Needless to say i’m talking about the oversimplified and misleading version of the Schrödinger’s cat paradigm, where he is both dead and alive until you watch it.
I don’t have a job but i follow theater courses at an academy. And my improvisation is both funny and awful until i show it to others.
In computer programm single threaded programs are pretty predictable (apart from human errors). As soon as you have multi threading that goes out the window. Modern CPUs in most devices you use have what’s called a scheduler that schedules when to let different things actually use the CPU so you can actually do multiple things at once. It’s a super important concept for what we want to do with devices. But because of that you have no guarantee about when (or if) other threads of your own code will execute. Apart from truly insane edge cases, single threaded programs act pretty deterministically. Multi threaded ones do not. It’s very similar to the “it’s alive and dead until you check” idea because you just don’t know. So much so that there are data types we use called things like Maybe where the result is either a success or a failure and you write code for both.
Also much like the cat in a box thing, programmers don’t really view it as magic, it’s just sort of a side effect of the uncertainty.
Is it actually non-deterministic or just too many variables and too much sensitivity to initial conditions influencing the scheduler’s decisions for the programmer to reasonably be able to predict?
It is deterministic, it is just determined elsewhere.
If thread 1 is working on a task and needs the output of thread 2, it doesn’t know what the output is. Of you move the tasks from thread 2 back into thread 1, then you have eliminated the point of multi threading.
Without getting philosophical, I’m going to say human behavior is non-deterministic. Because a human is using a computer you cannot reason about what may be running when. That’s why I say it’s non-deterministic. You can make an argument that a non real time computer not connected to the Internet could be considered fully deterministic, but it’s really just a distraction. That’s why I tried to make it clear I wasn’t talking about “magical ‘truly’ random” things.
I’m not trying to get overly technical or philosophical lol. For example, PRNGs are deterministic, but it’s sufficiently random that we treat it as random without worrying about whether it’s “actually random.” (But yes, there can be bugs where they actually are behaving too predictably and they actually aren’t random. This is why I’m trying to keep the topic simple without getting lost in the details.)
When you account for not knowing what else is going on the system I’d say it’s actually non deterministic. But not in a magical “truly random” sort of way, just that other things you don’t personally have control over are going on. If this topic interests you then you may want to look into real time computing which is an area where you do have deterministic systems where you can more accurately guarantee how long something will take. This is important in dangerous activities. Think things like nuclear reactors where a process taking too long might mean not alerting another part of a system that something bad has happened. Like the part of the system that tells you if something is too hot not responding so you keep adding fuel. Compare this to your phone. If your phone is slow then, well, it’s just annoying really.
Well, I work as a bartender, and here in Finland it’s strictly against the law to serve alcohol to, or even allow a “visibly intoxicated person” to enter the premises (a law which almost every bar breaks at some point, intentionally or no), and I think I’ve witnessed multiple times myself how a customer’s level of intoxication reveals itself only after you have served a drink to them and they’ve payed for it. Could it be called a Schrödrinker’s cat?
Not related to the Schrödinger question, but my advice for solving that problem would be to have some little robots trundling about with boxing gloves on. They can randomly harry each your walk-ins with a sudden flurry of blows. By seeing how these people handle the unexpected robotic assault, you should better be able to assess their level of inebriation.
The Heisenbug. Once you try to observe this kind of software bug with your technical means, it simply goes away.
I’m not sure I understand the question
If you’re looking for a “something is two opposites at once until met” then that’s anywhere any unsureness exists. Lesson plans are decent and lacking until taught to students. Visual art is pretty and dismal until witnessed by another beholder. Speeches are rousing and dogshit til spoken at the mic.
If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)” then that’s like a subset of all misconceptions.
- Monads in programming. Lots of people say they “get it” after a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it (judging by blog posts that recite a simplified explanation, but actually don’t get it).
- Tariffs. Lots of people learn middle school mercantilism (zero sum wealth) then guess that the economy is still import export balance, and that if we make people exporting to us more expensive then we get more of the zero sum pie. (Obviously wrong, and a basic macroeconomic lesson on consumer welfare in a system with a world price is useful)
- A lot of physics terms tbh. “I get momentum, that’s when it’s hard to stop when you’re fast.” Often they mean something closer to inertia. “I get the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s when seeing something changes it!” It’s closer to uncertainty in the measurement of tiny things because of the physical implication of what we measure it using. (e.g. by reading a photon off of something, we know we’re kinda inaccurate cuz the photon was discharged)
If you’re looking for a “something that’s explained oversimplifiedly then a lot of people say they get it (and are wrong)”
I studied math and my first thought here is Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
In what way?
Please never answer this question.
I’m confused.
The joke was that it would be incomplete if christian wouldn’t answer your question about Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
“The Computer never makes a mistake” is true and also probably responsible for people believing LLM-hallucinations uncritically
llm’s are dangerous and should never be used; but an overwhelming majority use it nonetheless.
Software both works perfectly (on the developers machine and most deployed instances) and fails dramatically (on some significant subset of deployed instances).
This makes the software both a success (since it works, and can generate revenue) and a failure (since it is unreliable, and may alienate paying customers).
The contrast is either too little or too much and I won’t know unless I look at the drawing again the next morning
Until I actually show up to the EVGo charging station, it’s both online and offline. The only way to know for sure whether there’s a working charger is to drive there and plug my car in.
Schrodinger’s Cat
I’m lifeguard, all my day is like that
Code is both great and terrible until it compiles.
Site reliability engineer here, your application is both alive and dead until the monitoring server pings its health status API.
In programming there is also the Heisenbug: as soon as you try to observe the bug, it disappears or changes its behavior.
It’s mostly because many observation processes are invasive and change the nature of the system under test
I fucking hate Heisenbergs!
Hrm, weird reproducible bug. Ok let’s hook up the ol’ debugger and… Where did the bug go? Shiiiiiiit.
My company is basically 30 startups in a trenchcoat. The bulk of our my org’s application was written 5-10 years ago by like 4 dudes, none of whom work at the company anymore. Cowboy coding doesn’t come close. We have so much legacy code and I alternate between “how the fuck does this work” in an impressed way and a horrified way anytime I look at it
As a bicyclist, I see that we have Schrödinger’s Cyclist: Too poor to be able to afford a car like “normal” people, but also a rich elitist who can afford to commute by bike.
Also, Schrödinger’s Bike Lanes: A conspiracy by car-hating politicians to punish drivers, but also an amenity that only rich elitists get in their neighborhoods.
For work I use a database written in COBOL. Reports are simultaneously running and frozen until I either get the report results or sufficient time has passed that I’m certain the system has crashed.
Isn’t that the halting problem?
A textbook example, yes. And Today I Learned something!
Projects will either be done next month or take at least a year to complete. Also, if you ask my team to calculate how long a project will take, and then ignore the estimate, the project will take infinite time because you are an insufferable moron.
A person that has a lot of certs or a high title is both extremely smart or extremely unintelligent. You don’t know until you start talking with them about things more than surface level.
