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Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

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Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#151

Post by m4rtink »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #117
rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

Not sure if it is a myth, but hadn't we forgotten to build Saturn V engines?

Not to mention there being a substantial advancements in engineering that make the F1 engines used by Saturn V basically obsolete.

The Space X Merlins have a much better thrust-to-weight ratio in the same gas generator cycle class, the Russian RD-180 powering the Atlas V is using oxygen rich staged combustion and is much more efficient.

And the current trend seems to be clearly liquid methane and liquid oxygen, covered by the phenomenal Raptor engine from Space X, the BE-4 from Blue origin and many smaller ones.

So hardly any regression on the chemical rocket engine front - pretty much the opposite, thankfully!

On the nuclear thermal rocket front on the other hand - yeah, we really did regress there. :P From almost flight ready NERVA examples in the 60s/70s to basically nothing even remotely flight ready today...

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#152

Post by lowbloodsugar »

ch4s3 wrote: post #138
scrumper wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Misses on short-term plans are a different concern to progress on a multi-century plan. Pig iron production might've missed its forecast for 2020, but it'd undeniable that China is building tremendous expertise in advanced manufacturing - and at a similar rate to that at which the west is shedding it.

Th narrative of "the west doesn't manufacture anything" is greatly oversold. The US makes more steel than it did 40 years ago, for example. Sure, we make fewer hairs and t-shirts, but it's natural for that stuff to chase lower labor costs. We're also an agricultural powerhouse. Now, for sure we have fallen a bit behind in making chips, but that may change.

So we are the Romans. We can make swords and bread! We'll do great in WWIII!

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#153

Post by jazzyjackson »

WJW wrote: post #130
aeonflux wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't watched yet, but I always wonder, what would be their reason to do so? I assume it takes huge amount of time and effort. They would get pretty similar effect by stopping much earlier. No need to polish two stone to death, just to fit one onto another. Whats even weirder, many times they seem to care much more about the connecting sides, not the eye-facing one. I don't buy the slavery-argument. Even with acces…

They wouldn't grind down the stones to micrometer flatness for construction work, just a mm or so. The type of buildings where you see extremely precise stonework tend to be cathedrals and palaces, where spending insane amounts of labor is kinda the point. It demonstrates to the masses how grand, rich and powerful the inhabitant of the building is. Spending lots of money on a building is a way of showing off.

from one angle, the church spends money for monumental purposes. But I’m not of the opinion that you can just spend your way to those cathedrals: the workmen (freemasons in the original sense) have to believe they are giving glory to god.

Here’s a great video [0][17min] documenting the Met Museum’s commissioning of moroccan mosaics, by the end you can see the craftsmen taking great pride in their work, above and beyond what they’re paid to do, carving “allah” over and over out of religious dedication.

(just want to push back on the notion that religion is all about manipulating people with your power, the crimes of the vatican notwishstanding)

[0] https://youtu.be/Og6cTlwBTrk

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#154

Post by WalterBright »

api wrote: post #27
rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…

Is it indeed annoying that every app isn't "cool" unless it attempts to reinvent the user interface.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#155

Post by bcrosby95 »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

I've seen that talk but it feels like putting the cart before the horse. The risk isn't in programming, it's in the CPUs themselves.

C and ASM are still some of the most popular languages in the world. But for a modern CPU, there are machines in the production process that only a single company in the world can make.

We're infinitely more likely to lose the capability to make a modern CPU than lose the capability to know how to code in C.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#156

Post by jazzyjackson »

Joker_vD wrote: post #149
svachalek wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly simple to construct a way to see your own face. All you need is a high-grade color LCD or OLED display, a high-resolution digital camera, a power source, a few controls and a logic board. Too bad none of this was available before 2010, those poor ancients must have always wondered what they looked like.

You jest, but I've heard a tale from a local engineering college: they regularly give to the graduating-year students a task to design some system which, after you remove all the fancy wordings, is basically insides of a toilet cistern/tank. Year after year, the students keep producing astonishingly convoluted designs.

I once re-invented the whistling teapot while deeply engrossed in using Arduino for anything and everything. I had only saucepans to boil water with and wished they could alert me once the water reached temp, perhaps optically sensing the turbulance of the surface.

My roommate could not roll their eyes enough.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#157

Post by Conlectus »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

I found this to be a compelling counterargument to Blow's alarmism about forgotten knowledge in tech https://www.datagubbe.se/endofciv/

A related point: numerically there are far more low level developers now than there were in past he idealizes. No such knowledge is being forgotten, it is used and innovated upon regularly. It may be in less frequent use, but is still there if needed.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#158

Post by mudita »

mc32 wrote: post #75
rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…

Do we have any contemporaneous record of this mechanism, or have references to the device not survived for some reason? If such a device was considered advanced or cutting edge or of note back then then wouldn't we expect some reference to the device?

According to Wikipedia similar devices were mentioned for example by Cicero, Archimedes supposedly wrote a now lost manuscript on the construction of devices like the Antikythera mechanism...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#159

Post by bmn__ »

feurio wrote: post #124
Robotbeat wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans left a ridiculous amount of stone tools which last basically indefinitely in the fossil record (and unlike bone fossils, don't require super special conditions to preserve them). So I think we'd have enough evidence from modern artifacts made of similar types of materials. A car buried under sediment would rust all out, but you'd be left with a big car-shaped bunch of rust as well as chunks of pure metal which…

Maybe the archaeologists of the future would weave scholarly narratives as to how these ferrous-based lifeforms lived, what their diet was and how they came to perish. Film-makers would use stop-motion techniques to depict battles between Fordusprefectops and Chevroletcamaro-Rex whilst their own early ancestors look on, clad in loincloths and bras made from footwell mats.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302827 "cars are the dominant species, since so much of our world has been dedicated to them"

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#160

Post by pkpioneer »

8 Ways to Make Your Old Laptop Feel New Again

A good computer is understandably expensive, but it sometimes feels like it isn’t worth the sticker price. After a few years of use, many laptops and PCs start to run slow; typical tasks are no longer as easy as they once were, and you find yourself eyeing the new computers on the market. But before you drop $2,000 on one of Apple’s new MacBook Pros, it’s worth figuring out if you can turn your old computer into a new one. Or at least, one that runs a lot more like a new one.

https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/12/8-ways-to-make-your-o...

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