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>Modern software is so huge and complicated (...) Not sure what can be done. Nothing. Any sufficiently complex system or body of knowledge is too large for any

• kevincox 6y ago
  This. The strength of modern civilization is the ability to abstract. This means that you can let Joe deal with the frobnicator and Jane design with the fritzer and you just need to trust them enough that you can plug the two together and it works. Joe and Jane don't need to understand what you are doing, and you don't need to understand what they are doing. Of course partial understanding, especially for related technology is helpful, but the farther away you get the less you know, and the more you need to rely on others.
  • lemax 6y ago
    Ahh... labor alienation. One of the great drawbacks and geniuses of our primary modes of production in modern society. As we become more and more separated from the things we actually work on, what are the drawbacks though? The general trend becomes if we want to do more, we create more separation. The social impact, for one, is in general a large extent of estrangement from our human essence. Tangibility is intuitive, abstraction, not so much.
    • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      This comment feels like something written by GPT-3. What are you actually trying to say here?
      • User23 6y ago
        GP is saying that hyper-specialization is intrinsically fragile.
        • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
          What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble. I suppose you could say many things have failed due to no one seeing the big picture among all the tiny details but without people focusing on the details none of that would have been possible to begin with.
          • grp000 6y ago
            As things are getting more complex, more people become specialized, and there are a lot more interfaces between specialties that need to be properly defined so things don't break. The more interfaces mean a higher likelihood of a system going wrong. That, and I feel that as long as you have a good big picture, you have a higher fault tolerance because there is a general goal you can identify to strive towards when something does go wrong to correct it. Certainly, I feel that in any field that has become sufficiently complex, there is a practical human limit for a single person to understand the field as a whole. Even if someone can claim to understand a field as a whole in a general sense and how it's major components interact, they will still lose information because of how much they have to abstract.
            • jcelerier 6y ago
              The reality does not seem to match that though. Pretty much everything not born out of negative emotions is better than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago. Tons of jobs don't need to be done anymore, and more are becoming automated, which is quite often better than human beings's much stronger randomness.
          • goatinaboat 6y ago
            What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble. You should read Collapse Of Complex Societies by Professor Joseph Tainter. Tl;dr a step change in complexity of ancient societies more often than not lead to their downfall. They were unable to train/retrain specialists quickly enough to deal with surprises.
    • CptFribble 6y ago
      There are concrete measurable benefits to the complex things we build. Improvements to quality of life, increased time for recreation, etc. On the other hand, you make a fair point - tangible contribution to Things is probably built into us from our origin as tool-makers. But isn't the gradual separation from direct contact with Made Things inevitable? At some point the body of knowledge required to make a meaningful contribution grows so large that learning it approaches the human lifespan. How can we avoid too much hyper-specialization in that case?
    • berkes 6y ago
      I fear there is another potential pitfall to this. When you've heard "the Linux Kernel is 15M LOC" you might conclude "reading other code is unnatainable", as quite some commenters do in this thread. It is not: there's very neat OSS out there that you can pick apart in a spare hour and go "AHA!". It might even span across to other niches. "Baking your own bread" is not that hard, if you get to it. But, becausethe entire process (fertilising ground, selecting seeds, growing grain, milling it) is too much for one person, lot's of people just give up alltogether and conclude that "today it is impossible to make your own food". Especially once you learn that bread mostly comes from large, complex industrial complexes today. Yet "just doing it" is very rewarding, as all the home-bakers will tell you. And it spans across time as well: Sure, no-one can make a toaster from 0: mine own ore, distill your own plastics etc (there's a brilliant documentary from someone attempting just this, forgot its name). So people conclude that when the toaster stops working, there's nothing one can do, and they turn to Ali-express or Amazon and just buy a new one. In short: I think labor alienation is toxic, in that it seeds itself into areas that don't need hyper specialisation.
      • tmzt 6y ago
        I picked up this book in a bookstore years ago, still have it on my shelf. The Linux Core Kernel Commentary [1] It takes only the parts of the kernel you need to understand, leaving out the drivers, device classes, and much of te ancillary pieces. For the parts it chooses, it goes through them line by line and follows the boot process, explains the concepts of a Unix and SYSV-like kernel. The 15M lines becomes much less intractible. [1] https://books.google.com/books/about/Linux_Core_Kernel_Commentary.html?id=iVsOAAAACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Linux_Core_Kernel_Comme...
  • scroot 6y ago
    What if computing is less like building tangible products and more like reading and writing?
• trilinearnz 6y ago
  There are some people with a massive capacity for holding the entire system in their head. John Carmack only reached the point of "too much" during Rage, for example. Pretty impressive!
• sokoloff 6y ago
  Since childhood, I have periodically tried to reason about when the latest moment in time was that a single human could have substantially all the knowledge that humans collectively possessed. As a kid, it was an easier thing to reason about (wrongly). As an adult, I’ve concluded that it was never possible to both have something we’d think was civilization and for one person to know substantially everything humans knew.
  • indigo945 6y ago
    You don't need civilization for this to be unfeasible. People tend to underestimate how much nomadic people know about things like animal behaviors, medical use of natural substances or about geography, especially with regard to the change of seasons. Arguably, it was never possible to know the entirety of human knowledge.
• mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  The thing with software though is that it's untethered to reality. It answers to no physical law. Monstrosities have been built and are still built which should not exist. More complexity != improvement. Also, 15M lines consists of drivers. The core of an OS is way, way smaller. And actually yes, physicists know all of physics pretty well. Not deep expert level no, but it's not like they don't even know whole fields exist which definitely happens in computing. There are definitely engineers that know how to build a full car. What makes you think it is impossible? You don't know all the details by heart no, but you know where to look, you can have a pretty deep broad understanding of things. Let's not kid ourselves into complacency, throwing our hands in the air saying "it's complex".
• orbifold 6y ago
  A good physicist has the ability to grasp a large fraction of all physics that has ever been done. And there is a pretty good directed knowledge graph. The action principle and some ideas from quantum mechanics are enough to anchor almost all other results.