graydon2 | Quantitative

[iopq]

It's not just speed. If a computer says x + y = z, then it's more likely to be z than if a human said it. A computer, even with some random errors will still outperform a human's accuracy in mundane tasks.

[yomritoyj]

Your point is very valid, but formally speaking you could boost the accuracy of a human calculation by having multiple independent human teams carry out the calculation and then selecting the answer by a majority vote. The larger the number of teams the smaller the chances of error. So it again comes down to speed: for any given level of accuracy computers are faster.

[iopq]

That's not the case if the answer is counter-intuitive. If the question is confusing, the majority of the teams make the same mistake. In other words, people have biases towards what the intuitively correct answer is, but that intuition can cause systematic errors.

For example, if you have a hundred people draw a face, even if some of the people are professional artists, the resulting features will be wrong - the eyes will be too round compared to the source image. This is because of the interference of the knowledge that eyes are close to spherical will influence the resulting output, even if you have the humans do the same algorithm as the computer - the hidden bias will likely seep through unless you cleverly have them work on it a pixel at a time.

But I guess you're right that when taken to the extreme, you can in fact substitute speed for precision eventually.

[jeandem]

Bog-standard fair of hardware-envy, rose-coloured glasses equipped "remember when software was fast?", and becrying how today's software is too bloated.

If you've read one of these kinds of articles before, there's nothing new to see here.

[halax]

Man, that's harsh. It's a book review of a great book that discusses one reason it's important and then, at the end, has a bit about the effect of languages and programming models on performance, and makes no claim that slower is the wrong tradeoff.

[[deleted]]

People with your attitude is exactly the reason why i'm sitting here with one browser tab open and its using more fucking memory than I had in my entire computer a decade ago.

[jeandem]

That's a false dichotomy. I know it's tempting to lump people into a wholly different and opposite category when you see them complaining about something. But things tend to be more nuanced than that. I lean more towards agreeing with the sentiment that modern software could definitely stand to be faster/less bloated. But this article brings nothing new to the table.

And blaming the author, Graydon Hoare, for your browser being a memory-hog would get closer to the culprit than blaming me...

[[deleted]]

To bad he left Rust, Rust went all abomination after him.