[loa_in_]

But software works only 99% of the time. For some definition of work: 99% of days it's run, 99% of clicks, 99% of CPU time in given component, 99% of versions released and linked into some business' production binary, 99% of github tags, 99% of commits, 99% of software that that one guy says is battle-tested

[jjmarr]

If twenty components work 99% of the time, then they only have an 0.99^20 = 82% chance of working as a collective.

If your 5.1 GHz (billion instructions per second) CPU had a 0.00000001% chance of failing at a given instruction, you'd have a 40% chance of a crash every second.

If a flight had a 1% chance of killing everyone aboard 10 million people/day * 1% = 100,000 people would die every day from a plane.

[diatone]

Gamblers fallacy

[Groxx]

Software works so much more than 99% of the time that it's a rather deliberate strawman to claim otherwise.

Newly-"AI"-branded things that I have touched work substantially less than 90% of the time. There are like 3 orders of magnitude difference, even people who aren't paying any attention at all are noticing it.

[BobbyJo]

Do you have to write your code presuming that sometimes 'a + b' will be wrong? I don't.

Software pretty much always "works" when you consider the definition of work to be "does what the programmer told it too". AI? Not so much.

[wruza]

It’s all about limits and edge cases. a+b may “fail” at INT_MAX and at 0.1+0.2. You don’t `==` your doubles, you don’t (a+b)/2 your mid, and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as <…>”. You don’t care about determinism because it’s a statistical instrument.

[BobbyJo]

> and you don’t ask ai to just book you vacation. You ask it to “collect average sentiment from `these_5k_reviews()` ignoring apparently fake ones, which are defined as <…>”.

That's exactly my point. You have to interact directly with the A.I. and be aware of what its doing.

[simonw]

That's not true. If software works correctly today then users can expect it to work correctly tomorrow. If it doesn't work any more that's a bug.