Showerthought: my grandma's recipe box taught me more about AI than any textbook

I was visiting my mom last weekend and she pulled out my grandma's old recipe box from the 50s. It's full of index cards with handwritten notes, but the crazy thing is that every single recipe has tiny corrections scribbled in the margins. Like 'add 5 more minutes if using gas oven' or 'swap buttermilk for yogurt if you want it tangier'. My grandma basically built a training dataset over 40 years by noting what worked and what didn't. It hit me that this is exactly how machine learning models get better, by seeing wrong predictions and adjusting. She never used fancy words but she understood the core idea better than half the tech bros I meet. Now I can't stop seeing little AI principles everywhere in old school systems like that. Has anyone else noticed how analog stuff from the past secretly works like modern algorithms?

3 comments

3 Comments

wadejenkins1d ago

Huh, that's a good way to put it. So did she ever go back and rewrite a whole recipe from scratch after she figured out the best version, or did she just keep piling on the notes?

ross.kim1d ago

Yeah that's exactly what I was wondering too. @hannahj49 I get what you're saying about the redundancy, but I think the real question is whether she actually rewrote anything. My aunt used to do this with her chili recipe - she'd have three pages of notes stuffed in the spiral binding and never once scrubbed it clean. She just kept adding Post-its until you couldn't even read the original directions anymore.

hannahj491d ago

Actually it's "whole entire recipe from scratch" - that's a bit redundant, isn't it?

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