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Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's got

Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. I used to notice it as a real lack of intergenerational knowledge transfer, but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" and "why would you do that?" over very basic knowledge that isn't even that old. For all the reading the average person claims to do, they sure don't seem to know very much outside of a 10-year window unless they happen to have studied history in college or whatever. But I don't necessarily blame said people, at least in the proximal sense. The technological industrial complex continuously refines its understanding of the desire for novelty that's always been there and seeks to exploit it; and they've gotten unreasonably good at that. It doesn't matter if your intellectual property is just as relevant as ever, perhaps more so, if there's some hip new alternative. Udemy and of course social media sites know this, and I think there's a feedback loop that goes beyond mere exploitation of the human psyche, but in the actual training of the human psyche to have blindness towards the past. The only answer right now, besides hosting your own courses (with hookers and blackjack), might be to periodically recreate your online presence from scratch in order to exploit the algorithm back. If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard. With the current state of AI, this may just be a cat and mouse game that can't be sustained.

oceansky 10mo ago
Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?
- dijit 10mo ago
  “why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
  - okibry 10mo ago
    Maybe in today, it has too many wrapper layer so the basic become deeper.
  - inetknght 10mo ago
    > I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. It's as if computer science, in terms of data structures and algorithms, isn't taught. Or, perhaps, isn't taught as being relevant. As for lack of knowledge about filesystems: it might be contributed by mobile devices hiding real filesystems from users. > the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible. Basics do make me feel productive. However, it seems bosses and businesses don't agree. I fear the day basics can be automated away.
    - gremlinunderway 10mo ago
      and in fairness to the mobile devices thing of abstracting file systems, when it comes to discoverability and organizing files or documents, a rigid hierarchy of nested sub-folders is far inferior to a single directory with tagging or other metadata properties you can use to filter and essentially build custom directories on the fly with.
  - SchemaLoad 10mo ago
    12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.
    - dijit 10mo ago
      you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation? Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.
- port11 10mo ago
  Keeping tech fast, if my worldview holds. One reason I left frontend work before was that none of my colleagues seemed to care that we shipped MBs of code to the client. I also tire of APIs that are in the multi-second response time arena, often because no one seems to bother with database indexes or JOIN optimisation. This should be banal, everyday stuff. Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?
TheSkyHasEyes 10mo ago
> Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast. If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.
- jaimie 10mo ago
  Does it though? I mean I'm still teaching thread-safety and recursion to my interns... a solid foundation is a solid foundation.
  - mathgeek 10mo ago
    For the fundamentals, sure, but many of the top sellers are going to be on things like React, Next, etc.
    - malfist 10mo ago
      And in ten years after react is forgotten about, there will still be companies actively hiring Java developers
      - llbbdd 10mo ago
        See you in ten years! We're a hop, skip and a jump from one click automated conversion from every legacy Java app to web and electron desktop compatible code and we can just retire Java entirely. in 2025, Java is not the most performant. It does not run in the most places. it is not the easiest to write or reason about. its advantage over anything else is momentum and it's losing that too. React is just a formalizatio of a UI update pattern that exists in every app ever made except the ones that are bad. Source: written a lot of java and nobody is currently paying enough to make it worth doing again.
      - locknitpicker 10mo ago
        > And in ten years after react is forgotten about, there will still be companies actively hiring Java developer In ten years you'll see greybeards complaining that new kids don't know shit about React fundamentals.
nickjj 10mo ago
Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category. Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate. > If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.
- warkdarrior 10mo ago
  > If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
  - JoshTriplett 10mo ago
    That's what I'd expect if I see a project with no commits in 2 years. Not 2 days.
    - goodpoint 10mo ago
      There's ton of perfectly usable 2-years old software.
      - geraldwhen 10mo ago
j45 10mo ago
Some owed in tech like relearning the same lessons over and over with new instead of realizing there’s a lot that is transferable and new technologies world be better implemented, sooner if it understood what had been done to date.
znpy 10mo ago
> but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining. My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described. It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.
dangus 10mo ago
On the other hand, old courses with outdated info are a major frustration on the platform and I can see why the Udemy might be downranking them. The person at the root of this comment thread might not like it but they can’t just sit back and collect revenue forever without putting out updates.
pnt12 10mo ago
There's a python course in plursight that I loved, it's quite the deep dive into the language and I learned a lot. One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much! I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies. https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire

oceansky 10mo ago

Can you give specific examples on lost knowledge?

dijit 10mo ago
“why is I/O in docker slow, and how would you improve it” is pretty esoteric knowledge now, but would have been considered basic knowledge (for other applications, not specifically just docker) only 12 years ago. I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. When I tune things I am asked how I know, but everything is just built from the basics, and the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible.
- okibry 10mo ago
  Maybe in today, it has too many wrapper layer so the basic become deeper.
- inetknght 10mo ago
  > I have had people working who don’t in the slightest understand how a filesystem works, so taking it a step further is impossible. It's as if computer science, in terms of data structures and algorithms, isn't taught. Or, perhaps, isn't taught as being relevant. As for lack of knowledge about filesystems: it might be contributed by mobile devices hiding real filesystems from users. > the basics don’t make you feel productive, so they’re always skipped when possible. Basics do make me feel productive. However, it seems bosses and businesses don't agree. I fear the day basics can be automated away.
  - gremlinunderway 10mo ago
    and in fairness to the mobile devices thing of abstracting file systems, when it comes to discoverability and organizing files or documents, a rigid hierarchy of nested sub-folders is far inferior to a single directory with tagging or other metadata properties you can use to filter and essentially build custom directories on the fly with.
- SchemaLoad 10mo ago
  12 years ago I certainly did not know why a servers IO would be slow, short of just the physical storage was slow. I think you might just be overestimating how much stuff people knew rather than the whole population forgetting how filesystem and IO internals work.
  - dijit 10mo ago
    you hadn’t heard of RAID, readahead, write-back/write-through, stride or even just the concept of fragmentation? Even if you didn’t, I doubt you didn’t have someone on staff who did know about these things and would help out randomly with troubleshooting and avoiding footguns.
port11 10mo ago
Keeping tech fast, if my worldview holds. One reason I left frontend work before was that none of my colleagues seemed to care that we shipped MBs of code to the client. I also tire of APIs that are in the multi-second response time arena, often because no one seems to bother with database indexes or JOIN optimisation. This should be banal, everyday stuff. Maybe we have too many layers of abstraction. Or there's just too much work to do now that businesses combine many roles into one?

TheSkyHasEyes 10mo ago

> Modern society totally devalues anything considered even slightly old. Mild counterpoint. Our professions(all things IT) moves bloody fast. If I were looking for info on cooking, baking, knitting sure... but IT stuff, I opine many of us seek the latest info because of the breakneck speeds this profession is known for.

jaimie 10mo ago
Does it though? I mean I'm still teaching thread-safety and recursion to my interns... a solid foundation is a solid foundation.
- mathgeek 10mo ago
  For the fundamentals, sure, but many of the top sellers are going to be on things like React, Next, etc.
  - malfist 10mo ago
    And in ten years after react is forgotten about, there will still be companies actively hiring Java developers
    - llbbdd 10mo ago
      See you in ten years! We're a hop, skip and a jump from one click automated conversion from every legacy Java app to web and electron desktop compatible code and we can just retire Java entirely. in 2025, Java is not the most performant. It does not run in the most places. it is not the easiest to write or reason about. its advantage over anything else is momentum and it's losing that too. React is just a formalizatio of a UI update pattern that exists in every app ever made except the ones that are bad. Source: written a lot of java and nobody is currently paying enough to make it worth doing again.
    - locknitpicker 10mo ago
      > And in ten years after react is forgotten about, there will still be companies actively hiring Java developer In ten years you'll see greybeards complaining that new kids don't know shit about React fundamentals.

nickjj 10mo ago

Yep, you're definitely not wrong. We see it all the time on GitHub. If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. The same thing with blogs in general. A post could be popular and ranked highly in 2020 but in 2025 it's not even ranked on a search engine, even if the content is still highly relevant and fully working. It's bad because you could have a 10+ year old site with 500+ posts but nothing old ranks anymore, there's no ranking bonus on new stuff from having a snowball effect of previously highly ranked stuff in the same category. Sites like StackOverflow sometimes show old things from 2017 because there's a bunch of recent comments. For a blog, even if you change the "updated at" date to something new, it doesn't matter and rewriting the post with different words makes no sense because the original content is still accurate. > If your courses on Udemy aren't seeing the traffic they deserve, close your account, and create a new one... assuming that's feasible and they don't check too hard Creating a separate account likely wouldn't work, at least not in the US. To get paid you have to fill out tax forms which has your social security number and other personal info tied to you as 1 human.

warkdarrior 10mo ago
> If a project hasn't gotten a new commit in 2 days then the project is claimed dead. That is certainly true, those projects are effectively dead. They lack security updates, lack integrations with new platforms, lack support for new HW architectures, lack newer privacy guarantees, etc., etc.
- JoshTriplett 10mo ago
  That's what I'd expect if I see a project with no commits in 2 years. Not 2 days.
  - goodpoint 10mo ago
    There's ton of perfectly usable 2-years old software.
    - geraldwhen 10mo ago

j45 10mo ago

Some owed in tech like relearning the same lessons over and over with new instead of realizing there’s a lot that is transferable and new technologies world be better implemented, sooner if it understood what had been done to date.

znpy 10mo ago

> but it's gotten so bad that it seems like more and more people react with "how do you know so much?" I had very similar experiences. I had some incredibly wild "successes" in fixing some company systems even though I had just joined the company and I was not familiar with such systems prior to joining. My "secret" is that I just read the service's documentation (the fine manual) and did what the documentation described. It's wild how some people's nowadays go around and around mindlessly trying stuff that the LLM of the day suggested, without actually learn enough to *reason* about internals of services and systems.

dangus 10mo ago

On the other hand, old courses with outdated info are a major frustration on the platform and I can see why the Udemy might be downranking them. The person at the root of this comment thread might not like it but they can’t just sit back and collect revenue forever without putting out updates.

pnt12 10mo ago

There's a python course in plursight that I loved, it's quite the deep dive into the language and I learned a lot. One day I was looking for it and couldn't find it - turns out it was archived and ranking much lower in search, because it was a handful years old. But apart from some syntactic sugar, the new python versions don't change the course that much! I found it: Python Fundamentals + Beyond the basics + Advanced, all retired. Highly recommend for someone who wants to get proficient at the language. And a big thanks for Robert, these videos really helped me get become "the python expert" at my last 2 companies. https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/robert-smallshire