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Does anyone else despise buzzwords? A little background. I am a senior dev with a government organization who works in machine learning. As everyone knows, AI is the hottest of the hot now. Thus, everyone believes that they need it.

Long story short. I had a "requirement" come down to develop an "AI" algorithm that totaled all of the hours that a device was used last month. I explained to them that they weren't looking for "AI" and instead they needed rudimentary mathematics and a touch of Business Analytics for visualization. When they finally understood, they told me "nevermind, we just want to get into AI"...

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  • 6
    I saw the government fund research work for distributed machine learning based on blockchain that used software defined networking.
  • 2
    Hype driven development.

    In physics department in university they despised that, too. But still there were 'fashion physics' - stuff that was hot or interested enough to stir some attention. Probably just how our brain works. I mean, if you put a handful of actors in the city center gazing into the air, poeple will follow, because there gotta be sth. We're still little stupid, curious apes following the herd.
  • 2
    Fear of missing out. On the otherhand its always good to improve oneself or innovate as a company. Using a hobby project or a case thats not entirely needed is the ideal playground.

    But they shlould reversed the question ‘we are interested in AI, we dont know if its usefull, bur we’re curious’

    Or you a senior dev should not shut the idea down and ask why the want AI and if you know a better fit. Now you are irrirated and so are they
  • 2
    I hate then when used in the wrong context but then, in some contexts buzzwords are actually correct!
  • 3
    I dont hate buzzwords, i hate the fuckwads who only give money to pitches with buzzwords in them. If funding was given to projects with real promise or pragmatic solutions to real-world problems, then we wouldnt be having this thread at all.

    Sure you can orchestrate your product in Kubernetes and it uses blockchain and whatever, but does it really need to? Its a webserver serving static content...
  • 2
    @arcsector a million times this. I really dislike this shit. Some people are trying to add stuff to applications that they barely need.

    For fucks sake, web development sometimes gets to be really complex yeah whatever.But sometimes I really feel that it is made complex by people jumping into every trend they can get into.
  • 3
    @AleCx04 "No you don't understand i need it for redundancy and auto-scaling"

    Then use EC2AS motherfucker, not a crazy API-based solution where your message broker needs to be COMPLETELY SEPARATE from your kubernetes environment...

    Can you tell that i dealt with this recently? Hahaha
  • 2
    Every time I see a project using unrelated or plain wrong buzzwords, I lose a few brain cells.. when such projects get funding on the other hand... No wonder that I'm an idiot by now. Cancer pits, every single one of them.
  • 1
    But what this shows is that machine learning needs a lot of explaining on what it's good for and what potential it has for doing business. And that it is not the managers and business executives fault to have wrong expectations as machine learning devs live in their "leave me alone" nerd bubble?
  • 2
    @heyheni while I agree that the community around data science needs to do a better job of explaining what they can provide, I do not agree that the blame rests entirely on us. A dev team cannot force that their executive leadership stop using a word politically, and out of context. It quickly turns into, a "our grand whoha leader calls it this, we shall preach it on high" in the real world. I have personally explained the difference between biz analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to the chief abuser of the term, and he shrugged me off.
  • 2
    @bradshaw15r yes
    "There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
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