[HN Gopher] Some things I realized about AI while contemplating ...
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Some things I realized about AI while contemplating slide rule
prices on eBay
Author : ColinWright
Score : 77 points
Date : 2022-09-09 10:42 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (misc-stuff.terraaeon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (misc-stuff.terraaeon.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I remember an HN article about the efficiency of EVs. The numbers
| showed that discounting the battery efficiency, the EV had 100%
| efficiency. This, of course, is absurd and any engineer should
| "gut check" that as wrong.
|
| I was pretty disappointed by the credulous acceptance of that
| nonsense on HN, and the arguments used to rationalize it.
|
| I looked up the author, who turned out to be a ski instructor.
| greesil wrote:
| Yeah.... The HN crowd is composed of a variety of people, and
| there probably are lots that understand but don't post when
| they see obvious nonsense because we don't have the bandwidth.
| I only read the comments because I'm an idiot who hopes there's
| a pearl of insight in here.
| bombcar wrote:
| The comments are usually the place to go because HOPEFULLY
| someone has pointed out the naked emperor. Though more and
| more that can get downvoted.
| tomrod wrote:
| I typically see cynical, political, or wrong information
| downvoted. It would be interesting to see semantic analysis
| of HN votes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As happened to me.
|
| Not that I mind, I don't care about karma. I just found it
| disappointing.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| As happened to 'everybody' at one time.
|
| Contribute -- that's all one can continue to do.
|
| HN is a jewel.
| bombcar wrote:
| Walter _does_ need to contribute more - we have 24
| letters to go!
| tiborsaas wrote:
| > Are we really willing to suffer whatever ill effects may come
| from applying some magical voodoo artificial intelligence to do
| all the work for us?
|
| Yes. Hopefully those will be minor effects and can be corrected
| two more papers down the line.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| This is a pretty low quality, low effort rant of the "back in my
| day" variety. "Engineers nowadays don't know what they are doing
| simply because I say so"
|
| I have many engineer friends. They have no problem understanding
| the math and physics and concepts of things like statics analysis
| and don't use simulation "because they don't understand the
| problem" but because simulations allow you to use more
| complicated, or more unusual structures that classical methods
| simply cannot work with.
|
| Your stupid slide rule and winging cannot compete with the power
| that you get from actually using the math that your older methods
| just approximate. Turns out, much more accurate simulation allows
| for BETTER SOLUTIONS.
|
| Stop being a crotchety and elitist angry person and try to
| _understand_ the way things are going, instead of casting new
| methods aside because you don 't personally understand or get
| them.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Read this comment, then read the post, and thought, well, I
| appreciate the author's thrust, which I would interpret as
| "become fluent in the fundamentals first" salted and undermined
| by yes a crotchety get off my lawn overstatement of the utility
| and value of doing so. Agree with the sentiment, I think,
| though.
|
| Personal comment: I think you (mrguyorama) are correct in
| pointing to the complexity of contemporary structures/problems.
|
| I would state this in terms of the where contemporary progress
| is being, what sorts of problems are being worked on, etc:
| considerably further into the fractal of hard problems, and in
| new regions of the problem domain which were not assailable
| through manual computation.
|
| The tools being used in other words are necessary and
| appropriate for what kinds of work are being done today.
|
| Aircraft design (etc.) today is only superficially related to
| what it was in the author's day. We are now in the hard 20% in
| a lot of ways.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Agreed. I can't help but think the approach he advocates is
| actually very limiting. When your instruments are more crude,
| you have to be more conservative in your approach. The accuracy
| of modern approaches allow us to be more open minded and
| creative in our solutions. When the cost of trying new
| materials and designs is just a simulation, you can afford to
| try really interesting new designs. That's a capability you
| can't realistically have with a slide rule.
| johnfn wrote:
| Haha, yeah. This rant reminded me of people who don't need any
| new fangled languages/frameworks - they're perfectly ok getting
| by in C/ASM. Neglecting that the entire point of abstraction is
| to achieve more complex tasks by hiding the details.
| tqi wrote:
| "I have mentioned this to a few of my fellow engineers over the
| years and they have looked at me like I was speaking ancient
| Aztec"
|
| This person ran it by some colleagues, who all disagreed, and
| the author took this as evidence in FAVOR of his belief? The
| hubris...
| dieselgate wrote:
| I don't know, I agree with some of what you're saying but don't
| understand why you use such a negative tone. Slide rules are
| awesome but I'd never say we should all use them now.
| Everything was built on the shoulders of giants
| kabdib wrote:
| I used slide rules a bunch when I was in high school, just
| before calculators killed them forever.
|
| I felt that I had a better grasp of what a particular
| computation _meant_. The need to keep track of orders of
| magnitude and so on helped me catch errors that would have
| slipped through if I was just pressing buttons and copying down
| results. The practice helped me later on with "back of the
| envelope" calculations.
|
| It doesn't make me nostalgic for slide rules, though. Give me
| an HP calculator any day.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the exact point - you worked through it and got a
| "feel" for how the variables worked, so even if you use a
| calculator you get a feel if things are off.
|
| Same thing happens everywhere - people don't understand
| enough to do something like ballparking some numbers to check
| if they're at all reasonable - but this is useful.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| > Stop being a crotchety and elitist angry person ...
|
| Sounds familiar, like I just read an example of it :/
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| takes one to know one (yikes). I do find it tough when
| readers attempt to deign a writer's mental state from some
| groups of characters strung together. Why, some might call
| that mindreading. '-)
| lantry wrote:
| > when readers attempt to deign a writer's mental state
| from some groups of characters strung together
|
| this is how written communication works
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| Anger isn't needed to make a good point! Politeness works
| just as well :)
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I'm sorry, I'm not making myself clear.
|
| The Author generates strings of characters (that
| ultimately form 'words' and 'sentences' and 'paragraphs'
| in aggregate).
|
| These character strings are chosen by an author to
| suggest a 'frame of mind' in order to best get her point
| across. So when an author of fiction causes a character
| to say things that are interpreted as angry, it doesn't
| mean the author _herself_ is, in fact, angry.
|
| Therefore, unless we know something not in evidence
| besides the author's strings of characters, drawing
| conclusions as to the writer's mental state is ... odd.
| Even for pieces of non-fiction.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| Not directed at your comment. But is calling a person a
| "crotchety and elitist angry person" necessary to the
| point being made? Seems a bit ad hominem to me.
| operator-name wrote:
| I find your comment surprising as I didn't get this impression.
| I think the author has a valid point against deterministic
| thinking, something that has increased as computers and
| numerical calculations have become cheaper.
|
| > Performing calculations with slide rules was part of what
| forced generations of scientists and engineers to _understand
| the approximations they were using to solve problems_.
|
| I think this is a valid and pretty strong point. Just as in
| science significant figures matter, the same does for all
| thinking. In the given example, it is undeniable that
| calculators don't propogate uncertainty the same way that a
| physical slide rule does.
|
| > He did not want to be bothered with the actual truth (i.e.
| flaws and inaccuracies in the simulation), because he was
| simply not interested.
|
| Models by definition do not capture all the intricacies, and
| it's important to have an instinct about what matters and an
| instruct about the expected model result. It is commonplace for
| simple models to ignore uncertainty and tolerances as a factor
| (for simulation speed or complexity reason), which can lead to
| drastic differences in simulated and true outcomes. Any
| reasonably complex model is also likely to be chaotic, but it
| can be difficult to appreciate when the model is useful, and
| when it isn't. I think it's quite easy to forget these nuances,
| especially if you don't fully appreciate the field you're
| modeling.
|
| > Am I arguing that we should throw away our computers and go
| back to slide rules? Absolutely not! Some problems can only be
| solved by computer simulation--because we really do not know
| enough to solve them any other way. > But, most design problems
| can be solved with simpler, less expensive, less time-consuming
| methods and tools and more experience and knowledge of basic
| principles. > wasting time with tools that are not appropriate
| for their jobs
|
| In my mind, this is much aligned with "premature optimisation
| is the root of all evil", and its something I've become
| extremely aware of as I've started getting into hobby CNC.
| Through this process I've had to learn when precision matter
| and when it can just be eyeballed, what can be approximated and
| how much of a fudge factor to use. Floating point accurate
| simulations just need to be good enough, and it's always
| expected that issues will arise in the real world. Most
| processes are forgiving enough that issues can be worked
| around, and it's a complete waste of time to try to anticipate
| everything.
|
| At least in my scope of vision, simulations and modeling with
| uncertainty or tolerances is rare. Models that acknowledge
| their internal chaotic nature are more common, but not common
| enough. Modeling with uncertainty is inherently complex, and
| I'd hazard a guess that your engineering friends are careful
| enough to only use simulations in specific and key areas that
| it has an advantage, but are likewise happy to use
| approximations where necessary.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely! The mathematics can be fuzzy because all the
| "numbers" you know are slightly wrong anyway and you know
| there are "unknown unknowns", the calculation is to get you
| in the ballpark.
|
| You have to compensate for this by having "check and adjust"
| steps in your manufacturing feedback loop and for the final
| product itself.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I recall a study where the researchers doctored calculators to
| give the wrong answer, and gave them to high school students
| for their work.
|
| The calculators had to produce an answer that was off by more
| than a factor of 2 before the students suspected something
| might be wrong.
|
| Back in the 80s at Boeing, the experienced engineers were
| deeply suspicious of any "computer numbers" because they'd been
| burned too many times by garbage results pushed by the computer
| department. I was the only person in my group (of about 30) to
| use a computer to calculate things. The others used calculators
| and graphical methods. My lead engineer didn't want any
| "computer numbers". I persisted, so he set up a competition
| between me and his best graphical method draftsman.
|
| One of the numbers I generated didn't match the graphical
| results. My lead said "see, you can't trust those computer
| numbers!" The graphics guy said he'd recheck that one. A couple
| hours later, he said he'd made a mistake and the computer
| numbers were correct. (Note the "couple hours" to get one
| number.)
|
| After that, my lead only trusted computer numbers from me, and
| directed a lot of the calculation work to me.
|
| (All designs were double checked by a separate group, and then
| validated on the test stand. Correcting a mistake by then,
| however, got very expensive.)
| butwhywhyoh wrote:
| For every story like this, I imagine there's (at least) one
| other where some green engineer set up a simulation with
| garbage assumptions, and argued that since the calculation
| was done by <insert advanced software package>, they must be
| right.
|
| I could tell you many stories of witnessing otherwise smart
| engineers run the worst possible simulations I've ever seen,
| but argue that their results were correct simply because the
| computer generated them.
| operator-name wrote:
| Computer simulations seem to have this blinding effect that
| makes it difficult to consider uncertainty and other
| assumptions.
|
| I suspect its our trust and reliance on digital computing,
| and the amount of cultural messaging.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Your post is exactly why the engineers were dismissing
| "computer numbers".
|
| I was certainly a very green engineer, but I had played
| around a lot with numerical simulations in college. I knew
| I could get better, faster, and more reliable results with
| a computer program than the calculators everyone else used.
|
| My lead was right to be very skeptical, and I enjoyed the
| challenge he set up for me. I had no problem being asked to
| prove my results were correct.
| operator-name wrote:
| There's no distinction between "computer numbers" and
| human numbers, either the model has a bad assumption or
| it's good enough, computer or no computer.
|
| The point is that we shouldn't trust a model just because
| it is run on a computer, just as we should trust that
| hand written calculations may not have numerical
| mistakes.
| marcinzm wrote:
| There's been jokes about Spherical Cow (ie: bad assumptions
| leading to clearly impossible results) since probably
| before computers.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It definitely had nothing to do with computers. My
| physics class was full of jokes about frictionless
| brakes, massless points, and pointless masses.
| SaberTail wrote:
| I'm skeptical that students given a doctored slide rule would
| fare any better in a similar study. There's nothing inherent
| to a slide rule that gives you a better sense for what the
| result should be. You do have to keep track of order of
| magnitude, but that's only going to marginally help you if
| we're talking about factor of 2 errors.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I think the idea is that learning to use a slide rule
| results in a deeper "intuitive understanding" of what the
| results of calculation should look like.
|
| Using a slide rule is also explicitly imprecise, so the
| user isn't expecting that the result to accurate to n
| decimal places. They're aware of the imprecision and are
| likely at least considering whether the level of precision
| is enough to answer the question they're asking.
|
| If I'm looking at a blueprint as see a dimension listed as
| "1.5mm", my instinct is that anything from 1.47mm to 1.53mm
| "-ish" is likely to suffice. I'm going to want to
| understand how that part interfaces with others to make
| sure it won't cause an issue if it's slightly different. If
| on the same drawing that dimension is marked as "1.5125mm",
| my assumption would be that the person who drew it out was
| specific for a reason. I'm going to be much less likely to
| try to consider the interface with other parts because I
| assume that level of precision indicates that it's already
| been considered.
|
| Note that the above is just a conceptual example. I'm not a
| draftsman, machinist, or an engineer - I've just done
| enough amateur machining and design work for 3D printing
| that it popped to mind. Yes, I'm aware that there are
| implicit and explicit tolerances based on the number of
| significant digits in a measurement. :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| One part (the stabilizer trim jackscrew) I designed at
| Boeing had a tolerance expressed as 4 digits after the
| decimal point. This was bounced back at me, suggesting I
| round it to a tighter tolerance with fewer digits.
|
| I replied that I had calculated the max and min values
| based on the rest of the assembly. When a part is
| delivered, if it is out of tolerance it gets bounced to
| the engineers to see if it can be salvaged. As the
| jackscrew was an _extremely_ expensive part, I reasoned
| that giving it the max possible tolerance meant cost
| savings on parts that wouldn 't have to get diverted to
| engineering for evaluation.
|
| The drawings got approved :-)
| operator-name wrote:
| I think the digital vs analogue clock is an adjacent,
| everyday example.
|
| On the human scale precise clock maths is rarely
| necessary, and conceptually thinking of time as a base 60
| number can be more trouble than good.
|
| Technology Connections has a very good video on this, and
| completely changed thinking: https://youtu.be/NeopkvAP-ag
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Further, you need to understand fits and tolerances.
| Maybe even things like thermal expansion properties. I
| learned this the hardway in my freshman intro-to-
| engineering class when I 3d-milled parts for a basic
| mechanical clock ... and had the whole system freeze up
| with friction because I didn't take it into account that
| you don't have exact fit of parts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A slide rule has the advantage in that you can see it
| working and how it works. A calculator has no such
| feedback.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Maybe this is why the abacus has and even continues to be
| a reliable instrument?
| wildzzz wrote:
| Just because _you_ don 't understand how a calculator
| works, doesn't make it any less precise than a slide
| rule. Understanding how your tools work is key for an
| engineer. That's why we go to school and learn how to do
| all of these equations by hand only to graduate to using
| computers to solve them later on. I know how to solve a
| circuit diagram but would it really be appropriate for me
| to spend days working the formulas when pspice can spit
| out an accurate answer in seconds? No, but only if I
| understand and can accept the limitations of the
| simulation. I may have to go back and adjust variables to
| get a worst case analysis so I can add margin to my
| result that can be passed to the next engineer in the
| chain. Simulation is just one step in the engineering
| process. Without knowing the variability of the inputs of
| the design, you won't get answers that closely match the
| real world measurements. Being able to simulate something
| as accurately as possible allows me to iterate a design
| in a very short amount of time that gives me a much
| greater understanding of the problem than if I did it all
| on paper. I can definitely understand that AI kind of
| fuzzes the simulation math such that it may produce
| something that isn't reproducible and that's a tough
| sell. But for the most part, simulations use a massive
| amount of math that is based on real world formulas that
| I'd be using anyway to solve the problem by hand.
| benreesman wrote:
| I think Walter Bright knows how a calculator works in
| extreme detail.
|
| You do realize who that is right?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've actually implemented IEEE 754 floating point code,
| from scratch.
|
| https://github.com/DigitalMars/dmc/blob/master/src/CORE16
| /DO...
|
| Also, many of the math library functions, though I used
| "Software Manual for the Elementary Functions" by
| Cody&Waite for a guide.
| benreesman wrote:
| I got started in software late enough that by the time I
| had a machine that could compile C++ it was Visual Studio
| and shortly `gcc`, so I missed the first round of your
| groundbreaking C++ compiler work, but as recently as 2018
| I was building all my C++ passed through your excellent
| Warp preprocessor (which absolutely smoked its
| predecessor).
|
| I imagine you know as much about IEEE 754 as anyone
| living.
|
| Thanks for the all the great software!
| operator-name wrote:
| Digital calculators don't model uncertainty in the same
| way that mechanical ones do. I would love a calculator
| that intuitively does tolerance proposition.
|
| The point here isn't a out precision, its about accuracy.
| Most simulations consider tolerances and variability as
| an afterthought, and as you point ouf spitting out a
| seemingly precise but likely innacurate output.
|
| Really we should have the best of both worlds -
| simulations should model uncertainty or use MTCS, and
| output a probability range.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > A calculator has no such feedback.
|
| That's an interesting thought.
|
| There's no reason a calculator _has_ to output only a
| number - with the computing power and displays at our
| disposal today, we could easily draw and /or animate a
| virtual slide rule.
|
| A virtual slide rule probably wouldn't be the best
| option, though. It's just a visual metaphor for how the
| values in the calculation relate to one another, and it's
| one that's only going to be useful for someone who has
| learned to use a slide rule.
|
| I wonder if there might be an effective, generic way to
| present calculations visually in a way that requires
| little or no training to understand. Has anyone done
| this?
| operator-name wrote:
| I think it's not about the final output, but rather how
| the output changes with the input. Calculators are a
| terrible tool for this.
|
| If the model can be ran at the rate of frames per second,
| sliders or other non precise inputs are good for this.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Another paradigm are Notebooks. Jupyter style are pretty
| popular these days, something like Wolfram Alpha's step-
| by-step mode or this project recently noted on HN
| https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/ are all good examples.
| Plenty of people use spreadsheets to explicitly chain
| operations.
|
| A specific operation is much less important than the
| context, dimensional analysis, getting order-of-magnitude
| or precision correct. Performing operations narrowly is
| probably operating on the wrong level.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| (Note the "couple hours" to get one number.)
|
| Perfectly suitable. But they did have a couple of hours to
| come up with the right numbers, and they did have slide rules
| and graphical methods as backup. That is what allows
| evolution, you can't believe a computer right from the start
| and instantly abandon older methods. Those methods have a
| place.
|
| In fact if an African student wanted to be a mathematician, a
| slide rule--due to its analog nature would--set him ahead and
| allow him faster results than his peers. Whereas a calculator
| you don't know where you've got it wrong.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course.
|
| The speedup wasn't in writing the program to do the
| calculations. The speedup was in being able to run the
| program repeatedly as the design got tweaked. There was
| also the fact that once the program proved correct, the
| iterations were also free of error. For example, if I write
| a program to compute sin(x), I only need to check a few
| points to verify it. Doing it graphically or by hand can
| introduce error for every use.
| operator-name wrote:
| > once a program proved correct
|
| Now that's the incredibly difficult part, as bugs are no
| stranger to code, let alone code that tries to model the
| real world with assumptions.
|
| The sin function is actually incredibly incredibly
| complex (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2284860/how-
| does-c-compu...) and implimentation are full of implicit
| and imperfect assumptions (like floating point). Under
| normal use these errors are silently propogated, and the
| floating point model well designed enough that for the
| majority it doesn't matter at all.
|
| Being able to run a model whilst iterating is great, but
| at the end of the day it's still a model, and could break
| down.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm painfully aware of that. My biggest enemy was
| accumulating roundoff error.
|
| I'd check the results by running the reverse algorithm to
| see if the outputs reproduced the inputs.
|
| For example, I'd check the matrix inversion by
| multiplying the input by the inverse and seeing how close
| it got to the identity matrix.
| dwater wrote:
| I had a stats professor theorize that at some point all stats
| calculations would be done with simulations instead of
| formulas, since formulas are simplified models of reality
| whereas simulations can capture much more of the complexity if
| properly constructed. This was 10 or 15 years ago and the
| feeling was computers were either fast enough already or would
| be soon enough for most problems. This came up as a result of a
| similar observation about the transition from tables to
| graphing calculators for probability distributions and things
| like that.
| blt wrote:
| It's true. Basically every estimation or inference problem
| can be solved by MCMC. The only reason not to do so is a lack
| of computational power.
| operator-name wrote:
| The majority of estimation problems have either:
|
| - too much uncertainty - extremely relaxed tolerances for
| acceptable answers
|
| and are performed in people's heads or simple napkin/grade
| school maths. It's not about computational power, it's
| about what's right for the job.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Plenty of computing power 15 years ago for bootstrapping
| (simulation-based estimation of uncertainty for an
| analytically estimated model), today plenty for the entire
| model itself (Bayesian MCMC, frequentist optimization-based
| methods)
| CrazyStat wrote:
| If you read the original 1979 bootstrap paper, one of the
| delightful things about it is that it discusses the
| computational cost (literally, in dollars) to rent time for
| the procedure on a shared mainframe.
| api wrote:
| Also on the fighter aircraft thing:
|
| I'm not sure simulation is why present designs take so long.
| It's more likely a mixture of bureaucracy, cost-plus
| contracting creating perverse incentives to stretch out
| development, and insisting on pushing the envelope as far as
| possible and maybe past a point of diminishing returns.
|
| The latter might indeed involve a lot of gratuitous simulation
| and hard number crunching, but it's to get to places you just
| couldn't get with classical approaches. Of course you can
| debate the diminishing returns angle and whether that extra
| 5-10% performance is worth the effort.
| zppln wrote:
| Another crucial point is that a fighter fielded today is
| expected to have feature parity with the previous one that
| was continuously upgraded for the past 30 years.
| bitL wrote:
| You see it all the time, "Deep Learning is not needed, in
| reality all you need is linear/logistic regression!" etc. Then
| you have to work with such people that sabotage anything
| outside their narrow view of how things have to be.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Ah, but they hold those views for a reason!
|
| It's likely that they've seen deep learning used to solve
| problems in the past that are more suitable to a simple
| regression. They may not have seen it used to solve problems
| where regressions failed.
|
| In your place, I'd dive into why they feel the way they do.
| Maybe they're right! More likely, maybe you're using deep
| learning for jobs it isn't best suited.
| bitL wrote:
| This attitude typically isn't about the "best tool for the
| job", i.e. do I really need DL or are decision trees or
| some regression sufficient for what I need to achieve? But
| about the persistent "you don't need DL at all!" stance.
|
| In a way I understand it, for example if somebody finished
| their computer vision PhD before Deep Learning and don't
| want to admit their knowledge is now next to useless for
| most industry cases...
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| The engineers I know definitely understand the principles they're
| talking about. Who is this mythical idiot engineer foolishly and
| blindly over-relying on models the author is so upset about?
| operator-name wrote:
| I have been, and I've seen others burned by this. I've also
| heard stories from others, and I'm not alone:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32783402
| jollyllama wrote:
| A guy was interviewing with an autonomous mobility team about a
| year ago and he said something to the effect of "just train it
| with machine learning." That decades of research into planning
| algorithms based on mathematics and theory from top universities
| might have been done for a reason escaped him. The team joked
| about this for months afterward.
| Animats wrote:
| Google Translate used to use algorithms created by a large
| group of linguists. In 2016, the machine learning systems
| exceeded the performance of the semi-manual created system, and
| the linguists were laid off.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's one of the more extreme cases of 'training your
| replacement' I've heaard.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Not that I'm necessarily defending this sentiment, I did
| recently watch a lecture about ML (I think it was fast.ai's
| Jeremy Howard) with a similar real life example.
|
| He spoke about a project from the 2000's looking to apply an
| artificial neural net to a medical diagnosis problem. What they
| did was spend many years of work with domain experts to
| identify the best features for the net to use. The professor
| then proceeded to explain that nowadays feature engineering
| approaches became so much more powerful, that significantly
| better results could be achieved in a more recent project much
| faster and without almost any domain expertise.
| pjbk wrote:
| Yes, better models and more refinement, and yet they still
| lack common sense. Computers (computational statistical
| models, ML included) are very good interpolators, even moreso
| in higher dimensions which are difficult or impossible to
| grasp for humans, to find linear or non-linear correlations.
| However when it comes to extrapolation most models fail
| miserably.
|
| It can be argued, since we don't know the ultimate cause of
| the laws of our universe, that we also rely in abductive
| reasoning and guide ourselves through models created by
| correlations based in our experience. But that has happened
| through millions of years of evolution and we still don't
| know how to build AI supervisors that can challenge that.
| idontpost wrote:
| > that significantly better results could be achieved in a
| more recent project much faster and without almost any domain
| expertise
|
| Except, you know, for the expertise that generated the data
| in the first place.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It is not exactly the same, but the process is strikingly
| similar. A family member of a buddy of mine is writing a game
| now. I mean he does subcontract for art part, but as one man
| army, he can really focus on his vision and not on... a lot
| of stuff that used to come with making a game ( platform,
| payment, distribution ). It is quite a time to be alive.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Just technically modern deep learning systems aren't generally a
| simulations. They are generally approximations. They take a large
| amount of data and predict immediate results. A simulation can
| determine what the expected final state of an economic or
| ecological system is (but requires sufficiently accurate
| assumptions about the structure of the system). A neural network
| normally can't do this (you can approximate what the model of a
| system is from some data and then approximate the predicted final
| state if you have enough models).
|
| The way engineered solution go would be:
|
| A) Simulated systems using equation with exact solution or
| perhaps numeric approximations of the exact solution equations.
| This combined with principles like conservation of energy allow
| to talk of the long term behavior of a system. Lots of large
| bridges were built with pencil-and-paper math before computers.
|
| B) Simulated systems. Things like finite element analysis of car
| crashes. This allows prediction but not very long term prediction
| of system behavior. This is the easiest and most reliable way to
| build a bridge.
|
| C) Approximating systems using only data and deep learning
| approximations. This lets you do things that A & B can't do but
| these generally don't do reasonable prediction in any significant
| timeframe. One could imagine that Dall-E can't design a bridge
| you'd be confident of walking across.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Having read the article but not the comments, I thought I'd share
| some things that jumped out to me.
|
| > I am sure that his engineers also use simulation, because as I
| said, that is what engineers do these days, but my guess is that
| Musk's executive insights have successfully minimized that in
| order to save huge amounts of time and money.
|
| My title these days is roughly equivalent to what most people
| here seem to mean when they speak of "staff engineers". Granted,
| I'm relatively new to the title, but I feel like I've been
| approaching problems like a staff engineer would most of my
| career (~15 years).
|
| I have no idea if the author's guess is correct about Musk, but
| my own experience tells me that when solving a problem, many
| people get stuck on trying to accurately estimate how much
| effort/time/money a given solution would require. Whenever I find
| myself analyzing a problem, I follow a set path:
| 1. Brainstorm potential solutions, without regard for how wild
| they might appear. 2. Roughly outline the potential
| positive and negative impacts of each - i.e., find the "upper and
| lower bounds" of each solution's impact 3. Classify the
| potential solutions into rough categories, by identifying the
| "decision points" where work toward each solution no longer also
| progresses toward the other solutions. This builds an informal
| conceptual "decision tree" 4. Choose what path to take
| immediately. Often, all of the potential solutions require or
| would benefit from the same groundwork. If so, no decision needs
| to be made yet. 5. Once I reach a "fork in the decision
| tree", refine my estimates of each solution only as much as is
| necessary to determine that one path down the tree is preferable
| 6. Continue this process until the solution ultimately presents
| itself.
|
| This seems complicated when I write it out like that, but the
| gist of it is that I see estimation as non-productive work, and
| minimize it to the extent that I can. If there are two potential
| solutions, both of which provide similar benefits, and I can
| ballpark solution A as probably taking 10-20 hours while solution
| B will take 50-100 hours I see no reason to spend my time trying
| to refine my estimate for solution B. It doesn't matter if where
| it really is in the range; as long as I'm reasonably confident in
| the estimated ranges, the choice is clear.
|
| I will say that this approach has had mixed results for me. In
| some environments, I feel like not being able to provide more
| accurate estimates for all options has led to leadership seeing
| me as lazy and impulsive. My time at those places has been short
| and not very enjoyable. In other environments, I've built enough
| trust with my colleagues that they generally trusted my
| judgement. My time there has been longer on average, and much
| more fulfilling.
|
| As I've matured as a professional - and as a person - I've
| increasingly made the effort to explicitly state the thought
| process that I use to my peers. I accept (and even _seek_ )
| disagreement. When I find it, I try to set my perspective aside
| and focus on understanding the process through which they arrived
| at their positions. In all cases, this has been because one of us
| was operating under a starting condition that wasn't shared.
| _Usually_ this has been a more junior person missing something
| due to not having encountered it before, but not always. When I'm
| right I try to be gracious about it. I'm wrong I readily admit
| that and then go the extra mile later to recognize the person who
| led me the right direction, preferably by quantifying the impact
| of their perspective: "We expected that the solution we were
| pursuing would have taken two weeks to implement; the solution
| presented by so-and-so reduced that to three days."
|
| > Over-simulation is a issue in many of our industries, and I
| think it is one of many reasons that our standard of living has
| gone down over the last six decades.
|
| I don't know that I agree with this statement at all. Regardless
| of whether or not it's true, the premise of the article as a
| whole remains valid.
|
| > Why am I even asking these questions? I have lived long enough
| to know the answer to all of them. Yes! If foolishly placing
| faith in artificial intelligence is the great existential filter
| implied by the Fermi paradox, then we may be about to filter
| ourselves out of existence. Even if it is not, we may further
| bankrupt ourselves in more ways than monetarily while looking for
| something to do the thinking for us that we are too lazy and too
| irresponsible to do for ourselves.
|
| I totally disagree with this conclusion.
|
| AI is just another tool, and knowing when to apply it will be the
| difference between efficiency and inefficiency. "Placing faith"
| in a tool is not something I would say that I do. In fact, I
| don't believe that a person can have "faith" at all - only
| "convictions" - but that's a conversation for another time... :)
| danielvf wrote:
| Or maybe it is that SpaceX is doing simulations on a level ahead
| of what everyone else does.
|
| Here's one of several amazing videos from SpaceX simulations.
| (There are more, but I don't have the link to the others)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI
| nebula8804 wrote:
| This is the same thing they are doing on the Tesla side of
| things. So apparently every car they manufacture has a "digital
| twin" that is created when the car is manufactured and serves
| as a data hub for all the data the real car sends back to the
| mothership over the life of the vehicle. This allows them to
| simulate potential issues and design problems that are then
| input into the manufacturing chain to improve subsequent cars.
|
| I bet some other automakers are probably doing something like
| this but I don't recall anyone talking about it at any
| conference yet.
|
| [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwtRJDRcXsY
| otterdude wrote:
| This has been done on jet engine fleet monitoring for well
| over 35 years. It has nothing to do with AI, or am I missing
| something?
| tomrod wrote:
| Not missing much, just that production integration of AI
| has become a feature-addition to a good data model.
|
| The digital twin model is just a data model. Advanced
| simulation could be considered AI, but that border gets
| fuzzy with "just the same math everyone has always done,
| with more compute."
| nottorp wrote:
| They're so digital they can't get the car doors to align with
| the body in the real world :)
|
| Source: the one Tesla that i've test driven had a crooked
| left rear door. Straight from the factory.
| avianlyric wrote:
| I mean the author seems to believe that the SLS is a space
| program, when clearly it's a jobs program.
|
| Nobody in congress or the senate gives a crap about if the SLS
| achieves anything, as long it keeps paying for jobs in their
| home state. Even senior leaders at NASA hate the SLS, and the
| fact that it hamstrings into using ancient technology that was
| difficult to use, even before everyone with the knowledge to
| operate it retired.
|
| NASA would much rather be developing new rocket technology,
| rather than painstakingly rearranging old rocket technology.
| But doing that would risk Apollo era jobs, so instead we have
| the SLS.
| otterdude wrote:
| I dont get what this has to do with AI. This is a discussion of
| CFD optimization, by using non standard indexing to link cells
| turbulence information.
| typhonic wrote:
| >My guess is that the people who used slide rules in their
| professions and were willing to pay over $50 to re-experience the
| nostalgia of playing with one again are now all dead.
|
| With the exception of the part about willing to pay over $50, I
| can say we are not quite all dead.
| vic-traill wrote:
| >My guess is that the people who used slide rules in their
| professions and were willing to pay over $50 to re-experience the
| nostalgia of playing with one again are now all dead.
|
| The Slide Rule Universe begs to differ!
|
| https://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/sruniverse.html
|
| Plus, the site is GeoCities Pretty :-)
|
| [Edit: Fixed typo]
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the author's arguments, but
| good luck optimizing something like those NASA evolutionary
| antennas [0] with a slide rule... in optimizing difficult
| numerical problems sometimes you DO need dumb, raw processing
| power.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/antenna...
| buescher wrote:
| This example is actually one I would trot out to bolster the
| author's arguments. Good luck optimizing one of those things,
| period. Really, try building one, let alone manufacturing them.
| Hansen & Collin's Small Antenna Handbook covers them, as
| "random segment antennas", in their utterly savage ("we're both
| retired and don't care what other people think") "Pathological
| Antennas" chapter. Hansen was, incidentally, one of the
| pioneers of FTDT computer modeling of antennas.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| This article is a great example of Good Old Days fallacy
| (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days). It is very
| unlikely that it is true that "When I was a young engineer,
| older, experienced engineers and engineering managers understood
| basic principles and the big pictures of the things they were
| working on.", rather it is very likely that some did and some did
| not, and most engineers back then didn't have any more insight
| than engineers today.
|
| The engineers that a young engineer was likely to seek mentorship
| from and who would be put in a position to mentor young engineers
| might be among the best, and so I have no doubt that the author
| did mostly interact with people that fit his description, but now
| that he is the experienced engineer / manager he is interacting
| with the worse engineers, the ones who _need attention_. As the
| squeaky wheel gets the grease, the bad engineers will require the
| most time and management effort to accomplish what good engineers
| can do without a lot of management / senior engineer time, so
| from the perspective of a senior engineer most of their time is
| spent with the worst engineers in their organization.
|
| What I am very confident of, however, is that engineers aren't on
| average worse than they were back in the good old days.
| Animats wrote:
| For one thing, despite what the author says, there are masonry
| bridges with spans longer than 100m. The record is 146m.[1]
| Building really large masonry bridges was a thing in China when a
| huge low-priced workforce was available, and heavy machinery and
| large steel beams were less available.
|
| Overreliance on simulations creates a need for really accurate
| simulations, which means considering lots of secondary effects
| and having enough data to support a simulation. This is hard.
|
| The problem with development by hand is that you can't deal well
| with multiple constraints. Modern electronic design: It can't
| cost much. It can't use much power. It can't be big. It can't
| interfere with other devices. It has to have really good
| performance. You have to do a lot of simulation, tweaking
| different parameters, to meet all those constraints. Or build a
| lot of prototypes. You usually can't just do a conservative
| design and get a saleable product.
|
| If you were designing a car today, and were willing to have 25%
| more weight, you probably could design it with a slide rule.
| You'd get a 1954 Buick Roadmaster, a sedan with a curb weight of
| 1983 kg.
|
| "An engineer is someone who can do for fifty cents what any fool
| can do for a dollar."
|
| [1] http://highestbridges.com/wiki/index.php/Danhe_Bridge
| Ancapistani wrote:
| The author calls out that they aren't a civil engineer, and the
| bridge example wasn't meant to necessary reflect reality.
|
| > If you were designing a car today, and were willing to have
| 25% more weight, you probably could design it with a slide
| rule. You'd get a 1954 Buick Roadmaster, a sedan with a curb
| weight of 1983 kg.
|
| Being 25% heavier than necessary is likely far too much. You
| could definitely design a car using analog tools and
| calculations to within <5% of the minimum requirements.
|
| This is a great example of where too much precision is a bad
| thing!
|
| A 1954 Buick Roadmaster had a curb weight of 4,430 lbs.
| Choosing a random modern car, a 2022 Toyota Camry has a curb
| weight of 3,310 lbs.
|
| Assuming those as a baseline, each 1% of weight due to
| "overprovisioning" would be 44.3 and 33.1 lbs respectively.
| Lowering the load capacity of the vehicle by 5% would mean a
| 221.5 lb reduction in capacity for the Roadmaster and 165.5 lb
| for the Camry.
|
| You have to account for not only the precision of your design,
| but also the precision with which it is used. I seriously doubt
| I could estimate to within 200 lbs how much the combined weight
| of all occupants and cargo in my vehicle is at any given time.
| It's therefore fair to say that the use case for a car is not
| estimated to within 5% of reality - so the car _must_ be
| overbuilt by some margin of >5% to account for that.
|
| If the precision of the intended use case is that high,
| spending additional time to reduce vehicle weight to <5% of the
| target capacity is wasted. It's better to make it a bit heavier
| than strictly necessary than it is to spend the resources to
| know precisely how heavy it needs to be to meet an imprecise
| requirement.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Being 25% heavier than necessary is likely far too much. You
| could definitely design a car using analog tools and
| calculations to within <5% of the minimum requirements.
|
| Most of the complexity of modern cars goes to crash standards
| which are much more rigorous than in the 1950s. I doubt you
| could design a car within 5% that meets crash testing
| standards without simulations or live testing.
| Animats wrote:
| True. Look at crash test videos. The entire front of the
| vehicle has crumpled and absorbed the crash energy, while
| windshield and passenger compartment remain intact.
| Figuring out just where to punch holes in the sheet metal
| beams to do that requires simulation.
| munificent wrote:
| _> You could definitely design a car using analog tools and
| calculations to within <5% of the minimum requirements._
|
| Including the emissions and fuel economy requirements?
| [deleted]
| fritztastic wrote:
| >we may further bankrupt ourselves in more ways than monetarily
| while looking for something to do the thinking for us that we are
| too lazy and too irresponsible to do for ourselves
|
| I've known machinists who said the same about CNC. Sure, there
| are benefits to establishing a good sense of the older ways- but
| it's not laziness or irresponsibility to embrace new technologies
| and utilize them for efficiency. There is a whole lot of bias and
| catastrophizing here, like the author is grieving the perceived
| loss of analog tools and projecting these emotions into this
| rather bleak commentary. Look, it's one thing to be nostalgic and
| appreciate simpler ways of solving/understanding things- but it's
| a whole nother one to make condescending judgements of value and
| extending these ideas onto generalizations against people.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Tools have their own advantages and disadvantages, and "new"
| tools are no exception.
|
| It would be ridiculous to produce 10,000,000 widgets with a
| manual lathe. The increase in time and material waste would be
| multiplied 10m times, so even a very small improvement would
| have huge impact on the cost.
|
| It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets
| with a CNC. Sure, maybe doing it manually will take an hour per
| widget instead of five minutes with the CNC, but modeling,
| creating toolpaths, testing, and optimizing the resultant gcode
| would likely take more time that just doing it the
| "inefficient" manual way.
|
| More generally, it seems like it's almost always worthwhile to
| preserve "the old ways", at least in some form. We don't need
| our entire workforce of machinists to be able to hop on a
| manual lathe and knock out parts precisely and efficiently -
| but if we don't have _some_ that can do that, we 're stuck with
| processes that are extremely inefficient for some jobs. In
| machining, there will always be a place for someone who
| specializes in fully manual work. There will always be a place
| for someone who is an expect in operating and supporting CNC
| machinery. Now there's also a place for people who are
| proficient enough in both areas to reliably know which process
| is appropriate for a given job.
| wizofaus wrote:
| "It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets
| with a CNC" Are you sure about that? If the part has
| exceptionally precise requirements but was relatively easy to
| define the cutting path for (because it made use of existing
| tools to do so), I would think even a single widget might be
| more cheaply and accurately produced by CNC than manually. I
| actually worked on software that generated CNC routing paths
| for widgets produced in small quantities, and while it's true
| if the software was written just for any single widget it
| wouldn't have been economical, it was able to generate a
| large number of routing paths based on minor tweaks to the
| inputs. As far as I knew, the effort required to load up
| various path configurations and produce small numbers of
| widgets each time wasn't that significant.
| operator-name wrote:
| My interpretation is that the author is being cautious for new
| technologies, and suggesting to only embrace them if they
| actually add value.
|
| > Am I arguing that we should throw away our computers and go
| back to slide rules? Absolutely not! Some problems can only be
| solved by computer simulation--because we really do not know
| enough to solve them any other way. > But, most design problems
| can be solved with simpler, less expensive, less time-consuming
| methods and tools and more experience and knowledge of basic
| principles. > wasting time with tools that are not appropriate
| for their jobs
|
| I'm sure the CNC space also has the "next hot thing" that in
| reality is less efficient (time, materials, process) than older
| methods, or a method using existing techniques.
| otterdude wrote:
| In my time developing jet engines I was told a story about how
| IBM in the early 2000s was paid 10s of millions of dollars to
| develop a fleet monitoring tool to spot maintenance issue, still
| a manual task.
|
| Over the course of a two year period all operational and
| development data (since 1980) was fed into a model with all the
| records of maintenance and issue.
|
| IBM came back and said, hey all these issues correspond to this
| parameter "EOT"... what's that?
|
| EOT stands for "Engine Operating Time". The insight provided by
| this model was essentially useless, and their contract was
| canceled.
|
| While ai is very cool, and interesting I think what the author is
| really saying is "AI" is really naive optimization where the the
| implementation is really only as good as the practitioners
| application knowledge.
|
| Let's not forget that at the end of the day Neural Nets are
| really just overfitting data
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >Even if it is not, we may further bankrupt ourselves in more
| ways than monetarily while looking for something to do the
| thinking for us that we are too lazy and too irresponsible to do
| for ourselves.
|
| Individual humans do not have the physical ability to not be lazy
| and irresponsible. In groups, any of these dynamics are
| amplified.
|
| If humanity is the peak of intelligence for the universe then
| there's no hope for anything.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Random aside: does anyone here have a recommendation for a slide
| rule? I'd like to have one, but I don't want to become a "slide
| rule enthusiast".
|
| Ideally, I'd like one that is as flexible (in application) as
| possible, durable, and at least decently attractive sitting on my
| desk. Neither price nor size is a primary consideration for me,
| but I'd like to buy only one if possible.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Get something from K&E on eBay.
|
| And Read Asimov's book on how to use a slide rule
| https://www.sliderulemuseum.com/Manuals/M220_AnEasyIntroduct...
|
| It's a fascinating instrument, and a lot of cleverness is
| involved in the choice of scales, plus precision manufacturing.
| Asimov will show you how to make your own simple slide rule.
|
| Slide rules work because of One Weird Trick -- Addition via
| sliding one member across another. It's just a question, then,
| of WHAT one is adding (or subtracting, which is just negative
| adding). do have fun, I have a small collection, because, you
| know, nerd.
| kragen wrote:
| I enjoyed my Post Versatrig; like a lot of the Post slide
| rules, it's made out of bamboo, which reduces the need for
| lubrication. I've also had slide rules made of mahogany and
| plastic, but the bamboo was nicer. Post made a few different
| Versatrig models, and I don't know which one I had.
|
| In terms of versatility, go for slide rules with scales that
| compute general-purpose functions (circular or hyperbolic
| functions) rather than special-purpose functions (feet to
| meters, Celsius to Fahrenheit, compound interest, horsepower to
| kilowatts). Also, get a duplex rule, not a simplex, since the
| cost difference is no longer important. And maybe go for a
| fairly large one; that extra half-digit of precision extends
| the rule's usefulness to a lot more calculations.
| CaptainNegative wrote:
| >I noticed that the prices of World War 2 era slide rules have
| fallen to below $20 US. Fifteen to twenty years ago, they were
| selling for $50-$80. My guess is that the people who used slide
| rules in their professions and were willing to pay over $50 to
| re-experience the nostalgia of playing with one again are now all
| dead.
|
| Not exactly the point of the article but I don't see how this
| follows. All this is saying is that the price of a collectible
| item, slide rules specifically from the WW2 era, have fallen.
|
| Collectibles change in price regularly, for plenty of reasons. On
| the other hand, an engineer or educator who just wants to use
| slide rules may not care about the specifics of when they were
| manufactured. The slide rule I purchased on eBay 14 years and 4
| months ago as a teaching tool was $6.99 with shipping, and if
| anything prices appear slighlty higher now even after adjusting
| for inflation.
|
| I don't know what the demand is for slide rules, and I assume it
| isn't astonishingly high, but I disagree that inferences can be
| drawn from the price of items valued for their history rather
| than their function.
| dgritsko wrote:
| I have to say, I wasn't expecting to see the Fermi paradox
| brought up in the final paragraph. I think that's the first time
| I've heard AI described as an existential threat not because of
| malevolence, but because of its potential to collectively dumb
| down all of humanity due to over-reliance on it.
| politician wrote:
| TLDR: We spend too much time and money building detailed
| simulations and have lost the ability to gut-check proposals.
|
| I'm not sure that I entirely agree: I imagine that most people
| are still able to gut-check proposals, but that the simulations
| are required to placate naysayers and to check compliance,
| regulatory, and process checkboxes.
| sparrish wrote:
| A change has been proposed to the old axiom about falsehoods:
|
| Lies, damn lies, statistics, and computer models.
| yardie wrote:
| > the people who used slide rules in their professions and were
| willing to pay over $50 to re-experience the nostalgia of playing
| with one again are now all dead.
|
| The price of collectable cars is also affected by the age of the
| collectors market. Prior to me it was all about Model-Ts, old
| '30s era etc that I would see on the collectibles TV shows. GenX
| was after '60s era big body American muscle. Millenials are
| collecting 80s era box Chevys. The price of those early Ford
| Model-T, as an example, has declined because the collectors are
| too old. And anyone born after WW2 has little nostalgia for them.
|
| Now I'm starting to see '80s Mercedes-Benz 300s at car shows. And
| the kids are dressing in 80s and 90s fashion, again.
|
| There is no deep meaning to collectibles market. Owning a slide
| rule was fashionable until they were not. Classic cars, vintage
| clothes, and comics are basically the same.
| [deleted]
| choeger wrote:
| > Will we really throw up our hands and finally announce to each
| other that we are too stupid to solve our problems?
|
| Well, yes. That's what "AI" is about: Create some, very complex,
| generic model and hope that it can encode the problem at hand
| well enough. Then do a parameter estimation, e.g., from real-
| world data. Voila, you got yourself a "model".
|
| When I first came in touch with machine-learning engineers, I was
| dumbfounded. They talked about models all the time and did so in
| a very smart manner. But not a single one could connect their
| "model" to the domain at hand. They didn't even understand the
| question.
| joshu wrote:
| if you lump all the parts of a large domain together and then
| paint the entire thing with the aspects of a part, you also get
| garbage.
|
| so author is doing the the same thing with reasoning that they
| complain about in engineering.
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