4 ms·

Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
This isn't complaining about today vs. life before the industrial revolution; it's complaining about today vs. last year or two, within a particular job sector. In other words, total amassed progress may be amazing, but according to the author, its derivative in web/consumer tech sucks (I'm inclined to agree, even if not for the same reasons).
atoav 7y ago
We as engineers continue to make similar mistakes over and over again, with technological advancement blocking the knowledge transfer between generations. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the generations of engineers, programmers and mathematicians before them. If “we” see a old Fortran program running some part of an airplane our intuitive reaction isn’t awe and admiration, but we spontaneously decide we can do it better. Some of these old creations run without flaw and yet the first intuition everybody gets is to replace them. In structural engineering lessons like these had to be learned the hard way: only with collapsing bridges and hundreds of deaths, engineers start to realize that the technical progress in tooling (e.g. computers) didn’t automatically translate to safer and more stable structures and that the stuff they did back in the day is even more impressive looking back considering that. I am not saying we are doomed: we have a incredible pool of interesting and cool solutions that worked reliably for ages. We just need to do a better job at not fooling ourselves with shiny new toys. We can’t jus assume historically hard problems become a piece of cake if we just throw the latest technology onto it, without even dealing with the lessons learned by the ones before us. This is hubris. A good analysis of the problem gets you a long way towards the solution, that is why running around with hammers and picturing everything as a nail is already creating problems: machine/deep learning is good at solving some problems, but bad at solving others.

This isn't complaining about today vs. life before the industrial revolution; it's complaining about today vs. last year or two, within a particular job sector. In other words, total amassed progress may be amazing, but according to the author, its derivative in web/consumer tech sucks (I'm inclined to agree, even if not for the same reasons).

atoav 7y ago

We as engineers continue to make similar mistakes over and over again, with technological advancement blocking the knowledge transfer between generations. Everybody thinks they are smarter than the generations of engineers, programmers and mathematicians before them. If “we” see a old Fortran program running some part of an airplane our intuitive reaction isn’t awe and admiration, but we spontaneously decide we can do it better. Some of these old creations run without flaw and yet the first intuition everybody gets is to replace them. In structural engineering lessons like these had to be learned the hard way: only with collapsing bridges and hundreds of deaths, engineers start to realize that the technical progress in tooling (e.g. computers) didn’t automatically translate to safer and more stable structures and that the stuff they did back in the day is even more impressive looking back considering that. I am not saying we are doomed: we have a incredible pool of interesting and cool solutions that worked reliably for ages. We just need to do a better job at not fooling ourselves with shiny new toys. We can’t jus assume historically hard problems become a piece of cake if we just throw the latest technology onto it, without even dealing with the lessons learned by the ones before us. This is hubris. A good analysis of the problem gets you a long way towards the solution, that is why running around with hammers and picturing everything as a nail is already creating problems: machine/deep learning is good at solving some problems, but bad at solving others.