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There are really few problems that are “impossible.” That is, if you count those customers/managers are interested in. All the rest is just “I’ll need 10 years, 230 million Dollars and a research team”
XKCD 1425 by Randall Munroe. License: CC BY-NC 2.5
“The other programmers keep accidentally writing code that ends up in an infinite loop. I'd like you to make a program that can reliably detect that.”
You may joke, but if I had a penny for every time someone asked me to solve a problem, that basically boils down to the halting problem, I'd be rich.
Yeah, accidentally running into the halting problem is common in automatic code analysis.
It'd be nice if we wrote something to detect it running into the halting problem.
I have always wondered why the answer to the halting problem isn't: "If no output has been returned in X time, BREAK, restart program from beginning."
what if it needed just one more second to complete?
Damn Vogons.
Because that will fail to detect a program that halts in X+1 time. The problem isn’t to detect if a program that halts halts, the problem is to generally create an algorithm that will guarantee that the analyzed program will always halt given an infinite time running on an infinite computer.
Just check the git blame.
This. Very few problems are truly impossible to solve, they arem in fact, just wildly impractical to solve. So don't try to tell the PM/client/coworker-with-a-'brilliant'-idea it can't be done, tell them what it'll take to work out what it'll take to do it. Either they go away, or you end up in charge of a project with an astronomical budget and no clearly defined deliverables.
I mean, now a days, I can upload the image into stable diffusion automatic1111 and click interrogate CLIP and then see if it outputs "bird" as a reverse promopt, but this comic WAS from 4 and a half years ago, so the programmer was right on the time-frame.
It always depends on which existing tools you have access to. Go back some more years and there is no GPS. Detecting the bird will be the easier problem then.
Funny thing is, since that comic was originally published bird detection has gotten a lot easier
I bet it's because the camera now also scans for the 5G radio waves that are used to control the "birds" instead of just recording waves in the visible spectrum
respect for uploading the image, linking the page, and crediting the author :)
Customer: Why is there so much latency over my tunnel from us-east to us-west?
Me: checks latency seems pretty normal, what's the issue?
Customer: The latency is too much. Why is it not as fast as us-east-1 to us-east-2?
Me: They are near each other. Us-West is across the entire United States
Customer: Make faster
Me: This is the speed of light. And over copper it's about 2/3 that
Customer: hmm are you sure that's as fast as it can go?
Me: Well, unless we change the laws of physics your not going to get any better latency
Customer: So.. can we do that? Change the laws of physics? What congressman do we need to email?
That's cause they always have money in the lobbying budget to fix things.
For the low price of billions and a decade of work they could build out hollow core fiber coast to coast to get the last 1/3 c.
that would really help with playing video games
Then you find out the real reason they need faster latency is because they're pinging the server for new data every 1ms
So can you give me an estimate for when you can solve that?
Anytime I run into that question I tell them if I could manage FTL comms I wouldn't be working here.
Eh, sometimes they're right about this one though. It's true that a request traveling near light speed is as fast as it can possibly be, but what if it's 17 requests? Sometimes you can fix latency by doing fewer transactions.
edit: love a downvote with no reply. Just "No!" [stomps feet]
what if we made a new type of blockchain? one that was powered by generative AI and the metaverse? oh! and could we make it so that it Empowers Business Solutions?
This can certainly be done as long as we stick to the five core values - take ownership, take the leap, act with integrity, put the customer first, and dare to innovate.
This whole comment chain is making me feel sad. And angry. And sangry.
Only if we have 3 red lines, 2 blue lines, and one transparent line. And have all of them perpendicular to each other.
Thanks, i had a stroke while reading that
Shut up shut up shut up!
Please don't give people stupid ideas
What we need is a paradigm shift in how we empower synergy between product lines through utilization of emerging technologies and strategic acquisitions to improve our KPIs across the platform.
Unionize, people. It's terrifying how few IT workers are unionized.
It's because of big pay, highly mobile employees, hiding the real role of the HR and this false sense of security compared to the rest of the workplaces despite all these lay-offs from the big companies. Also, whenever a unionizing attempt happens, the companies go into crackdown mode and have their multitude of ways to either fire you with a bogus reason, remove your post citing "restructuring" or pulling you on a dead career track and demonize you in front of your colleagues with the usual "we care about our employees and everything can already be resolved through HR" speech. And moreover, many of these issues have a direct cause the Work Laws of the respective countries
Corp IT when the team gets ready for production
And if you convince the project manager that it won’t work by telling them all the reasons why they come back a few days or weeks later asking why it won’t work.
Hah, yes, I was a few times between these two sides. My role was to understand both and doing something you could call "translating."
Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
You forgot sales