8 ms·
>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when
by esaym 4y ago
>Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about to break.
There's an experience that lives rent free in my mind as well. As a teen, I worked at a bait shop that was on the Gulf coast. They sold mostly live shrimp but had other live stuff for bait as well. Salt water was pumped from the nearby innercoastal canal by two heavy duty swimming pool type pumps. From there, the water was split through several different pipes and manifolds and dumped into the live bait tanks. The overflow ran back out to the canal.
There was this one customer I was getting bait for and he meandered around the bait room randomly (customers weren't supposed to be in there but I didn't feel like saying anything). He ended up way in the back of the room where the pumps were and I could see him touching them. Figuring I needed to get him out of there politely I walked back there pretending to check on stuff. Before I could say anything, he says "You will need a new pump soon". Um "What?" I say. "Put your hand on this one". So I did, I felt nothing. "Now put your hand on this one". And that one had a really high frequency vibration coming through it. "The bearings are shot, it will lock up soon".
I was impressed. Granted for two more years I'd regularly "feel" the pump again, the vibrations were slowly getting worse. But then a hurricane came and flooded everything anyway so we got new stuff.
But still, anytime I see a high RPM electric motor running, I got to "give it a feel".
- pm90 4y agoPeople who work closely with machines develop an instinct for how it operates. If you think about it, all mechanical machines are state machines (in the CS sense) and if you’ve had to work with and fix shit long enough your brain commits those experiences to long term memory.
- fnbr 4y agoThis is really obvious if you ride bicycles & do your own maintenance. You can quickly identify weird sounds/patterns with problems, because it’s such a simple machine.
- ta988 4y agoOr more likely state machines are a highly simplified view of reality... Working with machines is a combination of probabilities, intuitions, experience, chance... Most work with machines is not 1 or 0.
- samatman 4y agoAnalog state machines are the older kind. Examples: gearbox, ignition switch, Big Red Button. They don't follow or respect the laws of digital state machines, but are reasoned about in a broadly similar way.
- noduerme 4y agoI like this. It holds true for looking at code to some extent - what people call "code smell". But the main difference would be that failure modes in CS tend to be binary - a piece of code produces the expected result or it doesn't. And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Whereas your car's brakes don't go out all at once (hopefully), and yet it's guaranteed to happen eventually without maintenance, so a mechanic's eye is trained more toward what's currently going wrong with a known system than what might go wrong with a novel system.
- a_t48 4y ago> And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainability issues - if the codebase is continually changed some code is more likely to break than others.
- noduerme 4y agoI'm kinda coming from a do-it-once, do-it-right background. Usually code I write just runs untouched for 10 years. So I'd classify any breaking changes to the codebase a change in the environment. But either way, something breaks or it doesn't. It's not like some non-obvious wear and tear is going to happen over a year or two on its own, if no human messes with it.
- mike_hock 4y agoI've never heard/read/thought of "code smell" as anything BUT referring to maintainability issues. When you're debugging a concrete issue and have a hunch what might be the cause, that's not a "code smell."
- noduerme 4y agoCode can smell and be perfectly maintainable. Sometimes it's even more maintainable, because it's so unnecessarily replicated that the patterns become obvious. You could even argue that the best precision code is the hardest to grok and maintain in the long run.
- Bayart 4y agoI agree, and I'd say good computer guys also make good mechanics. The core skills are the same. There's a guy called M539 on YT who's the best mechanic I know and just started out doing it as a hobby aside his IT job.
- nickt 4y agoIt reminds me of an old story - The Handyman’s Invoice https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y agoA friend working at a photocopy shop could hear a paper jam from one high-speed copier when taking a break across the street. They'd be in the shop, opening the machine covers, before it came to a complete stop. Well-running equipment almost always has a characteristic sound and rhythm. Variations from that become quite apparent.
- eastbound 4y agoI hear my computer’s processor when it’s processing. It’s like a modem sound, but high-pitch. All of us used to rely on the HDD distinct sound to know when the games were finished loading ;)
- bombela 4y agoahah same. I think we hear the coils that are used to lower the voltage for the CPU. They are modulated based on the current demand.
- taneq 4y agoMy Dell XPS13 does that and it’s super annoying. It’s some kind of cross talk with the speaker amplifier because when I mute the sound or use headphones it goes away. When I was a kid our BBC Micro used to do the same, you could “hear it thinking”.
- sprucely 4y agoYep, my XPS does too. I believe it's called "coil whine" and is caused by surface-mount inductors whose windings aren't fully encased in resin or whatever material they use.
- justinlloyd 4y agoThere is a reason I won't listen to music or wear noise cancelling headphones in the workshop. I wear ear protection, that dulls the damaging frequencies, but I want to hear when the drill is biting or about to skip, I want to know if the table saw is struggling or if the cutter head on the router is biting a little too deep.
- marttt 4y agoSeveral forestry workers I know used the same argument: while working with a brush cutter, they prefer not to use a FM headset because it would distract them away from also hearing what the machine's engine is doing. I personally have also felt less concentrated and more mentally tired while trying to simultaneously cut brush and listen to music (let alone an intellectually challenging podcast). As a tinnitus sufferer, I use both ear plugs + best possible earmuffs to reduce the dangerous frequencies as much as I can. Works fine, and I can still hear the machine, too.
- justinlloyd 4y agoBench Dog protectors with the built-in ear plugs, plus 3M muffs. I have pretty bad tinnitus from my musician days and spending too long listening to the drummer pound as hard as he can "because he just wants to be heard." When I hit a nail in some salvage wood, or the moisture was a little higher than I estimated, I want to know about it before it becomes a problem. You can feel the slip, and hear the fence creak on the saw long before you get a kickback. Only ever once had a kickback because someone distracted me as I was cutting. The rule in the workshop is: You don't talk or call to the guy operating any kind of machine or power tool, even handheld. You get in clear line of sight, and wait for him to acknowledge you. You don't signal or wave or point.
- spoonjim 4y agoThere are startups today that automate this process with machine learning. They record the vibrations from your equipment and notify you when something changes or is likely to fail given historic patterns for similar equipment.
- hef19898 4y agoAh, selling ML to the predictive maintainance market!
- randomsearch 4y agoMany, many, many startups - this seems to be a very popular idea!
- rightbyte 4y agoThey are selling the delusion that factories wont need qualified mechanical engineers to maintain the machines and interpret the vibration data.
- rusteh1 4y agoNot just startups[1]. AWS, among others I'm sure, have at least attempted to turn this man's intuition into a little yellow box and an algorithm. Scaling to many thousands of machines at once, instead of just the ones he happens to touch. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/monitron/ https://aws.amazon.com/monitron/
- jseban 4y ago[flagged]
- t-3 4y agoBlaming communist sympathies is unfair when wage labor offers the exact same incentives to slack, and nothing could be more capitalistic.
- jseban 4y agoBlaming the technology is what's unfair. You can go back in history and see the luddite movement or Marx's theory of alienation to describe exactly the same issues in the industrial revolution, do you think we should have used that to stop technological progress in 1896? Of course you always want a job that's easy and physical and natural, but you also want all the niceties of modern society. There are also many choices available if you want to live in a low tech world of the past, you actually have a lot of influence on how much technology you want in your life, work wise as well, it's just that people of course don't want to make any sacrifices on the good things that tech and modern society brings. Just eat the cake and have it too, how hard can it be.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoI want all the niceties of modern society to include high quality widely available single-payer health care, sane non-captured media, politicians who are responsible to voters and not to corporations and extremely rich individuals, significant social investment in education and basic research, no forced personal debt, climate stability, and no indirect incentives which reward crime as a workable path out of extreme poverty. As you say - how hard can it be?
- jseban 4y agoHaving a utopia is impossible hard, and those issues you want to solve are literally the same fundamental problems that have existed since the dawn of civilisation, they are not caused by technology, and destroying computers in the office and insisting on only using rubber stamps and fax machines is not going to help in any way.
- bombcar 4y agoOne I remember is knowing if Windows 95 was going to lockup and crash just by hearing the hard disk start to thrash - with SSDs swapping to death is silent. And with many of these the difference between a journeyman and a master is the journeyman is saying “it’s never done that” whilst the master is already running.
- burntoutfire 4y agoMacbooks are the worst, they don't even HDD led, or even "switched on" led!. Quite often, I can't tell if it's on already and coming back from sleep, or do I need to press "Power" button again. What a frustrating design.
- samatman 4y agoI'm not sure I understand this complaint in detail? If a Macbook is asleep, it will just wake up, you'll see the keyboard light, there is no need to press the power button. If there is a need to press the power button it is because the machine is off. Don't worry, it will make a distinctive and iconic sound once it is not off and display, you guessed it, a white apple logo on the screen. What circumstances lead to your confusion about its state? I can't relate!
- ProZsolt 4y agoMy private laptop is fine, but my corporate laptop with a lot of bloatware sometimes takes a few seconds to wake up. From hibernation sometimes it takes 10+ seconds from hitting the space button to see the something is happening.
- burntoutfire 4y agoThe machine can wake up for many seconds (I'm running Windows 10 on my Macboo Pro). During that time, there's no communication on the state of the machine at at all (the keyboard doesn't light up for me). Is it still asleep? During wake up? Or maybe powered off completely for some reason? If it's powered off, then I should press the "Power" button... But what if it isn't? - will pressing it kill the wake up process? Who knows! So much frustration caused by removing a single LED.
- noduerme 4y agoWhy is there an apostrophe after "workers", and why has it caused me to read this six times?
- Mordisquitos 4y agoIt may have been caused by an incomplete editing decision. If you remove a few words the sentence becomes grammatical, if clumsy. Compare: > Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: [...] ...with... > Technology robbed workers’ highly valued physical knowledge about a job: [...] Maybe the original sentence was the second one and was edited for clarity, but they forgot to remove the apostrophe.
- zasdffaa 4y agoWe NEED a multifaceted version of this for computers, relevant to their internal state (and maybe HD errors). Something that would tell of meme use, mem fragmentation, cpu use and spikiness, locality of cpu, disk behaviour, working set size and so much more in a visceral form. I mean more than on-screen info. (there's an old story of a guy sitting on ancient, giant disk drives to tune his program but not so much else I know of).
- zeristor 4y agoNow I’m commuting I’m fed up of how noisy the tube is compared to the newer trains, was BREL just crap? I’ve taken to using an audio spectrograph app on my phone to watch the white noise, and the band of resonances. Quite interesting in probably far too geeky away, I’ve not been called up for suspicious activity whilst innocuous I’m not sure how I’d be able to explain it. I’ve also been thinking about tracking the sound of the bath filling to gauge how much is in it, just to track not to use. I guess air pressure, and water temperature play key parts.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoMy grandfather was a car mechanic after he come out the navy and always had a stethoscope in his tool-box. He'd listen around the engine before diagnosing crankshaft or valve maladies like some kind of auto-doctor. Come to think of it, machine listening techniques could be deployed in a modern mech-engineering to predict physical failures in advance given how easy it is to embed a piezo crystal and and TPU core.
- goodpoint 4y ago> machine listening techniques could be deployed in a modern mech-engineering to predict physical failures in advance It has been done for decades.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoYes, I remember reading something about its use on bridges and giant steel structues to listen for bad welds when the wind blows. I guess for auto stuff there's so many embedded sensors in a modern engine there's little need these days.
- sokoloff 4y agoThere’s still plenty of bearings and pumps that wear or make noise without setting a code or having the computer tell you what to do.
- snom380 4y agoThey don’t use TPU cores, but most of not all modern commercial helicopters and aircraft have vibration monitoring and reporting. I would assume the same is the case in many other industrial systems as well.
- batguano 4y agoReminds me of the classic joke: A surgeon is at home, and the plumber comes to fix his sink. The plumber works for 15 minutes, the sink is fixed, and he hands the surgeon his invoice. “$850?” the surgeon exclaims, in shock. “I’m a surgeon and I don’t make that much!” “Yeah,” says the plumber, wistfully. “I didn’t make that much when I was a surgeon, either.”