
Flintstoning your way around hard technical challenges - scrollinondubs
https://grid7.com/2020/06/lateral-thinking-and-flintstoning/
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lqet
I have seen this pattern multiple times: (1) tell client completely
underdefined problem can be solved automatically, (2) tell developer to
implement it, (3) developer spends months trying to automate it, (4) days
before the deadline the code does something that would barely count as
acceptable, (5) an intern is hired last-minute to solve the problem manually,
(6) "we will do it by hand until we have fixed the code".

The client will never know (5). The intern will eventually do it manually
full-time. The code is of course never fixed.

Months later, the developer finally has enough understanding of the problem to
find out that it has been a research topic for decades, with no satisfying
results so far.

~~~
m463
There's that xkcd...

[https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/)

They're going to have to update the comic, since the GPS tech tree that
enabled the first one can not be combined with the AI tech tree to make the
second one simple.

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TheSpiceIsLife
The simplest solution to the problem presented in xkcd 1425 is to assume every
photo is a photo of a bird, and just let billions of users be mildly annoyed /
extremely frustrated by that assumption.

Then we can write thousands of blogs posts titled like _" Falsehoods
Programmers Believe About Photos"_.

~~~
m463
So you're saying "everything is a bird" \+
[https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/) = training data :)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I'm not a software developer by any stretch of the imagination, but from an
outsiders perspective:

That does appear to be the AI / Machine Learning approach ;)

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Scarblac
We have a website where customers of our company can upload data sets for
various domain-specific modelling software, and we can do various integrity
and quality checks on the data for them.

If it gains traction we'll maybe automate parts of it some day, but for now
it's lovingly referred to as AaaS, or Arnold-as-a-service.

~~~
gowld
Or as it's called in the industry, "AI/ML".

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snarfy
A friend told me a story of a job he got with a consulting company working for
a phone company. Their job was to move all of the data from the old system to
the new system. They had a multiyear contract where they charged millions to
move this data.

When he got there, two terminals were set up - one the old system and the
other the new. His job was to read the data from one screen and type it by
hand into the other. He was one of hundreds of low paid contractors hired for
typing skills.

After a few days of that drudgery, he decidedly said screw this, ^C the app,
and ended up at a shell. He spent the next two weeks figuring out how to copy
the data file from the old system to the new, and then used a handful of shell
scripts to successfully convert the majority of the data.

He showed his boss what he'd done, and was swiftly fired. If anybody found
out, they didn't want to lose their lucrative multiyear contract. They'd
rather type it all in by hand.

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1propionyl
This is referred to as the "Wizard of Oz" method (or "experimenter-in-the-
loop"). It's very common in HCI research, as well as in product prototyping in
various industries.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment)

A variation of the technique is also common in CS user studies, where the
novel tool under study works, but is too computationally intensive (i.e. slow)
to actually use in the study. In this variation, the tool's results are
precomputed, and the tool's interface is mocked up so that it just retrieves
precomputed results (or it delegates to a human researcher playing the
"wizard").

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cardiffspaceman
There was some research at IBM, which I have tried to find a reference for,
that tested: "What if we wanted to build a better word processor, after having
completely solved speech recognition?" They devised an experiment where the
subject, given the task of say creating a document, would speak and "the
system" would respond by entering text and the usual things that word
processors do. "The system" was a CRT and a human confederate behind a curtain
who would type stuff and otherwise respond to the subject's commands.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
Thats the Wizard of Oz approach in research.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment)

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karmakaze
There's another aspect to this. Sometimes that human isn't 'in' the system but
can be the user of it.

I recently made a script to document the code paths from any GraphQL or REST
endpoint to code lines taking a database lock. It was a hack with false
positives. I 'fixed' it by making it an interactive app instead of a script.

~~~
karmakaze
My favourite story along these lines was after the invention and widespread
adoption of the telephone.

"At this rate everyone will have to be a telephone operator." Thus rotary
(then DTMF) self-dialling was born.

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gkop
“Wizard of Oz prototyping” is a better name for this idea.

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theamk
I am always worried about solutions like this -- what if one day, the human
makes a mistake and deletes newest photos instead of the oldest ones? What if
the VA I have chosen misinterprets my instructions and does nothing?

With programming, as long as I take reasonable precautions, I will know that
either the task will get done, or I'll get notifications that something is
wrong. With humans? Not so much.

(Let's just not forget "reasonable precautions" part -- there is a surprising
amount of people who apply the sloppiest programming for the dangerous
actions. People who think that "let's use date parser which auto-detects date
format" and "any error code means we can delete document" are good ideas)

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jimmaswell
How hard can a script to delete documents based on timestamp possibly be?

~~~
stagger87
The saying "can't see the forest for the trees" comes to mind here.

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jasimmonsv
I have always heard this as to "mechanical turk the problem"

~~~
jacinabox
Yeah right, mechanical turk it, that's easy enough to say, then you have to
find yourself a dwarf.

~~~
Finnucane
Hand me the pliers.

~~~
jacinabox
Yeah, I bet you're all set for that.

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diablo1
There's an XKCD for this: [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

Also, anecdotally, I literally automate to prevent RSI[0]. There's only so
much the human body can manually do with a computer

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury)

~~~
chrisweekly
classic xkcd, one of my faves. esp the alt-text.

