code. A modern car, around 100 million. Do you think anyone at Ford understand all 100 million lines? Do you think they have complete specifications for all that code?" https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

THE GIST. "There is a difference between 100 million lines of code that no one person understands... and 10 lines of code no one can understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF HUMAN SMARTS. -- "it is the fundamental tenet of science that nothing is impossible to understand."" "-- "That's nonsense. It's a fervent hope that nothing is impossible to understand, we have no choice but to operate as if this were true, but it's a fact that human intelligence has finite limits. I'm a computer scientist: those limits are a gating factor in this industry." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIVE THINKING. "Our finite intelligence requires human engineers to use a divide and conquer approach to problem solving, where we break down problems into smaller problems that we can understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

SPAGHETTI CODE. "In software, we call code that has too many interconnections "spaghetti code", and it's notorious for quickly exceeding the ability for humans to reason about it." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

NEURAL NETWORKS. "We have to aggressively avoid interconnections and side effects (this is taken to an extreme in functional programming, where no side effects are allowed). We also struggle with parallel programming, such that very few people actually know how to do it well. Nature doesn't give a shit about these limitations. The brain is a massively parallel pile of spaghetti code." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

DERIVATIVE KNOWLEDGE. "A scientist let a computer program a chip, using natural selection. The outcome was an extremely efficient chip, the inner workings of which were extremely difficult to understand." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

DR THOMPSON'S OFFSPRING. "Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn