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Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual phys

Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production. The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the job, and possibly losing customers. The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.

trenchpilgrim 1y ago
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
  - hansmayer 1y ago
    The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
      - jaggederest 1y ago
        We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that. Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts. A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
        menaerus 1y ago
        Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the saturation point we need to be able to define a system up to the point where there are almost no more unknowns (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Are those tools functional? Have you ever checked? I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools and they can seem to work perfect while giving the wrong measurement. Other might be cutting tools that cut, but they are a bit dull and if you don't know how to check you won't realize the cuts are not as good as new anymore (or maybe you have sharpened them and they now cut the wrong profile...). There are many ways a tool can seem functional but be wrong.
        red-iron-pine 1y ago
        > but likely some of them are measurement tools where and why did you come to this conclusion?
        bluGill 1y ago
        When someone says machine tools I assume it assumes the measurement tools. It doesn't have to, but you can't do much work without measuring. (unless you build to fit - which works okay but there is a reason it went obsolete 100+ years ago)
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      No they don't. The 3 year number came from some random person on the internet who claimed to be a Google employee and was denied by Google, as you can see on any of the articles about this claim: > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular, representing a good balance between cost, performance and efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being much more expensive).
  - rmoriz 1y ago
    I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
    - trollbridge 1y ago
      We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore. It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100. Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes. An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.
      - rmoriz 1y ago
        The key is to calculate right and go for the mainstream hardware. If you are a hosting company with diversified use cases, you have plenty of room to downcycle hardware until it breaks. If you are operating under limited space in a field with bleeding edge/performance targets, doing this is not viable. There are many solution provides that will buy your outdated things. I‘m not saying that old hardware is great or a cash cow in general, but the lifetime can usually be doubled or tripled if the right use case can be found and when you are the owner. Side quest: Virtualized instances at cloud providers never get upgraded unless recreated. I bet there are millions of VMs running for years on specs and prices of 2018-2020.
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response. > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
    - rhubarbtree 1y ago
      It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years. The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a bunch of companies, where they were saying their accountants are extending to 5 years. Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.
      - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.
        mr_toad 1y ago
        A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.
        mbesto 1y ago
        And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases. Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.
- numpad0 1y ago
  So like, up to 100 months.
imtringued 1y ago
That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.
nvader 1y ago
I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
- noosphr 1y ago
  You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either. There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  "If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed. There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process. Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you. This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
  - nvader 1y ago
    This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective. Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
janalsncm 1y ago
That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now. By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge, transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.
- subscribed 1y ago
  Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
  - spiresofagartha 1y ago
    what's it?
    - formerly_proven 1y ago
      Probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0
    - ssonal 1y ago
      Likely this one on the tooling & die industry, and the process knowledge that has evaporated from America over time. https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52 https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52
      - subscribed 1y ago
        Exactly this one.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
  - 1y ago
RataNova 1y ago
It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
- wongarsu 1y ago
  Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away. And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
- Broken_Hippo 1y ago
  Did we, though? I am just not convinced. A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead. How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k. They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but that's no different now. Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs, and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds. Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to last? How about an ink pen?
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    I think a lot of people conflate "built to last" with "ability to be repaired by yourself." To continue the car analogy, I could replace almost any part easily, with simple tools I have at home, on my 1990 GMC 1500 truck. Parts are plentiful and cheap, plenty of room to work on the engine, nothing is hidden inside black boxes. It's got 280k miles on it and still running great. To contrast that with my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek hybrid, is much more difficult to work on, can't even fit my hands to access anything that's not on the top of the engine, other repairs requiring full engine removal and specialized tools. There's more electronics and more completely sealed systems. Same can be said about some household appliances, and even computers. Not only were things, generally more repairable, but repair didn't require specialized tools in most cases, we didn't have to first melt glue, resolder SSDs, etc. My old compaq Armada may not have been built to last at the time, but it was certainly stupid easy to repair and replace every single component in it.
ForHackernews 1y ago
The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-presses/ https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...
tclancy 1y ago
There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.
- fidotron 1y ago
  I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then. I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to. Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.
    - kenhwang 1y ago
      Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.
      - red-iron-pine 1y ago
        arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil. crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't making things heavy. e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-vehicles-keep-getting-heavier-or-are-they/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-ve...
egberts1 1y ago
They can stop using the screwdriver, wrench, and hammer and see how far they can get. Or keep changing those tools to better fit the job. Progress continues with continual process improvements.
UncleOxidant 1y ago
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me. There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
- kipchak 1y ago
  Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance. There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.
dcchambers 1y ago
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me. The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years. If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen. Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
manquer 1y ago
Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow. Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality. In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are. The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive. We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
- walkabout 1y ago
  > In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are. Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975. Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
  - manquer 1y ago
    DC-3 was an exception[0] The point was not on any specific technical or economic factor. It was to illustrate that rapid evolution in comfort, or speed and also safety[1] means people will prefer adoption of newer tech quickly and not be concerned about longevity and actively devalue slightly older products. When the improvements start becoming marginal only then longevity start to matter. The planes developed from 90s to now have lot to offer operators but not much new[2] to passengers, we are still designing(not just operating) new 737 variants after all. Most people cannot tell the age of the plane if the cabin has been refreshed. This preference for newer generation of tools has little to do with previous generations having different values as nostalgically some like to ascribe to, but simply to technology maturity was my point. --- [0] As impressive the 100 year history and the longevity of a pre-war design has been. We have to keep in mind the dynamics of unpressurized plane operating at less than 300 knots with a service ceiling of less than 25,000 feet is hardly comparable to that of any modern passenger aircraft cruising at 0.90+ mach for 12-15+ hours daily at 37,000 feet going through tens of thousands pressurization cycles. [1] Airframes perhaps were not a popular safety concern directly, pressurized and reduced noise in cabins were major selling points. Air safety regulations were famously said to be written in blood. It is undeniable that was massive drop in fatalities in 80-90s from 60-70s after safety became concern and everyone held both operators and manufacturers accountable. [2] Improved range or better engine reliability that meant we can do longer ETOS on twin engine etc do benefit passengers indirectly.
EliRivers 1y ago
Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
redwood 1y ago
I'm reminded of how the New York City subway continues to rely on parts that it essentially cannot replace... similarly how the rail system in India essentially involves maintaining what the British left behind since a lot of the pieces can't easily be upgraded or replaced. To be clear in both cases upgrades and maintainability would be possible but requires concerted effort to modernize with a long term mindset

trenchpilgrim 1y ago

> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.

iancmceachern 1y ago
A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
- hansmayer 1y ago
  The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    Exactly, I'm a mechanical engineer and I still have tools given to me by my machinist great uncle from WWII that are not only functional, they're identical to a new tool I'd buy today for that purpose, from the same manufacturer. This is the difference the OP was highlighting
    - jaggederest 1y ago
      We've also been doing machining in the modern sense for at least a hundred and fifty years. The GPU as a concept is about 30 years old, and in the modern sense much younger than that. Innovation occurs on a sigmoid curve, we're still very early in the sigmoid for software and computer hardware, and very late in the sigmoid for machining, unless you include CNC, in which case, we're back to software and computer hardware being the new parts. A better example would be the tape out and lifetime for semiconductor fabs, which are only about 70 years old and have lifetimes measured in the decade range.
      - menaerus 1y ago
        Interesting thought but is it that the sigmoid curve can represent the developments in SW and/or HW? To reach the saturation point we need to be able to define a system up to the point where there are almost no more unknowns (variables), no? I am thinking that this probably isn't possible in the context of {SW, HW}.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Are those tools functional? Have you ever checked? I'm not sure what tools you are talking about, but likely some of them are measurement tools and they can seem to work perfect while giving the wrong measurement. Other might be cutting tools that cut, but they are a bit dull and if you don't know how to check you won't realize the cuts are not as good as new anymore (or maybe you have sharpened them and they now cut the wrong profile...). There are many ways a tool can seem functional but be wrong.
      - red-iron-pine 1y ago
        > but likely some of them are measurement tools where and why did you come to this conclusion?
        bluGill 1y ago
        When someone says machine tools I assume it assumes the measurement tools. It doesn't have to, but you can't do much work without measuring. (unless you build to fit - which works okay but there is a reason it went obsolete 100+ years ago)
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    No they don't. The 3 year number came from some random person on the internet who claimed to be a Google employee and was denied by Google, as you can see on any of the articles about this claim: > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular, representing a good balance between cost, performance and efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being much more expensive).
- rmoriz 1y ago
  I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/ https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    We have a box at work for employees bring hardware in they’re getting rid of, along with hardware we’re throwing out that we don’t need anymore. It has a pile of GPUs that are completely obsolete for any task: they use way too much power, have a large form factor that burns up a PCIe x16 slot, are loud, some need extra power cables, lack driver support on modern operating systems, and in return for all that don’t have as much power as something much better you could get for $100. Value on eBay seems to be about $10-$15, mostly for people with a retro computing hobby or people removing semiconductor components for other purposes. An obsolete data centre isn’t worth much either. (We have a small one made from equipment being liquidated from local data centres that have been upgraded.) The power consumption is too high and it is not set up for efficient HVAC for modern ultra high power draw workloads.
    - rmoriz 1y ago
      The key is to calculate right and go for the mainstream hardware. If you are a hosting company with diversified use cases, you have plenty of room to downcycle hardware until it breaks. If you are operating under limited space in a field with bleeding edge/performance targets, doing this is not viable. There are many solution provides that will buy your outdated things. I‘m not saying that old hardware is great or a cash cow in general, but the lifetime can usually be doubled or tripled if the right use case can be found and when you are the owner. Side quest: Virtualized instances at cloud providers never get upgraded unless recreated. I bet there are millions of VMs running for years on specs and prices of 2018-2020.
rhubarbtree 1y ago
Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response. > Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
  - rhubarbtree 1y ago
    It dropped down, but is now being extended to 5 years. The 3 year number was reported by the FT this year from a bunch of companies, where they were saying their accountants are extending to 5 years. Another example, MS just moved from 4 years to 5.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      You are confusing depreciation (which is mostly driven by tax reasons) with service lifecycle.
      - mr_toad 1y ago
        A lot of these tax codes were written when computers were outdated within a year. The turnover of computers slowed a lot in the last two decades, but the tax codes haven’t changed.
      - mbesto 1y ago
        And you're confusing all of these terms. The "3 years" is the standard warranty and typically gets extended to 5 years (and maybe 7 or 8 depending on the vendor). This is consistent with Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, etc. servers. Nvidia GPUs on the other hand...there likely could be different terms, but idk because they are not typical purchases for 95% of the companies who make server hardware purchases. Source - I regularly work with IT departments and review their contracts as part of diligence.
numpad0 1y ago
So like, up to 100 months.

imtringued 1y ago

That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.

nvader 1y ago

I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion. However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation. Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.

noosphr 1y ago
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either. There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
DannyBee 1y ago
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation." This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts. After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed. There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process. Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you. This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
- nvader 1y ago
  This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective. Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.

janalsncm 1y ago

That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now. By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge, transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.

subscribed 1y ago
Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
- spiresofagartha 1y ago
  what's it?
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    Probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDzBE6vz5r0
  - ssonal 1y ago
    Likely this one on the tooling & die industry, and the process knowledge that has evaporated from America over time. https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52 https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=SgZMaXmhydWHfb52
    - subscribed 1y ago
      Exactly this one.
ffsm8 1y ago
They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
- 1y ago

RataNova 1y ago

It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter

wongarsu 1y ago
Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away. And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
Broken_Hippo 1y ago
Did we, though? I am just not convinced. A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead. How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k. They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but that's no different now. Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs, and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds. Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to last? How about an ink pen?
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  I think a lot of people conflate "built to last" with "ability to be repaired by yourself." To continue the car analogy, I could replace almost any part easily, with simple tools I have at home, on my 1990 GMC 1500 truck. Parts are plentiful and cheap, plenty of room to work on the engine, nothing is hidden inside black boxes. It's got 280k miles on it and still running great. To contrast that with my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek hybrid, is much more difficult to work on, can't even fit my hands to access anything that's not on the top of the engine, other repairs requiring full engine removal and specialized tools. There's more electronics and more completely sealed systems. Same can be said about some household appliances, and even computers. Not only were things, generally more repairable, but repair didn't require specialized tools in most cases, we didn't have to first melt glue, resolder SSDs, etc. My old compaq Armada may not have been built to last at the time, but it was certainly stupid easy to repair and replace every single component in it.

ForHackernews 1y ago

The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-presses/ https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...

tclancy 1y ago

There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”. Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.

fidotron 1y ago
I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then. I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to. Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
- nradov 1y ago
  Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.
  - kenhwang 1y ago
    Even non-EVs have gotten quite a bit heavier due to the inclusion of more structural safety features and creature comforts.
    - red-iron-pine 1y ago
      arguably the biggest driver is simply the cost of oil. crumple zones made of styrofoam and plastic bumpers arn't making things heavy. e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-vehicles-keep-getting-heavier-or-are-they/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2019/01/03/new-ve...

egberts1 1y ago

They can stop using the screwdriver, wrench, and hammer and see how far they can get. Or keep changing those tools to better fit the job. Progress continues with continual process improvements.

UncleOxidant 1y ago

> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me. There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.

kipchak 1y ago
Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance. There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.

dcchambers 1y ago

> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me. The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years. If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen. Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.

manquer 1y ago

Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow. Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality. In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are. The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive. We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.

walkabout 1y ago
> In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are. Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975. Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
- manquer 1y ago
  DC-3 was an exception[0] The point was not on any specific technical or economic factor. It was to illustrate that rapid evolution in comfort, or speed and also safety[1] means people will prefer adoption of newer tech quickly and not be concerned about longevity and actively devalue slightly older products. When the improvements start becoming marginal only then longevity start to matter. The planes developed from 90s to now have lot to offer operators but not much new[2] to passengers, we are still designing(not just operating) new 737 variants after all. Most people cannot tell the age of the plane if the cabin has been refreshed. This preference for newer generation of tools has little to do with previous generations having different values as nostalgically some like to ascribe to, but simply to technology maturity was my point. --- [0] As impressive the 100 year history and the longevity of a pre-war design has been. We have to keep in mind the dynamics of unpressurized plane operating at less than 300 knots with a service ceiling of less than 25,000 feet is hardly comparable to that of any modern passenger aircraft cruising at 0.90+ mach for 12-15+ hours daily at 37,000 feet going through tens of thousands pressurization cycles. [1] Airframes perhaps were not a popular safety concern directly, pressurized and reduced noise in cabins were major selling points. Air safety regulations were famously said to be written in blood. It is undeniable that was massive drop in fatalities in 80-90s from 60-70s after safety became concern and everyone held both operators and manufacturers accountable. [2] Improved range or better engine reliability that meant we can do longer ETOS on twin engine etc do benefit passengers indirectly.

EliRivers 1y ago

Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.

redwood 1y ago

I'm reminded of how the New York City subway continues to rely on parts that it essentially cannot replace... similarly how the rail system in India essentially involves maintaining what the British left behind since a lot of the pieces can't easily be upgraded or replaced. To be clear in both cases upgrades and maintainability would be possible but requires concerted effort to modernize with a long term mindset