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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

#81

Post by staindk »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #22

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 hav…

I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.

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

#82

Post by hatefulheart »

esikich wrote: post #66
hatefulheart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough…

This is a very cringe take.

Me and OP aren’t super heroes, we can’t do what a team of talented individuals created even if that team existed many moons ago. That isn’t the point.

We both questioned the tone and the conclusion of the comment.

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

#83

Post by c7b »

Moral panic. We all have private tutors on every subject at our disposal now. It takes some special kind of mental gymnastics to conclude from this that no one will learn anything anymore henceforth. The article is just a long-winded way of saying "Kids today have it too easy", or, equivalently, "I'm getting old".

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

#84

Post by vladms »

esikich wrote: post #66
hatefulheart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough…

Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ?

Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.

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

#85

Post by VorpalWay »

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.

When I took software focused computer engineering around 2010, we still had courses that took us all the way down to transistors and even the physics of P and N junctions and how that applies to CMOS. (And even some basic analog electronics.)

Did I end up an expert at those layers? Of course not, but I know the basics and I know enough that if I need to I know where to start learning more. Just like I wasn't a C++ or hard realtime expert after university either, but now a decade and a half later I am pretty good at those (and a bunch of other skills that ended up relevant to my line of work).

Basically, none of the layers are "magic" to me. Even if I don't know the details of it, I know the general principle and I know I could learn more if I need it.

(I think you naturally end up an expert at the layer(s) you work in, and the knowledge tapers off as you go down (or up) the stack. For example, I know a fair bit about how the CPU works (cache coherency, pipeline stalls etc), I can passably read x86 assembly, etc. Because they affect the layer I work at (hard realtime systems C++ and now also Rust). I know far less about web dev than hardware.)

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

#86

Post by seethishat »

fritzo wrote: post #15

I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

Obviously no one knows every detail all the way down the stack. It's not possible, but having some level of understanding of how a system operates is useful especially if you ever have to fix it yourself or explain why/how it is broken.

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

#87

Post by Brendinooo »

>What is dying is acquaintance. The plain, unglamorous intimacy of having fought a particular machine, and lost, and gone back, and finally felt the thing give.

I think this is a universal feeling that accompanies any technological innovation. My phrasing is that new technology unbundles the thing people want from the craft that was formerly required to get it; any craft requires someone to learn and achieve through struggle.

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

#88

Post by JumpCrisscross »

staindk wrote: post #81
CommieBobDole wrote: post #22

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 hav…

I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.

Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.

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

#89

Post by bluefirebrand »

fritzo wrote: post #15

I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

> "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

Should we petition to rename this site to "Stone Age News" or something then?

Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought figuring out how things work was pretty core to the Hacker mentality.

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

#90

Post by hirvi74 »

esikich wrote: post #66
hatefulheart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough…

That was one the major criticism I have of my CS degree's program. Perhaps the knowledge I wish for is not truly CS in the mathematical/theoretical perspective, but I believe it would have been absolutely valuable to learn.
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