4 ms·

That's how progress works. 50 years ago you could work on a brand new car with just the tools in your garage, now you'd need specialized knowledge, equipment,

That's how progress works. 50 years ago you could work on a brand new car with just the tools in your garage, now you'd need specialized knowledge, equipment, and more to the point that it's not really possible to be a home mechanic on many areas. This isn't new for new's sake, these improvements bring real benefits. And as things get more complex, people will specialize more and more. In the future, your average "dev" might not know the ins and outs of how the transport layer works, but that's okay because there is someone else who mainly only does that.

pythonlion 10y ago
you can build a brand new 1967 car with just the tools in your garage? Wow
- chucky_z 10y ago
  I mean... yeah, actually, you can -- if you had every (new) part from, say, a 1967 Ford F-series truck, anyone could absolutely, with just a Chiltons and a good set of tools, put together every nut, bolt, and screw from a giant crate of parts to build it.
  - pythonlion 10y ago
    That's interesting. I wish I could buy these "kits" today, put it together myself and drive a cheap cool car. Is that was a option then?
    - stan_rogers 10y ago
      It wouldn't be cheap. The safest, cheapest and most efficient "packing crate" for the parts for a single car is the assembled vehicle. (It's somewhat different when you can stack 50 left front fenders.) A kit car (most use fibreglass bodies) would be a much better option. Expect to spend about 1000 hours (much of that building jigs). The second one you build goes much smoother and faster than the first, even if it's a different kit based on a completely different pair of vehicles (the "source", from which most of the drive train parts will be drawn, and "target").
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      Kit cars are still a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_car . That said, they are almost all replicas of old cars, and in some countries getting them licensed for use on the road is hard.
      - smarnach 10y ago
        From the Wikipedia article: "A kit car should not be confused with a 'hand built' car or 'special' car, which is typically built from scratch by an individual."
        gsnedders 10y ago
        The parent, a few up, was talking about getting every part: to me that implies you're using pre-made body-panels, etc., rather than making them from scratch.
  - serf 10y ago
    If you're willing to gloss over the expertise needed to build a vehicle (experiences and know-how) then you might as well gloss over the same on modern platforms. My current day vehicle requires no additional tools or software other than python and pyserial + a USB/OBD2 dongle that can be had for under 10 bucks and my garage filled with the same wrenches that I could have used to work on many previous generations of car offered in the past few decades. With these tools I can touch every subsystem that a factory service mechanic can. One could say "You'd be insane to try to bang out every bit of a communications protocol and interface with the car that way", but I could say "You'd be insane to rely on a novice with zero experience to build a car i'd want to try and drive." I have no doubt that the novice would get something rolling, but suspension / engine / AFR tuning is a skill set that requires experience and education; the novices product would be inferior to the craftsmen. tl;dr: with sufficient gumption there isn't really that much more stuff in your way of being a backyard mechanic -- sure the companies try to dissuade you from doing so, but they have been doing that since the 50s Jaguars and 1000 dollar service manuals. There is just a wider variety of required reading. And to those interested : using your CS skills to 'perform the impossible' on a car is a hoot -- As ECMs and control software become more powerful and more in control of the car, so does the technical wizard!
    - beachstartup 10y ago
      indeed. in some of today's cars it's really astounding how much more power you can make quite easily, if you're into that sort of thing. hit a few keys and turn a few knobs and all of a sudden you're making 50 horsepower more, and living life in the no warranty danger zone. exciting!
      - travanx 10y ago
        Hondata is a great example of using a laptop to tune a car. For those interested in buying parts like assembling a big lego, http://www.factoryfive.com/ http://www.factoryfive.com/ is a good place to check out. Not thinking too much about it, I used letsencrypt on my business site as soon as I read that google would be looking at TLS for SEO purposes. Sadly SEO seemed more important than speed if I was using both to judge if we use TLS or not. If the speed is an issue what does it matter if someone can't find the site?
xg15 10y ago
We assume that there will always be someone who knows it works. With more systems working fully automated or administrated remotely, I think it's fully possible that for some niches there won't be anyone anymore with the exact technical details - or the only people who possess them will be sitting an ocean apart behind the walls of $megacorp and are not allowed to share the knowledge. In fact, the current crisis in information security shows that even today, a lot of people have serious misconceptions how the systems they are using daily work - with practical consequences.
- jethro_tell 10y ago
  I don't think you have to assume that. First, the knowledge is there, the tools are there, it's just that it takes time to learn. All most all of this stuff is in RFCs and built in the public eye in the standards bodies and OSS. You can read the code, you can read the standards, you can get a book about it. It's just not intuitive, because most complicated things grow past that. Second, there will always be experts at various parts of the stack. That's how 'capitalism' works, right? We all specialize until we only do one thing really well. I don't think we could have scaled the internet to the size it is now if everyone who worked in IT was still keeping the mail server off spam blacklists, and keeping the company web-server humming in the closet. We get to a point as a group where we have bigger problems to solve and so someone learns to solve hundreds of peoples spam problems, and someone learns to solve hundreds of peoples route buffering problems, and someone learns to solve end to end encryption for web traffic. Everyone can't be a functional expert in everything, that's how we moved past the middle ages. And that's how we are going to move forward as well.
sly010 10y ago
> This isn't new for new's sake, these improvements bring real benefits. Half of the time. In the case of HTTPS, for sure. But it is becoming increasingly hard to tell apart real improvement and change-for-change. This is especially true in the customer electronics space, but also in the cloud industry. I would argue that a major selling point for a lot of things today IS the fact that they are "new" not that they are "better". Just think of all the "smart" devices that use a server in the cloud to connect to your phone 1m away...
- jethro_tell 10y ago
  Not a problem we would have if we had adopted new IPv6 years ago just because it's new. Connecting devices together when you don't own the router between is hard. It's harder when everything uses nat and stateful firewalls. A product that relies on the user being able to change settings in their router is not a mass market product, so you don't see a lot of people build things like that. That's what I would want, that's what you might want, but most people want 'end to end' connectivity without having to mess with port forwarding, static addressing/DDNS update, or firewalling. Had those interfaces/problems been solved/simplified 10 years ago, we wouldn't have these conversations. But no one did, and we are here.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

pythonlion 10y ago

you can build a brand new 1967 car with just the tools in your garage? Wow

chucky_z 10y ago
I mean... yeah, actually, you can -- if you had every (new) part from, say, a 1967 Ford F-series truck, anyone could absolutely, with just a Chiltons and a good set of tools, put together every nut, bolt, and screw from a giant crate of parts to build it.
- pythonlion 10y ago
  That's interesting. I wish I could buy these "kits" today, put it together myself and drive a cheap cool car. Is that was a option then?
  - stan_rogers 10y ago
    It wouldn't be cheap. The safest, cheapest and most efficient "packing crate" for the parts for a single car is the assembled vehicle. (It's somewhat different when you can stack 50 left front fenders.) A kit car (most use fibreglass bodies) would be a much better option. Expect to spend about 1000 hours (much of that building jigs). The second one you build goes much smoother and faster than the first, even if it's a different kit based on a completely different pair of vehicles (the "source", from which most of the drive train parts will be drawn, and "target").
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    Kit cars are still a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_car . That said, they are almost all replicas of old cars, and in some countries getting them licensed for use on the road is hard.
    - smarnach 10y ago
      From the Wikipedia article: "A kit car should not be confused with a 'hand built' car or 'special' car, which is typically built from scratch by an individual."
      - gsnedders 10y ago
        The parent, a few up, was talking about getting every part: to me that implies you're using pre-made body-panels, etc., rather than making them from scratch.
- serf 10y ago
  If you're willing to gloss over the expertise needed to build a vehicle (experiences and know-how) then you might as well gloss over the same on modern platforms. My current day vehicle requires no additional tools or software other than python and pyserial + a USB/OBD2 dongle that can be had for under 10 bucks and my garage filled with the same wrenches that I could have used to work on many previous generations of car offered in the past few decades. With these tools I can touch every subsystem that a factory service mechanic can. One could say "You'd be insane to try to bang out every bit of a communications protocol and interface with the car that way", but I could say "You'd be insane to rely on a novice with zero experience to build a car i'd want to try and drive." I have no doubt that the novice would get something rolling, but suspension / engine / AFR tuning is a skill set that requires experience and education; the novices product would be inferior to the craftsmen. tl;dr: with sufficient gumption there isn't really that much more stuff in your way of being a backyard mechanic -- sure the companies try to dissuade you from doing so, but they have been doing that since the 50s Jaguars and 1000 dollar service manuals. There is just a wider variety of required reading. And to those interested : using your CS skills to 'perform the impossible' on a car is a hoot -- As ECMs and control software become more powerful and more in control of the car, so does the technical wizard!
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    indeed. in some of today's cars it's really astounding how much more power you can make quite easily, if you're into that sort of thing. hit a few keys and turn a few knobs and all of a sudden you're making 50 horsepower more, and living life in the no warranty danger zone. exciting!
    - travanx 10y ago
      Hondata is a great example of using a laptop to tune a car. For those interested in buying parts like assembling a big lego, http://www.factoryfive.com/ http://www.factoryfive.com/ is a good place to check out. Not thinking too much about it, I used letsencrypt on my business site as soon as I read that google would be looking at TLS for SEO purposes. Sadly SEO seemed more important than speed if I was using both to judge if we use TLS or not. If the speed is an issue what does it matter if someone can't find the site?

xg15 10y ago

We assume that there will always be someone who knows it works. With more systems working fully automated or administrated remotely, I think it's fully possible that for some niches there won't be anyone anymore with the exact technical details - or the only people who possess them will be sitting an ocean apart behind the walls of $megacorp and are not allowed to share the knowledge. In fact, the current crisis in information security shows that even today, a lot of people have serious misconceptions how the systems they are using daily work - with practical consequences.

jethro_tell 10y ago
I don't think you have to assume that. First, the knowledge is there, the tools are there, it's just that it takes time to learn. All most all of this stuff is in RFCs and built in the public eye in the standards bodies and OSS. You can read the code, you can read the standards, you can get a book about it. It's just not intuitive, because most complicated things grow past that. Second, there will always be experts at various parts of the stack. That's how 'capitalism' works, right? We all specialize until we only do one thing really well. I don't think we could have scaled the internet to the size it is now if everyone who worked in IT was still keeping the mail server off spam blacklists, and keeping the company web-server humming in the closet. We get to a point as a group where we have bigger problems to solve and so someone learns to solve hundreds of peoples spam problems, and someone learns to solve hundreds of peoples route buffering problems, and someone learns to solve end to end encryption for web traffic. Everyone can't be a functional expert in everything, that's how we moved past the middle ages. And that's how we are going to move forward as well.

sly010 10y ago

> This isn't new for new's sake, these improvements bring real benefits. Half of the time. In the case of HTTPS, for sure. But it is becoming increasingly hard to tell apart real improvement and change-for-change. This is especially true in the customer electronics space, but also in the cloud industry. I would argue that a major selling point for a lot of things today IS the fact that they are "new" not that they are "better". Just think of all the "smart" devices that use a server in the cloud to connect to your phone 1m away...

jethro_tell 10y ago
Not a problem we would have if we had adopted new IPv6 years ago just because it's new. Connecting devices together when you don't own the router between is hard. It's harder when everything uses nat and stateful firewalls. A product that relies on the user being able to change settings in their router is not a mass market product, so you don't see a lot of people build things like that. That's what I would want, that's what you might want, but most people want 'end to end' connectivity without having to mess with port forwarding, static addressing/DDNS update, or firewalling. Had those interfaces/problems been solved/simplified 10 years ago, we wouldn't have these conversations. But no one did, and we are here.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]