Matt BlazeNov 25, 2022

Stop saying there are no algorithms. Algorithms don't necessarily involve opaque machine learning-driven decisions. Showing posts in chronological order is an algorithm. Showing a partial ordering of posts coming in from other nodes in a federated distributed system is an algorithm. Anything involving computers uses algorithms.

Even if you can predict what it does, there's an algorithm. ESPECIALLY if you can predict what it does.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

Show threadstd::polarNov 25, 2022
@mattblaze Yeah. I have the inverse pet peeve. I hate when people call everything "AI". Even if it is just a bruteforced, statically precalculated tic-tac-toe bot. A dozen nested ifs do not machine learning make.
Show threadMatt BlazeNov 25, 2022
@sehe oh, I hate that. Also, using AI to mean “some sort of advanced technology that I don’t personally understand”.
Show threadzev
@mattblaze @sehe I dunno, honestly even in the ML sense I still bristle at the use of "AI" to describe anything that currently exists (or believably could in the foreseeable future). It's not just that it's not general, but even in the fairly limited scopes of the problem domains it's applied to, the failure modes it exhibits do not give the impression that what's going on under the covers has any relation to the workings of "real" intelligence.

It's certainly a pretty lost cause at this point, but I think I'll probably continue to stubbornly employ air-quotes any time I (grudgingly) use the term myself.

Nov 26, 2022 at 12:06amWeb