Amelias Bedelia are my spirit animals.
post
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bedelia
Premise
The stories follow Amelia Bedelia, a maid who repeatedly misunderstands various commands of her employer by taking figures of speech and various terminology literally, with comical results. For example, she interprets a request to "put the lights out" as a request to physically put the light bulbs outside. Other examples include "tag a player out" when playing baseball resulting in her placing an actual tag on the player and then picking up the person to ask how far out they should be.
Computers often do what you said, not what you meant.
Honestly more experience with that might help some people who are habitually unclear in their thinking and communication
Computers
oftenliterally always do what you said, not what you meant.
FTFY
Even excluding cosmic rays and other random bit flips, it's still not just "you" unless you designed the whole thing starting with sand and copper (and high quality only, none of this Ea-Nasir stuff) and wrote all the software starting from machine code.
Really what a computer does is the composition of what's it's told to do by you, the devs of the app you're using, the devs of the compiler that compiled the app, the devs of OS that compiler ran on..., the devs of the OS the app is running on, the devs of the compiler of that OS, the devs of the OS that OS compiler ran on..., ...The UEFI devs (and their compilers, etc.), the motherboard manufacturer and their design software..., the RAM manufacturer..., the CPU designer..., GPU..., etc.
Except when I use them. Then there are error messages for the error messages that no one has seen before because I tried to print something.
That's not true there is stuff like race conditions, galactic which energy beams, broken cpus, computational bit flips, ram bit flips and stuff like row hammer, just as an example list, where the computer is very likely to not do what you said and not do what you meant
Edit: depending what you do even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon could be a problem
It’s like the classic “how do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” lesson
https://www.highrock.co/2022/07/never-assume-a-lesson-from-peanut-butter-and-jelly/
I saw this on reddit ages ago and it still makes me laugh

Knowing her tendency to take everything literally, this is bound to be one bizarre erotic novel.
As someone who got irrationally angry at Amelia Bedelia as a kid, I really wish this was a real book. An adult version where she gets properly called out on her bullshit would be absolutely cathartic to read.
Damn you too? I was like 8 years old thinking to myself, here we have an asshole, who is clearly inept, and yet her reputation never suffers.
I know, right? The whole reason why she was such a big fuckup to begin with was because she was surrounded by enablers! Even my prepubescent self knew there were no good people in those books.
It's been a while since I've read that. Thank you for reminding me about it friend.
It's an evergreen blog post, but it hits different in the age of code generating agents. Less of a commiseration in the eccentricities of writing code, more nostalgic for the before times. That could just be forced usage of those agents at work talking though
Was going to say “wants needs to be told what to do exactly” and does exactly that is one of the reasons so many autistic people like myself are into computers.
And then i learned about Amelia Bedelia and i will literally eat my shirt if that isn’t autism coded.
I dislike how the post calls those traits as dumb
, i personaly loath the times i gave exact instructions only for a non autistic to ignore half and gladly show me something that is useless to me. But i do still agree wirh the underlying message.
When technology does things I didn't tell it to do I get irrationally angry.
Why did I go into IT.
I feel this a lot, especially as someone who enjoys computers and such. Why does my phone not do what I tell it to? Why did we as a society choose that Google should have more say than an end user? It sucks. The one that gets me the most is that you'll try to do things sometimes and it has the audacity to say things are not allowed by the admin. FUCKER I OWN YOUUUUU, WHY AM I NOT THE ADMIN???
I love AI as digital Amelia Bedelia. Bedeliae?
It’s like Postmasters General.
The plural of Surgeon General is Surgeons General.
The past tense of Surgeons General is Surgeoned General.
"General" is descriptive, not like a military title, and therefore isn't pluralized. "Bedelia" isn't indicative of the status of the Amelia, it's just her surname. Pluralizing Amelia instead of Bedelia implies there's another kind of Amelia she could be, which sadly isn't the case. She's doomed to be that dumb forever.
Bedelia is plural, a single is a Bedelium.
I had a professor describe it as such: "Computers aren't smart. They're just extremely fast at finding all the wrong answers first."
computers are "so fucking stupid" because you fucked up the instructions? god forbid you ever meet my autistic ass
I once wrote msql instead of mysql and it took me days to figure out where I'd gone wrong. I did the "else echo ("error1"); " thing (sorry, can't php anymore) and even though I found the line where the error was, my brain took ages to see I missed the y. I used to both love and hate coding.
I look forward to the semi-daily posts by one of the regulars at !comicstrips@lemmy.world
EDIT : I was going to post a link to internet archive, but those are all part of some official library collections, so we're shit out of luck lads
top 50 comments