I guess now we finally know why Babbage never finished building the Analytical Engine.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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I always assumed they were asking if it was rigged.
Like, i can write function sum(a, b) that always returns 10, and impress people how it's correct when I pass in 1,9 and 2,8 and 3,7. But if I pass in 7,7 it'll still return the "right" answer of 10, because it's rigged and not actually doing math.
That's a good point, but a few decades of talking to clients has led to a number of conversations like this where they want it to "just work", even if they've input the wrong information.
Clients? Shit happens in my house.
"My monitor keeps turning off."
"Ok next time it happens ill look at it and see if i can figure out what is going on."
"Cant you just fix it?"
"Fix what? I dont know whats wrong yet."
"Just fix the monitor."
Legitimately, about 1/3 of the time my mere presence seems to magically fix the issue.
There was a thread on Reddit where people likewise noted that having another person try problematic software solved the issue. So one commenter regaled how a dude sidestepped the whole rigmarole by saying to his colleague “look, this thing's broken again”, and then before the other guy could step in, he clicked the thing himself, and it worked.
i really should have gone into IT because electronics spontaneously break around me
Same, I keep track of magic on a white board in my office
Sometimes I wonder if people really do affect their environment with their thoughts and attitudes and maybe people who believe in ghosts but don't believe in technology can see ghosts and have their tech fail in unexplainable ways, but the presence of someone who understands and believes in it changes the way it works and doesn't see paranormal shit because they don't believe in it.
Like my ex believed in paranormal stuff and apparently experienced some herself and also had her tech stuff fail spectacularly in ways I couldn't replicate if I tried but would otherwise work fine for me.
Though I do have a feeling that if their activity on the PC was recorded, it would actually turn out to be just them lying about (or not even knowing) what they did and the behavior of the tech being as logical as usual, given their actions. Or they just ran into a rare race condition and the correct actions fail like 0.3% of the time.
But it would be more interesting if it was the other thing.
I've started defaulting to just saying "yes" with my family and pretending to fix it. I'm actually thankful for the laptop revolution, cause I can just say "it's fucked, buy a new one."
Once you've got the new one, I'll take your old one and dispose of it appropriately...
I have like a dozen old laptops with various flavors of Linux on them because of this. Can't give them away cause apparently Linux is a scary word in this part of the country.
Ah, you must be an expert
One time my boss asked me to basically solve the Travelling salesman problem.
My first pass at ot was a simple grab closest neighbor solution, but that left a slightly unoptimal path and my boss asked me to "fix" it. I explained to him why, no, I can't make it both fast amd accurate, pick one, while also showing him that wikipedia page. I was so mad when he said just make it more accurate ignoring now it takes hours to run sometimes only to save 10 seconds of a machine moving.
This is how I expect AI to work. I will silently think of a thing, and the AI must make it perfectly in one go. If it doesn't, I have just lacked in describing in detail what it should do. And that takes thousands of lines of code.
magic
(Sprinkles of fairy dust)
That's a valid assumption one can only make without knowing the malevolent stupidity of typical computer users.
Alternatively, people could genuinely believe the primitive computer is a "thinking machine". So if you fat-finger an input, will the machine know you made a mistake and intuitively correct you? Not unlike asking "Hey, I've got ten days of vacation, can I take two weeks off?" And your coworker - knowing a week is seven days, but you're only referring to business days - responds "Yes".
No, they were literally asking if the machine was able to return the right result if the person didn't enter it ccorrectly. You know, like how some people expect search engines and AI to give them the answer they want even if they use the wrong words.
Oh like when you type "population of tenton" and it returns "Did you mean Trenton? That population is XYZ"
Yes, except in the case of Babbage's machine they were asking if putting 1235 instead of 1234 would give the same answer.
Search engines work that way because of having large large datasets and pattern recognition that can suggest based on typos. Calculators don't do that.
Yeah but calculator back then was a profession. So if suddenly a machine can replace a complete profession it's at least conprehensible to assume it can do more than it actually can. It's basically the same with AI right now. There is this "overshoot" of what is expected from a new paradigm shifting technology. Similar to how people 100 years ago thought there will be flying cars by now.
Helicopters are flying cars.
It is possible that the question was intended to be about human error checking prior to starting the process of calculating, like noticing a lack of a decimal on a monetary number in a data set, and Babbage misunderstood. That would be a valid question, but isn't how the quote is phrased.
Maybe the person asking went on inventing error handling
No I meant Teton.
Big ones.
"Can it ChatGPT?"
"No."
"Can ChatGPT?"
"No."
"If I fuck up, will it correct it?"
"No."
"Will ChatGPT correct it?"
"Yes. Too much."
Same, and I feel like this still applies pretty well to arguments about AI bias not being something anyone should be too concerned about.