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We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

unmitigatedrisk.com

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Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#31

Post by krunck »

> Destin pointed them at NASA SP-287, a document the Apollo engineers wrote and left behind specifically so the next generation wouldn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch. The title is “What Made Apollo a Success.” It has been sitting there, public, for decades. Most of the people in that room had not read it.

> The principle at the center of that document is blunt:

> “Build it simple and then double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.”

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#32

Post by D13Fd »

SirFatty wrote: post #28
ekelsen wrote: post #27

Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing! Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.

You're wrong.

It's hard to even tell any more. So many people are using AI that even the non-AI-using people are starting to write like that.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#33

Post by bluGill »

krunck wrote: post #31

> Destin pointed them at NASA SP-287, a document the Apollo engineers wrote and left behind specifically so the next generation wouldn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch. The title is “What Made Apollo a Success.” It has been sitting there, public, for decades. Most of the people in that room had not read it. > The principle at the center of that document is blunt: > “Build it simple and then double up on a…

> double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.”

This is bad advice for a rocket where we are already on the edge of what is even possible. If earth had just a little more gravity it wouldn't be possible to escape our gravity well to a moon. Good engineering is a lot more complex than that simple little advice and a good engineer should already know all the ways that advice is wrong in the real world.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#34

Post by bluGill »

rawgabbit wrote: post #23
oersted wrote: post #20

I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software. We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore. From day one I had…

React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust were deterministic programming languages; they did exactly what the developer specified. With Claude Code, they are semi-independent non-deterministic agents; they are more like consultants that the developer manages. The fact that they tend to generate verbose code which overwhelms the developer's ability to review is also troubling.

When they generate such code I hit delete and start over. I mostly don't have a problem understanding the code that Claude writes (or whatever AI I'm using today - my company keeps changing what they want me to use). It sometimes takes some time to figure it out, but it isn't any worse than figuring out what other programmers have written.

I do however need several rounds of "review this code", and pointing out trivial details that are wrong, before it is worth me trying to figure out the big picture.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#35

Post by cadamsdotcom »

ekelsen wrote: post #27

Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing! Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.

Sorry but your comment is off topic and not in the spirit of discussing the article, hence my downvote.

I’m sure you’re otherwise a lovely human, but man.. you gotta move on from this.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#36

Post by WillAdams »

bluGill wrote: post #21
WillAdams wrote: post #10

Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the backgrou…

Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn. There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer,…

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46019429

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#37

Post by ekelsen »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #35
ekelsen wrote: post #27

Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing! Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.

Sorry but your comment is off topic and not in the spirit of discussing the article, hence my downvote. I’m sure you’re otherwise a lovely human, but man.. you gotta move on from this.

It's absolutely a discussion of the article. It's literally about how it was written.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#38

Post by ekelsen »

SirFatty wrote: post #28
ekelsen wrote: post #27

Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing! Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.

You're wrong.

I'm willing to bet hard money.

I went to some of the oldest writing on the blog, the style is completely different.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#39

Post by ekelsen »

D13Fd wrote: post #32
SirFatty wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong.

It's hard to even tell any more. So many people are using AI that even the non-AI-using people are starting to write like that.

Read the entries in the blog that predate AI, the style is very clearly different.

I would be shocked if someone consciously or unconsciously adopted AI style so perfectly so quickly. Changing your style is not easy and if you're capable of it, probably this is not the style you'd pick.

Re: We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

#40

Post by mikewarot »

bluGill wrote: post #33
krunck wrote: post #31

> Destin pointed them at NASA SP-287, a document the Apollo engineers wrote and left behind specifically so the next generation wouldn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch. The title is “What Made Apollo a Success.” It has been sitting there, public, for decades. Most of the people in that room had not read it. > The principle at the center of that document is blunt: > “Build it simple and then double up on a…

> double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.” This is bad advice for a rocket where we are already on the edge of what is even possible. If earth had just a little more gravity it wouldn't be possible to escape our gravity well to a moon. Good engineering is a lot more complex than that simple little advice and a good engineer should already know all the ways that advic…

It's not bad advice, it's Great advice. If you're at the leading edge of any technology, you haven't had decades of experience to fall back on to characterize the components involved in the configuration to which they'll be applied. All sorts of new problems cropped up once everything was in space. Clean metal surfaces spontaneously weld, for example.

You obviously have to be well aware of the tyranny of the rocket equation, but you really shouldn't use that as an excuse to try to trick your way around problems in clever ways that are likely to cascade into mission failure and possible cost of the crew at the first little anomaly.

You can't just pull over to the side of the road in aircraft, and space is even more unforgiving. There's nothing to stand on to lever against. Even a slow accumulation of sweat can drown you if you're not careful.

Keep It Simple and Stupid is the bedrock of good engineering.

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