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Nobody knows how the whole system works

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Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#131

Post by cadr »

agumonkey wrote: post #108
sgarland wrote: post #107

> “What happens when you type a URL into your browser’s address bar and hit enter?” You can talk about what happens at all sorts of different levels (e.g., HTTP, DNS, TCP, IP, …). But does anybody really understand all of the levels? [Paraphrasing]: interrupts, 802.11ax modulation scheme, QAM, memory models, garbage collection, field effect transistors... To a reasonable degree, yes, I can. I am also probably an outl…

There's various degrees of understanding, for instance as a web dev, you know the browser, the osi network stack.. (in theory, there are a lot of tweaks) then maybe the electronics.. but the radio / wireless part is another world in itself with a totally different mindset (analog waves) which make the rabbithole way too long (and wide.. radio is a big world on its own)

Amateur radio is pretty approachable and has lots of opportunity to go down those rabbit holes.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#132

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Huh?

The whole point of society is that you don’t need to know how the whole thing works. You just use it.

How does the water system maintain pressure so water actually comes out when you turn on the tap? That’s entirely the wrong question. You should be asking why you never needed to think about that until now, because that answer is way more mind-expanding and fascinating. Humans invented entire economic systems just so you don’t need to know everything, so you can wash your hands and go back to your work doing your thing in the giant machine. Maybe your job is to make software that tap-water engineers use everyday. Is it a crisis if they don’t understand everything about what you do? Not bloody likely - their heads are full of water engineering knowledge already.

It is not the end of the world to not know everything - it’s actually a miracle of modern society!

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#133

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

Well, to be fair, we've already been there, for many years (dependency hell). In those cases, LLMs are likely to actually improve things.

For myself, I like to know what's going on, to a certain extent, but appreciate abstraction.

I am also aware that people like me, probably don't make commercial sense, but that's already been the case for quite some time.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#136

Post by pixl97 »

matheus-rr wrote: post #84

The dependency tree is where this bites hardest in practice. A typical Node.js project pulls in 800+ transitive dependencies, each with their own release cadence and breaking change policies. Nobody on your team understands how most of them work internally, and that's fine - until one of them ships a breaking change, deprecates an API, or hits end-of-life. The anon291 comment about interface stability is exactly righ…

>What I've noticed is that teams don't even track which of their dependencies are approaching EOL or have known vulnerabilities at the version they're pinned to

I mean hopefully they are outsourcing it to some kind of SBOM/SCA type tool that monitors this.

With this said, I've seen a lot of projects before AI started touching anything stuck in this old dependency hell were they couldn't really get new versions integrated without causing hundreds of other problems leading to a cascade of failures.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#137

Post by sceptic123 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #66
sceptic123 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're saying _you_ can't do those things, just that most people can't which I have to agree with. They're not saying people can't learn those things either, but that's the practice you're talking about here. The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.

> The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly. You can eat some real terrible stuff and like 99.999% of the time only get the shits, which isn't really a concern if you have good access to clean drinking water and can stay hydrated. The overwhelming majority of people probably would figure it o…

You're not going to be any good for hunting, farming or keeping warm if you have the shits though.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#139

Post by pixl97 »

sceptic123 wrote: post #128
pixl97 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you list a situation where this matters that you know this personally? Maybe if you end up alone and lost in a huge forest or the Outback, but this is a highly unlikely scenario. If society falls apart cooking isn’t something you need to be that worried about unless you survive the first few weeks. Getting people to work together with different skills is going to be far more beneficial.

The existential crisis part for me is that no-one (or not enough people) have the skills or knowledge required to do these things. Getting people to work together only works if some people have those skills to begin with. I also wasn't putting the focus is on cooking, the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important. And you are far more optimistic about people than me if you…

>the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important

These are very important when you're alone. Like deep in the woods with a tiny group maybe.

The kinds of problems you'll actually see are something going bad and there being a lot of people around trying to survive on ever decreasing resources. A single person out of 100 can teach people how to cook, or hunt, or grow crops.

If things are that bad then there is nearly a zero percent change that any of those, other than maybe clean water, are going to be your biggest issue. People that do form groups and don't care about committing acts of violence are going to take everything you have and leave you for dead if not just outright kill you. You will have to have a big enough group to defend your holdings 24/7 with the ability to take some losses.

Simply put there is not enough room on the planet for hunter gathers and 8 billion people. That number has to fall down to the 1 billion or so range pretty quickly, like we saw around the 1900s.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#140

Post by bethekidyouwant »

stetrain wrote: post #119
xorcist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food That's a bizarre claim, confidently stated. Of course I can make a fire, cook and my own food. You can, too. When it comes to hunting, skinning and the cutting of animals, that takes a bit more practice but anyone can manage something even if the result isn't pretty. If stores ran out of food we would have devastating problems but because of specializa…

You think that the majority of people actually know how to do those things successfully in the absence of modern logistics or looking up how to do it online? I have a general idea of how those things work, but successfully hunting an animal isn't something I have ever done or have the tools (and training on those tools) to accomplish. Which crops can I grow in my climate zone to actually feed my family, and where wou…

I mean before you stave to death because you don’t have food in your granary from last year, you don’t even have the land to hunt or plant food so it’s not even relevant
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