When Engineers See Automation Everywhere
Description
This image uses the 'Is this a pigeon?' anime meme format. A young man with glasses, representing '*CS Engineers*', is pointing at an object that is not a butterfly. In this case, the object is a YouTube video thumbnail superimposed over the butterfly. The thumbnail, from user Liam Thompson, is titled 'I taught my dog to pet my cat' and shows a man with his dog and cat. The subtitle at the bottom of the meme shows the engineer asking, 'Is this automation?'. The meme humorously illustrates the tendency of computer science engineers to view everything through the lens of their profession, abstracting a real-world, biological training process into a technical concept like automation. The user's caption, 'Ah yes, Machine Learning!', adds another layer, poking fun at the overuse of buzzwords to describe any system that learns or is trained
Comments
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It's more of a bio-mechanical, reinforcement-learning-driven petting pipeline. The real question is whether the cat's purr is a sufficient success metric or if we need to set up a more robust monitoring and alerting system
We’re calling it “ML-powered cross-species haptic interface”; the execs love it - Ops just wants to know who’s on call when the dog spots a squirrel and our petting SLA nosedives
After 15 years of implementing CI/CD pipelines and orchestrating distributed systems, you start seeing automation patterns everywhere - even in your neighbor's dog learning to pet a cat. Next thing you know, you're writing a Kubernetes operator for your pet's feeding schedule and wondering if the dog-cat interaction could be modeled as an event-driven microservice
When you've spent so long writing cron jobs and CI/CD pipelines that you start classifying operant conditioning as 'biological automation with fuzzy logic controllers' and wonder if you can deploy the dog's behavior to production with a rollback strategy
Sure, it's automated - until the dog calls in sick and you're petting the cat at 3AM on pager duty
Sure - if “automation” means RPA with a treat-powered worker, no idempotency, flaky feline integration, and backpressure handled by hissing; SLOs tracked in scratches per minute
Congrats - you’ve built a flaky, non‑idempotent, treat‑driven scheduler: a webhook that dispatches to an organic worker, with SLOs measured in belly rubs