Computers often do what you said, not what you meant.
Honestly more experience with that might help some people who are habitually unclear in their thinking and communication
Computers often do what you said, not what you meant.
Honestly more experience with that might help some people who are habitually unclear in their thinking and communication
I saw this on reddit ages ago and it still makes me laugh

Knowing her tendency to take everything literally, this is bound to be one bizarre erotic novel.
As someone who got irrationally angry at Amelia Bedelia as a kid, I really wish this was a real book. An adult version where she gets properly called out on her bullshit would be absolutely cathartic to read.
Damn you too? I was like 8 years old thinking to myself, here we have an asshole, who is clearly inept, and yet her reputation never suffers.
I know, right? The whole reason why she was such a big fuckup to begin with was because she was surrounded by enablers! Even my prepubescent self knew there were no good people in those books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bedelia
Premise
The stories follow Amelia Bedelia, a maid who repeatedly misunderstands various commands of her employer by taking figures of speech and various terminology literally, with comical results. For example, she interprets a request to "put the lights out" as a request to physically put the light bulbs outside. Other examples include "tag a player out" when playing baseball resulting in her placing an actual tag on the player and then picking up the person to ask how far out they should be.
Okay yes. This was what I thought it was. My second grade teacher read this to us once, and the thing about drawing the drapes has stuck with me for most of my life. She's a complete fuckup who ruins everything, but she's good at baking pies so that makes it okay.
Baking is a rather exact science, I've been told, so it makes sense she would excel at it.
Her whole thing was she didn't get figures of speech or euphemism. If you tell her to "draw the drapes" she'll get out a pencil and paper and start sketching the curtains. Which means she should be useless at baking, the second a recipe tells her to separate the eggs she'll put one in the bedroom and one in the parlor.
I bet that whoever taught her how to bake gave her specific instructions without figures of speech, and maybe even rewrote recipes to be absolutely literal, then gave her the book of literal recipes. Which she follows with precision. Alternatively maybe she just memorised the recipes.
"I asked you to measure out four cups of rice!"
"I did!"
"Well where are they?"
"I poured them back in the box."
"Back in the box!?"
"But don't worry, I remember -- they were exactly 17 inches."
It's been a while since I've read that. Thank you for reminding me about it friend.
It's an evergreen blog post, but it hits different in the age of code generating agents. Less of a commiseration in the eccentricities of writing code, more nostalgic for the before times. That could just be forced usage of those agents at work talking though
Was going to say “wants needs to be told what to do exactly” and does exactly that is one of the reasons so many autistic people like myself are into computers.
And then i learned about Amelia Bedelia and i will literally eat my shirt if that isn’t autism coded.
I dislike how the post calls those traits as dumb
, i personaly loath the times i gave exact instructions only for a non autistic to ignore half and gladly show me something that is useless to me. But i do still agree wirh the underlying message.
When technology does things I didn't tell it to do I get irrationally angry.
Why did I go into IT.
I feel this a lot, especially as someone who enjoys computers and such. Why does my phone not do what I tell it to? Why did we as a society choose that Google should have more say than an end user? It sucks. The one that gets me the most is that you'll try to do things sometimes and it has the audacity to say things are not allowed by the admin. FUCKER I OWN YOUUUUU, WHY AM I NOT THE ADMIN???
I love AI as digital Amelia Bedelia. Bedeliae?
It’s like Postmasters General.
The plural of Surgeon General is Surgeons General.
The past tense of Surgeons General is Surgeoned General.
"General" is descriptive, not like a military title, and therefore isn't pluralized. "Bedelia" isn't indicative of the status of the Amelia, it's just her surname. Pluralizing Amelia instead of Bedelia implies there's another kind of Amelia she could be, which sadly isn't the case. She's doomed to be that dumb forever.
Bedelia is plural, a single is a Bedelium.
I had a professor describe it as such: "Computers aren't smart. They're just extremely fast at finding all the wrong answers first."
computers are "so fucking stupid" because you fucked up the instructions? god forbid you ever meet my autistic ass
I once wrote msql instead of mysql and it took me days to figure out where I'd gone wrong. I did the "else echo ("error1"); " thing (sorry, can't php anymore) and even though I found the line where the error was, my brain took ages to see I missed the y. I used to both love and hate coding.
I look forward to the semi-daily posts by one of the regulars at !comicstrips@lemmy.world
EDIT : I was going to post a link to internet archive, but those are all part of some official library collections, so we're shit out of luck lads
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