My strategy is just-in-time learning. Anyone attempting to eager load all the knowledge is either crazy or exceptionally brilliant.
A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
51–60 of 80 posts
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#52I think being on level
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#53I think a more realistic goal for our time is to aim at being at level 1 of ignorance (ignorance with awareness) [1].
[1] http://andrewboland.blogspot.com/2008/08/five-levels-of-igno... (just submitted on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643445)
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly). They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_Ev...
Returning to your original post, We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided Abstraction is necessary, true, but it's not clear to me what the abstraction-level we have now really gets us. In other words, say we had a BBC micro with a 2Ghz 6502 in it. What productive computing tasks that we do now could it not do? Or let's imagine an Atari ST with a 2Ghz 68000,…
It doesn't get us anything at all other than a fucking huge rabbit hole to stare down every time you do anything. Lets look at a pretty naff case for .Net CLR on x86 for windows workflow:
application -> xaml -> framework -> server -> container -> c# -> cil -> bytecode -> x86 instructions -> microcode.
Now forth on a 68000:
Forth screen -> 68k instructions
To be honest, for what I consider to be life and death stuff, a 10MHz 68000 is good enough (I have one in my TI92 calculator).
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#55A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with in…
Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal. This is a semantic discussion about the meaning of 'understanding': does it mean you can globally explain how the system works and could come to understand the smallest detail of every part? Or does it mean you understand the smallest detail of ever…
> Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal.
The interesting way to construe the article's claim is not that it's impossible to know everything, but that's impossible to know everything that people already know about the field you work in.
Were there blacksmiths who knew everything anyone knew about forging swords? Did Newton or Da Vinci know everything anyone knew about the various fields they were expert in? Are there farmers now who know everything anyone knows about how farming works? The article claims that at some point it became a certainty that programmers cannot know everything that anyone knows about how to use the tools they use and what those tools do. The stack is too complex. That's at least a sensible and interesting claim.
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#56That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and softwa…
> You can have complete understanding. No you can't. Nobody can. Literally. So you're using Windows right now. I suppose you know that a complete windows desktop takes more than 200 millions lines of code ? That's about 10,000 books. If you really want _complete_ understanding of your system, you really have to read and understand 10,000 technical books. Let's say you learn really really fast, and you can read 1 book…
This looks fantastic.
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#57A complete understanding if you ask me is one which requires no impenetrable "black-box abstractions" to be substituted in the abstraction hierarchy. In the case of a CPU, you would have to have a full gate level understanding of it and an understanding of how the gates operate. To be honest, the "complete understanding" died way before the original post. It was the moment that they started building computers with in…
Then blacksmiths in the Middle Ages did not 'understand' the forging of swords. Only modern materials science allowed us to 'understand' why forging creates harder metal. This is a semantic discussion about the meaning of 'understanding': does it mean you can globally explain how the system works and could come to understand the smallest detail of every part? Or does it mean you understand the smallest detail of ever…
Semantically speaking, understanding is simply knowing enough to recreate something, preferably with your own aquired skills and knowledge. We're all just fancy parrots wrapped up in monkey bodies.
To be honest, the bedrock abstraction should stop at "what humans can realistically create with their own hands from nothing". You can make your own transistor quite easily and Ebers-Moll provides a nice set of rules to work with.
The quantum physicists and philosophers can remain arguing about technicalities then and let the rest of the world observe, understand and create.
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any idea where someone (such as me) born too late to have an original Micro might be able to get hold of one?
If you're in the UK, there's a liquid market in BBCs, C64s and similar on eBay. There are a few sellers who refurb them (e.g. new power supplies, cleaned up cases etc). You can easily adapt a BBC to use SCART too (the lead will cost about a fiver) and use it on a modern TV, if you don't fancy using a big old CUB monitor.
Get a Cub monitor though - it's not the same without one!
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're in the UK, there's a liquid market in BBCs, C64s and similar on eBay. There are a few sellers who refurb them (e.g. new power supplies, cleaned up cases etc). You can easily adapt a BBC to use SCART too (the lead will cost about a fiver) and use it on a modern TV, if you don't fancy using a big old CUB monitor.
Get a Cub monitor though - it's not the same without one!
I have two :-)
Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was the proud owner of an ARM copro [1] many years ago (I still have the Master it was plugged into) and the first Acorn RISC machine (an A310 with 512k RAM if I remember correctly). They were and still are extremely powerful and productive machines. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro_expansion_unit#ARM_Ev...
Returning to your original post, We really are building things with too deep abstraction hierarchies causing knowledge to be divided Abstraction is necessary, true, but it's not clear to me what the abstraction-level we have now really gets us. In other words, say we had a BBC micro with a 2Ghz 6502 in it. What productive computing tasks that we do now could it not do? Or let's imagine an Atari ST with a 2Ghz 68000,…
The main thing is that you'd need a new set of abstractions for security, and then you'd need to implement HTML5 on it anyways to do all the things we can do on a computer now.