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Interesting, but couldn't you ask this of any existing technology with years of development and realize you don't know how we arrived at a function we take for

Interesting, but couldn't you ask this of any existing technology with years of development and realize you don't know how we arrived at a function we take for granted? What happens when you press the accelerator on your car?

canadian_tired 6y ago
Indeed. I have realized 2 things: First, technical specialization is increasingly more fine-grained; second, assumptions that anything outside of the specialization will magically just work. To extend your example, 30 years ago you could easily find someone who understood the whole chain...from the pedal all the way to the rubber on the road. Today? the pedal itself likely has a microcontroller in it... designed by a pedal expert, who knows what the various I/O requirements are and has little or no concern with what the car actually does. Probably leads to better pedal designs, but you need an army of people to tell you why the car might not move.
bluetomcat 6y ago
> What happens when you press the accelerator on your car? No single automotive engineer can answer that question to the level of detail that the original post wants to approach. A car is a collection of separately engineered mechanical devices meeting some power/torque/thermal requirements, electronic units which, to a mechanical engineer are essentially black boxes with inputs and outputs. Abstraction is in every field of engineering and it helps people reason about a complex system in terms of abstract interconnected parts, not in terms of bits, bytes, cogs or bearings. In a similar vein, a web developer, a browser developer, a kernel developer, a network driver developer each use different levels of abstraction and paradigms in order to achieve their thing.
- mcguire 6y ago
  There is another way of asking this question: "Someone types the URL of your application in their browser and doesn't get the application page. How do you figure out what went wrong?"
amelius 6y ago
"If you want yo make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan I guess a similar statement holds if you want to understand anything starting from nothing.
squeaky-clean 6y ago
This would be my perfect coffee table book. "What Happens When I X", or something.
- foota 6y ago
  You may like Randal Munroe's (of xkcd) books if that sounds intriguing.
  - charwalker 6y ago
    Thing explainer is fun, but definitely intensive and worth time to go over. I think I've gone through half of it with focus.
  - squeaky-clean 6y ago
    "Thing Explainer" and "What If" are my current coffee table books actually, hahaha, so spot on with the recommendation. I want a second copy of Thing Explainer because my friends have flipped through it so much.

canadian_tired 6y ago

Indeed. I have realized 2 things: First, technical specialization is increasingly more fine-grained; second, assumptions that anything outside of the specialization will magically just work. To extend your example, 30 years ago you could easily find someone who understood the whole chain...from the pedal all the way to the rubber on the road. Today? the pedal itself likely has a microcontroller in it... designed by a pedal expert, who knows what the various I/O requirements are and has little or no concern with what the car actually does. Probably leads to better pedal designs, but you need an army of people to tell you why the car might not move.

bluetomcat 6y ago

> What happens when you press the accelerator on your car? No single automotive engineer can answer that question to the level of detail that the original post wants to approach. A car is a collection of separately engineered mechanical devices meeting some power/torque/thermal requirements, electronic units which, to a mechanical engineer are essentially black boxes with inputs and outputs. Abstraction is in every field of engineering and it helps people reason about a complex system in terms of abstract interconnected parts, not in terms of bits, bytes, cogs or bearings. In a similar vein, a web developer, a browser developer, a kernel developer, a network driver developer each use different levels of abstraction and paradigms in order to achieve their thing.

mcguire 6y ago
There is another way of asking this question: "Someone types the URL of your application in their browser and doesn't get the application page. How do you figure out what went wrong?"

amelius 6y ago

"If you want yo make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan I guess a similar statement holds if you want to understand anything starting from nothing.

squeaky-clean 6y ago

This would be my perfect coffee table book. "What Happens When I X", or something.

foota 6y ago
You may like Randal Munroe's (of xkcd) books if that sounds intriguing.
- charwalker 6y ago
  Thing explainer is fun, but definitely intensive and worth time to go over. I think I've gone through half of it with focus.
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  "Thing Explainer" and "What If" are my current coffee table books actually, hahaha, so spot on with the recommendation. I want a second copy of Thing Explainer because my friends have flipped through it so much.