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Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

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Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#21

Construction

I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to).

The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make them like they used to" rings true.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#22
Lisp, Smalltalk are the first family of important tech fading to oblivion due to time passing and corporate interest. Most people do not think them in such terms but they represent The Real Desktop tech, the user programmable flexible environment to live in to free the power of computing. Without it, like today, our civilization lost an immense opportunity. We need people that work to push desktop systems, single-applications flexible systems where anything is a function, easy to combine, change and extend as the user wish. Simple and powerful enough end users can use and change.

Domestic food production is another, far simpler, not that exiting, but still important: these days some children do not even know where came from something they eat. Without any catastrophic scenario any society need to know at least superficially anything essential to survive. This include for instance basic knowledge about tools for instance to grind and pack meat to make salami, tools to sterilize and store vacuumed foods etc new tools to modernize and made such process a pleasure to do.

Last but not least generic knowledge, generic tools. We have gazillions of hyper-specialist in any fields and veeeeery few able to see the big picture. We have gazillion of tools for doing a thing and only one. We need generic stuff. Standards not made like https://xkcd.com/927/ but made and updated to be useful and spread. This is the essence of most tech, including the generic desktops cited above, including solar panels with maaaany cells one after another, including bricks, simple thing we can use to made a wall, a house, a bridge, ... it's very hard to made anything in such domain, but it's tremendously useful once done. In the past we have seen some examples here and there, nowadays nobody care.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#23

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

I would +1 this I think the long term best thing we can be doing is documenting the how and why of building, designing, fixing, working with etc... everything

Many companies store huge amounts of documents, but every team does it in its own way. One template can quickly result in thousands of variations. If robust documentation principles are not used from the very beginning (checklists / reduction in free text, visual indications, etc), it will be a nightmare to make sense of that data afterwards. Also, there is no value in generating large amounts of text data unless you can easily scan it and retrieve the information of interest

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#25
post #16

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

I would not just knowledge transfer, but knowledge organization. We have so many different ways to represent knowledge, but it is very hard to access it or know where to look. I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.

I'd agree with knowledge organization. It's either you have to root through academic texts or try and navigate the spammy internet with no really happy medium. It's almost like there's a complete lack of quality middle ground information. It's either total SEO garbage or very low quality entry level information or incredibly specific/dense academic content and the middle ground is missing.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#27

My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on. - Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising d…

Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.

This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off that workforce.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#28
post #12

Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives EVs, and also making the grid more maintainable, more robust, and easier to fix if damaged by anything from mundane causes to EMPs. Some thoughts: * Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side with existing equipment and…

> Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives EVs,

The British National Grid says that already planned increases in capacity will cope with plenty to spare.

Your assertion is a very common one not backed by those in the industry.

Re: Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

#30
No single thing, but in general the gradually declining fraction of people capable of understanding complex systems "from top to bottom" concerns me.

I have seen far too many projects become locally-smart but globally-incoherent due to the gradual dissolution of systemic understanding over time.

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