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One thing that disturbs me is how incurious people seem to be about their hardware. I was talking with two people who make their entire living from iPhone apps,
by aristus 17y ago
One thing that disturbs me is how incurious people seem to be about their hardware. I was talking with two people who make their entire living from iPhone apps, and they didn't know it is an ARM device.
Part of it is surface-mount components, part of it is that the hardware is being pushed down the commodity stack. But I wonder what kitchen innovations we are missing because few people tinker with the bare metal anymore.
For 30-odd years hackers built their own lightsabers. Now they've pretty much stopped. I can't decide if that's inevitable or not.
- pyre 17y agoTo some extent things are technology-limited now. Not many people are going to build a 45nm process in their garage.
- aristus 17y agoPeople didn't build IC fabs in their garages either. But we knew the ins and outs of the hardware. Some things are beyond human ability, but there seems to be much less interest in homebrewing our primary computing devices than I think that should account for.
- pyre 17y agoI think it bears mentioning that at one point in time the hardware was the software for the most part. Now the hardware has grown powerful and general-purpose enough that it can largely be abstracted out of the picture for most applications (or at least abstracted to down to general high-level parts -- e.g. X Mb/Gb of RAM vs what type of controller chip is being used). I think that most people that are interested in 'tinkering' with things are doing it in software instead of hardware.