Here's the tl;dr: "Kids these days."
We have used too many levels of abstractions
371–380 of 564 posts
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t even know the difference between a form submitted through JS vs a browser. Who cares? Unless there’s a problem, there’s no reason to know such things. And I’ve written http webservers by hand. People here have way too much confidence in their interview questions being a good signal for experience. It’s pretty wild.
"Who cares? " You are proving my point. You should care.
Why? I’d rather care about ML.
My point is that your question is some esoteric gotcha party question that may as well be out of Trivial Pursuit. But you’re treating it like anyone who doesn’t care is just being a bad engineer. There are countless ways engineers spend their time, and choosing what to work on is the most important choice of their careers. It’s on you to justify the claim that knowing the difference between a JS form submit vs browser submit matters at all, let alone that it’s a distinction that comes up in day to day life.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Vernor Vinge was right, though-- software (and hardware) archaeologist will be a real job. Spend some time in the coin op game community... This is all we spend our time on. Well that and cabinet repair. But seriously though, keeping these old games alive requires serious reverse engineering of both hardware and software. Especially if they have custom chips, ASICs, undocumented features, etc. But the work has to b…
Having been working on writing documentation, tools and homebrew SDKs for arguably one of the most influential arcade systems ever made [1], I could not agree more with this. Hardware and software gets left behind by the original developers all the time, but that in no way makes it no longer relevant - and it certainly does not make the underlying concepts outdated. Z80 or 68000 assembly language might be completely…
> And yet most of my 19-year-old university classmates want to stay away from "scary" embedded or kernel work in favor of web or game development.
It seems that with more abstraction, more people throw up their hands and say "I'll never understand it", "The designers of this system did things in the stupidest way possible", "It's magic" or (in the case of the financial system) "It's a rigged game" "You're working for the man"
What all of these points of view have in common is that the people who hold them have given up trying to understand the world around them. Instead they take the intellectually lazy way out and compose their own pet theories of why things are the way they are, this is where tinfoil hat stuff comes from. This is dangerous, and is sort of the point of the original article.
I keep telling people that "the world is still knowable, still understandable". You have to put in the time and learn about it. It's easy to do, you just have to do it. There are plenty of "average" people playing in these "difficult" to understand fields.
What we desperately need to cultivate is a culture that encourages and rewards curiosity. When people are curious, they take the time to learn about the world around them, and why things are what they are.
If you don't master the world around you, it masters you.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, they have never seen a dump of an HTTP message, headers and verbs are abstract things to them. Hell, many of them don't know you can have fully functional websites with zero JS, including payment, video, login, etc. I started to write an HTMX tutorial ( https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1 ) because I noticed a l…
I started writing a book for exactly this reason. https://www.networksfromscratch.com/ It will take me 10 years to finish it at the pace I’m going though :)
This is great! Thanks for the link.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think ChatGPT would be allowed nowadays? It’d be my source for something so esoteric. I haven’t bothered to learn mail protocols because any message you send will be marked as spam unless it’s from a major provider.
> any message you send will be marked as spam This is not true. I run a mail server for myself and some friends. It started as an old desktop running under the desk at a university, transitioned to the back corner of a server room when I was working as a network engineer, and now it runs on a Raspberry Pi in a closet of my house. I had to pay extra to get a static IP at home, but everything has been off the shelf and…
Happy to hear that; thanks for correcting me. I was going off of what other people said, which I should have mentioned. It’s nice to know that it’s still possible to run a mail server.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
An important thing to remember is that not only did you get to watch the layers be added, you also have decades of experience . In today's field, where we double in number every N years, that's enough time to accumulate enough knowledge to feel like a demigod—to have more than 20 years of experience is extremely rare in the industry right now. That won't always be the case: eventually we'll stop growing exponentially…
its more than just time. the sad part about this evoluation is that younger people are enculturated to believe that the foundations that they are standing on represent some sort of inviolate physics and not just some technical decision someone made 20 years ago. i think whats required to move forward isn't just some dusty studying of these physics, but a reawakening to an understanding that these are just systems wit…
> younger people are enculturated to believe that the foundations that they are standing on represent some sort of inviolate physics and not just some technical decision someone made 20 years ago.
This is simply not my experience of young people or of being young. There's a reason why radical movements are led and populated largely by the young—to the extent they err, it's on the side of "let's tear it all down and start over".
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#377Suppose someone is a relatively well versed professional but they have a hole in their understanding…They don’t know X - where X is HTTP verbs or linear algebra or Assembly or the difference between Java and JavaScript or how to write vanilla JavaScript in general…
it’s very likely that those skills are immaterial to their job. It’s also very likely that they will never need those skills.
All of computing is layering abstractions and no one - no one - understands all of them. The author cherry-picks their own favorite layers as being “what kids these days don’t understand” while ignoring their own ignorance of other layers.
One does not need to understand alternating current in order to plug in a vacuum.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#378The future looks especially bleak because LLMs, for many who I work with, are doing with logic what Google did with memory. 'Just ask chatgpt' will be a thing ; maybe not chatgpt, probably indeed just google but with a their chatbot which can do 'logic' and abstractions built in.
Google -> you don't need a longterm memory, just Google it.
So with good LLMs (and the latest iteration of chatgpt is really good at a lot of things you don't want bore yourself with), you don't need to process logic and abstraction as it will do it for you.
This is not yet there for everyone but I think it will work the same. Lazy the mind and have less and less rigor where the abstractions get more abstract and also more shallow.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#379As a 15+ years webdev my recent projects in the front-end are almost pure "vanilla JS" (Just JS) + Html, and CSS with only Petite Vue / Alpine on top. I find the modern Vue, React etc. stacks absolutely insufferably complex and prone to breaking in 1000 places each time you upgrade some package, or change som random thing in the already stupidly complex "Tooling/Build" chains people are setting up by default. And it'…
I would really love to know where you put imba.io in your tools evaluation.
It's the only one I can grok that allows me to work at high levels and just plain js when I need to. I hate that it has any external dependency, but I'm just blazingly fast building with it that I justify the 50kb extra.
Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions
#380I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…
This is the perfect articulation of something I think about all the time. It is so much easier if you were in it while it was happening.
I've been trying to write a blog post about this, and how to address the problem specifically for front end development, where it's absolutely ludicrous. It's a very serious problem, especially when you think about security.
You have all these people clamoring to get cloud certifications so they can work in IT but its so complex. A certification isn't enough. There just aren't enough people with enough knowledge and practical experience to fill all the needs that companies have.