We used to call that premature optimization. Now we complain tasks don’t have enough AI de-optimization. We must all redesign things that we have done in traditional, boring not-AI ways, and create new ways to do them slower, millions or billions of times more computationally intensive, more random, and less reliable! The market demands it!
I call this shit zero-sum optimization. In order to “optimize” for the desires of management, you always have to deoptimize something else.
Before AI became the tech craze du jour I had a VP get obsessed with microservices (because that’s what Netflix uses so it must be good). We had to tear apart a mature and very efficient app and turn it into hundreds of separate microservices… all of which took ~100 milliseconds to interoperate across the network. Pages that used to take 2 seconds to serve before now took 5 or 10 because of all the new latency required to do things they used to be able to basically for free. And it’s not like this was a surprise. We knew this was going to happen.
But hey, at least our app became more “modern” or whatever…
We used to call that premature optimization. Now we complain tasks don’t have enough AI de-optimization. We must all redesign things that we have done in traditional, boring not-AI ways, and create new ways to do them slower, millions or billions of times more computationally intensive, more random, and less reliable! The market demands it!
I call this shit zero-sum optimization. In order to “optimize” for the desires of management, you always have to deoptimize something else.
Before AI became the tech craze du jour I had a VP get obsessed with microservices (because that’s what Netflix uses so it must be good). We had to tear apart a mature and very efficient app and turn it into hundreds of separate microservices… all of which took ~100 milliseconds to interoperate across the network. Pages that used to take 2 seconds to serve before now took 5 or 10 because of all the new latency required to do things they used to be able to basically for free. And it’s not like this was a surprise. We knew this was going to happen.
But hey, at least our app became more “modern” or whatever…