Substitute certain overhyped programming terms with more accurate replacements | Hacker News Reader

Substitute certain overhyped programming terms with more accurate replacements

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60 pointshuijzer43 comments

Reminds me of several years ago when the extension Cloud to Butt was popular, which (predictably) replaces mentions of the "cloud" with "butt" [0]. It created at least a few funny stories [1].

I guess when the cloud hype blew over, new hypes emerged only to be tackled by extensions like these.

[0] https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/3zdnoh/tifu_by_forget...

Did the "cloud hype" really "blow over"? Seems to be a pretty big thing nowadays.

It's passed through the hype cycle to now be mainstream - whether that's a good or a bad thing is left up as an exercise to the reader. All major companies I've worked with / for are in the cloud now.

AWS must be laughing, those sly dogs.

Some of the hype has disappeared too. I remember when there was a general idea that cloud would "eliminate" your need to have ops teams, because you won't need them, Amazon just takes care of it for you! Now everybody knows that's not true. It might reduce it vs. a datacenter but certainly you need people setting up cloud resources and diagnosing problems. I also remember when the idea was floating around that simply being in the cloud made your software resilient, period. Now I think there's a greater understanding you still need to do some things to get that result, even if it's easier than doing it all yourself.

Also haven't heard as much about it being cheap. Again, it might still be cheaper than some other options, but it certainly isn't the case that it's just magically cheaper. The thriving field of companies who help you reduce your cloud spend is evidence of that....

I remember it was also that cloud as a term was pure marketing hype. Unnecessary rebranding of a thing we already had a good name for, servers. And also to pick such a irrational name ”cloud” which didn’t relate to technology at all. You could hear everyone use it in nonsense high flying keynotes. All the hands-on computer people laughed at it and I think cloud to butt was part of that.

In the end it’s actually really good word for newish concept and using it does not feel silly to me anymore.

TFA:

> Inspired by and adapted from the infamous [cloud-to-butt](https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt) extension, as originally released under the WTFPL (here BSD0)

Ah I didn't see the About this Extension part, just read the description underneath the title.

I remember when some AWS employees had that extension installed in their browser and unintentionally wrecked havoc on the internal wiki with it. There were these various trails of devastation until the word got out that maybe this extension is a bad idea when you work for a cloud.

The existence of cloud->butt is kind of humorous. "Look, this thing is overhyped by people who don't understand it. What if we :s/cloud/butt/g, but like in an addon?" Yeah, I get it. Very clever.

I don't understand actually using it though. I mean, I sort of get it. Perhaps, deep down, everyone is easy to amuse; it's just a question of what domain are they easily amused by. But do you really want to give yourself programmatic word aphasia?

Doing it a second time, years later, feels more strange. Like watching a child who copies a joke made by an adult without understanding the structure or semantics of the joke, I find myself nervously smiling at the presentation before me.

And then you come along, "AWS employees ... extension installed ... wrecked havoc ...". Yes, that seems like a predictable result. Thank you for your anecdote, I kind of expected that to be the case and it at least feels good to hear that my understanding of the world matches someone's experience.

Placeholder text will find a way into production -- make it safe. Lorem ipsum exists for a reason.

>I don't understand actually using it though.

Why not? Some people can "Yeah, I get it. Very Clever." just from the description. Some people CAN'T. The proof of this is in math class where people struggle with word problems. You are in the category of people that get it from description only. Have empathy for the people that need to see it in action.

Also, you know, it's fun. Don't ruin it for others because you can't/won't/don't

> Have empathy for the people that need to see it in action.

With the full context of my comment, I feel that I've given sufficient empathy for people who aren't me.

> I mean, I sort of get it. Perhaps, deep down, everyone is easy to amuse; it's just a question of what domain are they easily amused by.

Is this not an allowance?

> Also, you know, it's fun. Don't ruin it for others because you can't/won't/don't

I hope I wasn't ruining anyone's fun by being unable to properly comprehend how they choose to have it and verbalizing that incomprehension. Although, if speaking with uncertainty about a topic is enough to ruin someone's fun, then I feel I should note that I find fun in making overly wordy comments about how I don't understand other people. I implore you not to ruin my fun because you can't/won't/don't.

Although, I suspect my fun has never wrecked an internal wiki. I'll leave it to historians to judge between my fun and theirs.

The fun thing about cloud->butt for me was that is showed up infrequently enough that I would forget about it and occasionally be really confused. Like when a company called cloudplugs showed up on tech news sites. Everyone needs a little chaos in their work day.

I like to play a game with my future self by laying down little traps I know I’ll fall into and be confused by. I call it singleplayer pranking, it’s great!

I've had friends install it on various machines maily as a prank - and I laugh like I'm 12 every time.

The term is WREAKED havoc, FYI.

"There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer."

The core of this extension's content script is this:

  function handleText(textNode)
  {
        var v = textNode.nodeValue;

        v = v.replace(/\bAI\b/g, "BS");
        v = v.replace(/Artificial Intelligence/g, "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet");
        v = v.replace(/Artificial intelligence/g, "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet");
        v = v.replace(/artificial Intelligence/g, "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet");
        v = v.replace(/artificial intelligence/g, "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet");

        v = v.replace(/\bML\b/g, "IF");
        v = v.replace(/\bMachine Learning\b/g, "IF Statements");
        v = v.replace(/\bMachine learning\b/g, "IF Statements");
        v = v.replace(/\bmachine learning\b/g, "IF Statements");

        v = v.replace(/\Deep Learning\b/g, "Linear Algebra");
        v = v.replace(/\Deep learning\b/g, "Linear Algebra");
        v = v.replace(/\deep learning\b/g, "Linear Algebra");

        textNode.nodeValue = v;
  }

It does exactly what the manifest description says, nothing more.

> Substitute certain overhyped programming terms, such as "Deep Learning", and "Machine Learning", and "Artificial Intelligence" with more accurate replacements such as "Linear Algebra", "IF Statements", and "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet", respectively.

There was an article that NNs are just a decision trees, sounds better then "if statements".

If you expand a NN to decision trees, the resulting decision tree(s) can take up orders of magnitude more space and take orders of magnitude more time to run than the original NN.

The paper is discussed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_okxGdHM5b8

So...compressed decision trees?

at that point most things are compressed decision trees.

Possibly related: learning is isomorphic to compression, and the two may be in fact fundamentally the same thing.

Oh, wow. I'd long thought of my own learning as "when reality surprises, isn't merely what you'd expect, isn't "obvious", then fix that, with emphasis on simplicity and generality". I'd not recognized that as compression. Tnx!

Counter argument: For every trainable NN, there exists an equivalent, sparser [edit] trained NN.

https://numenta.com/blog/2019/08/30/case-for-sparsity-in-neu...

https://web.archive.org/web/20211130211241/https://www.bhaut...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635

NNs are decision trees only if all the activation functions are step functions, which makes sense intuitively.

While I agree these terms are abused, the author exaggerates in the opposite direction. Granted, AI understood as AGI is "BS that doesn't exist" (yet?). But DL and ML are working quite well and delivering decent results. It's true they're overhyped by unscrupulous marketers and greedy CEOs trying to grab more money from VC, but thanks to these technologies you can have pretty accurate text recognition, for example (and, to a lesser degree, although still impressive, also speech recognition).

I made similar for location names, municipality names, people names and switched them with ones local data, pulled from their Facebook or manually added.

It was called Local Edition. It did the switch on news articles so the person would feel a personal pain from horrible global news. That bomb didnt drop in Afghanistan and kill 12 bystanders. It dropped on your nearby grocery store and killed 12, including 3 of your friends w/ names and photos.

A generalization of Cloud-to-Butt!

>Substitute certain overhyped programming terms, such as "Deep Learning", and "Machine Learning", and "Artificial Intelligence" with more accurate replacements such as "Linear Algebra", "IF Statements", and "BS That Doesn't Exist Yet", respectively.

Wouldn't deep learning be more accurately described as "calculus"?

Is deep learning focused on calculating the area under curves?

Galaxy brain: Calculus is also linear algebra.

Machine learning = if statements? Now that is some proper BS

Full form should be "if statements with extra steps" :).

(Personally, I feel "linear regression" is a better substitute phrase.)

I look forward to citing this in formal writing. Thanks.

how aggressively idiotic

You haven't seen the extravagant claims marketing, bloggers and futurists have been peddling in the name of ML, 'AI', or its even more wish-object cousin, 'AGI'.

I've had to sit through some excruciating sessions.

I have, mostly they don't understand the tech and the concpts invloved but it doesn't matter because they are mostly concerned with what to do with tech. This type of FUD is not understanding the tech and the concepts involved while claiming superiority, really obnoxious.

Yes but there's a lot of those suits going around and getting paid $$$ to "demystify AI" to non-technical audiences. Hype pays.

Relevant XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1288/ https://xkcd.com/1625/ https://xkcd.com/1679/

This is one of those things you'd better do with a userscript instead of yet another addon. Way more flexible too.

You forgot this one: https://xkcd.com/1031/

And this one: https://xkcd.com/2304/

Or more specificaly https://xkcd.com/1838/

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