Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#261

Post by yyyk » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 5:06 AM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #77

bobthechef wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example closer to home, though perhaps not as stark, is the loss of expertise in various industries that have been outsourced. The US is a good example. This is one (of many) arguments against outsourcing your industry just because it's cheaper and increases the profits of the outsourcing company. The tradition and culture that allows a certain industry to flourish is interrupted and destroyed and rebuilding that…

Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale. While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close. It is really the result of not thinkin…

>It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today

There's a tendency in the West to airbrush history, and pretend that the opening to China was just a result of business lobbies. There was an intentional policy decision based on 'liberalization through trade' theory, which managed to be one of the most disastrous theories out there (far more disastrous than 2000-era US WoT policies). This was pushed by politicians and academics, and up until the oughts businesses were more reacting to the policy as creating it.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#262

Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

usrbinbash wrote: post #215

jfengel wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where the notion that productivity software should be “attractive” came from. From the people who make choices about where to put their money. You can get away with ugly software -- especially if you had something that worked 20 years ago and is still sufficient, and there is no alternative. But if users have the choice of something attractive, they'll pick it.

That depends entirely on the use case and the user. I have the choice of many many many text editors and IDEs to manage my source code. What do I use? vim. In a terminal(-emulator). Why? Because I like my editor to be ready the moment my finger leaves the ENTER key, I like direct interoperability with the terminal, I like that I can hack together even the most absurd things in .vimrc, and I like that I have the same…

VLC is bloated. Try mpv from https://mpv.io/

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#263

Post by usrbinbash » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #262

usrbinbash wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends entirely on the use case and the user. I have the choice of many many many text editors and IDEs to manage my source code. What do I use? vim. In a terminal(-emulator). Why? Because I like my editor to be ready the moment my finger leaves the ENTER key, I like direct interoperability with the terminal, I like that I can hack together even the most absurd things in .vimrc, and I like that I have the same…

VLC is bloated. Try mpv from https://mpv.io/

Thanks, looks like an interesting project, will definitely keep it on my radar.

However, after compiling it and measuring it on an older machine (a Lenovo T430 running Arch) against the out-of-the-box vlc install, I can see no advantage in memory footprint or cpu usage, they are about the same. (I compared mvp running in terminal against vlc running with ncurses interface module)

Since mpv doesn't offer an ncurses interface, and is still in development, I will, for now, stick with vlc.

However, the scripting options definitely seem great, as I said i will keep it on my radar.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#264

Post by anyfoo » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

not-my-account wrote: post #253

anyfoo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That some things in history took the span of multiple generations to finish was quite the revelation to me. The Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. As another example, this amusing video [1] tells the story of how King Louis XIV wanted a map of the entirety of his kingdom from Cassini, and how it was apparently Cassini's great grandson (4 generations over 120 years) who finally concluded the project. For…

I am guessing that [1] pointed to this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyX_EJQOIU I don't see the reference.

Indeed, thanks. I went hunting for the video, but then forgot to paste it in (and am long past the edit window). :/

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#265

Post by marcus_holmes » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #229

marcus_holmes wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan fielded armies of hundreds of thousands of men, all equipped with swords. I guess if you totalled the weight on metal on them, you could cobble together a battleship. But it's not really about quantity, more quality of the ore. And the point isn't about that. The point is that the constraint (bad ore quality) forced the Japanese to get better at metalworking. Resource constraints aren't as bad as we think, beca…

Hundreds of thousands? The battles I read about maybe reached tens of thousands, and who knows how many had swords. Even in Europe, a large part of the armies were peasants with whatever comes to hand. Their resource constraint on metals wasn't the ore, but the availability of the enormous quantities of wood required to process it.

Wikipedia says 400,000 samurai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai#:~:text=In%20the%20187....

Every Samurai had at least two swords. So at least a million swords. Let's say a sword weighs 1Kg, that's 1000 tonnes of steel. So probably not enough for a battleship, but maybe a small destroyer.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#266

Post by tsoukase » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

ninjamayo wrote: post #41

For anyone interested, this museum in Thessaloniki Greece: https://www.noesis.edu.gr/en/ancient-greek-technology/ has a lot of very interesting items. If you ever visit the city, worth going there. I was particularly impressed with Syracusia, the giant ship/castle designed by Archimedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia

Absolutely invaluable place for every age. A day full of experiences (technology, science, history...).

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#267

Post by toss1 » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

yyyk wrote: post #261

toss1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, this is a massive strategic blunder of historical scale. While the US and western countries are asleep at the switch and think that they are exploiting cheap Chinese labor, the Chinese have a 100- and 500- year plan and are exploiting our myopia for short-term profits to gain manufacturing expertise and military advantage. It may not be too late to reverse, but it is close. It is really the result of not thinkin…

>It is really the result of not thinking ahead and letting the business lobbies have what they want today There's a tendency in the West to airbrush history, and pretend that the opening to China was just a result of business lobbies. There was an intentional policy decision based on 'liberalization through trade' theory, which managed to be one of the most disastrous theories out there (far more disastrous than 2000…

YES, this is definitely a huge factor that I failed to mention - the concept that economic free(ish) markets are incompatible with authoritarianism and would lead to political freedom.

From a BBC article yesterday [0]:

"Indeed the US trade representative responsible for negotiating China's WTO deal, Charlene Barshefsky, told a Washington International Trade Association panel this week that China's economic model "somewhat disproved" the Western view that "you can't have an innovative society, and political control""

I can sort of see how the idea took hold, as the previous large authoritarian states in USSR and CCP had so dramatically and consistently underperformed (to be polite) the democracies that it would seem that the converse would be true, that economic freedom would force democracy.

So, ya, it would seem like a good hypothesis, but I sure wouldn't bet a lot on it without solid testing.

Yet, the political leaders all turned out to be fools and bet the entire future of democracy itself on that notion.

Then, combine that with the MBA idea that the only thing important is the ideas and management and trifling things like manufacturing can be outsourced to their cheapest locale and that manufacturing know-how, innovation, and supply chain control don't matter, and we've come to the brink of destroying the free world.

Now, we have a historical fight on our hands to recover from these blunders.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59610019

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#268

Post by lumost » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

anyfoo wrote: post #231

tzs wrote: post #67

I think we tend to underestimate what ancient technology could produce because we forget that in ancient times they often operated on longer timescales than we do. With our technology for example we could make all the parts for the Antikythera mechanism in a short time. The ancient Greeks definitely had no technology that would have allowed them to do that, so we see the existence of the Antikythera mechanism as a gr…

That some things in history took the span of multiple generations to finish was quite the revelation to me. The Cologne Cathedral took over 600 years to finish. As another example, this amusing video [1] tells the story of how King Louis XIV wanted a map of the entirety of his kingdom from Cassini, and how it was apparently Cassini's great grandson (4 generations over 120 years) who finally concluded the project. For…

The economic structures that incentivises this are also pretty mysterious.

Why does Cassini's child continue a project that they won't finish? why does King Louis XIV's successor continue funding it? Was the payment structure lump sump for 4 generations of work? or simply compelled labor?

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#269

Post by ch4s3 » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #241

ch4s3 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous. We're churning out new ideas in biotech, medicine, media, finance, automobiles, airplanes, batteries, some solar stuff, and on and on. We have a huge, dynamic economy that does a lot of things really well. We've uncovered some major issues in the last two years but we've done better I think than one might have expected under the circumstances. I think in particular the rapid development and product…

We are actually getting quite behind on some of that stuff that you mentioned. Boeing is a shell of it's former self, having been hollowed out by the financial types, and can't launch a new aircraft without killing hundreds or a new spacecraft without an order of magnitude more time and money vs SpaceX. China absolutely leads the world in solar cell production, and of course most critical microchip production is offs…

It isn't myopia at all to think that near term conventional large-scale nation-state warfare is unlikely. I'm well aware that industrial giants of the last half century aren't as dynamic as they once were, but it hardly matters. We have tons of talent and capacity, it isn't unlikely for newer and better companies to be built.

The only important thing where we seem to be at a serious disadvantage is in chip fab, but there are several companies looking to break ground on new facilities in the US in the next few years.

Trying to hand-wring over an unlikely war seems unproductive. There are two major powers today, and we have an extant model in living memory for how to keep tensions below a critical level. The Chinese plan to compete with the West via the Belt and Road initiative seems unlikely to lead to anything other than economic conflict.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#270

Post by n3dm » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #2

In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0... The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices.…

I was so intrigued by his videos, the story of the mechanism, that I went and saw the actual remains of it when I was overseas and in Athens. Chris tweeted a photo I took of it while I was there.