12 ms·

We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower

151 points by obscurette 1y ago

fithisux 1y ago
[flagged]
floppyd 1y ago
"Old man yells at cloud", but in so-so-so many words
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  > we’ve traded reliability and understanding for the illusion of progress. I wish there was a somewhat rigorous way to quantify reliability of tech products so that we could conclude if tech on average was about as buggy in the past. I mean I also feel that things are more buggy and unreliable, but I don't know if there's any good way to measure it.
  - troupo 1y ago
    I mean. I takes over a second with a blocking loading indicator to change car temperature by one degree: https://grumpy.website/1665 https://grumpy.website/1665 This... This is quite quantifiable
    - worldsayshi 1y ago
      I'm sure specific issues are quantifiable. But trying to quantify the overall trend seems like a challenge.
  - ipcress_file 1y ago
    I'm conflicted. I remember when I bought my first vehicle with electronic ignition. It wasn't as good as the electronic ignition today and I had to replace a few black box components that I didn't understand (what is a "thick film module" anyways???). So I was irritated and wished that my truck still had points and a regular distributor. Flash forward to today. I can't remember the last time I replaced an ignition system component. I still don't know how they work. I can guarantee that the techs who do occasionally replace them at the dealer don't know how they work. But the whole system is so much more reliable. That said, I do wonder how young people are supposed to learn and gain understanding in a world where they cannot possibly understand the components in complex systems. Back in the day (I know, yelling at a cloud), I could actually understand how a set of points and a distributor -- or a even a three-transistor radio -- worked.
  - palata 1y ago
    If you look e.g. at websites, I think we can measure that the average website today is slower to load than 15 years ago, even though hardware is orders of magnitude faster. Another thing is that today, you receive updates. So bugs get fixed, new bugs get introduced, it makes it harder to track other than "well, there are always bugs". Back then, a bug was there for life, burnt on your CD-ROM. I'm pretty sure software shipped on CD-ROM was a lot more tested than what we deploy now. You probably wouldn't burn thousands of CD-ROM with a "beta" version. Now the norm is to ship beta stuff and use 0-based versioning [1] because we can't make anything stable. Lastly, hardware today is a lot cheaper than 25 years ago. So now you buy a smartphone, it breaks after a year, you complain for 5min and you buy a new one. Those devices are almost disposable. 25 years ago you had to spend a lot of money on a PC, so it had to last for a while and be repairable. [1]: https://0ver.org/ https://0ver.org/
  - scott_w 1y ago
    From playing video games, I'm going to say that generally games are more reliable today than they were in 2005, and I recall a few absolute fucking howlers from the 90s and 2000s (looking at you, Digimon World!) My comparison points: Fallout 3 being a shitshow of bugs on release vs Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Rebirth feeling practically bug-free on release. In fact, I don't think I hit any bugs in Final Fantasy 16 either.
    - zargon 1y ago
      Rest assured, Bethesda’s next release will be another bugfest. Not exactly a useful comparison.
      - scott_w 1y ago
        They probably will but they’re the comparisons I have to hand and, let’s be honest, this entire discussion is based on anecdotes.
    - troupo 1y ago
      On the other hand you didn't have "download this multigigabyte patch on day 1" because once burned to a CD it was there forever. Same for "you haven't touched your game console? here's 200 gigabytes of updates at 200kb/s"
      - scott_w 1y ago
        Having had a PS4 and a PS5, I’d say even this has improved.
- torlok 1y ago
  It's always old people complaining that 20-year-olds didn't learn programming 40 years ago like they did when computers had 5 assembly instructions, and a beeper for peripherals.
  - palata 1y ago
    I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers". But it's not specifically about assembly, it's about software design. You can take a modern programming language (say Swift or Rust) and look at how software written with those languages is architected, and the points still stand: abstractions above abstractions above abstractions because people don't understand the lower levels. People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad". But give them Meson and they will make a mess as well. People have no clue about packaging and distribution, so they will say "it sucks sooo badly" and will distribute their code as a docker container, embedded in a 6GB Ubuntu image. Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information, yet they are generated by higher-level systems, full of HTML and bullshit and it's impossible to read in a simple client. Etc. Software quality is going down year after year, it is a fact. Probably because it is becoming more and more accessible, but the fact remains.
    - scott_w 1y ago
      > I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers". As a software engineer in his mid-30s now, I can assure you many "older people" will have little-to-no memory of messing around with assembly and electronics. When I was getting started, my boss told me about an engineer who had a deep knowledge of how to lay out data to efficiently read and process it. My response? "I just stick it in Postgres and it does it all for me!" No shade to that engineer but I do believe he was in his 50s/60s at the time, so it's quite likely he's retired on a decent pension by now!
- palata 1y ago
  I would be curious to know if: - You have enough experience to agree with the post but feel like writing such a post won't change anything, or - You are more of a junior and don't understand what the author means because you've grown up with the engineering quality we have today. Given that you consider this to be "so-so-so many words", I would bet it is the second option. Older people wouldn't consider that this is a huge text. Am I right? :-)
  - aaron695 1y ago
    [dead]
xenocratus 1y ago
I'm sure he wrote all of this on, sent it over, and now is re-reading it from his Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer.
taikahessu 1y ago
Well, it's obviously true new stuff breaks fast, can't argue with that. But it's deliberate, not forgetfulness. Just capitalism on steroids.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  > Deliberate I've been thinking about this; I suspect that a lot but not all of "planned obsolescence" comes down to not acting on a flaw, that aligns with your interest, as it appears. Can that be thought of as deliberate? It's a trolley problem kind of question I guess.
david927 1y ago
Someone made a video clip showing the Crumbl Cookies ingredients list and each one has around 100 ingredients https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1940924371255939236 https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1940924371255939236 Our software is like that. A small system will have a crazy number of packages and dependencies. It's not healthy and it's expensive and it's stupid. Culture tends to drive drunk, swinging wide to extremes and then over-correcting. We're already fully in the wrong lane when we start to have discussions about thinking about the possibility of change.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  Everything in the physical world is the same. There are hundreds of pieces even in the smallest toaster, and no one in the world knows how to make half of one without all those external dependencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw It's not a software thing, it's just how humanity works.
  - SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
    Even if you consider something like "build a bridge", that classic comparison of software and traditional engineer, all the components of said bridge have been created by someone else with particular expertise. The civil engineer who designed where the iron beams will go played no part in the metallurgy of those beams.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
    Milton Friedman put it best, in "I, Pencil". Everything around you is the result of hundreds to thousands of economic actors, loosely but robustly coordinated in a way to get you what you actually want at as low of a price as you can get away with. The complexity of the supply chain is the price of admission to the game. https://youtu.be/67tHtpac5ws?si=eZk_5K32gL4PxDgv https://youtu.be/67tHtpac5ws?si=eZk_5K32gL4PxDgv
  - nobodyandproud 1y ago
    Yes and no. The physical world is bound by rules that are unchanging (more-or-less). Above this layer we’ve also devised and agreed upon standards that remain unchanging, though it’s regional: Voltage, screw/bolt sizes, tolerance levels, materials, material measurements, etc. At this layer, we’ve commoditized and standardized because it’s useful: It makes the components cost-effective and predictable. In software and computing, I can only think of the low-level networking standard that remain stable. And even that has to be reinvented somewhat for each OS or each nee language. Everything else seems to be reinvented or rewritten, and then versioned. Imagine having to upgrade your nuts and bolts in your car to v3.01 or lose support?
ivape 1y ago
We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work. There's an education gap that needs to be addressed, but I don't know how it will get addressed. A lot of the web in the past few decades came from industry so industry had a way of training up people. Most of this ML stuff is coming from academia, and they aren't really the best at training up an army at all. It's hard to know who to blame for all of this because it's kind of like not having an early warning asteroid detection system. HN or various communities did not have discussions even five years prior to GPT about the impending doom (no early warning at all). If you just take HN, we sat around here discussing a million worthless things across Rust/Javascript/startup b.s for years like headless chickens (right here on the frontpage) without realizing what was really to come. Makes me wonder if the places I go for tech news are enough to be prepared. Which brings me back to what I quoted: We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work. We aren't creating them. They are the existing devs that had no idea AI was going to be a thing. Had anyone known it was to be such a thing, everyone would have ditched going to web development bootcamps in the mid 2010s.
goopypoop 1y ago
JavaScript is required to read this rant edit: lol
skybrian 1y ago
If it works, he's lucky. For example, Commodore 64's often had a dodgy power supply that would eventually damage the computer. My Vectrex still worked last I checked.
- forinti 1y ago
  About every 15 years I have to change the caps on my Beeb. The third job is coming soon.
analog31 1y ago
Ironically, the technology that amazingly still works after 40 years is shown in front of a shelf full of books.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Books are fragile. Their pages often include acid in order to self destruct. For resilience we should be recording on clay tablets. /s
  - analog31 1y ago
    Oddly enough, I've read that the clay was originally re-usable, and the ones that are preserved were baked in accidental fires. Kind of a weird opposite meaning of book-burning.
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
> Software has followed the same trajectory, piling abstraction upon abstraction until we’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application. This is like saying old software is so simple that updating a line of code can break an entire application. It's a silly thing to say. No matter how complex or how simple a piece of software is, you can easily break it. If you have a program that prints out "hello world", guess what? Updating a single character can break the entire application! The world is more complex now. We've stood on the shoulders of giants who stood on the shoulders of giants. A few centuries ago a renaissance man could make advances in multiple fields. Now people are specialized. It's the same thing with software. Of course, people take it to an extreme. However, you go ahead and write your own crypto library, I'll use a vetted one created by experts.
- alganet 1y ago
  If I break some source code by messing with it, I know what happened. I might even learn from it. Now if npm breaks it, or Claude breaks it, a developer might not even know what was broken. He's talking about that kind of thing, not the resilience of code to take random character deletions. IT is very much non-specialized compared to older disciplines. It's so young. Every single one of us is still a jack of all trades in some degree. You're relying on the "don't roll your own crypto" popular quote to drop the mic. That's misguided. This advice comes from an argument of strength by numbers, not anything related to abstractions. It tells me you don't understand it.
  - darig 1y ago
    [dead]
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Doesn't it mean more that some packages aren't conforming to common sense like semver?
- softfalcon 1y ago
  This is exactly my take on folks bemoaning the evolution of complexity in software (and hardware) worldwide. To lend some credence to other folks points of view, there are arguments I can agree with that are adjacent: - "We don't need that complex framework for our needs, we stick to a simpler, older library." - "We decided to not use <shiniest_new_toolkit> it had performance issues that the maintainers are still sorting out." - "Working with the new framework showed a lot of promise, but there is still a lot of instability in the API since it's so new. We couldn't commit to using a toolkit that hasn't been nailed down yet." These are actual concerns and shows caution towards adopting new things until they match your use-case, dev-timelines, and performance requirements.
bitwize 1y ago
I love how he talks about knowing thermal characteristics, etc. and then cites the TI-99/4A as an example of something designed by people who Really Knew What They Were Doing. The TI-99/4A was notorious for being prone to overheat due to its power supply. Munch Man and Parsec were complete non-starters for me when it got hot in July. This was even mentioned, specifically, in Halt and Catch Fire. The early microcomputer engineers were spitballing. You want to talk about the number of bodge wires that were in every TRS-80? Or the Apple III having no thermal vents per order of Steve Jobs, and the "you're holding it wrong" of the 80s being "drop it on your desk to fix it"? We know how to build better, more reliable computers for cheaper today than we ever did in the 80s. Then we fuck them up with things like Windows, but still.
wyager 1y ago
> Large language models are impressive statistical text predictors — genuinely useful tools that excel at pattern matching and interpolation. Slightly OT: It's interesting how many (smart!) people in tech like the author of this article still can't conceptualize the difference between training objective and learned capability. I wonder at this point if it's a sort of willful ignorance adopted as a psychological protection mechanism. I wonder if they're going to experience a moment of severe shock, just gradually forget that they held these opinions, or take on a sort of delusional belief that AI can't do XYZ despite all mounting evidence to the contrary.
- ReptileMan 1y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit?
  - gjm11 1y ago
    (Not GP, but:) LLMs' initial training is specifically for token-prediction. However, this doesn't mean that what they end up doing is specifically token-prediction (except in the sense that anything that generates textual output can be described as doing token-prediction). Nor does it mean that the only things they can do are tasks most naturally described in terms of token-prediction. For instance, suppose you successfully train something to predict the next token given input of the form "[lengthy number] x [lengthy number] = ", where "successfully" means that the system ends up able to predict correctly almost all the time even when the numbers are ones it hasn't seen before. How could it do that? Only by, in some sense, "learning to multiply". (I haven't checked but my hazy recollection is that somewhere around GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 LLMs went from not being able to do this at all to being able to do it fairly well on moderate-sized numbers.) Or suppose you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The SHA256 hash of [lengthy string] is "; again, a system that could do that correctly would have to have, in some sense, "learned to implement SHA256". (I am pretty sure that today's LLMs cannot do this, though of course they might have learned to call out to a tool that can.) If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "One grammatical English sentence whose SHA256 hash is [value] is " then that thing has to have "learned to break SHA256". (I am very sure that today's LLMs cannot do this and I think it enormously unlikely that any ever will be able to.) If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The complete source code for a program written in idiomatic Rust that does [difficult task] is " then that thing has to have "learned to write code in Rust". (Today's LLMs can kinda do some tasks like this, and there are a lot of people yelling at one another about just how much they can do.) That is: some token-prediction tasks can only be accomplished by doing things that we would not normally think of as being about token prediction. This is essentially the point of the "Turing test". For the avoidance of doubt, I am making no particular claims (beyond the illustrative ones explicitly made above) about what if anything today's LLMs, or plausible near-future LLMs, or other further-future AI systems, are able to do that goes beyond what we would normally think of as token prediction. The point is that whether or not today's LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" in some useful sense, it doesn't follow from the fact that they are trained on token-prediction that that's all they are.
ryukoposting 1y ago
> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit. If the thesis is that we should understand the systems we work on, then sure, I can get behind that. At the same time, I wouldn't expect a mechanic to know how to process iron ore into an ingot.
- alganet 1y ago
  Machinists know their materials. They might not know every step to process it, but they understand the manufacturing process of different kinds of metals and their properties. They definitely don't "vibe machine" without thinking about underlying concepts.
  - BillyTheMage 1y ago
    As a redneck I think you vastly underestimate the prolifity of vibe machining
    - alganet 1y ago
      I am sure hobbysts vibe machine a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not supposed to be representative of the industry.
- 827a 1y ago
  Software engineers aren't to computers as mechanics are to cars. The closest correlate is, like, automotive engineers working at Ford or Toyota; and I would 100% expect that someone involved in the process at those companies has reasonably deep knowledge about, for example, the structural characteristics of casted metal.
MontyCarloHall 1y ago
>That TI-99/4A still boots because it was designed by people who understood every component, every circuit, every line of code. It works because it was built to work, not to generate quarterly revenue or collect user data or enable some elaborate software-as-a-service business model. The methods and algorithms powering advances in modern science, medicine, communications, entertainment, etc. would be impossible to develop, much less run, on something so rudimentary as a TI-99/4A. The applications we harness our technology for have become much more sophisticated, and so too must the technology stacks underpinning them, to the point that no single individual can understand everything. Take something as simple as real time video communication, something we take for granted today. There is no single person in the world who deeply understands every single aspect, from the semiconductor engineering involved in the manufacture of display and image sensors, to the electronics engineering behind the communication to/from the display/sensor, to the signal processing and compression algorithms used to encode the video, to the network protocols used to actually transmit the video, to the operating system kernel's scheduler capable of performing at sufficiently low-latency to run the videochat app. By analogy, one can understand and construct every component of a mud hut or log cabin, but no single person is capable of understanding, much less constructing, every single component of a modern skyscraper.
- alganet 1y ago
  You're misdirecting. He's criticizing the act of _not building_ on previous learnings. _It's in the damn title_. Repeating mistakes from the past leads to a slow down in such advancements. This has nothing to do with learning everything by yourself (which, by the way, is a worthy goal and every single person that tries knows by heart that it cannot be done, it's not about doing it).
raincole 1y ago
> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit And the ones who can design a op-amp circuit can't manufacture the laminate their circuit is going to be printed on. And the ones who know how to manufacture the laminate probably doesn't know how to refine or synthesize the material from the minerals. And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves. No one knows everything. Collaboration has been how we manage complexity since we were biologically a different species than H. sapiens.
- alganet 1y ago
  I'm fairily confident that someone like Ben from Applied Science can both laminate circuits and write modern code. https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience https://github.com/benkrasnow https://github.com/benkrasnow If he can, what's stopping you? There are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things all around you. Aiming for these things is important, and we need those kinds of people with ambitious learning goals.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    Because specialization is vastly more efficient, productive, and I don't have an interest in cutting and laminating my own circuit boards. I can pay a tiny (relative to the alternative investment of DIY) to get multilayer boards in a day.
    - alganet 1y ago
      You're changing your argument. Before, you said people _can't_ (in general, anyone that knows how to code cannot possibly learn how circuits work). Now, you're saying that _you don't want to learn_. That's on you, buddy. Don't project your insecurities on the whole IT field. People can, and will, learn across many layers of abstraction.
      - hluska 1y ago
        You missed the point of that entire comment didn’t you?
charcircuit 1y ago
This article is against accessibility. It's not that people are forgetting. We just don't require them to know everything to build things. >Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing. Edge computing is not "just" distributed processing. That fails to recognize the point of minimizing latency. >Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files. Not all modules are microservices. It's again term to a more specific practice. >Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond. Those are somewhat related concepts but they still don't have the same meaning. >Compare that to today’s black-box system-on-chip designs, where a single failure means the entire device becomes e-waste If you really wanted to, you could fix the system-on-chip. >We’ve mistaken complexity for sophistication and abstraction for advancement. People are not adding complexity and abstractions just for fun. >We’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application This has always been the case. Bugs still existed in the 1900s. >What started as a legitimate return to hands-on engineering has been co-opted by influencer culture, where the goal isn’t to build something useful but to generate content about building something photogenic. Social media being dominated by people good at social media and not by the top makers will happen in every endeavor. Accessibility has allowed many more people to be able to create basic things. >We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work They don't need to. And this has always been the case. There is too much to know and having different people specialize in different things is effective. Additionally there is great value in making software accessible making people with less knowledge to be able to make things. It allows for more things to be created that deliver value to people. >The best engineering solutions are often elegantly simple. They work reliably, fail predictably, and can be understood by the people who use them. They don't require constant updates or cloud connectivity or subscription services. Sure, but many people want a solution that can be delivered now and for cheap.
ozim 1y ago
Meh, fluff article without substance. Title misses the mark and hand waves shitload of progress we have. Nagging about consumer electronics is fine because a lot of stuff has its issues. But compared to 20 or even 10 years ago everything on average works much better.
photochemsyn 1y ago
Obviously a lot of design and engineering tasks these days don't have the goal of producing robust, repairable, long-lived hardware and software - where's the profit in that? If iphones lasted twice as long as they now do, wouldn't sales drop by 50% unless consumers decided they preferred the longer-lived phones? This would create pressure on all manufacturers to produce long-lived phones with easily replaceable batteries and publicly available repair kits. And what happens then? The entire market shrinks for all phone manufacturers, and the shareholders throw tantrums over lost profits. In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons. There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades. That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?
jeroenhd 1y ago
> Modern developers debug through seventeen layers of frameworks to discover that their problem is a missing semicolon in a configuration file generated by a tool that abstracts away another tool that was created to simplify a process that was perfectly straightforward twenty years ago. But it wasn't straightforward twenty years ago. Maybe it was to you, but it wasn't to others. There's a reason the world moved away from command line interfaces and it's not just to bully the nerds. Same reason many Americans don't know how to use a clutch, and why chopping down trees for your own house has fallen out of fashion. As society specialises and technology advances, responsibilities are divided. > The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet. We’ve mistaken complexity for sophistication and abstraction for advancement. A VHS player is built on top of tons of abstractions. There's a component somewhere in the middle that will take electric pulses and turn them into subtitles you can turn on or off. Just like that WiFi router still has its analog pins you could hook your oscilloscope up to if you want to troubleshoot it. We have lost service manuals for many electronics indeed, but that's because servicing these devices no longer earns anyone a living. Electronics as complex as VHS players have dropped in price from a month or two's wage for a whole family to the price of eating out. Spending half a year teaching yourself electrical engineering to maintain your TV isn't worth the time investment anymore, unless you're doing it out of personal interest. You can repair the failed electronics on WiFi routers. You don't need to, though, because the electronics no longer constantly fail like they used to. The skills electrical engineers from the last century have proudly honed just aren't as relevant as they used to be. The "old man yells at cloud" complaint that kids these days don't even know assembly is just as relevant as it was in the days when assembly was commonplace, when kids those days didn't even know how to program spinning drums or knit magnetic core memory without the help of an assembler. Billions of people drive cars every day. Most of those people have no idea how their car works beyond the ignition, yet the world relies on that technology and it's working just fine. Cars do break down sometimes, and that's when you call in the experts. The people who know the ins and outs of assembly, machine code, and CPU microcode, still exist. The difference between back then and now is that, like cars, you don't need years of education before you can comfortably use the devices anymore. I too lament the overly complex software ecosystem of today, the simple apps that have grown to hundreds of megabytes, the Javascriptification of our world, but that's not a failure of society. It's what you get when you go for the cost-optimised computing approach that has lead to supercomputers in our pocket rather than the quality-over-features approach that you needed back when people spent more than a year's worth of meals on relatively simple electronic devices.
hluska 1y ago
> The same publications that use “disruptive AI” unironically are the ones that need to Google “what is a neural network” every time they write about machine learning. This is called “good journalism”. It would be great if Elektor tried practicing it.
unyttigfjelltol 1y ago
> (Google is less than helpful with a dumbed-down user interface that basically tells you that “something went wrong.") This UI trend of denying access to under-the-hood complexity is deeply unsettling. It creates a cliff edge failure mechanism where the system (which often is essential) works and then suddenly doesn't. No warning approaching the failure state, no recourse on the far side, completely baffling how this became an industry standard.
- convolvatron 1y ago
  the best part is when you look at the from the perspective of composition. if I build a thing using complicated 'industry standard' components that are just supposed to work, then when something happens I'm pretty much lost. now take my thing, add some marketing about how it 'just works', and have someone else use it in a high level concatenation of other such functions and pretend it 'just works'. now we are actually employing large numbers of people just to babysit these half-assed things, and everyone is fine with it because we all used 'industry standard' components, and thats really the best we can do isn't it. armies of on-call system resetters are just part of the picture now.
fusionadvocate 1y ago
Abstractions hide details, that does not mean they cease to exist. The problem with abstractions is that it makes it easier to create conflicts when making changes. Lots of hidden details are affected by a high level change.
zzzeek 1y ago
I see a bunch of "nobody knows everything, this old man needs to appreciate modern technology stacks" comments, and in some ways I blame the post for this because it kind of meanders into that realm where it gets into abstractions being bad and kids not knowing how to make op-amp circuits (FTR, I am from the "you have to know op-amps!" generation and I intentionally decided deep hardware hacking was not going to be my thing), but the actual core thing I think is important here is that working hard is being devalued - putting in the time to understand the general workings underpinnings of software, the hardware, using trial and error to solve an engineering problem as opposed to "sticking LEDs on fruit", the entire premise of knowing how things work and achieving some deep expertise is no longer what people assume they should be striving for, and LLMs, useful or not, are only accelerating this. Just yesterday I used an LLM to write some docs for me, and for a little bit where I mistakenly thought the docs were fine as they were (they weren't, but I had to read them closely to see this) it felt like, "wow if the LLM just writes all my docs now, I'm pretty much going to forget how to write docs. Is that something I should worry about?" The LLM almost fooled me. The docs sounded good. It's because they were documenting something I myself was too lazy to re-familiarize with, hoping the LLM would just do it for me. Fortunately the little bit of my brain that still wanted to be able to do things decided to really read the docs deeply, and they were wrong. I think this "the LLM made it convincing, we're done let's go watch TV" mentality is a big danger spot at scale. There's an actual problem forming here and it's that human society is becoming idiocracy all the way down. It might be completely unavoidable. It might be the reason for the Fermi paradox.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Marshall Mcluhan called this out ages ago: >every extension is also an amputation that said, it is up to society, and to a lesser extent individuals to determine which skills will be preserved --- an excellent example of a rational preservation of craft teaching in formal education is the northern European tradition of Sloyd Woodworking: https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/ https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/ >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with ... hand and ... eye and appreciate the labor of others.
bee_rider 1y ago
> The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet. This seems like a pretty weird example, right? WiFi routers don’t connect to the internet. If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house. That’s the sort of locally-unsolvable problem that everybody last century was familiar with; the crappy copper telephone wire that was never designed to let the Internet blast through it and it will eventually rebel and start giving you noise. If your router doesn’t work, I don’t know. Cheap routers are not a new invention or sign of the times, I think. VHS players, if I remember correctly, often died in mysterious ways (they have all sorts of little motors and finicky sensors in them).
- freshtake 1y ago
  I don't know, I think the point of the example is one of transparent engineering. VHS players could break for any number of reasons but the manufacturers used to put in effort to make them repairable. Obviously a much simpler piece of hardware, but the relative effort felt much greater. When I used to use Google Wifi, it regularly struggled to connect or establish/maintain connectivity to the outside world, even though my modem was successfully connected. Similar to nest devices, you often have to power cycle them several times to get them into a good state
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I guess. All I know is, when I was a teenager we had a broken VHS player that I wanted to fix. I was a clever kid, so I took it from a broken VHS player, to a broken VHS player that was also in many pieces.
    - freshtake 1y ago
      Lol yeah, very familiar
- SoftTalker 1y ago
Procrastes 1y ago
I loved my TI-99/4A. I used to think it was ahead of its time, but now I realize it was from an altogether alternate timeline where we built stuff to work.
dangus 1y ago
Ugh, another one of these articles. This idea that we don’t understand the internals of anything anymore and nothing is reliable is a mix of nostalgic cherry-picking and willful ignorance of a lot of counter-examples. Sure, a bunch of consumer appliances are nebulous, but they are designed for those tradeoffs. It’s not like your old VHS player was designed specifically to be easy to repair either. The author is complaining about their of advanced networking feature breaking on a router intended for consumers. Why they haven’t upgraded to a prosumer setup is a mystery - OpnSense on a mini PC combined with some wireless access points is one way to go that offers a lot more configurablility and control. Complaining that not everyone can understand low level hardware is ignorant of all the really cool low level hardware and maker communities that have exploded in recent years, and it’s ignorant of the fact that specialization existed back in the “good old days” as well. For example, we had separate transmission and body shop specialists in the mid-century, you couldn’t just go to any mechanic to fix any problem with your car. I’d like to see someone in the VHS era design a printed circuit board using CAD software and get it printed on-demand, then design an enclosure and 3D print it in their house for pennies. You can design your own keyboards and other electronic gadgets and basically own a little factory in your own home these days. You can share designs with ease and many of the tools are open source. The amount of sophistication accessible to the average person is incredible these days.
phendrenad2 1y ago
If everyone could do Bode plots, design an op-amp circuit, design their own programming language and wrangle kubernetes clusters, would it really improve the world? Or would we just have a lot of useless knowledge?
FilosofumRex 1y ago
Abstraction explosion is surly detrimental to innovation, but so is "mathification", propelled by rapidly declining computational costs. Romans tremendously progressed, despite using inferior "math" compared to the Greeks, and Americans compared to the English & French. Note how willingly China ships its top mathys to the US grad school while retaining its best engineers at all costs. Only technologies that make it into tools/hardware (realware) will survive, the rest are destined to be e-wasted.
thadk 1y ago
idk, if you're going to center that good old TI computer, you gotta contrast the Conways law of that company, and the semi-solo person sharing 'grammable tidbits. The desired carrying capacity lies in that institution. Today it's in Shenzhen. But the ~1980s corporation is no longer and it was driven by the hype cycle too, it's just not a recognizable one. You can google the adverts or read Soul of a New Machine.
xg15 1y ago
All the usual rebuttals in this thread, but I don't see anyone engaging with his assertion that we're forgetting and reinventing things. If it really a were just division of labor, beneficial abstraction, shoulders of giants, etc, shouldn't we be able to distinguish genuinely new concepts from things we already had 40 years ago in a different context?

151 points by obscurette 1y ago

fithisux 1y ago

[flagged]

floppyd 1y ago

"Old man yells at cloud", but in so-so-so many words

worldsayshi 1y ago
> we’ve traded reliability and understanding for the illusion of progress. I wish there was a somewhat rigorous way to quantify reliability of tech products so that we could conclude if tech on average was about as buggy in the past. I mean I also feel that things are more buggy and unreliable, but I don't know if there's any good way to measure it.
- troupo 1y ago
  I mean. I takes over a second with a blocking loading indicator to change car temperature by one degree: https://grumpy.website/1665 https://grumpy.website/1665 This... This is quite quantifiable
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    I'm sure specific issues are quantifiable. But trying to quantify the overall trend seems like a challenge.
- ipcress_file 1y ago
  I'm conflicted. I remember when I bought my first vehicle with electronic ignition. It wasn't as good as the electronic ignition today and I had to replace a few black box components that I didn't understand (what is a "thick film module" anyways???). So I was irritated and wished that my truck still had points and a regular distributor. Flash forward to today. I can't remember the last time I replaced an ignition system component. I still don't know how they work. I can guarantee that the techs who do occasionally replace them at the dealer don't know how they work. But the whole system is so much more reliable. That said, I do wonder how young people are supposed to learn and gain understanding in a world where they cannot possibly understand the components in complex systems. Back in the day (I know, yelling at a cloud), I could actually understand how a set of points and a distributor -- or a even a three-transistor radio -- worked.
- palata 1y ago
  If you look e.g. at websites, I think we can measure that the average website today is slower to load than 15 years ago, even though hardware is orders of magnitude faster. Another thing is that today, you receive updates. So bugs get fixed, new bugs get introduced, it makes it harder to track other than "well, there are always bugs". Back then, a bug was there for life, burnt on your CD-ROM. I'm pretty sure software shipped on CD-ROM was a lot more tested than what we deploy now. You probably wouldn't burn thousands of CD-ROM with a "beta" version. Now the norm is to ship beta stuff and use 0-based versioning [1] because we can't make anything stable. Lastly, hardware today is a lot cheaper than 25 years ago. So now you buy a smartphone, it breaks after a year, you complain for 5min and you buy a new one. Those devices are almost disposable. 25 years ago you had to spend a lot of money on a PC, so it had to last for a while and be repairable. [1]: https://0ver.org/ https://0ver.org/
- scott_w 1y ago
  From playing video games, I'm going to say that generally games are more reliable today than they were in 2005, and I recall a few absolute fucking howlers from the 90s and 2000s (looking at you, Digimon World!) My comparison points: Fallout 3 being a shitshow of bugs on release vs Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Rebirth feeling practically bug-free on release. In fact, I don't think I hit any bugs in Final Fantasy 16 either.
  - zargon 1y ago
    Rest assured, Bethesda’s next release will be another bugfest. Not exactly a useful comparison.
    - scott_w 1y ago
      They probably will but they’re the comparisons I have to hand and, let’s be honest, this entire discussion is based on anecdotes.
  - troupo 1y ago
    On the other hand you didn't have "download this multigigabyte patch on day 1" because once burned to a CD it was there forever. Same for "you haven't touched your game console? here's 200 gigabytes of updates at 200kb/s"
    - scott_w 1y ago
      Having had a PS4 and a PS5, I’d say even this has improved.
torlok 1y ago
It's always old people complaining that 20-year-olds didn't learn programming 40 years ago like they did when computers had 5 assembly instructions, and a beeper for peripherals.
- palata 1y ago
  I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers". But it's not specifically about assembly, it's about software design. You can take a modern programming language (say Swift or Rust) and look at how software written with those languages is architected, and the points still stand: abstractions above abstractions above abstractions because people don't understand the lower levels. People routinely write completely wrong CMakeLists and then complain about CMake being "sooo bad". But give them Meson and they will make a mess as well. People have no clue about packaging and distribution, so they will say "it sucks sooo badly" and will distribute their code as a docker container, embedded in a 6GB Ubuntu image. Most emails you receive just contain a couple lines of useful information, yet they are generated by higher-level systems, full of HTML and bullshit and it's impossible to read in a simple client. Etc. Software quality is going down year after year, it is a fact. Probably because it is becoming more and more accessible, but the fact remains.
  - scott_w 1y ago
    > I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers". As a software engineer in his mid-30s now, I can assure you many "older people" will have little-to-no memory of messing around with assembly and electronics. When I was getting started, my boss told me about an engineer who had a deep knowledge of how to lay out data to efficiently read and process it. My response? "I just stick it in Postgres and it does it all for me!" No shade to that engineer but I do believe he was in his 50s/60s at the time, so it's quite likely he's retired on a decent pension by now!
palata 1y ago
I would be curious to know if: - You have enough experience to agree with the post but feel like writing such a post won't change anything, or - You are more of a junior and don't understand what the author means because you've grown up with the engineering quality we have today. Given that you consider this to be "so-so-so many words", I would bet it is the second option. Older people wouldn't consider that this is a huge text. Am I right? :-)
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]

xenocratus 1y ago

I'm sure he wrote all of this on, sent it over, and now is re-reading it from his Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Home Computer.

taikahessu 1y ago

Well, it's obviously true new stuff breaks fast, can't argue with that. But it's deliberate, not forgetfulness. Just capitalism on steroids.

worldsayshi 1y ago
> Deliberate I've been thinking about this; I suspect that a lot but not all of "planned obsolescence" comes down to not acting on a flaw, that aligns with your interest, as it appears. Can that be thought of as deliberate? It's a trolley problem kind of question I guess.

david927 1y ago

Someone made a video clip showing the Crumbl Cookies ingredients list and each one has around 100 ingredients https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1940924371255939236 https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1940924371255939236 Our software is like that. A small system will have a crazy number of packages and dependencies. It's not healthy and it's expensive and it's stupid. Culture tends to drive drunk, swinging wide to extremes and then over-correcting. We're already fully in the wrong lane when we start to have discussions about thinking about the possibility of change.

BiteCode_dev 1y ago
Everything in the physical world is the same. There are hundreds of pieces even in the smallest toaster, and no one in the world knows how to make half of one without all those external dependencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODzO7Lz_pw It's not a software thing, it's just how humanity works.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y ago
  Even if you consider something like "build a bridge", that classic comparison of software and traditional engineer, all the components of said bridge have been created by someone else with particular expertise. The civil engineer who designed where the iron beams will go played no part in the metallurgy of those beams.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  Milton Friedman put it best, in "I, Pencil". Everything around you is the result of hundreds to thousands of economic actors, loosely but robustly coordinated in a way to get you what you actually want at as low of a price as you can get away with. The complexity of the supply chain is the price of admission to the game. https://youtu.be/67tHtpac5ws?si=eZk_5K32gL4PxDgv https://youtu.be/67tHtpac5ws?si=eZk_5K32gL4PxDgv
- nobodyandproud 1y ago
  Yes and no. The physical world is bound by rules that are unchanging (more-or-less). Above this layer we’ve also devised and agreed upon standards that remain unchanging, though it’s regional: Voltage, screw/bolt sizes, tolerance levels, materials, material measurements, etc. At this layer, we’ve commoditized and standardized because it’s useful: It makes the components cost-effective and predictable. In software and computing, I can only think of the low-level networking standard that remain stable. And even that has to be reinvented somewhat for each OS or each nee language. Everything else seems to be reinvented or rewritten, and then versioned. Imagine having to upgrade your nuts and bolts in your car to v3.01 or lose support?

ivape 1y ago

We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work. There's an education gap that needs to be addressed, but I don't know how it will get addressed. A lot of the web in the past few decades came from industry so industry had a way of training up people. Most of this ML stuff is coming from academia, and they aren't really the best at training up an army at all. It's hard to know who to blame for all of this because it's kind of like not having an early warning asteroid detection system. HN or various communities did not have discussions even five years prior to GPT about the impending doom (no early warning at all). If you just take HN, we sat around here discussing a million worthless things across Rust/Javascript/startup b.s for years like headless chickens (right here on the frontpage) without realizing what was really to come. Makes me wonder if the places I go for tech news are enough to be prepared. Which brings me back to what I quoted: We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work. We aren't creating them. They are the existing devs that had no idea AI was going to be a thing. Had anyone known it was to be such a thing, everyone would have ditched going to web development bootcamps in the mid 2010s.

goopypoop 1y ago

JavaScript is required to read this rant edit: lol

skybrian 1y ago

If it works, he's lucky. For example, Commodore 64's often had a dodgy power supply that would eventually damage the computer. My Vectrex still worked last I checked.

forinti 1y ago
About every 15 years I have to change the caps on my Beeb. The third job is coming soon.

analog31 1y ago

Ironically, the technology that amazingly still works after 40 years is shown in front of a shelf full of books.

paulryanrogers 1y ago
Books are fragile. Their pages often include acid in order to self destruct. For resilience we should be recording on clay tablets. /s
- analog31 1y ago
  Oddly enough, I've read that the clay was originally re-usable, and the ones that are preserved were baked in accidental fires. Kind of a weird opposite meaning of book-burning.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

> Software has followed the same trajectory, piling abstraction upon abstraction until we’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application. This is like saying old software is so simple that updating a line of code can break an entire application. It's a silly thing to say. No matter how complex or how simple a piece of software is, you can easily break it. If you have a program that prints out "hello world", guess what? Updating a single character can break the entire application! The world is more complex now. We've stood on the shoulders of giants who stood on the shoulders of giants. A few centuries ago a renaissance man could make advances in multiple fields. Now people are specialized. It's the same thing with software. Of course, people take it to an extreme. However, you go ahead and write your own crypto library, I'll use a vetted one created by experts.

alganet 1y ago
If I break some source code by messing with it, I know what happened. I might even learn from it. Now if npm breaks it, or Claude breaks it, a developer might not even know what was broken. He's talking about that kind of thing, not the resilience of code to take random character deletions. IT is very much non-specialized compared to older disciplines. It's so young. Every single one of us is still a jack of all trades in some degree. You're relying on the "don't roll your own crypto" popular quote to drop the mic. That's misguided. This advice comes from an argument of strength by numbers, not anything related to abstractions. It tells me you don't understand it.
- darig 1y ago
  [dead]
1718627440 1y ago
Doesn't it mean more that some packages aren't conforming to common sense like semver?
softfalcon 1y ago
This is exactly my take on folks bemoaning the evolution of complexity in software (and hardware) worldwide. To lend some credence to other folks points of view, there are arguments I can agree with that are adjacent: - "We don't need that complex framework for our needs, we stick to a simpler, older library." - "We decided to not use <shiniest_new_toolkit> it had performance issues that the maintainers are still sorting out." - "Working with the new framework showed a lot of promise, but there is still a lot of instability in the API since it's so new. We couldn't commit to using a toolkit that hasn't been nailed down yet." These are actual concerns and shows caution towards adopting new things until they match your use-case, dev-timelines, and performance requirements.

bitwize 1y ago

I love how he talks about knowing thermal characteristics, etc. and then cites the TI-99/4A as an example of something designed by people who Really Knew What They Were Doing. The TI-99/4A was notorious for being prone to overheat due to its power supply. Munch Man and Parsec were complete non-starters for me when it got hot in July. This was even mentioned, specifically, in Halt and Catch Fire. The early microcomputer engineers were spitballing. You want to talk about the number of bodge wires that were in every TRS-80? Or the Apple III having no thermal vents per order of Steve Jobs, and the "you're holding it wrong" of the 80s being "drop it on your desk to fix it"? We know how to build better, more reliable computers for cheaper today than we ever did in the 80s. Then we fuck them up with things like Windows, but still.

wyager 1y ago

> Large language models are impressive statistical text predictors — genuinely useful tools that excel at pattern matching and interpolation. Slightly OT: It's interesting how many (smart!) people in tech like the author of this article still can't conceptualize the difference between training objective and learned capability. I wonder at this point if it's a sort of willful ignorance adopted as a psychological protection mechanism. I wonder if they're going to experience a moment of severe shock, just gradually forget that they held these opinions, or take on a sort of delusional belief that AI can't do XYZ despite all mounting evidence to the contrary.

ReptileMan 1y ago
Can you elaborate a bit?
- gjm11 1y ago
  (Not GP, but:) LLMs' initial training is specifically for token-prediction. However, this doesn't mean that what they end up doing is specifically token-prediction (except in the sense that anything that generates textual output can be described as doing token-prediction). Nor does it mean that the only things they can do are tasks most naturally described in terms of token-prediction. For instance, suppose you successfully train something to predict the next token given input of the form "[lengthy number] x [lengthy number] = ", where "successfully" means that the system ends up able to predict correctly almost all the time even when the numbers are ones it hasn't seen before. How could it do that? Only by, in some sense, "learning to multiply". (I haven't checked but my hazy recollection is that somewhere around GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 LLMs went from not being able to do this at all to being able to do it fairly well on moderate-sized numbers.) Or suppose you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The SHA256 hash of [lengthy string] is "; again, a system that could do that correctly would have to have, in some sense, "learned to implement SHA256". (I am pretty sure that today's LLMs cannot do this, though of course they might have learned to call out to a tool that can.) If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "One grammatical English sentence whose SHA256 hash is [value] is " then that thing has to have "learned to break SHA256". (I am very sure that today's LLMs cannot do this and I think it enormously unlikely that any ever will be able to.) If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The complete source code for a program written in idiomatic Rust that does [difficult task] is " then that thing has to have "learned to write code in Rust". (Today's LLMs can kinda do some tasks like this, and there are a lot of people yelling at one another about just how much they can do.) That is: some token-prediction tasks can only be accomplished by doing things that we would not normally think of as being about token prediction. This is essentially the point of the "Turing test". For the avoidance of doubt, I am making no particular claims (beyond the illustrative ones explicitly made above) about what if anything today's LLMs, or plausible near-future LLMs, or other further-future AI systems, are able to do that goes beyond what we would normally think of as token prediction. The point is that whether or not today's LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" in some useful sense, it doesn't follow from the fact that they are trained on token-prediction that that's all they are.

ryukoposting 1y ago

> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit. If the thesis is that we should understand the systems we work on, then sure, I can get behind that. At the same time, I wouldn't expect a mechanic to know how to process iron ore into an ingot.

alganet 1y ago
Machinists know their materials. They might not know every step to process it, but they understand the manufacturing process of different kinds of metals and their properties. They definitely don't "vibe machine" without thinking about underlying concepts.
- BillyTheMage 1y ago
  As a redneck I think you vastly underestimate the prolifity of vibe machining
  - alganet 1y ago
    I am sure hobbysts vibe machine a lot, and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not supposed to be representative of the industry.
827a 1y ago
Software engineers aren't to computers as mechanics are to cars. The closest correlate is, like, automotive engineers working at Ford or Toyota; and I would 100% expect that someone involved in the process at those companies has reasonably deep knowledge about, for example, the structural characteristics of casted metal.

MontyCarloHall 1y ago

>That TI-99/4A still boots because it was designed by people who understood every component, every circuit, every line of code. It works because it was built to work, not to generate quarterly revenue or collect user data or enable some elaborate software-as-a-service business model. The methods and algorithms powering advances in modern science, medicine, communications, entertainment, etc. would be impossible to develop, much less run, on something so rudimentary as a TI-99/4A. The applications we harness our technology for have become much more sophisticated, and so too must the technology stacks underpinning them, to the point that no single individual can understand everything. Take something as simple as real time video communication, something we take for granted today. There is no single person in the world who deeply understands every single aspect, from the semiconductor engineering involved in the manufacture of display and image sensors, to the electronics engineering behind the communication to/from the display/sensor, to the signal processing and compression algorithms used to encode the video, to the network protocols used to actually transmit the video, to the operating system kernel's scheduler capable of performing at sufficiently low-latency to run the videochat app. By analogy, one can understand and construct every component of a mud hut or log cabin, but no single person is capable of understanding, much less constructing, every single component of a modern skyscraper.

alganet 1y ago
You're misdirecting. He's criticizing the act of _not building_ on previous learnings. _It's in the damn title_. Repeating mistakes from the past leads to a slow down in such advancements. This has nothing to do with learning everything by yourself (which, by the way, is a worthy goal and every single person that tries knows by heart that it cannot be done, it's not about doing it).

raincole 1y ago

> They can deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters but couldn’t design a simple op-amp circuit And the ones who can design a op-amp circuit can't manufacture the laminate their circuit is going to be printed on. And the ones who know how to manufacture the laminate probably doesn't know how to refine or synthesize the material from the minerals. And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves. No one knows everything. Collaboration has been how we manage complexity since we were biologically a different species than H. sapiens.

alganet 1y ago
I'm fairily confident that someone like Ben from Applied Science can both laminate circuits and write modern code. https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience https://github.com/benkrasnow https://github.com/benkrasnow If he can, what's stopping you? There are extraordinary people doing extraordinary things all around you. Aiming for these things is important, and we need those kinds of people with ambitious learning goals.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  Because specialization is vastly more efficient, productive, and I don't have an interest in cutting and laminating my own circuit boards. I can pay a tiny (relative to the alternative investment of DIY) to get multilayer boards in a day.
  - alganet 1y ago
    You're changing your argument. Before, you said people _can't_ (in general, anyone that knows how to code cannot possibly learn how circuits work). Now, you're saying that _you don't want to learn_. That's on you, buddy. Don't project your insecurities on the whole IT field. People can, and will, learn across many layers of abstraction.
    - hluska 1y ago
      You missed the point of that entire comment didn’t you?

charcircuit 1y ago

This article is against accessibility. It's not that people are forgetting. We just don't require them to know everything to build things. >Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing. Edge computing is not "just" distributed processing. That fails to recognize the point of minimizing latency. >Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files. Not all modules are microservices. It's again term to a more specific practice. >Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond. Those are somewhat related concepts but they still don't have the same meaning. >Compare that to today’s black-box system-on-chip designs, where a single failure means the entire device becomes e-waste If you really wanted to, you could fix the system-on-chip. >We’ve mistaken complexity for sophistication and abstraction for advancement. People are not adding complexity and abstractions just for fun. >We’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application This has always been the case. Bugs still existed in the 1900s. >What started as a legitimate return to hands-on engineering has been co-opted by influencer culture, where the goal isn’t to build something useful but to generate content about building something photogenic. Social media being dominated by people good at social media and not by the top makers will happen in every endeavor. Accessibility has allowed many more people to be able to create basic things. >We’re creating a generation of developers and engineers who can use tools brilliantly but can't explain how those tools work They don't need to. And this has always been the case. There is too much to know and having different people specialize in different things is effective. Additionally there is great value in making software accessible making people with less knowledge to be able to make things. It allows for more things to be created that deliver value to people. >The best engineering solutions are often elegantly simple. They work reliably, fail predictably, and can be understood by the people who use them. They don't require constant updates or cloud connectivity or subscription services. Sure, but many people want a solution that can be delivered now and for cheap.

ozim 1y ago

Meh, fluff article without substance. Title misses the mark and hand waves shitload of progress we have. Nagging about consumer electronics is fine because a lot of stuff has its issues. But compared to 20 or even 10 years ago everything on average works much better.

photochemsyn 1y ago

Obviously a lot of design and engineering tasks these days don't have the goal of producing robust, repairable, long-lived hardware and software - where's the profit in that? If iphones lasted twice as long as they now do, wouldn't sales drop by 50% unless consumers decided they preferred the longer-lived phones? This would create pressure on all manufacturers to produce long-lived phones with easily replaceable batteries and publicly available repair kits. And what happens then? The entire market shrinks for all phone manufacturers, and the shareholders throw tantrums over lost profits. In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons. There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades. That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?

jeroenhd 1y ago

> Modern developers debug through seventeen layers of frameworks to discover that their problem is a missing semicolon in a configuration file generated by a tool that abstracts away another tool that was created to simplify a process that was perfectly straightforward twenty years ago. But it wasn't straightforward twenty years ago. Maybe it was to you, but it wasn't to others. There's a reason the world moved away from command line interfaces and it's not just to bully the nerds. Same reason many Americans don't know how to use a clutch, and why chopping down trees for your own house has fallen out of fashion. As society specialises and technology advances, responsibilities are divided. > The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet. We’ve mistaken complexity for sophistication and abstraction for advancement. A VHS player is built on top of tons of abstractions. There's a component somewhere in the middle that will take electric pulses and turn them into subtitles you can turn on or off. Just like that WiFi router still has its analog pins you could hook your oscilloscope up to if you want to troubleshoot it. We have lost service manuals for many electronics indeed, but that's because servicing these devices no longer earns anyone a living. Electronics as complex as VHS players have dropped in price from a month or two's wage for a whole family to the price of eating out. Spending half a year teaching yourself electrical engineering to maintain your TV isn't worth the time investment anymore, unless you're doing it out of personal interest. You can repair the failed electronics on WiFi routers. You don't need to, though, because the electronics no longer constantly fail like they used to. The skills electrical engineers from the last century have proudly honed just aren't as relevant as they used to be. The "old man yells at cloud" complaint that kids these days don't even know assembly is just as relevant as it was in the days when assembly was commonplace, when kids those days didn't even know how to program spinning drums or knit magnetic core memory without the help of an assembler. Billions of people drive cars every day. Most of those people have no idea how their car works beyond the ignition, yet the world relies on that technology and it's working just fine. Cars do break down sometimes, and that's when you call in the experts. The people who know the ins and outs of assembly, machine code, and CPU microcode, still exist. The difference between back then and now is that, like cars, you don't need years of education before you can comfortably use the devices anymore. I too lament the overly complex software ecosystem of today, the simple apps that have grown to hundreds of megabytes, the Javascriptification of our world, but that's not a failure of society. It's what you get when you go for the cost-optimised computing approach that has lead to supercomputers in our pocket rather than the quality-over-features approach that you needed back when people spent more than a year's worth of meals on relatively simple electronic devices.

hluska 1y ago

> The same publications that use “disruptive AI” unironically are the ones that need to Google “what is a neural network” every time they write about machine learning. This is called “good journalism”. It would be great if Elektor tried practicing it.

unyttigfjelltol 1y ago

> (Google is less than helpful with a dumbed-down user interface that basically tells you that “something went wrong.") This UI trend of denying access to under-the-hood complexity is deeply unsettling. It creates a cliff edge failure mechanism where the system (which often is essential) works and then suddenly doesn't. No warning approaching the failure state, no recourse on the far side, completely baffling how this became an industry standard.

convolvatron 1y ago
the best part is when you look at the from the perspective of composition. if I build a thing using complicated 'industry standard' components that are just supposed to work, then when something happens I'm pretty much lost. now take my thing, add some marketing about how it 'just works', and have someone else use it in a high level concatenation of other such functions and pretend it 'just works'. now we are actually employing large numbers of people just to babysit these half-assed things, and everyone is fine with it because we all used 'industry standard' components, and thats really the best we can do isn't it. armies of on-call system resetters are just part of the picture now.

fusionadvocate 1y ago

Abstractions hide details, that does not mean they cease to exist. The problem with abstractions is that it makes it easier to create conflicts when making changes. Lots of hidden details are affected by a high level change.

zzzeek 1y ago

I see a bunch of "nobody knows everything, this old man needs to appreciate modern technology stacks" comments, and in some ways I blame the post for this because it kind of meanders into that realm where it gets into abstractions being bad and kids not knowing how to make op-amp circuits (FTR, I am from the "you have to know op-amps!" generation and I intentionally decided deep hardware hacking was not going to be my thing), but the actual core thing I think is important here is that working hard is being devalued - putting in the time to understand the general workings underpinnings of software, the hardware, using trial and error to solve an engineering problem as opposed to "sticking LEDs on fruit", the entire premise of knowing how things work and achieving some deep expertise is no longer what people assume they should be striving for, and LLMs, useful or not, are only accelerating this. Just yesterday I used an LLM to write some docs for me, and for a little bit where I mistakenly thought the docs were fine as they were (they weren't, but I had to read them closely to see this) it felt like, "wow if the LLM just writes all my docs now, I'm pretty much going to forget how to write docs. Is that something I should worry about?" The LLM almost fooled me. The docs sounded good. It's because they were documenting something I myself was too lazy to re-familiarize with, hoping the LLM would just do it for me. Fortunately the little bit of my brain that still wanted to be able to do things decided to really read the docs deeply, and they were wrong. I think this "the LLM made it convincing, we're done let's go watch TV" mentality is a big danger spot at scale. There's an actual problem forming here and it's that human society is becoming idiocracy all the way down. It might be completely unavoidable. It might be the reason for the Fermi paradox.

WillAdams 1y ago
Marshall Mcluhan called this out ages ago: >every extension is also an amputation that said, it is up to society, and to a lesser extent individuals to determine which skills will be preserved --- an excellent example of a rational preservation of craft teaching in formal education is the northern European tradition of Sloyd Woodworking: https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/ https://rainfordrestorations.com/tag/sloyd/ >Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with ... hand and ... eye and appreciate the labor of others.

bee_rider 1y ago

> The VHS player in my basement could be fixed with a screwdriver and a service manual (OK, sometimes an oscilloscope). Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet. This seems like a pretty weird example, right? WiFi routers don’t connect to the internet. If your modem can’t connect to the internet, something has probably broken outside your house. That’s the sort of locally-unsolvable problem that everybody last century was familiar with; the crappy copper telephone wire that was never designed to let the Internet blast through it and it will eventually rebel and start giving you noise. If your router doesn’t work, I don’t know. Cheap routers are not a new invention or sign of the times, I think. VHS players, if I remember correctly, often died in mysterious ways (they have all sorts of little motors and finicky sensors in them).

freshtake 1y ago
I don't know, I think the point of the example is one of transparent engineering. VHS players could break for any number of reasons but the manufacturers used to put in effort to make them repairable. Obviously a much simpler piece of hardware, but the relative effort felt much greater. When I used to use Google Wifi, it regularly struggled to connect or establish/maintain connectivity to the outside world, even though my modem was successfully connected. Similar to nest devices, you often have to power cycle them several times to get them into a good state
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I guess. All I know is, when I was a teenager we had a broken VHS player that I wanted to fix. I was a clever kid, so I took it from a broken VHS player, to a broken VHS player that was also in many pieces.
  - freshtake 1y ago
    Lol yeah, very familiar
SoftTalker 1y ago

Procrastes 1y ago

I loved my TI-99/4A. I used to think it was ahead of its time, but now I realize it was from an altogether alternate timeline where we built stuff to work.

dangus 1y ago

Ugh, another one of these articles. This idea that we don’t understand the internals of anything anymore and nothing is reliable is a mix of nostalgic cherry-picking and willful ignorance of a lot of counter-examples. Sure, a bunch of consumer appliances are nebulous, but they are designed for those tradeoffs. It’s not like your old VHS player was designed specifically to be easy to repair either. The author is complaining about their of advanced networking feature breaking on a router intended for consumers. Why they haven’t upgraded to a prosumer setup is a mystery - OpnSense on a mini PC combined with some wireless access points is one way to go that offers a lot more configurablility and control. Complaining that not everyone can understand low level hardware is ignorant of all the really cool low level hardware and maker communities that have exploded in recent years, and it’s ignorant of the fact that specialization existed back in the “good old days” as well. For example, we had separate transmission and body shop specialists in the mid-century, you couldn’t just go to any mechanic to fix any problem with your car. I’d like to see someone in the VHS era design a printed circuit board using CAD software and get it printed on-demand, then design an enclosure and 3D print it in their house for pennies. You can design your own keyboards and other electronic gadgets and basically own a little factory in your own home these days. You can share designs with ease and many of the tools are open source. The amount of sophistication accessible to the average person is incredible these days.

phendrenad2 1y ago

If everyone could do Bode plots, design an op-amp circuit, design their own programming language and wrangle kubernetes clusters, would it really improve the world? Or would we just have a lot of useless knowledge?

FilosofumRex 1y ago

Abstraction explosion is surly detrimental to innovation, but so is "mathification", propelled by rapidly declining computational costs. Romans tremendously progressed, despite using inferior "math" compared to the Greeks, and Americans compared to the English & French. Note how willingly China ships its top mathys to the US grad school while retaining its best engineers at all costs. Only technologies that make it into tools/hardware (realware) will survive, the rest are destined to be e-wasted.

thadk 1y ago

idk, if you're going to center that good old TI computer, you gotta contrast the Conways law of that company, and the semi-solo person sharing 'grammable tidbits. The desired carrying capacity lies in that institution. Today it's in Shenzhen. But the ~1980s corporation is no longer and it was driven by the hype cycle too, it's just not a recognizable one. You can google the adverts or read Soul of a New Machine.

xg15 1y ago

All the usual rebuttals in this thread, but I don't see anyone engaging with his assertion that we're forgetting and reinventing things. If it really a were just division of labor, beneficial abstraction, shoulders of giants, etc, shouldn't we be able to distinguish genuinely new concepts from things we already had 40 years ago in a different context?