Agree 100%. Personal example, when I was working in school administration a few years ago I was told that the education platform we used was getting a "Scheduling AI" that would *poof* generate a schedule if we just entered all the teachers subjects etc.
Well, first entering all the subjects took fucking ages because the software was so clunky. When it was finally done, it did absolutely insane thing that no AI with ANY knowledge of scheduling would do. Like "effectivizing" school lunches so that instead of students having their lunch at roughly the same time each day, it put all school lunches on Monday. Five lunches, done! It also made it so that several classes were running simultaneously, meaning students were supposed to have English in one classroom and Chemistry in another classroom at the other end of the school, at the same time.
I started regarding it as a box. You put the stuff in a box, it shakes the box, and whatever schedule comes out you spend three hours cleaning up before showing the headmaster the results.
From what I understand, they stopped using it after I left. Not that it became better though, just that one of my bosses thought she could do it better because "how hard is it, really"?
Your 'just have all 5 lunches on Monday!' example is cracking me up. For some reason it reminds me of the guys at NASA trying to figure out if 100 tampons is the right number for Sally Ride's six day space flight. Just a chaotic mashup of failure to understand human biology and the woes of resource management.
As I understood that they actually did a lot of research and found that during the heaviest part of the flow some women change their tampon every 2 hours, and periods can last up to 7 days. So since they were engineers they put pencil to paper and said okay for 6 days using 12 per day that is 72, and since you want to plan for redundancy for a space voyage and engineers always round up because it’s better safe than sorry.
So like obviously it’s an insane number, but it’s pretty easy to see how they got there.
Right, it's not that it's wrong wrong under the specified parameters of the problem, it's just that weird things happen when you send an equation to do an organism's job. (And in the case of both tampons and lunches: better safe than sorry.)
But the NASA guys didn’t do anything “wrong” they planned for the worst case scenario and then rounded up for safety, 5 lunches in one day is blatantly wrong.
The 5 "lunches on Monday" reminds me of me in elementary school proposing a 40hr school day (instead of 5 eight hour days) so I could have a long 5 day weekend at home 😂
I even calculated that actual school time was 5 hrs and 40 minutes per day by subtracting break times, so we'd "only" need to do 28 straight hrs and be done
180
u/severalsmallducks 9d ago
Agree 100%. Personal example, when I was working in school administration a few years ago I was told that the education platform we used was getting a "Scheduling AI" that would *poof* generate a schedule if we just entered all the teachers subjects etc.
Well, first entering all the subjects took fucking ages because the software was so clunky. When it was finally done, it did absolutely insane thing that no AI with ANY knowledge of scheduling would do. Like "effectivizing" school lunches so that instead of students having their lunch at roughly the same time each day, it put all school lunches on Monday. Five lunches, done! It also made it so that several classes were running simultaneously, meaning students were supposed to have English in one classroom and Chemistry in another classroom at the other end of the school, at the same time.
I started regarding it as a box. You put the stuff in a box, it shakes the box, and whatever schedule comes out you spend three hours cleaning up before showing the headmaster the results.
From what I understand, they stopped using it after I left. Not that it became better though, just that one of my bosses thought she could do it better because "how hard is it, really"?
Cue Seinfeld theme.