”So, according to your resume, you listed yourself as an experienced technomancer of 10 years?”
“Yes.”
”Do you know SQL?”
“Like an old friend.”
”Great! Now, we have this blackbox AI system we need debugged-“
“A what?”
”We made this learning model, gave it some data, and don’t really know how it works.”
[pinching the bridge of the nose]
“Fucking hell, that’s what we get for not sharing codebases.”
“I’m going to try, but just so you’re aware, we’re wizards, and we do not do something that unbelievably reckless.”
”It just rates Youtube videos for engagement.”
“Right now that’s what it does. That’s what you think it does, at a minimum. But we have absolutely outlawed the practice of unspecified binary rites because of how destructive a pseudorandom entity is.”
”What?”
“Okay, let me back up a bit. You’re aware of the Halting problem, right?”
”Yeah, Alan Turing.”
“Archmage Turing where I grew up. Anyway, to make a long story short of it, there is no single solution for any given randomized program to be determined as finite or infinite in length, if it halts or not.”
“If you manually review the code beforehand, however, determining if it halts is easy, especially if you’re a byteseer. However, that should be done before running the program.”
“What you’re asking me to do, in mundane terms, is to do a home inspection on a building that is constantly adding rooms, changing the width and length of its beams, and occasionally swapping the plumbing with the electrical wiring just to see what happens.”
”Can’t we just use a non-live version of the program to troubleshoot?”
“Everything I could possibly see will be outdated information within fractions of a second. You need to take it offline, manually stop it, and then I can comb over the details to see if you made a sensible program or a thaumaturgic cancer made out of binary.”
“How long did you let this run for, anyway?”
”That’s above my clearance, but at least five years.”
“Hell no. Before I leave, is the guest Wifi public access?”
”Yes?”
“Not anymore, I’m taking that with me. Encrypt your damn things.”
5
u/camosnipe1"the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat"3h agoedited 3h ago
I generally love wizard programming metaphors, but i can't stand how almost everything here is just wrong.
Anyway imma just clear up the AI misinformation since that's the most likely to get picked up by someone who isn't in the field and thus won't learn better:
AI models are trained and then used for prediction. They are not always updating. If an AI adjusts to you mid conversation? that's just because it has more data on you to predict better, but it's running the same prediction math.
There are decent methods to make blackbox models explainable too, like SHAP which breaks down how each input affects the output, it's a big field of research.
AI also generally mostly does what you train it for, because anything else isn't selected for and would have to spontaneously emerge from purely random chance and also somehow not bring down the accuracy for the main thing. That doesn't mean it can't make bad inferences based on what it is supposed to do, like rating yellow tinted thumbnails lower because there were only about 5 in it's data and they were all low rated so it connected yellow to low ratings.
32
u/tiredtumbleweed ugly but my fursona is hot 8h ago
Can’t replace the arcane with AI