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We have used too many levels of abstractions

unixsheikh.com

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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#161

Post by joschi03 »

donatj wrote: post #139

> Power steering is yet another level of abstraction that further improves the driving experience. I am a pretty firm believer that antilock brakes are a bad abstraction that might cause fewer accidents, but often more dangerous accidents than they prevent. They avoid a class of accident caused by the brake’s locking limiting your ability to steer. They cause a whole class of accidents where you hit things at a highe…

On tarmac you slow down faster with ABS. The friction is higher when the tires are _not_ sliding. Fastest deceleration happens just at the point before tires would start to slide.

On gravel/snow, ABS perfoms worse. But 99% of the time you likely are not in such a context.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#162

Post by MaxBarraclough »

subomi wrote: post #66

Reading this, I had an epiphany about why open-source software is essential. How do you peak under opaque abstractions? It's just not possible. Imagine if Kubernetes was closed source & binary distribution only. Understanding abstractions is, I think, why being open source has become table stakes for infrastructure software.

Right. The Free Software Foundation have written about this, they consider the right to study software to be part of 'Freedom 1'.

* https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

* https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.en.html

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#163

Post by biomattr »

Ive been doing academic biomedical research for the last 15 years. Finding competent reviewers for computational papers is like NP complete. Yet there is a factorial increase of sophisticated code in the literature. So we got the inverse problem to tech. Not enough of the old school, goto reviewer scientists have learned the foundational stuff.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#164

Post by quenix »

jiggawatts wrote: post #105
EvanAnderson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be an increasingly important history component in comp sci., software engineering, infosec, and associated fields. I think this is a place where the IT field has done a bad job and, as a result, we've had unbelievable amounts of "wheel reinvention". I'd love to hear from somebody with experience in scientific or other disciplines and IT who could contrast their fields with ours. I only know that I have had…

Analogue electronics design has been almost entirely replaced by digital micro-controllers to the point that finding old-school electrical engineers that can design non-digital circuits is becoming a challenge.

Is this really true? Many aspects of analogue design are still relevant imo.

Actual IC design (VLSI etc) is still a purely analogue field and all digital technology is fundamentally analogue at its core.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#165

Post by csydas »

Danieru wrote: post #39
loup-vaillant wrote: post #29

> Question everything. Especially things that don't make any sense to you. Don't just assume that someone else knows better - that's how you quickly turn into a blind follower. That’s what I do by default since I was a kid, and I can tell you the social pressure not to is significant. I recall an interview I did once, and one reason I failed it was "questioning everything". It didn’t even felt like it, I was just ask…

Questioning everything also gets you stuck in bed asking why the sky is a different shade of blue. Others might have accepted the unknown and ate breakfast.

asking why the sky is blue when you don’t know is perfectly fine and even admirable when everyone else seems to know and you don’t. i would expect such a person to at least try some research first and then share what they learned and what questions they still have, but if someone is asking earnestly and i have time, then why shouldn’t i help?

i don’t thjnk the logical extreme you position here is correct; if it’s an interest for the person why shouldn’t they pursue it? questioning everything for me is just getting to the point that it’s not magic anymore.

i probably don’t need to know the entire kernel code base to figure out why my eth0 won’t stay up. it might help a bit to know some of it if i’m getting weird kernel-ey messages in the logs.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#166

Post by hliyan »

steeleduncan wrote: post #151

There was a point in the history of aviation where anyone who could fly a plane was also capable of constructing and designing one. I wonder if there were similar concerns at that time about a future where someone could be in a cockpit of a plane without truly understanding how the machine works from first principles? Today that type of concern would seem absurd, and we've gotten used to the idea that flying a plane…

It would be concerning if pilots, aircraft maintenance technicians and aeronautical engineers shared titles and job descriptions so similar that it was hard to tell them apart.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#167

Post by metalrain »

steeleduncan wrote: post #151

There was a point in the history of aviation where anyone who could fly a plane was also capable of constructing and designing one. I wonder if there were similar concerns at that time about a future where someone could be in a cockpit of a plane without truly understanding how the machine works from first principles? Today that type of concern would seem absurd, and we've gotten used to the idea that flying a plane…

Yes, I cannot imagine how anyone could know all the details that go into each step.

It's good to have people that do know how computers operate and how we use them, but specialization is also good thing.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#168

Post by mnky9800n »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #56
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I mean by "precious few". I am continuously hiring new people, mostly senior devs and tech leads. Maybe one in a hundred has any understanding of what virtual memory is. Or why one process can't access memory of another process and, if you really want it, how to set it up. Two decades ago that was common knowledge. It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open…

Im from the new breed. I'd like to know all that but, where do I get the money? It's not like I can spend so much time tinkering without producing. If at least was able to purchease a home I wouldnt have this pressure. I guess in the US is different because people have higher salaries. You have to have the time/resources to dive that deep. Or maybe it's your job, line some of the folks in a local company that work in…

Why do you need money to learn things? The internet exists. The library exists. Meetups exist. Go out and learn things you are interested in.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#169

Post by MaxBarraclough »

diarrhea wrote: post #103
subomi wrote: post #66

Reading this, I had an epiphany about why open-source software is essential. How do you peak under opaque abstractions? It's just not possible. Imagine if Kubernetes was closed source & binary distribution only. Understanding abstractions is, I think, why being open source has become table stakes for infrastructure software.

To add: the two most popular languages by most popular metrics, JavaScript and Python, are interpreted. There, you don’t have a choice. Go is different of course. Your insight is very good. Not being able to dig into source code when needed is unimaginable.

> you don’t have a choice

That's not really true, obfuscating JavaScript can be quite effective at making it difficult to study the program's workings. It can't be perfect at this, of course, but neither is conventional ahead-of-time compilation to machine code.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#170

Post by donatj »

aifooh7Keew6xoo wrote: post #149
donatj wrote: post #139

> Power steering is yet another level of abstraction that further improves the driving experience. I am a pretty firm believer that antilock brakes are a bad abstraction that might cause fewer accidents, but often more dangerous accidents than they prevent. They avoid a class of accident caused by the brake’s locking limiting your ability to steer. They cause a whole class of accidents where you hit things at a highe…

[flagged]

Versus blindly locking your brakes sure, in some cases but not versus actually knowing how to drive a car without abs.
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