Programming

17437 readers

152 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

339

This comic was published less than ten years ago, and it's wild how obsolete it is (xkcd.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I remember this one. It seems as spot on now as it was then, IMO. It's not trying to say that object detection is magic or impossible, since it was totally possible then as well. It just requires a dedicated team + time + money to pay them, which is what this comic was trying to express. It is true there are more off-the-shelf software available for newer programmers now than there was before, so dev time is shorter, but that's more just degrees of comfort / budget as opposed to anything fundamentally different.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It could have been the other way around if global positioning systems were either not developed or used only by the military. In that case, detecting scenery of a park could be easier than trying to figure out the position on the map.

Or it could just be that maps data are not shared. You'll need to hire boats and hire people to go and draw the map.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's true, even if the specific example doesn't hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I'd make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I'm pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.