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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

#191

Post by apsurd »

lukan wrote: post #167
apsurd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hah, that made me laugh. To this day I'm so proud to have learned how to repeatedly just wipe my PC C drive when needed then reinstall XP or whatever. I'm just a web-dev that got their start by googling "how to make a website". As I leaned in there came a turning point where I wanted badly to switch from windows, php, scripts, to Ruby on Rails. But installing ruby at the time just didn't work. I worked up the courage - eventually - to partition my drive and install linux. After that, I got to experience a proper terminal and the rest is history.

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

#192

Post by overgard »

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…

The real problem is the philosophy that arose in the 1970s that "maximizing shareholder value" is the point of business. As a society, we've become obsessed with optimizing this one variable at the expense of all others and "growth" has become a religion. At it's core, the most important thing we should be optimizing for is "does this business improve the world while turning a robust and sustainable revenue stream" not "how much money can we make for investors". The latter will always optimize for incredible wealth disparity, enshittification, and mostly useless people like Elon Musk becoming stupidly wealthy because it's basically impossible for them to lose money no matter how bad their ideas are (once you're a certain level of rich, your passive income is just immense). I'm not saying shareholders/investors shouldn't be considered, but it can't be the only or the most important metric. We've completely lost the plot on the social and market purpose of a corporation.

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

#193

Post by obloid »

>To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked.

As someone who played plenty of computer games as a teen in the 90s I assure you that I did not know how it worked. I learned how it worked later when I got a CS degree at university. Following the instructions from the booklet that came with the game may have helped me to get it working, but there was minimal understanding.

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

#194

Post by hexasquid »

tines wrote: post #164
switchbak wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think what you are describing is covered by either an E reader or the giant collection of how-to explantions on YouTube?

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

#195

Post by tines »

hexasquid wrote: post #194
tines wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think what you are describing is covered by either an E reader or the giant collection of how-to explantions on YouTube?

Videos aren’t books, and ereaders aren’t TVs.

The book/written word is also a technology that has preferences on how it’s used and transformations that it imposes on its users, and they’re much different than those of TV or computers.

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

#196

Post by pseudosavant »

legobmw99 wrote: post #133
pseudosavant wrote: post #105

I can't help but think this type of step function change has happened with computers before. The change from punch cards to magnetic storage certainly made it so you didn't have to "know how it works" for every single bit. The change from machine code to a language like Fortran brought about such an abstraction that a Fortran dev didn't "know how it works" at that same level anymore. At this point, the layers of abst…

It's hard to articulate why, but 35 layers of deterministic abstraction feels very different from 1 layer of nondeterministic one. In particular, I think every developer has experienced the need to jump "down the stack" to debug or understand something (even if not all the way down). Certainly, I think any senior developer should be at least conversant in the first few levels below wherever they "live". But this seem…

I still see this more like there will be "devs" that only know how to use LLMs and not any layer under it.

Just like there were web devs that only knew jQuery but not any actual JS. Game devs that know only Unreal Engine or Unity but nothing about DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan. C/C++ devs that know nothing about LLVM IR or the actual bits their compiler generates. It can also be a poor understanding of the layers in the abstractions above you too.

I find a lot of value in being able to understand levels beneath the layer I'm mostly working in. There are things, even/especially with LLMs, that I can grasp because of my deeper understanding.

But there have been plenty in our field that have only known their level of the abstraction for quite a long time. Every time there is something introduced that lowers the barrier to entry to making things, there is a version of this "but they don't know how it really works..."

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

#197

Post by andai »

WJW wrote: post #98
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

No, that person is just the only one in his family who knows how computers work. There's plenty of people in generations both older and younger that know too, just apparently not his parents or his kids. Some of the most impressive assembly written today is by people younger than 20. It'll be fine.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/h8ElOpITBjQ

> It was a Minecraft convention. We had the game set up with a keyboard, and a controller. By the 2nd day we realized, none of the kids could use a keyboard. So on the 2nd day we set up two controllers instead.

> Then I noticed something else. We counted it. 50% of the kids would come up to the console, push the controller out of the way, and try to touch the screen.

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

#198

Post by maciekkmrk »

no_multitudes wrote: post #170

>The difficulty was the knowledge. Please write your blog posts yourself. I don't want to have to parse through this stupid claude output to get to your point. Literally just posting the prompt would be better than this.

We have very different perception of the same shared reality. I read the entire blog post and it didn't cross my mind that it was AI written.

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

#199

Post by conartist6 »

recursive wrote: post #183
conartist6 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree wholeheartedly. I do not give a fraction of a flying fuck what MW thinks competence is. I'm a goddamn engineer and I know what it means

If you use your own definition for words, don't be upset when there's confusion about what they mean when you try to communicate.

Sure, but don't think I'll be impressed by pedantry when there is no real doubt what I mean.
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