I guess now we finally know why Babbage never finished building the Analytical Engine.
Ada Lovelace invented coding on that thing btw
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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iiiiiiitttttttttttt
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you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
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And then had the wisdom to die before a computer capable of running her programs was invented, thus saving the bother of having to debug them.
Writes code.
Realises that debugging code that was written by the lunatic that is yourself two nights ago is going to be a big part of her life.
dies
We've all had debugging sessions where that feels like the best option. Right?
I wouldnt have done anything different
Debugging was easier when all you had to do was spray the room with fly spray and vacuum the tubes.
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I realize you jest, but I bet she did actually debug them by running through them by hand. I've found and fixed many bugs via code review without actually running into the bug during a run. Plus wtf else was there to do in the 1800s? Debugging might have been relatively highly entertaining in those days.
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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.
i really should have gone into IT because electronics spontaneously break around me
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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.
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I always assumed they were asking if it was rigged.
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.
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"Can it ChatGPT?"
"No."
"Can ChatGPT?"
"No."
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That quote is my favorite example of a very polite wtf
So the I-d10t bug has been around since the beginning, it seems.
Layer-8 issue, even when it's DNS, it's a Layer-8 issue.
Could be layer 9, management
i.e. "I'm not smart enough, nor dumb enough, to understand how you arrived at such a stupid question."
And thus the role of QA was born.
All unit tests show PEBKAC
Could it run Doom though?
I've seen a couple papers on theoretical designs for purely mechanical computers that can run doom, but as far as I am aware I've never heard of one that's actually been built.
but in theory yes it could have
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it has limited memory but could me expanded, by a lot. but I'm theory yes, no display though.
Pff, who needs a display? Just do that Matrix thing and render the raw state in your head.
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Confusion of ideas in, garbage out.
Old enough to remember Babbages video game store. I'd spend hours re-reading the descriptions on the back of every game box. Joy. Great share, thanks!
Ah yes, I remember being in the store when Charles Babbage himself would brag about his high score in Asteroids. Or that time he gave me a copy of the Doom shareware on 3.5" floppy. /s
Wasn't it a member of Parliament who asked him this? Or was that addition apocryphal?
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GIGO
I've replied with just these letters to people before. Improved UX can only get you so far, before the ticket becomes "can you fix stupid?".
PEBCAK.
[off topic?]
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-difference-engine-a-novel-william-gibson/0a5ffa44e0f3f9f1
"The Difference Engine" Fifty years ago, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage gave the British empire the first working computer. Since that time, life has changed vastly in some areas, but remained the same in others. Great novel.
Being extremely, extremely generous, maybe they meant a human would notice the input was incorrect? But even then, a human could notice the same when inputting it into a computer.
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