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192 points imasl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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rsynnott ◴[] No.45311963[source]
This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

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gus_massa ◴[] No.45312761[source]
I'm not sure about the current state of the art, but microprocessors production is (was?) very bad. You make a lot of them in a single silicon wafer, and then test them thoughtfully until you find the few that are good. You drop all the defective ones because they are very cheap piece of sand and charge a lot for the ones that works correctly to cover all the costs.

I'm not sure how this translates to programming, code review is too expensive, but for short code you can try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization

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1. CorrectHorseBat ◴[] No.45313084[source]
Design for test is still a major part of (high volume) chip design. Anything that can't be tested in seconds on wafer is basically worthless for mass production.