[srl]

Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience.

The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.

Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.

This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.

[CrazyStat]

> It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything).

No, this is actually totally false. There is a world championship in computer-aided correspondence chess [1], and you won't get anywhere near the top ranks by having "enough modesty to just not do anything."

[1] https://www.iccf.com/

[grey-area]

Does deep blue participate?

If not your assertion is false.

[iopq]

The best chess-playing program is Stockfish and it could give deep blue and any human a handicap and still win easily

The state of art is much better now than before

[CrazyStat]

Deep blue is 25 years out of date and far far weaker than modern chess engines.

[grey-area]

I think that strengthens the point, don't you? Deep blue could beat humans a long time ago, and it's still the case that computers don't need humans to play chess, and play it better than humans do.

[CrazyStat]

> Deep blue could beat humans a long time ago

Yes

> and it's still the case that computers don't need humans to play chess,

Sure, I guess

> and play it better than humans do.

In the sense that they can beat humans in a 1v1, yes.

But none of that is relevant to the original claim, which is that a human in the loop makes a computer play worse--i.e., that human+computer is worse than computer alone. This claim is false, as the ICCF championship demonstrates each year.

[cehrlich]

I can’t comment on America, but when I lived in Amsterdam everyone I knew used an app called Buienradar for this exact use case. The accuracy was astonishing.