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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

#211

Post by StanislavPetrov »

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…

>I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.

Making the jump from 300 baud to 2400 felt like magic!

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

#212

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

cylo wrote: post #141
roywiggins wrote: post #97

A shame that Pangram flags this as AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-0269...

Given that I’m the author, I promise you I’m a real human. It’s not AI. Obviously there’s a rise in pure AI writing but I find these sort of services that “analyze” content more harmful than good.

No one questioned that you're human, but the writing is very apparently AI-written.

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

#213

Post by matheusmoreira »

c7b wrote: post #83

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".

Yeah, I'm learning more than I have ever learned before. I suppose the worry is that people won't want to learn, though. That people will prompt the AI to just do things without caring about why and how they are done. That's a legitimate worry, but it's not new.

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

#214

Post by busymom0 »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #210
busymom0 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmmm, I didn't read that as AI. What gives?

Perhaps that's a you issue? but it has tells all throughout the text.

Would you mind elaborating on what other tells the text had that it's written by AI?

The top comment only based off of one sentence which to me doesn't seem AI. And the author is saying in comments here that it's not AI.

I am genuinely curious as I'd like to update my brain on how to detect AI slop if that's the case here.

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

#215

Post by StanislavPetrov »

Legend2440 wrote: post #152
mywittyname wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's broadly true though, that younger people struggle with the fundamentals of computing, even if there exists specific examples of young people accomplishing exceptional feats. We raised a generation of people on consumption-based computing devices, which means they don't develop the skills necessary to produce things using computers. Of course, we can teach these skills, but to do that, we must first acknowledge i…

Most people in my generation didn't know the fundamentals of computing either. That's why I get paid the big bucks to make computers work for them.

>Most people in my generation didn't know the fundamentals of computing either.

That's true of my generation as well, but computers weren't ubiquitous and used by everyone all the time for virtually everything.

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

#216

Post by nairboon »

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.

That's not an AI text.

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

#217

Post by phainopepla2 »

c7b wrote: post #83

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".

Having all the world's knowledge at our fingertips didn't seem to make us any smarter (quite the contrary, from where I'm sitting), so I'm skeptical that having private tutors at our disposal is going to. Perhaps for the ever-curious few, but for most people those "tutors" will probably just end up as another form of entertainment.

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

#218

Post by firefoxd »

At this point, I sound like a brand ambassador. But I highly recommend The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. It's a story about what happens when the machine of modern life that we all rely on suddenly stops. It's been operational for hundreds of years, and there is no one left who knows how to fix it.

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

#219

Post by StanislavPetrov »

WJW wrote: post #204
CommieBobDole wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree; the situation "young people know all about computers" was maybe a twenty-five year phenomenon; before that, there weren't enough computers for it to be generally true, and at some point you no longer needed to know all about computers to successfully use a computer for the sorts of things the general population does.

"Young people know all about computers" was never true either. It was maybe true for people like you and me, the type of people who now frequent places like HN. But for the vast majority of people, computers were never all that interesting.

>"Young people know all about computers" was never true either.

That's true, but only because not all young people owned or used computers. I was born in the mid 70s and got my first computer as a young child. Back then you had to "know all about computers" to use the computer and get it to function. These days, every kid grows up surrounded by computers, with a computer in their pocket, and very few have even an inkling of how they work.

Thus "young people who use computers know all about computers" used to be a true statement, but no longer is.

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

#220

Post by joshmoody24 »

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 it's impossible to understand the whole stack. My rule of thumb is to understand at least two layers of abstraction above and below the thing I'm actively working on.
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