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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

#171

Post by tines »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #89
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.

> "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude. Should we petition to rename this site to "Stone Age News" or something then? Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought figuring out how things work was pretty core to the Hacker mentality.

If being a Luddite means I'm the only one who cares to understand anything, I'll accept the label gladly.

You: I think it’s good to understand some things.

This guy: If you don’t understand everything then you might as well not understand anything!

Guys like this are a corporation’s wet dream. Total intellectual dependence.

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

#173

Post by sph »

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…

We are on average losing control, but you individually can choose whether to lose control or not.

Programming languages, UNIX, debuggers aren’t going anywhere. There is more to computing than what your boss demands and what is hyped on tech forums.

In fact I believe the indie/handmade scene will grow substantial if not boom, even if just as a hobby for most. Showing what you have made with your blood sweat and tears will elicit more praise and delight when you could have just asked a machine to do it all along.

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

#174

Post by recursive »

pram wrote: post #17

"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked. So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them." Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol

If you wanted to play a PC game in the Windows 3 era, you were playing a DOS game. Playing it inside of windows just made it even more difficult.

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

#175

Post by baal80spam »

smsm42 wrote: post #29
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge - I mean, they can generate new arrangements of information, but they have no idea whether any of it real or making sense, unless humans - explicitly or through training - tell them, the more we rely on LLM knowledge the less the quality of it would be. Right now the LLMs are mainly in auxiliary role, so most of the knowledge erosion they generate is laughed at and relati…

I think what you describe is called the Model Collapse.

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

#176

Post by drdexebtjl »

budman1 wrote: post #156
vitally3643 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a period of a century or more where steam engine design parameters were determined by experiment and gut feel. The physics of fluid dynamics required to explain why a design is optimal just did not exist yet. There's a lot of places in history where engineering far outpaced the science required to explain it.

If your design work is not based upon science and mathematics, it is not engineering. Not saying engineering is required to build or improve a product; it is not. "try this" is not engineering.

Of course it is. The science comes from reproducing what you tried and getting the same results.

You may not have a good enough model for this observation to allow you to predict the results of other starting conditions, but it’s a model nonetheless, one that narrowly applies to the conditions you tried.

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

#177

Post by doitLP »

kev009 wrote: post #162

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 compute…

> At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.

The thing is, if there’s a way to do something easier people will generally just do that. All the nostalgia of the olden days has as a component that there were no alternatives as the example in the article highlights.

We can try to preserve the hard way to things that gets improved, but the hard way will only ever be niche if it doesn’t become extinct entirely. There is no going back.

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

#178

Post by recursive »

Ekaros wrote: post #19
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #8

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work. That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot , actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information ( and…

I can already see future where there is group of people goading AI to right direction by repeatedly changing what they ask slightly. And then memorise the times when you got right incantation for seemingly right outcome. Without actually understanding or being able to reason about process in the middle. Possibly a seemingly inconsequential misspoken word or typo can lead to better or worse outcome. Or maybe just not…

Communing with the machine becomes spiritual. Computer operators will become a priesthood.

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

#179

Post by adverbly »

Speak for yourself but I certainly don't know how it works.

Also, if you don't think the difficulty is the knowledge, I'm sorry but I must disagree. There has been more than one government or corporation or large institution that has tried to destroy history and knowledge in the past.

I think it's fair to say that knowledge is also at risk.

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

#180

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

esikich wrote: post #66
hatefulheart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.

What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough…

The parent post's argument can be boiled down to "You don't know absolutely everything therefore it's fine to know little or nothing." It's the Chewbacca defense of AI boosterism.
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