Weekend Plans Post: Thinkin’ ’bout Numbers
We had an emergency meeting today, due to a massive number of critical problems that the scanner picked up.
Apparently, the recent batch of updates resulted in a *HUGE* patch of red on the report and we had to go in and have a meeting about who dropped the ball and how.
Well, first, we hammered out exactly what was going on.
(Numbers are made up for privacy reasons, you know how it is.)
The errors all read more or less the same thing: “YOUR KERNEL IS OUTDATED! YOU NEED TO BE RUNNING A KERNEL NEWER THAN 9.6!”
And we quickly checked uname -r and hammered out that, yes, indeed… we were running 9.25.
And everybody in the room immediately sighed. Wait, what the heck is going on?
And we brainstormed for a minute or two and I remembered a conversation that I had with a buddy about a fun way to test AI’s thinking processes is to ask it “Is 9.9 a bigger number than 9.11?”
9.11 is bigger than 9.9. pic.twitter.com/zBrdLGAoH2
— Riley Goodside (@goodside) July 15, 2024
This caused a fun little argument over the whole number thing and how people thought about numbers versus how computers thought about them and… well, the argument flashed to mind and I yelled “THIS IS THE AI THING!” and drew the problem on the whiteboard and explained that our definitions were making the inverse mistake.
9.25 is a smaller number than 9.6.
Therefore our kernel was outdated.
We digressed into the whole discussion of what numbers are, really, when you think about them and talked about how we were going to use new scanner definitions on Monday when this, surely, will be cleaned up.
And it was so nice to click and see the exact mistake that the scanner definitions made.
We were so used to having semantic problems that it was refreshing and confusing to see a syntax problem.
Anyway. Maribou gets home tomorrow and the weekend will be spent having Maribou back again. A trip to the grocery store to restock her staples, a trip to Costco to make sure that everything else is stocked up… and, of course, getting the kitties reacclimated to The Nice One being home again.
It’ll be good to get back to normal.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “Package Inspector”. Photo taken by the author.)