Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video] • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by russh » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:31 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #71

throwawayay02 wrote: post #19

It is absolutely not a computer, though. They observed the observable astrological phenomena was cyclical and made a system of gears for their periods to predict it's state. It's interesting, but for context it is centuries younger than the first Greek geared clocks, so it's definitely not something we should be too surprised that existed.

I guess the definition of "computer" you have is "stored program machine", but a lot of other machines were called computers back then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108965 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

"Computer" was not limited to machines https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/women-nasa/

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

#182

Post by Vetch » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

kenfox wrote: post #110

crispyambulance wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might be helpful to consider what happened to the dinosaurs. The same could happen to us if we fail to evolve in time... Asteroid hits. Wipes out almost all life. A million years later, the biomass around us will have all been converted to a black ooze (oil), covered by millennia of rock, sediment, and tectonic plates. Eventually future civilized beings who plunder the Earth for our biomass that has been c…

Coal and oil formation would not occur due to lifeforms able to digest trees. It would be extraordinarily difficult to reset to those primordial conditions. I don't think an asteroid hit could do it.

Are you sure about this? I actually looked into this not too long ago and that theory no longer seems well supported.

Oil forms when sea plankton and algae are buried and exposed to high pressures and heat. Coal forms when dead plant material protected somehow from biodegredation (say by mud) forms peat and is then buried, and exposed to high pressures and heat.

I was also surprised to learn that the inabality of fungus and bacteria to degrade lignin is unlikely to have been a key driver of coal formation during the Carboniferous period, instead it was "a unique combination of everwet tropical conditions and extensive depositional systems during the assembly of Pangea".

Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Delayed-fungal-evoluti...

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

#183

Post by walterbell » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

stabbles wrote: post #74

I realize how much I miss the #dislikes for videos like these. The title sounds clickbaity and #dislikes would confirm that. I guess it is not clickbait given that it's on hackernews and by the BBC, but if this context was missing...

Would YT remove comments which posted the dislike count from Archive.org?

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

#184

Post by masklinn » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #180

masklinn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iron rusts over historical timescales, metal deposits form over geological ones.

Am I wrong to think of metal deposits as just "rust mixed with rock"? It doesn't seem like the rock part (i.e. the details of what it is mixed with) should be critical for the extraction process?

> Am I wrong to think of metal deposits as just "rust mixed with rock"?

They're concentrated rust mixed with rocks, otherwise it's not economically viable to extract.

Like, iron is ridiculously common, relatively speaking: on earth as a whole it's more common than oxygen, for the crust it ranks 4th at 5% by mass, meaning if you went at it randomly you'd need to sift through 20kg of materials to get 1kg of iron.

Currently, we exploit formations as low as 15% iron (banded iron formations / taconite), that's the lower limit of the economically feasible, and those results in absolutely enormous amounts of tailings (waste materials).

Pre-industrialisation, unless you had no other choice (e.g. only had ironsands to work with) you really wanted to exploit natural (or "direct-shipping") ores, in the 60~70% range, the extraction is way too much work otherwise.

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

#185

Post by usrbinbash » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #88

usrbinbash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a problem of the craft however, it's a problem of the culture. We are perfectly capable of writing native GUIs, and we have powerful tools for it as well. QTDesigner comes to mind as a well known example. The problem is, about 12 years ago, application design went through a gameification and "toy-i-fication" phase, from which it has yet to recover, because suddenly, everything had to look like it was desig…

The problem is when this culture extends a couple of generations the craft gets lost.

Not really, because there is always a high demand for good software. Just because cookware nowadays is usually made from cheap, industrially pressed sheet metal, doesn't mean high-quality copper and cast-iron cookware is no longer made.

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

#186

Post by jfengel » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

jazzyjackson wrote: post #147

jfengel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a culture problem, but it goes back before phones and Javascript. Even before that, application design was usually terrible. Apps were almost universally ugly. Developers just aren't very good at it; it's not in their skill sets. They're good at making apps fast and small, but not at making them usable. Rare companies would hire separate designers, and the apps could be functional and attractive, but they were…

I wonder where the notion that productivity software should be “attractive” came from. Were whole businesses not built on VisiCalc? The registers at B&H photo in NYC appear to be some DOS terminal system, but the employees know the keyboard shortcuts by muscle memory and the interface’s reaction time is instantaneous. If that’s not good software I don’t know what is.

I wonder where the notion that productivity software should be “attractive” came from.

From the people who make choices about where to put their money. You can get away with ugly software -- especially if you had something that worked 20 years ago and is still sufficient, and there is no alternative. But if users have the choice of something attractive, they'll pick it.

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

#187

Post by beamatronic » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #172

tzs wrote: post #67

I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do. With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a gr…

Same goes for the perfectly fitted stones in Inkan walls in Peru. They weren't built by aliens or telekinesis, but rather unoccupied workers that rubbed on the stones all day for decades. There is plenty of evidence that these walls and cities were never in a "finished" state, but always in progress, with partially complete stones and scattered pieces not yet near the wall in many sites.

What's remarkable to me is to think about the infrastructure that must have existed, even to support this basic labor. All these stones had to get quarried and moved around. All these workers had to be fed, housed, and clothed. Whatever tools and simple machines they used, would have required constant maintenance.

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

#188

Post by wheelerof4te » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #36

wheelerof4te wrote: post #12

Just think abput all the knowledge that was lost over the centuries and millenia of human civilization. Who are we to think that our technology is the greatest and the most advanced on this planet? We have no conclusive evidence to claim such titles. Ancient people have drawings of strange creatures and devices that descend from the heavens. Even the Pyramids show signs of advanced engineering, such as deep tunnels a…

This is generally considered a dangerous line of thinking, but I believe society has become too soft. We're so frightened of mystical thinking and being wrong that people aren't willing to entertain "dumb" ideas. Just don't make the mistake of thinking it's anything more than speculation.

Plenty of people were afraid of "dangerous thinking", so we stagnated as a species during the middle ages.

That's why some civilizations were more advanced thusands of years ago than, say, Britain during the 1200's.

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

#189

Post by LeifCarrotson » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #155

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…

The machines at the very top are the only ones at the very top, yes. But there are dozens of manufacturers and fabs building useful ICs slightly shy of the bleeding edge. Lots of microcontrollers, general-purpose ICs, and special purpose ICs are still very frequently made on 22nm and 45nm scales.

And most of the hard trial-and-error discovery and experimentation has been done already, so it should not take 50 years to recover 50 years of historical progress. A process from 1970 can be done in the garage with 'just' a microscope and projector (and a lot of skill and hard work!): http://sam.zeloof.xyz/second-ic/

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

#190

Post by lowbloodsugar » Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #169

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles, airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the last two years but we've done better I think than one might have expected under the circumstances. I think in particular the rapid development and product…

When WWIII happens it wont matter how many weapons you have at the start of the war. What will count is how fast you can make more weapons. That's all that matters. The war ends one one side runs out of weapons (or soldiers but China has a bit of a lead there). We can't even make new cars when supply from China is reduced. If you think having aircraft carriers is going to matter then you've not been paying attention. [1] The future is technology. Technology requires chip manufacture. That happens about 100 miles off China's coast, or rather, in China's opinion, on a Chinese owned island 100 miles off the mainland.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002