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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

#161

Post by tines »

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.

I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?

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

#162

Post by kev009 »

I came into the US tech industry in 2011 from a CS program (programming on my own longer), which was basically a pipeline into Java or web dev at that time (the classes on other things like OS, compilers, and FPGA were a thing, but seen by most as a hurdle not a promising or practical career pathways).

Most of the people I dealt with for the decade following that (i.e. pre-LLM) had little clue how any part of computers worked, and I don't intend that to be particularly pejorative, it's just that it's been somewhat easy to carve out a niche doing something to do with programming while having little understanding of the small or big picture.. all heuristics and applying working patterns.. for a few decades.

You can still understand whatever you want, today, with added tools. It's just a choice to turn your brain on or off. I think LLMs are perfectly fine as a learning tool to interrogate a subject, do comparatives, and then formalize your understanding by reading the sources. At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.

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

#163

Post by overgard »

This might just be a personality trait of me, but I really like technology that's transparent enough that I can fix/modify/understand it. Opaque technology gives me an ick. It's not really a complexity thing -- Linux has this property of being transparent even though it's extremely complex. The way he describes old computers.. man, I loved that about them, there was nothing _secret_ going on, you weren't worried about telemetry or weird background processes. Then again, I still drive a manual transmission internal combustion car in 2026, so maybe I don't represent the world.

Then again, maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel. Even though AI boosters kind of annoy me, I do appreciate that they're tinkering and hacking and working to understand the technology on some level. I think there's always going to be some small number of people that are like this, in the same way there are still people that look at disassembly and understand CPU caches.

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

#164

Post by tines »

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…

And you can use a TV to read books, but nobody does.

Every technology has ways it can be used, and ways it wants to be used. This one wants to be used in a way that produces outcomes we won't like.

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

#167

Post by lukan »

apsurd wrote: post #32
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…

The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably. Now everything…

"warm nostalgia" "reformatting C drives due to malware"

Processing error.

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

#168

Post by Barrin92 »

andai wrote: post #65

@ryancbriggs - 18 Oct 2024 > When I was young I fixed my parents’ computer and now that I’m older I fix computers for my kids. Are we the only generation that knows how computers work? https://x.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844 https://xcancel.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844

maybe another angle to this that I observed: my working class dad who had little education happily taught himself a bit of programming with computer magazines in the 80s an 90s. He actually could figure out his way around a command prompt.

I went on to study CS and teach undergrad courses and what I noticed, this started already maybe a decade ago, is that CS students who we handed bootable linux usbs couldn't figure out how to set their system up. And not just that, they just kept emailing us with statements like "it didn't work, what do I do?". It's not just lack of knowledge but complete helplessness when something doesn't work in 2 minutes. That's the biggest problem with this reliance on ChatGPT or whatever.

I think the young generation is in an even worse position. Not only do they not know how computers work, they don't even have the basic DIY problem solving attitude our parents have.

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