8 ms·

A similar design (the space shuttle main engine) brought me some peace of mind at work one day. Nowadays, I do deep learning for a living, before that I was do

by Iv 8y ago

A similar design (the space shuttle main engine) brought me some peace of mind at work one day. Nowadays, I do deep learning for a living, before that I was doing computer vision. One day I am really pissed off at some compiling issue, with a parallel code and I am like "fuck this, this is a plumbing issue! I should spend my time on algorithms and shit. Not on ordering the damn bytes of the raw pixels. I have done that for years, that should be a solved problem by now." I go on reddit for some well-deserved outrage-slacking and stumble on the shuttle engine. "Yeah, that's what I am talking about. Now that is engineering." Then I realized it is basically a maze of pipes and pumps. Uh, yeah, 95% of plumbing (and some metallurgy feats as well). Ok, back to coding my data pipelines then...

mrec 8y ago
"Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up" -- John Carmack
- delibes 8y ago
  I think somewhere in this sci.space archive of rocketry usenet wonders is a quote along the lines of "Rocket science is just extreme plumbing". Cryogenics with powerful oxidizers is hard! https://yarchive.net/space/index.html https://yarchive.net/space/index.html
- 00N8 8y ago
  "All engineering is plumbing - some fields just manage to avoid working on broken sinks & toilets" -anonymous
  - mrec 8y ago
    Even the arts aren't necessarily safe. A story told by the composer Philip Glass in 2011: > While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.
    - bazooka2th 8y ago
      My day job is plumbing. I really very badly want to be able to make a decent living through the skills I've been practicing outside of my job, and this quote is motivating to me. Thank you! :)
hyperbovine 8y ago
I guess one glaring difference might be that they got this right when it mattered. Not a single Saturn V ever failed during launch. The aerospace engineering culture is vastly different than the "engineering" that goes on in ML/AI, and software development more generally. I have a lot of respect for it.
- Iv 8y ago
  The cost of failure is higher in aerospace. But I must say that in my job, when you manage to make your modified code pass all the thousands of unit tests and see the benchmark results increase and the 80 cores of the test machine firing up, feeding GB/s of data in their pipeline at the optimal fillrate, there is something of of a "ignition aaaaaand liftoff!" moment that is deeply satisfying. I am just allowed to try pressing the red button several times a day instead of once every two years.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    80 modern processors have around four orders of magnitude more "moving" parts than a Saturn V, according to what I can Google. And the Saturn V, it is said, had a particularly large number of parts because it was hand-made to an extent that modern machinery is not. Comparing the number of parts underestimates the complexity of a computer system, of course, because the software is a machine with a vast number of parts, on top of the hardware. In other words, I'm on the side of those who say software is hard to get right for good reason, and not because the practitioners are less competent.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Saturn V suffered several engine failures. It had persistent pogo oscillations that put Apollo 6 into the wrong orbit and forced much of its test plan to be canceled, and nearly destroyed Apollo 13 during launch. Vibrations severely damaged Skylab during its launch. I would not say it never failed. It never went kaboom in the sky, but there are other ways to fail.
  - sidlls 8y ago
mannykannot 8y ago
There's some serious chemistry, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics involved as well. I suppose someone is thinking that fluid dynamics is plumbing, but it would be a stretch to make that claim over issues like the size and shape of the combustion chamber, its throat and the bell, which are dependent on the characteristics of transonic and supersonic flow.

by Iv 8y ago

mrec 8y ago

"Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up" -- John Carmack

delibes 8y ago
I think somewhere in this sci.space archive of rocketry usenet wonders is a quote along the lines of "Rocket science is just extreme plumbing". Cryogenics with powerful oxidizers is hard! https://yarchive.net/space/index.html https://yarchive.net/space/index.html
00N8 8y ago
"All engineering is plumbing - some fields just manage to avoid working on broken sinks & toilets" -anonymous
- mrec 8y ago
  Even the arts aren't necessarily safe. A story told by the composer Philip Glass in 2011: > While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.
  - bazooka2th 8y ago
    My day job is plumbing. I really very badly want to be able to make a decent living through the skills I've been practicing outside of my job, and this quote is motivating to me. Thank you! :)

hyperbovine 8y ago

I guess one glaring difference might be that they got this right when it mattered. Not a single Saturn V ever failed during launch. The aerospace engineering culture is vastly different than the "engineering" that goes on in ML/AI, and software development more generally. I have a lot of respect for it.

Iv 8y ago
The cost of failure is higher in aerospace. But I must say that in my job, when you manage to make your modified code pass all the thousands of unit tests and see the benchmark results increase and the 80 cores of the test machine firing up, feeding GB/s of data in their pipeline at the optimal fillrate, there is something of of a "ignition aaaaaand liftoff!" moment that is deeply satisfying. I am just allowed to try pressing the red button several times a day instead of once every two years.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  80 modern processors have around four orders of magnitude more "moving" parts than a Saturn V, according to what I can Google. And the Saturn V, it is said, had a particularly large number of parts because it was hand-made to an extent that modern machinery is not. Comparing the number of parts underestimates the complexity of a computer system, of course, because the software is a machine with a vast number of parts, on top of the hardware. In other words, I'm on the side of those who say software is hard to get right for good reason, and not because the practitioners are less competent.
mikeash 8y ago
Saturn V suffered several engine failures. It had persistent pogo oscillations that put Apollo 6 into the wrong orbit and forced much of its test plan to be canceled, and nearly destroyed Apollo 13 during launch. Vibrations severely damaged Skylab during its launch. I would not say it never failed. It never went kaboom in the sky, but there are other ways to fail.
- sidlls 8y ago

mannykannot 8y ago

There's some serious chemistry, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics involved as well. I suppose someone is thinking that fluid dynamics is plumbing, but it would be a stretch to make that claim over issues like the size and shape of the combustion chamber, its throat and the bell, which are dependent on the characteristics of transonic and supersonic flow.