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192 points imasl42 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | 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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1. steelblueskies ◴[] No.45329123[source]
Evolution via random mutation and selection.

Or more broadly, the existence of complex or any life.

Sure, it's not the way I would pick to do most things, but when your buzzword magical thinking so deep all that you have is a hammer, even if it doesn't look like a nail you will force your wage slaves to hammer it anyway until it works.

As to your other cases.. injection molded plastic parts for things like the spinning t bar spray arm in some dishwashers. Crap molds, pass to low wage or temp to razorblade fix by hand and box up. Personally worked such a temp job before, among others so yes that bad output manual qc and fix up abounds still.

And if we are talking high failure rates... see also chip binning and foundry yields in semiconductors.

Just have to look around to see the dubious seeming is more the norm.