141–150 of 283 posts
A shame that Pangram flags this as AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-0269...
Obviously there’s a rise in pure AI writing but I find these sort of services that “analyze” content more harmful than good.
Is the premise here correct? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a 1990s computer user who knew how to edit autoexec.bat or insert a floppy to boot their computer "knew how it worked" in a meaningful sense.
The stack of abstractions is deeper now, and all indications suggest it's not going to stop deepening. But I think the abstractions were already quite deep by the 1990s.
(I think the classic error here is a demographic one: computer nerds always poke through abstractions, because they do it for fun. I don't think that's going to stop, anymore than web browsers stopped people from writing kernels. If anything, we write more low-level code than ever, because access to the prerequisite knowledge is less gatekept than before.)
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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.
Determinism is way undervalued.
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…
> They will have a tool that does everything and asks for nothing, and they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about. Oh come on! Of course I wondered how a light switch work, and I then learnt. I remember taking apart broken electronics as a kid, and that later morphed into also trying to repair things. Including the computer (both hardware and software wise). I remember…
The thing is, yes it will still happen, but at substantially decreased rate. Groups of people banding together to solve a problem or figure a solution will slowly stop forming. Everyone will be out there learning just for themselves. The collective knowledge of people will likely ebb. Things will be different and individuals will have to adapt.
There are also still courses you can take to learn practical skills, I for example took a short blacksmithing course a few years ago. A lot of fun and way harder than it looks (at least if you want to get good at it, my goal was just to give it a try and have fun, and 5 evenings was enough for that).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So now instead of improving the tools of biology so we can actually understand it deeply - we increase complexity of IT so we have to rely on muddy, side-effecty tools of biology to try to infer some of the properties of the systems we made. That's depressing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do not understand the need to argue that monkeys are better than screwdrivers at screwing. Just let the monkey be the best version of a monkey.
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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 sy…
Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like
> You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them. Sometimes you built a boot disk for a single game. A floppy whose entire reason to exist was to start the computer in the configuration that one program demanded. Is the premise here correct? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a 1990s computer user who knew how to edit autoexec.bat or insert a floppy to boot their computer "knew how it worked" in a meaningful…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.
I think it's safe to say that computing should be mostly deterministic. I know compilers use heuristics that are stochastic, but come on. Imagine if you were given a layer of abstraction that randomly flipped bits from time to time... That's not an abstraction, it's random programming.
Computing has never really been deterministic all the way down. Storage gets corrupted, RAM has soft errors, networks drop/reorder packets, schedulers race, caches go stale, distributed systems partition, query planners change plans, ...
Obviously those become tolerable because we've developed layers of contracts and understanding the bounds around them. Error correcting codes, checksums, retries, consensus, idempotency, false-positive rates, SLAs, etc.
If the abstraction is “delegate this task to a junior engineer, analyst, lawyer, designer, or support rep,” you dont expect deterministic behavior. There's review, constraints, escalation, checklists, tests, and accountability.