Why Computers Can't Count Sometimes

2018-11-12

[public] 2.85M views, 142K likes, 883 dislikes audio only

Sometimes, numbers on sites like YouTube and Twitter jump up and down; subscriber counts lag, like-counts bounce all over the place. Why is it so hard for computers to count? To answer that, we need to talk about threading, eventual consistency, and caching.

Thanks to my proofreading team, and to Tomek on camera!

The Cambridge Centre for Computing History: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

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