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We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

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

#71

Post by OkayPhysicist »

8note wrote: post #55
101008 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…

how did you make the transistors? made your own vacuum chambers? i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do

We had a photolithography lab when I was at school. It's not that complicated to make a few npn transistors. The difficult part is doing it well.

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

#72

Post by jjk7 »

switchbak wrote: post #43
steelframe wrote: post #27

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 ne…

The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works". I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - espe…

Nobody has time anymore to read a textbook.

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

#73

Post by bix6 »

hatefulheart wrote: post #52
101008 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…

Exactly. Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.

Name checks out

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

#74

Post by apsurd »

hatefulheart wrote: post #52
101008 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…

Exactly. Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.

come on now.

so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing.

life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.

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

#75

Post by simianwords »

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…

This comment might have gone hard in 2023. Now it seems out of place. LLM's do hold knowledge empirically. They sometimes give out wrong information, like humans. And you need someone with better knowledge to correct it.

> But we are losing the knowledge

No we aren't and this is spreading FUD. Things have always been like this. Its called specialisation and this is how society progresses. I don't know how the supply chain worked to get the food to my table. That's why its so cheap!

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

#76

Post by vladms »

saulpw wrote: post #57
101008 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that profes…

You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.

I have similar experience with the poster, and the way I read it is, "from the things I build here are some examples". I did learn about advanced physics topics that enable transistors, and even did some experiments, but for fundamental stuff you "don't build stuff".

Did I do all physics or all electronic circuit design or all software stacks? Definitely not. But I spent 3 years learning (and building) about lots of stuff.

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

#77

Post by kibwen »

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.

No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.

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

#78

Post by simianwords »

smsm42 wrote: post #29
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 relati…

> Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge

1. GPT proved Erdős Unit Distance Conjecture entirely on its own

2. GPT-5.4 Pro Solves Erdős Problem #1196 (April 2026)

In fact there's a whole benchmark that's measuring this: https://epoch.ai/frontiermath

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