/r/badcomputerscience

Photograph via snooOG

Did someone prove P=NP using quantum physics? Is the Halting problem easily solveable using one weird trick? Is the singularity apparently going to kill us all? Then it belongs in this subreddit.

Badcomputerscience is the /r/badscience of computer science. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, check out /r/badscience and read through a few threads. The basic objective of /r/badcomputerscience is to identify, dissect, and discuss some of the misconceptions about our field that we see on a day to day basis, both here on Reddit and elsewhere in the media.

RULES:

1: ALL submissions must include an explanation as to why it's bad computer science. Ideally, the un-knowledgeable individual should be able to step in here and learn why what they said was wrong.

2: ALL links to content on Reddit must be non-participation (np) links. Simply replace the "www" of the URL with "np".

3: Harassment, insults, slurs, or any other offensive material will result in an insta-ban. PLEASE be civil

/r/badcomputerscience

1,335 Subscribers

9

Happy Cakeday, r/badcomputerscience! Today you're 8

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 1 posts:

5 Comments
2022/10/04
22:46 UTC

9

Happy Cakeday, r/badcomputerscience! Today you're 7

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 1 posts:

0 Comments
2021/10/04
22:46 UTC

35

You can apparently think of racism as a computable Turing machine

4 Comments
2019/11/06
18:05 UTC

13

This entire thread (no, chatbots are not intelligent beings)

3 Comments
2018/03/30
19:39 UTC

20

In which computer science is useless

10 Comments
2018/03/08
09:28 UTC

11

"if someone solves NP-Complete in a meaningful way our society just changes like blamb. so i don't expect that it has."

1 Comment
2017/12/01
08:16 UTC

11

AI brings out the crazies

Sightings of ghost cars are probably because of early self driving cars tests.

Sightings of ghost cars goes back about as far as cars being a common thing. And this doesn't explain any of the other phantom vehicles people reportedly see, some of which are older than digital computers.

Counterfactual Quantum Communication is responsible for the Mandela effect, aka "I forgot how to spell Berenstain bears"

I'm at the point in my life where I fully embrace the fact that I do not understand how quantum computing and communication works. At this point if you told me it was literally just magic, I would probably agree with you and move on my day. Having said that, I kind of doubt this powerful magic is able to cause everyone everywhere to forget that New Zealand is south of Australia, send you and a bunch of random people on reddit to a new dimension where some movie called Shazaam was never made, or put you in a timeline where Nelson Mandela died in prison.

The black cube in the article is not a reference to 'black box' programming (vis-a-vi "we don't understand how this AI works, so it's like a black box"), instead, it's an example of how we all worship Saturn

Just, please, get mental help.

Here's an archive link to that forum post. The premise is that ancient Jews worshiped the Roman god Saturn as "El" (but no, not really, a bunch of random English words include "el" in them, El was represented by a black box (???), and there are a bunch of random places with large black boxes.

Demon's literally exist, and AI is a perfect way of holding them

OK, "AI" is a program, which means that it's a series of instructions. I guess you could say that the demon will, like, port itself as a module in the AI's code, or something? Maybe they're using "AI" as a term including hardware, but then you'd just be saying that "you could overwrite the program's code and replace it with a demon", but then... why would you need the AI?

What I'm saying is that I have questions you guys.

they can barely program a computer opearting system that's half decent and not riddled with exploits and now we're opening this can of worms. lol humans.

Incompetence isn't the reason for shoddy operating systems; money is.

Yeah, OK, modern operating systems have 45-85 millions of lines of code, but sure, sure buddy.

Sorry, but there's just nothing else to say about this.

5 Comments
2017/07/25
10:38 UTC

11

When consumers become cybersecurity experts

2 Comments
2017/06/28
00:28 UTC

22

Scientists can't explain how AI works!

2 Comments
2017/05/15
01:47 UTC

24

Twitter AI Bot proves that White Race is the superior race based on pure logic.

2 Comments
2017/01/04
23:54 UTC

10

It seems like every time a functional language is posted, people are upset that a non-Algol syntax exists.

6 Comments
2016/11/29
16:03 UTC

9

[+1000] The Internet is the colloquial term for Interconnected Networks. ... TL;DR The Internet is a collection of networks and your can start your own any time; that's how this thing actually works.

3 Comments
2016/09/18
05:09 UTC

5

Re: Manifolds make you a better programmer (x-post from r/badmathematics)

2 Comments
2016/07/06
04:32 UTC

27

"Any amount of text can be represented by 8 characters"

13 Comments
2016/06/14
16:17 UTC

18

"This is the halting problem, and it's something humans absolutely can do with minor domain knowledge, and something computers absolutely can't do yet."

2 Comments
2016/05/25
03:24 UTC

39

Many times I have thought that to myself that computers would work better if you could just "add a two" in binary code.

7 Comments
2016/03/24
23:08 UTC

4

Microsoft wiping a 4chan /pol/ brigade on their experiment ruins the whole experiment

1 Comment
2016/03/24
18:57 UTC

5

Quantum Computing. Definitely, it's the next iteration of computing from Classical.

6 Comments
2016/03/02
06:37 UTC

9

People with inverted qualia experience the encryption key as the decryption key, and experience a long time as a short time

1 Comment
2016/02/12
02:34 UTC

14

"TIL that more than 1,000 experts, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, have signed an open letter urging a global ban on AI weapons systems"

8 Comments
2015/12/08
10:08 UTC

20

P = NP? "It could also be p = 3np or 4np" (from badmath)

7 Comments
2015/10/15
19:10 UTC

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