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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

unix.foo

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Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#21

Post by throeei4 »

> The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. Maybe. But I think competence is the part that’s fine.

> knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever

If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amazing and how Linux sucks. Kids like that in 1990ties would buy expensive consoles, and would not deal with hack PC's to get free games.

Many people today are still dealing with cheap shitty hardware, 7 years old Android phones and sketchy ROMs... Just because there is no other option!

https://unix.foo/posts/it-will-never-be-the-year-of-the-linu...

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#22

Post by CommieBobDole »

The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without having to unlearn a lot of what we know now.

I'm old enough to see this process in action; I used to be young and in possession of esoteric knowledge that made me infinitely in demand and now most of the things that young people have esoteric knowledge about is things that I don't particularly care about, and I'm left with a lot of finely honed skills to solve problems that have mostly been abstracted away.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#23

Post by dan-bailey »

Stefan-H wrote: post #6

There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the comput…

This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#24

Post by zormino »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #13
tor0ugh wrote: post #7

It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated c…

> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#26

Post by kaonwarb »

I resonate with every example given - setting jumpers by hand, sound card interrupts, autoexec.bat. I'm also a happy user of LLMs and agents. This article captured for me what is lost - which, as others point out, has long since been lost, if ever had, in other fields (e.g. modern cars vs. the Model T). I wouldn't go back, but I can still have a sense of loss.

Beautiful writing.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#27

Post by steelframe »

I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.

For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.

Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).

With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.

The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.

Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#28

Post by thewebguyd »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

Imagine if we had LLMs back then to write xorg.conf for you and it hallucinated the modeline and you blew up your monitor.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#29

Post by smsm42 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge - I mean, they can generate new arrangements of information, but they have no idea whether any of it real or making sense, unless humans - explicitly or through training - tell them, the more we rely on LLM knowledge the less the quality of it would be. Right now the LLMs are mainly in auxiliary role, so most of the knowledge erosion they generate is laughed at and relatively quickly corrected. But would this hold once the role of generative AIs increases? We already essentially entered the chaos period with news content - there's so much noise that it's basically impossible to know if any news message you read is true or manipulated somehow. This is going to start happening to more fundamental knowledge too, either on purpose or just by the force of the probabilistic nature of generative AI.

Re: We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

#30

Post by smsm42 »

Ekaros wrote: post #19
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

I can already see future where there is group of people goading AI to right direction by repeatedly changing what they ask slightly. And then memorise the times when you got right incantation for seemingly right outcome. Without actually understanding or being able to reason about process in the middle. Possibly a seemingly inconsequential misspoken word or typo can lead to better or worse outcome. Or maybe just not…

Welcome to the future. Make no mistakes.
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