4 ms·

I can see that reasoning and these days my opinion there is that if one doesn’t understand the stack end to end then they’re contributing to an ever increasing

I can see that reasoning and these days my opinion there is that if one doesn’t understand the stack end to end then they’re contributing to an ever increasing risk of implosion. That’s largely where we are today in many sectors of society. Experts who only understand the nuances of a niche layer they’ve patched into a series of layers of indirection by the result of not taking the time to fully understand what one is working with from first principles or fundamentals. The OS’s of today are computation stacks that resemble something like bandaids and house of cards with people piling on intricate complexity without conceptual understanding that can be effectively reasoned about. I understand that simple is hard. However when one can reason about a system when it fits entirely in their head then they can extend it completely. I believe all systems should be this way. To have anything else is a risk of corruption or assimilation as the minority control a majority through complexity against time. Sorry I kind of went off on a tangent there. Tl:dr systems should fit in anyone’s ability to reason about it conceptually. Anything too complex is an attack vector and disaster waiting to happen.

Joker_vD 6y ago
So. Do you understand, for example, the intricacies of x86 microcode and how its executed on all Intel microarchitechtures relevant today: from Sunny Bridge to Sandy Cove? I don't remember who said that, but it's a really smart observation: Civilization is not just the state of society when there are lots of smart professionals, orchestrated together to provide infrastructure, and tools, and goods, and services, it's a state of society when almost everyone routinely uses the fruits of labour of those professionals without even being aware of that labour. That's the point: that it Just Works™. You don't have to think about it.
- arethuza 6y ago
  "In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable." Hence the title of probably the scariest thing ever broadcast on TV: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
- dfischer 6y ago
  I don't agree with that conclusion that it just works. I'd argue that it doesn't work and gives the false illusion of things working right or well. There's a lot to unpack there. Another way to describe it is that software and hardware are only becoming increasingly complex. What are the total amount of people that understand this complexity end to end? That is a very small elite. Given anything goes wrong like infrastructure or some unknown unknown event then the entire idea of "Just Works" is going to be surely broken. This is a huge attack vector to humanity.
  - akkartik 6y ago
    You've probably seen Jonathan Blow's talk on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk I'm super interested in the subject: https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu. In the framework of this thread I focus on 2 of the 3 layers: problem and software. Hardware is out of scope. For now. Recently I've started thinking about BIOS (inspired by https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031). So perhaps it's only a matter of time.
    - dfischer 6y ago
      I haven’t seen the talk actually. I’m increasingly more interested in this problem space and it’s good to find like-minded people and ideas. Thanks for sharing. I’ll look into it!
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  The author is probably getting at Charles Moore's ideas on how to build a system. He is a genius and madman. The man takes a problem and builds his own hardware then software to solve that particular problem as efficient as possible. It's crazy. It also takes a long time, but he gets what is pretty much the most minimal stack from A-Z and understands the full thing. Obviously, most people can't do that due to less skill and time allowed.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    Indeed the author does. I recommend reading that blog post [0], it's rather well-written and enjoyable. The thing is, "genius" doesn't scale. At some point, if you want to scale production up, you'd need more people. And most of them won't be geniuses, they will be normal people, in the very literal sense of the word "normal": they'll be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most of the parameters; and even the number of parameters in which they're outliers too will be in the middle of some bell curve. So either your tools and processes accommodate normal people, or your company won't make it. Heck, even if you somehow manage to gather together 10 geniuses, it's a (biased) coin toss whether they'll work together productively. And that means you will at some point arrive at systems (and organizations!) that nobody comprehends in entirety. At this stage you can only hope that those systems managed to grew up resilient, that is, that they can be maintained, repaired, and extended on a piece-by-piece basis. Sometimes they can't be (cf. most government departments/small-to-medium businesses at the latest stages of their life cycle), so they collapse and are (eventually) replaced by something else. Sometimes it turns out that the organization that had collapsed was your whole civilization and now you're in the the Dark Ages. That sucks, but the only way out of the Dark Ages is gradually building up a new complex system, and while it will start from a small and seemingly perfect new way to run things, it will eventually, grow large and incomprehensible in its entirety—if it doesn't, it will be supplanted by the one that can grow so, there is really no escape from this. [0] https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...
    - dfischer 6y ago
      If there is no escape from this then I’m gutted from my sense of purpose. I envision a world where all concepts are accessible without genius or contrived complexity. I don’t agree with the bell curve intuitively. I feel that it’s a result of the overwhelming bad programming baked within humanity between institutionalized education and incentives within our economies. Environmentally it caters to averaging the average and incentivizing complexity with pseudo-genius. True genius is simplicity in my eyes. True genius can take a complex idea and give it the affordance where one can reason about it without intense training or remembering. Their skill may not be great in navigating, but it’s accessible to understand. Perhaps I’m optimistically doomed. However that’s the world I want to build towards.

Joker_vD 6y ago

So. Do you understand, for example, the intricacies of x86 microcode and how its executed on all Intel microarchitechtures relevant today: from Sunny Bridge to Sandy Cove? I don't remember who said that, but it's a really smart observation: Civilization is not just the state of society when there are lots of smart professionals, orchestrated together to provide infrastructure, and tools, and goods, and services, it's a state of society when almost everyone routinely uses the fruits of labour of those professionals without even being aware of that labour. That's the point: that it Just Works™. You don't have to think about it.

arethuza 6y ago
"In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable." Hence the title of probably the scariest thing ever broadcast on TV: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
dfischer 6y ago
I don't agree with that conclusion that it just works. I'd argue that it doesn't work and gives the false illusion of things working right or well. There's a lot to unpack there. Another way to describe it is that software and hardware are only becoming increasingly complex. What are the total amount of people that understand this complexity end to end? That is a very small elite. Given anything goes wrong like infrastructure or some unknown unknown event then the entire idea of "Just Works" is going to be surely broken. This is a huge attack vector to humanity.
- akkartik 6y ago
  You've probably seen Jonathan Blow's talk on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk I'm super interested in the subject: https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu. In the framework of this thread I focus on 2 of the 3 layers: problem and software. Hardware is out of scope. For now. Recently I've started thinking about BIOS (inspired by https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031 https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031). So perhaps it's only a matter of time.
  - dfischer 6y ago
    I haven’t seen the talk actually. I’m increasingly more interested in this problem space and it’s good to find like-minded people and ideas. Thanks for sharing. I’ll look into it!
7thaccount 6y ago
The author is probably getting at Charles Moore's ideas on how to build a system. He is a genius and madman. The man takes a problem and builds his own hardware then software to solve that particular problem as efficient as possible. It's crazy. It also takes a long time, but he gets what is pretty much the most minimal stack from A-Z and understands the full thing. Obviously, most people can't do that due to less skill and time allowed.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  Indeed the author does. I recommend reading that blog post [0], it's rather well-written and enjoyable. The thing is, "genius" doesn't scale. At some point, if you want to scale production up, you'd need more people. And most of them won't be geniuses, they will be normal people, in the very literal sense of the word "normal": they'll be somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most of the parameters; and even the number of parameters in which they're outliers too will be in the middle of some bell curve. So either your tools and processes accommodate normal people, or your company won't make it. Heck, even if you somehow manage to gather together 10 geniuses, it's a (biased) coin toss whether they'll work together productively. And that means you will at some point arrive at systems (and organizations!) that nobody comprehends in entirety. At this stage you can only hope that those systems managed to grew up resilient, that is, that they can be maintained, repaired, and extended on a piece-by-piece basis. Sometimes they can't be (cf. most government departments/small-to-medium businesses at the latest stages of their life cycle), so they collapse and are (eventually) replaced by something else. Sometimes it turns out that the organization that had collapsed was your whole civilization and now you're in the the Dark Ages. That sucks, but the only way out of the Dark Ages is gradually building up a new complex system, and while it will start from a small and seemingly perfect new way to run things, it will eventually, grow large and incomprehensible in its entirety—if it doesn't, it will be supplanted by the one that can grow so, there is really no escape from this. [0] https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines.html https://yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machines...
  - dfischer 6y ago
    If there is no escape from this then I’m gutted from my sense of purpose. I envision a world where all concepts are accessible without genius or contrived complexity. I don’t agree with the bell curve intuitively. I feel that it’s a result of the overwhelming bad programming baked within humanity between institutionalized education and incentives within our economies. Environmentally it caters to averaging the average and incentivizing complexity with pseudo-genius. True genius is simplicity in my eyes. True genius can take a complex idea and give it the affordance where one can reason about it without intense training or remembering. Their skill may not be great in navigating, but it’s accessible to understand. Perhaps I’m optimistically doomed. However that’s the world I want to build towards.