Jeremy Howard: belief

Transcript context

…But you're only gonna get that with really great software engineering. Yeah. You wanna be careful. I think in the end like IPykernel, I'm finding for example, it's just too big a piece, right? Because in the end, the the team that made the original IPykernel were not able to create a set of tests that correctly exercised it, and therefore real world downstream projects, including the original nb classic, you know, which is what IPykernel was extracted from, didn't work anymore. So this is this is kind of where our focus is on now on the development side at Answer dot ai, is finding the right sized pieces and making sure they're the right pieces. Knowing how to recognize what those pieces are, and how to design them, and how to put them together is actually something that normally requires some decades of experience before you're really good at it. Certainly, it's true for me. I reckon I got pretty good at it after maybe 20 years of experience. Yeah. It's a big question. It's like how do you build these software engineering chops which are now even more important than they've ever been before, they're the difference between somebody who's good at writing computer software and somebody who's not. That feels like a challenging question. I know. And there's also this notion that there are so many different ways to abstract and represent something. Know, the world is a very complex place. And maybe the way we've been abstracting and representing software is mostly a reflection of our own cognitive limitations, right? And even in the sciences and in physics, you tend to have a lot of quite reductive methods of modeling the world. And then you've got complexity science, is just embracing the constructive, dissipative, gnarly nature of things. And I think a lot of software today, we don't understand. Right? So for example, there are many globally distributed software applications that use the actor pattern. And this is just this ins it's basically like a complex system. Right? And the only way we can understand it is by doing simulations and tests because no 1 actually knows how all of these things fit together. So you could argue, I guess, as a bull case that maybe we already are doing this at the top of software engineering, and that is what we want to do eventually anyway.…

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