On Wednesday, 25 December 2024 at 11:24:00 UTC, Dom DiSc wrote:
On Wednesday, 25 December 2024 at 01:45:18 UTC, Jo Blow wrote:
I think the real problem is that we've been building on
systems that were build on very primitive ideas and so it's a
constantly piling on of ad-hoc changes that may or may not
evolve into something more and then a constant need to
maintain them.
Yes. That's how evolution works.
There is nothing in evolution that says it has to proceed at a
high error rate. Many creatures have barely evolved over millions
of years.
The faster one proceeds the more errors will be made. That is
just a fact.
Evolution is differential geometry at work. All dynamical systems
and processes(such as AI training, simulations, etc) evolve and
their error is controlled by a "step size" and the larger the
step size the worse the results.
Humans seem to have a desire to get things done as fast as
possible and that produces far more errors than necessary.
So I don't agree with your implication evolution necessarily is
highly error prone. In fact, if that was the case biology would
just be nothing but chaos by now.
Ideally if, say, we could just create a new system from the
ground up(including hardware) with all the "learned lessons"
we would get systems that would be far more efficient and
"complex". It is because we can, as a species, handle the
complexity more. But what we really have is having to work
with essentially a primitive system with many layers upon
layers of improvements to give it the features and
expressiveness we really want from realizing there are better
ways.
But I think this is unavoidable.
Take a look at the human genom, it contains everything from
frogs and fish to apes until the "higher" functions like
consciousness are build upon them. Evolution never invents
everything new from scratch but only applies small changes and
test if they survive.
You clearly understand that the more one works to do it right the
more likely they will get it right and that it will take longer?
Capitalism accelerates the process and this leads to far more
errors than it would otherwise.
Surely you know that if you rush something that you are more
likely to make errors? So it is not a question of unavoidable. It
is a question of abiding by correct principles that are aligned
with how the universe works. Going against those principles is
what makes it "unavoidable".
The issue is that the cost to truly start fresh is too much to
go back and "do things right" with the lessons learned. So we
are stuck with the flaws of the past that has become part of
our "DNA". [This is true of all things because it is evolution
at work]
It's not only the cost to start new from scratch, it's the
problem that everything has to become battle-tested again,
which takes ages.
This is why things like printf are still in use.
No, it doesn't have to become battle-tested again. You are
assuming there is no memory in the system. Humans learn from
their mistakes.
printf is in use because it works and there is no real need to do
anything else that would do the same thing.
When you first wrote a hello world program and made mistakes are
you saying that if you now go and write one you will make just as
many mistakes?
Many more people know how to program than ever before and that
means that those outliers who are exceptional have learned much
more deeply. All this moves the experiential level towards a
direction that is less error prone.
30 years ago most entry level programmers were terrible. Because
of evolution current entry level programmers are typically the
equivalent of a seasoned programmer 30 years ago. Many kids now
days are programming when most kids back then didn't even know
what a computer was.
The bugs and design issues were due to their ignorance and
"having to learn on the job" while also having limited knowledge.
It's a completely different scenario today.
What is being done is that we are being anchored to the lowest
common denominator of the past because there is no real incentive
or desire to put in the world. People are lazy. Same thing
happened to Rome and it crashed and burned. Just like you people
will say "Why reinvent the wheel". The reason is because it can
be rebuilt with hindsight and one see the problem in a different
light and fight a better solution that is more efficient.
With your logic one could say "Why invent computers, we have the
abacus and it works great for our purposes".
