4 ms·

> 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 manufactur

> 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?
      - alganet 1y ago
        If I did, people failed to explain why. I think I made an excellent counterpoint that is not against specialization, but complementary. This counterpoint is particularly important in an age where specialization is being oversold and mixed with snake oil.
    - PickledChris 1y ago
      That is because you are replying to two different people. People can learn across layers of abstraction, but specialisation is generally a good thing and creates wealth, a Scottish guy wrote a good book on it.
      - alganet 1y ago
        There are many industries that specialized but kept and refined old knowledge instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over. > That is because you are replying to two different people. He chose to follow the argument of the previous dude, so, it's all the same for me. Everything I said still applies.
    - rtkwe 1y ago
      I don't know what raincole's meaning was but can't there doesn't have to be a permanent inability just a current one, IMO backed up by the next sentence about the people making circuit boards not knowing how to refine the raw materials into those that they use. That's what I took it as.
turbofreak 1y ago
[flagged]
kragen 1y ago
If I remember correctly, one of the first white people to successfully visit the Māori reported that when he told them he didn't know how to make pistols, black powder, porcelain, hemp rope, etc., they thought he was lying, because in their culture everyone knew how to make everything. There was a division between men's work and women's work, that was all. They had specialization, but not of the kind you are talking about. The Little House on the Prairie books fictionalize the childhoods of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder in the US in the late 19th century. They expected their readers, whose grandparents had grown up in similar conditions, to believe that one or more of their parents knew how to shoot a bear, build a house, dig a well, poultice wasp stings, cast bullets, fertilize and grow crops, make cheese, whitewash walls, drive horses, run a business, read a book, play the fiddle, dance a jig, sing, keep bees, clear fields in forests, harvest honey, spin thread, weave cloth, thresh wheat, and many other activities. There were "store-bought" goods produced by the kind of specialization you're talking about, but Laura's family had a few durable goods of that sort (Pa's rifle and ax, the family Bible) and mostly they just did without. More recently the Lykov family survived 40 years of total isolation from society, missing World War II completely, but did suffer some heartbreaking losses in material standard of living because they didn't know, for example, how to make ceramic or iron. Agafia Lykova is still living there on her parents' homestead, nearly a century later. Specialization is indeed very efficient, but that answers the questions, "What can I do for others?" and "How can we survive?" Historical answers bespeaking specialization are archived in many of our surnames in the West: Cooper, Fuller, Goldschmidt, Herrero, Nailer, Roper, Molnar, and, of course, Potter. But for those questions to matter, we also need to answer the questions, "How can I be happy?" and "How can we be happy?", and for thousands of years it has been at least widely believed that devoting your entire self to specialization runs counter to those goals—among other things, because it can open doors to the kinds of exploitation, unfreedom, and insecurity the article is lamenting. And sometimes regional specialization leads not to prosperity for every region but to impoverishment, and regaining the lost skills is the path out of the kind of abysmal poverty that produces regular famines; that's why there's a charkha on the Indian flag. TI was no exemplar here; you can't even write your own machine code to run on the TI-99/4A, but the situation with Nest is in many ways far worse. I think it's worth distinguishing between situations where someone chooses not to learn about, modify, or repair artifacts, and situations like these where they are not permitted to learn, especially when the prohibition is established in order to exploit them economically, as in both the TI case and the Nest case, or as in medieval guilds. Some specializations are thousands of years old; tin mining in Cornwall supported much of the Bronze Age, and silicosis was already known as an occupational disease of potters in Classical times. But 80 hours a week breaking rocks in a tin mine is not a path to human flourishing, nor to economic prosperity for the person doing it. Neither is buying thermostats you aren't allowed to understand. We shouldn't idealize it just because it's profitable.
jmulho 1y ago
You’re part of a different species than H. Sapiens?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jjmarr 1y ago
I can design a simple op-amp circuit and deploy to a Kubernetes cluster because Canada has a "Computer Engineering" degree that's a hybrid between CS/Electrical Engineering. It doesn't work in practice. CS graduates from my school are trained on git and Linux command lines. CE teaches none of this and students discover in 3rd year they cannot get an internship because they share all their code as IDE screenshots in Google Docs. But we do know how the entire process of building a computer works, from quantum physics, semiconductor doping, npn junctions, CMOS logic, logic gates, hardware design languages, assembly, C, and Java. If only all of this "important" knowledge didn't crowd out basic skills.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I think designing the EE and computer engineering curriculum is pretty tough. Because: * the EE’s need to learn matlab or numpy, to use as a tool * so do the computer engineering students, probably * the computer engineering students also need to learn low level stuff, because they might reasonably end up writing drivers or embedded code * separating out what should be in which classes is kind of tricky; keeping in mind that the students don’t necessarily know anything about programming at all, you probably need some kind of “intro to the general idea of programming” class * realistically when they start the program they don’t know much about what the jobs look like, so it is good if they are able to switch paths, for the first couple years * realistically a lot of people just want to get a stem degree and then go be a programmer anyway
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Time was that this sort of thing was covered in courses such as: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati... but they've since switched to Python for reasons: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=2331 https://irreal.org/blog/?p=2331
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I think you can teach this sort of class, in Python. Just using the basic syntax of Python, which is essentially pseudocode. The main danger, I think, is that it would involve doing lots of things in a non-pythonic way, which could confuse the students if they went on to write Python for real.
9rx 1y ago
> And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves. As a farmer and software developer, with a electronics hobby (and it being a part of the job of being a farming these days), I can check off growing crops, op-amp circuits, and Kubernetes deployments. I don't own, or have reasonable access to, the necessary capital for laminating circuit boards and synthesizing minerals. > No one knows everything. But, really, access to capital is the real limiting factor. Getting to know something isn't usually all that difficult in and of itself, but if you have no way to do it then you're never going to get to know it. Collaboration is less important to efficiency than optimizing use of capital. Its just that we don't have many good ideas about how to optimize use of capital without also introducing collaboration.
anonzzzies 1y ago
It was not a great remark indeed, however, most modern devops we meet (all seniors, big corps) know nothing lower level, often not much about Linux or what the coding etc. And it is always terrible: like LLMs, they like adding complexity: just put a nlb with an alb and private link with a gateway with a nlb with an alb! These guys (sorry, it is generally guys) believe they are experts but they are terrible. Get paid as experts though. You don't have to know everything but BASIC understanding about the what is underneath would be nice.
cherryteastain 1y ago
> THE GREATEST IMPROVEMENTS in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. > To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker...a workman not educated to this business...could scarce, perhaps..make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. I have seen a small manufactory...where ten men only were employed...Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
- alganet 1y ago
  When you divide and specialize manufacture, you get efficiency. When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    You clearly don't. If you design a desk lamp, it wasn't designed by a committee just because a person designed the screws, another designed the plate stamping machine, another designed the bulb socket and etc.
    - Buttons840 1y ago
      > When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee. In your counter-example, the design was not divided, and thus it is not a counter-example at all.
      - spongebobstoes 1y ago
        The division of design doesn't stop because some of the pieces can be bought at a store. The lamp design clearly was divided -- the final designer did not design the screws, lightbulb, wiring, and perhaps many other components. Someone had to design those components that were then combined creatively into a lamp. Dividing design into components that can be effectively reused is tricky, but it remains essential.
SkyMarshal 1y ago
Humans congregating into cities, specializing and developing expert capabilities in particular fields, and collaborating and relying on others for what they're not specialized in, is a big part of the story of the Enlightenment -> Industrial Revolution -> Electricity Revolution -> Information Age.
no_wizard 1y ago
I agree with your general thesis, but I will say someone who understands the conceptual and at least simplified way everything comes together are usually better at their speciality than those who know their speciality but don’t have some understanding of how things come together
msgodel 1y ago
In theory. The socialization premium is getting high enough that you are actually often better off doing everything on your own again.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  That's a tough row to hoe --- classic example of that is a pencil (see Thoreau and his family's history/business), though interestingly, there is a specialized tool now for making one (from components): John Economaki's "Pencil Precision" from Bridge City Tool Works: https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision I have the preceding "Chopstick Master v2" and it is a delight to use (and probably if there was a suitable set of instructions for collecting the materials for making a pencil lead and baking them, I'd probably have the successor).
dev_l1x_be 1y ago
To a certain extent yes. However, when i get rid off a layer of abstraction from my supply chain I usually get better results. That is the scary part to me.
okbuuuut 1y ago
[dead]
tom_m 1y ago
We used to know everything to get the job done. Some of us still believe in that.

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?
    - alganet 1y ago
      If I did, people failed to explain why. I think I made an excellent counterpoint that is not against specialization, but complementary. This counterpoint is particularly important in an age where specialization is being oversold and mixed with snake oil.
  - PickledChris 1y ago
    That is because you are replying to two different people. People can learn across layers of abstraction, but specialisation is generally a good thing and creates wealth, a Scottish guy wrote a good book on it.
    - alganet 1y ago
      There are many industries that specialized but kept and refined old knowledge instead of repeating the same mistakes over and over. > That is because you are replying to two different people. He chose to follow the argument of the previous dude, so, it's all the same for me. Everything I said still applies.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    I don't know what raincole's meaning was but can't there doesn't have to be a permanent inability just a current one, IMO backed up by the next sentence about the people making circuit boards not knowing how to refine the raw materials into those that they use. That's what I took it as.

turbofreak 1y ago

[flagged]

kragen 1y ago

If I remember correctly, one of the first white people to successfully visit the Māori reported that when he told them he didn't know how to make pistols, black powder, porcelain, hemp rope, etc., they thought he was lying, because in their culture everyone knew how to make everything. There was a division between men's work and women's work, that was all. They had specialization, but not of the kind you are talking about. The Little House on the Prairie books fictionalize the childhoods of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder in the US in the late 19th century. They expected their readers, whose grandparents had grown up in similar conditions, to believe that one or more of their parents knew how to shoot a bear, build a house, dig a well, poultice wasp stings, cast bullets, fertilize and grow crops, make cheese, whitewash walls, drive horses, run a business, read a book, play the fiddle, dance a jig, sing, keep bees, clear fields in forests, harvest honey, spin thread, weave cloth, thresh wheat, and many other activities. There were "store-bought" goods produced by the kind of specialization you're talking about, but Laura's family had a few durable goods of that sort (Pa's rifle and ax, the family Bible) and mostly they just did without. More recently the Lykov family survived 40 years of total isolation from society, missing World War II completely, but did suffer some heartbreaking losses in material standard of living because they didn't know, for example, how to make ceramic or iron. Agafia Lykova is still living there on her parents' homestead, nearly a century later. Specialization is indeed very efficient, but that answers the questions, "What can I do for others?" and "How can we survive?" Historical answers bespeaking specialization are archived in many of our surnames in the West: Cooper, Fuller, Goldschmidt, Herrero, Nailer, Roper, Molnar, and, of course, Potter. But for those questions to matter, we also need to answer the questions, "How can I be happy?" and "How can we be happy?", and for thousands of years it has been at least widely believed that devoting your entire self to specialization runs counter to those goals—among other things, because it can open doors to the kinds of exploitation, unfreedom, and insecurity the article is lamenting. And sometimes regional specialization leads not to prosperity for every region but to impoverishment, and regaining the lost skills is the path out of the kind of abysmal poverty that produces regular famines; that's why there's a charkha on the Indian flag. TI was no exemplar here; you can't even write your own machine code to run on the TI-99/4A, but the situation with Nest is in many ways far worse. I think it's worth distinguishing between situations where someone chooses not to learn about, modify, or repair artifacts, and situations like these where they are not permitted to learn, especially when the prohibition is established in order to exploit them economically, as in both the TI case and the Nest case, or as in medieval guilds. Some specializations are thousands of years old; tin mining in Cornwall supported much of the Bronze Age, and silicosis was already known as an occupational disease of potters in Classical times. But 80 hours a week breaking rocks in a tin mine is not a path to human flourishing, nor to economic prosperity for the person doing it. Neither is buying thermostats you aren't allowed to understand. We shouldn't idealize it just because it's profitable.

jmulho 1y ago

You’re part of a different species than H. Sapiens?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jjmarr 1y ago

I can design a simple op-amp circuit and deploy to a Kubernetes cluster because Canada has a "Computer Engineering" degree that's a hybrid between CS/Electrical Engineering. It doesn't work in practice. CS graduates from my school are trained on git and Linux command lines. CE teaches none of this and students discover in 3rd year they cannot get an internship because they share all their code as IDE screenshots in Google Docs. But we do know how the entire process of building a computer works, from quantum physics, semiconductor doping, npn junctions, CMOS logic, logic gates, hardware design languages, assembly, C, and Java. If only all of this "important" knowledge didn't crowd out basic skills.

bee_rider 1y ago
I think designing the EE and computer engineering curriculum is pretty tough. Because: * the EE’s need to learn matlab or numpy, to use as a tool * so do the computer engineering students, probably * the computer engineering students also need to learn low level stuff, because they might reasonably end up writing drivers or embedded code * separating out what should be in which classes is kind of tricky; keeping in mind that the students don’t necessarily know anything about programming at all, you probably need some kind of “intro to the general idea of programming” class * realistically when they start the program they don’t know much about what the jobs look like, so it is good if they are able to switch paths, for the first couple years * realistically a lot of people just want to get a stem degree and then go be a programmer anyway
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Time was that this sort of thing was covered in courses such as: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati... but they've since switched to Python for reasons: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=2331 https://irreal.org/blog/?p=2331
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I think you can teach this sort of class, in Python. Just using the basic syntax of Python, which is essentially pseudocode. The main danger, I think, is that it would involve doing lots of things in a non-pythonic way, which could confuse the students if they went on to write Python for real.

9rx 1y ago

> And probably none of them knows how to grow and fertilize the crop to feed themselves. As a farmer and software developer, with a electronics hobby (and it being a part of the job of being a farming these days), I can check off growing crops, op-amp circuits, and Kubernetes deployments. I don't own, or have reasonable access to, the necessary capital for laminating circuit boards and synthesizing minerals. > No one knows everything. But, really, access to capital is the real limiting factor. Getting to know something isn't usually all that difficult in and of itself, but if you have no way to do it then you're never going to get to know it. Collaboration is less important to efficiency than optimizing use of capital. Its just that we don't have many good ideas about how to optimize use of capital without also introducing collaboration.

anonzzzies 1y ago

It was not a great remark indeed, however, most modern devops we meet (all seniors, big corps) know nothing lower level, often not much about Linux or what the coding etc. And it is always terrible: like LLMs, they like adding complexity: just put a nlb with an alb and private link with a gateway with a nlb with an alb! These guys (sorry, it is generally guys) believe they are experts but they are terrible. Get paid as experts though. You don't have to know everything but BASIC understanding about the what is underneath would be nice.

cherryteastain 1y ago

> THE GREATEST IMPROVEMENTS in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour. > To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker...a workman not educated to this business...could scarce, perhaps..make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. I have seen a small manufactory...where ten men only were employed...Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. - An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776

alganet 1y ago
When you divide and specialize manufacture, you get efficiency. When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  You clearly don't. If you design a desk lamp, it wasn't designed by a committee just because a person designed the screws, another designed the plate stamping machine, another designed the bulb socket and etc.
  - Buttons840 1y ago
    > When you divide and specialize design, you get design by commitee. In your counter-example, the design was not divided, and thus it is not a counter-example at all.
    - spongebobstoes 1y ago
      The division of design doesn't stop because some of the pieces can be bought at a store. The lamp design clearly was divided -- the final designer did not design the screws, lightbulb, wiring, and perhaps many other components. Someone had to design those components that were then combined creatively into a lamp. Dividing design into components that can be effectively reused is tricky, but it remains essential.

SkyMarshal 1y ago

Humans congregating into cities, specializing and developing expert capabilities in particular fields, and collaborating and relying on others for what they're not specialized in, is a big part of the story of the Enlightenment -> Industrial Revolution -> Electricity Revolution -> Information Age.

no_wizard 1y ago

I agree with your general thesis, but I will say someone who understands the conceptual and at least simplified way everything comes together are usually better at their speciality than those who know their speciality but don’t have some understanding of how things come together

msgodel 1y ago

In theory. The socialization premium is getting high enough that you are actually often better off doing everything on your own again.

WillAdams 1y ago
That's a tough row to hoe --- classic example of that is a pencil (see Thoreau and his family's history/business), though interestingly, there is a specialized tool now for making one (from components): John Economaki's "Pencil Precision" from Bridge City Tool Works: https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision https://bridgecitytools.com/products/pp-1-pencil-precision I have the preceding "Chopstick Master v2" and it is a delight to use (and probably if there was a suitable set of instructions for collecting the materials for making a pencil lead and baking them, I'd probably have the successor).

dev_l1x_be 1y ago

To a certain extent yes. However, when i get rid off a layer of abstraction from my supply chain I usually get better results. That is the scary part to me.

okbuuuut 1y ago

[dead]

tom_m 1y ago

We used to know everything to get the job done. Some of us still believe in that.