Re:AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
by Quimoniz on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @07:22PM
(#50373337)
huh. Interesting background. Thanks for sharing.
Regarding your remark "[...] because second shelf algorithms now rival or beat the top shelf ones [...]". That is honestly something I would never have believed back in the 2000s, Windows XP era:
I thought we needed more than the classic mathematical operations and if/else for an operating system that drives the modern world like it had been envisioned by sci-fi in the past 100 years.
That turned out to be wrong: Your modern android with a couple of simple apps is everything a man from 1900 might ever conceivably want from technology.
And it is all if/else/while and mathematical operations.
It turned out you just needed enough of these, to get everything working nicely.
Regarding your remark "[...] because second shelf algorithms now rival or beat the top shelf ones [...]". That is honestly something I would never have believed back in the 2000s, Windows XP era:
I thought we needed more than the classic mathematical operations and if/else for an operating system that drives the modern world like it had been envisioned by sci-fi in the past 100 years.
That turned out to be wrong: Your modern android with a couple of simple apps is everything a man from 1900 might ever conceivably want from technology.
And it is all if/else/while and mathematical operations.
It turned out you just needed enough of these, to get everything working nicely.
Watching in awe. Watching in awe.