16 ms·

We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

• raffraffraff 3mo ago
  Try getting a Linux laptop to just go to fucking sleep and not drain it's battery flat within a few hours, and wake up without losing wifi.
• HoldOnAMinute 3mo ago
  I wanted things to be a little easier, but not this easy
• babakzy 3mo ago
  probably, simply not. People be working on physical things managed by AI!
• Lwerewolf 3mo ago
  Modding communities are still going. Kids, afaik, are still playing around with hosting minecraft servers or whatever is en vogue/cool/meta/etc nowadays. DIY 8-bit computers are gaining popularity. IMO the fact that something's become very mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's been watered down for everybody. There will always be people with various levels of curiosity and enthusiasm.
  • hootz 3mo ago
    Yeah, I don't think human curiosity can be extinguished. It can be disincentivized, yes, but not extinguished. Nerds will always be nerds.
  • raxxorraxor 3mo ago
    I think so too. The others were already lost when smartphone replaced computers for the casual user. Although I could imagine never having invested in software development if an agent could just have solved my problems. Same with learning an instrument. Very slow progress to what an AI can do today. And for most pop songs you cannot even claim that it copied more than the other generic pop songs. Yes, if you cannot trim the code, there is a complexity barrier you won't march through.
• bambax 3mo ago
  We always were the only people who ever knew how it worked. In 1990 people fellow students called me to fix their computer, they had absolutely no idea how any of this worked. No. Idea. Yes, the machine was being difficult; but their reaction wasn't to fight it, or understand it. It was to call someone to do it in their stead. I'm not sure things are very different now.
  • dbalatero 3mo ago
    Maybe the difference is more of the professionals in the field now haven't built that same muscle, as there's a broader group of people working in tech. Whereas the folks that could fix things in the 90s mainly gravitated to computers as a profession. Just random musing though I truly don't now.
  • tacostakohashi 3mo ago
    I feel that things are pretty different. Although the example of interrupts and jumper settings being common knowledge is a bit of a stretch... it's still amazing to recall that MS-DOS was regarded as an end-user / consumer OS, and that, more generally, it really was regarded as totally normal to need to invest some time in learning about the system, files, directories, typing, configuring/customizing settings and network options just to be able to do what you wanted to do. I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
      Compare with what the drivers/operators of the earliest automobiles were expected to know vs. what the same category of people are expected to know today. There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.
      • mghackerlady 3mo ago
• Stefan-H 3mo ago
  There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the computing environment, instead they operate now at the highest levels of abstraction we are capable, so called "natural language". "The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium. You only ever know the things that you can lose to." We who grew up in this era formed a hands-on engineer's knowledge of these systems, built from experience and practice, learning these layers of abstraction as the bleeding edge developed. Many these days have entered into a world where there are easy answers abound, they just might not be right, and one has to gauge how much they care about correctness.
  • dan-bailey 3mo ago
    This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.
    • mdavidn 3mo ago
      Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
      • Folcon 3mo ago
        I keep coming back to the idea of taking that concept and just running with it, IE building up a toolchain alongside some concrete tasks to solve with it and just adding more detail until we reach a reasonably sophisticated level I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like
• tor0ugh 3mo ago
  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 content, curated interfaces - everything that resembles some kind of hardship ironed out in thousand steps of iterations to appease the market which means the lowest common denominator. But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
    > It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile. We could do this forever.
    • zormino 3mo ago
      This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.
      • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
        The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift
        • jjk7 3mo ago
          (in recent memory). Surely the industrial revolution was a much larger disruption.
• bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  > 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 they always will, by their very nature), you need someone with actual knowledge to be able to recognize the BS and correct it. But we are losing the knowledge, and unless things change we will be no better off than the people in dystopian sci-fi stories who pray to the machine god because nobody knows how it actually works.
  • arm32 3mo ago
    I'm sure this comment will get buried, but I wholeheartedly agree with your take.
  • Ekaros 3mo ago
    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 saying "Please" will sometimes produce wrong output. and other times you must not use it... Sounds like absolutely horrifying dystopia.
    • smsm42 3mo ago
      Welcome to the future. Make no mistakes.
    • recursive 3mo ago
      Communing with the machine becomes spiritual. Computer operators will become a priesthood.
  • thewebguyd 3mo ago
    Imagine if we had LLMs back then to write xorg.conf for you and it hallucinated the modeline and you blew up your monitor.
• CPLX 3mo ago
  Who cares? There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC. Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code. As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing. Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide. The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles. So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.
  • yiggnewer 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • smsm42 3mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
• nobodyandproud 3mo ago
  It doesn’t have to be this way, but the cost is performance (and falling behind competitors).
• fritzo 3mo ago
  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.
  • antisthenes 3mo ago
    > "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude. What absolute nonsense. To openly admit to be proud of one's ignorance.
  • seethishat 3mo ago
    Obviously no one knows every detail all the way down the stack. It's not possible, but having some level of understanding of how a system operates is useful especially if you ever have to fix it yourself or explain why/how it is broken.
  • bluefirebrand 3mo ago
    > "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.
    • tines 3mo ago
      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.
  • Dylan16807 3mo ago
    It's not hard to understand the physics and fabrication. The rest of that isn't part of how a computer works.
    • kzrdude 3mo ago
• pram 3mo ago
  "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
  • spankibalt 2mo ago
    The average user didn't have "to mess much" with that in DOSland either. Most of that is just false memory. IRQ settings? Pffft. Cards came factory-configured to a default that was then detected by the setup routine of any game coded in a merely competent enough fashion. And you were free to change the jumper config on the card... which obviously meant you had to change it accordingly in a game's (or application's) setup config. It's all in the manual. Et cetera. That indeed teached you at least a modicum of working basic literacy of how some of the systems in your computer worked. Back then, I never heard PC people bitching about these trivialities. That came much later, often in form of lamentations of still bitter Amiga nerdlingers, confused "retro" gamers, or (other) computer illiterates.
  • thewebguyd 3mo ago
    Yeah same. I remember playing a bunch of Sierra games on my first PC as a kid on either. Most I had to deal with was installing the drivers for my SoundBlaster card from the included disk. Most I dealt with was putting in the CD, double clicking the installer and entering the product key. That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
  • fusslo 3mo ago
    Anecdotally, I think it depends on age and family more than anything. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, games because we couldn't afford anything new. Started with win98 and games from the mid 90s, but running them in 2002. I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
• Finnucane 3mo ago
  This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.
• nostrademons 3mo ago
  This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939. I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes. I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to. It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.
  • bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
    > And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to. people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.
• throeei4 3mo ago
  > The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. Maybe. But I think competence is the part that’s fine. > knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amazing and how Linux sucks. Kids like that in 1990ties would buy expensive consoles, and would not deal with hack PC's to get free games. Many people today are still dealing with cheap shitty hardware, 7 years old Android phones and sketchy ROMs... Just because there is no other option! https://unix.foo/posts/it-will-never-be-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop/ https://unix.foo/posts/it-will-never-be-the-year-of-the-linu...
  • klibertp 3mo ago
    That other post is just plain wrong. LLMs are just about the only thing that can meaningfully benefit from having access to almost all the code your environment is built from. If you're on Linux, the agents not only have all that code accessible in web search, but also almost certainly include most of it in their training data. If anything, agents are an opportunity for the "Linux year on the desktop". Granted, I don't personally believe Linux needs to have that year; it's just fine without any mass adoption there. It's simply no longer that important a segment. I thought most of the debate around that also died out years ago (perhaps even a decade?) Still, I recently had the opportunity to compare how Codex configures macOS and Fedora for the same task, and the latter was a bit faster and significantly cheaper (in tokens). That's obviously anecdata - maybe the particular task was overrepresented on one side or something - but I wouldn't be surprised if this was a more general trend.
• CommieBobDole 3mo ago
  The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without having to unlearn a lot of what we know now. I'm old enough to see this process in action; I used to be young and in possession of esoteric knowledge that made me infinitely in demand and now most of the things that young people have esoteric knowledge about is things that I don't particularly care about, and I'm left with a lot of finely honed skills to solve problems that have mostly been abstracted away.
  • 101008 3mo ago
    > The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that professionally). The same about algorithms, databases, and a lot of things. But now I find it valuable and thankful that my professors (and whoever designed the career) considered important topics that I had to lear.
    • hatefulheart 3mo ago
      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.
      • esikich 3mo ago
        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 to say that I know how it all works.
• jldugger 3mo ago
  Paging Vernor Vinge to the white courtesy phone.
• kaonwarb 3mo ago
  I resonate with every example given - setting jumpers by hand, sound card interrupts, autoexec.bat. I'm also a happy user of LLMs and agents. This article captured for me what is lost - which, as others point out, has long since been lost, if ever had, in other fields (e.g. modern cars vs. the Model T). I wouldn't go back, but I can still have a sense of loss. Beautiful writing.
• steelframe 3mo ago
  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 network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication). With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing. The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter. Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.
  • switchbak 3mo ago
    The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works". I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
    • jjk7 3mo ago
      Nobody has time anymore to read a textbook.
• bknight1983 3mo ago
  I wouldn't calling it learning more and more like "cycling through SoundBlaster DMA and IRQ options until the sound work". Still, there was an intrinsic curiosity that isn't as prevalent.
• Terr_ 3mo ago
  I worry less about whether people know how it all works. I worry more about whether people care and consider it a problem when nobody knows.
• agentultra 3mo ago
  “The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.” I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals. You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results. And this degrades with compression and time. There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”
• jtwaleson 3mo ago
  I've been thinking that there might not be new programming languages. The amount of code in the current popular ones will explode, so that's what all LLMs will be trained on. Good luck coming up with a new language and getting enough content out there that LLMs will be fluent with it. If true, I think that's a shame. There's plenty of innovation still to be done.
  • legobmw99 3mo ago
    How pessimistic you are on this subject depends on how much you believe in domain transfer for these tools. No programming language sprung out of a vacuum, and it seems reasonable to think that a LLM sufficiently trained on all the C++, Haskell, and OCaml in the world could probably do a decent job at writing Rust, even if it had never seen it before, given the rust compiler as a tool and rust documentation as input It certainly does worry me, though. As does the increasing amount of materials and manuals that seem to be written assuming the LLMs will be the (only? primary?) audience
    • klibertp 3mo ago
      > How pessimistic you are on this subject depends on how much you believe in domain transfer for these tools. I tried to force various LLMs to generate many strange languages for the past 3 years. From Raku to Smalltalk, to Common Lisp and Janet, to Prolog, D, Nim, Zig, Elixir, F#, etc. It's a mess. They do a mostly good job with language semantics. Agents can also use standard tooling to catch and fix syntax errors. So far so good, though if a given language provides an unusual implementation for a popular feature, the model can get confused. It's usually easy to spot. The problem is with the ecosystems. They tend to be tiny, and for new languages, they will be tiny almost by definition. As a result, the vast majority of the generated code either reimplements things from scratch or hallucinates dependencies. Since the agents iterate and the hallucinated deps don't materialize, the model fixes that... more often than not by writing from scratch. Or leaving a `// TODO:` comment. What I found helpful is straight-up vendoring deps as submodules. Armed with grep and sources, they are much more likely to produce working code. But that also means you still need to handle the dependencies yourself, while it'll "just work" for a Kotlin/Gradle project. It doesn't matter for all projects to the same degree, of course, but it is a pain point that will add to the difficulty (sky-high already) of a new language getting any traction, unfortunately :(
• deleted 3mo ago
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• jdw64 3mo ago
  [dead]
• baconmania 3mo ago
  Folks who keep mentioning that this is no different than any previous upward leap of abstraction in human history are missing a key point that the frontier labs are certainly not missing: this is the first time in computing that you are becoming completely dependent on a _subscription service_. I don't need to know how my CPU works because it continues to work once built. Once I outsource all cognition to a billable service, I am forever and continuously in thrall to someone else's revenue strategy.
  • felix-the-cat 3mo ago
    But this too shall pass, it used to be you were dependent on a subscription to just have access to a computer itself (mainframe) and now we all have one in our pockets. I’m sure some day we will be able to run something as good as Claude at home.
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  Two thoughts: 1: This is why I prefer console games. I just want to have fun without fighting with the machine. 2: There are plenty of people who appreciate old techniques and methods; and keep them alive. Think of going to a museum and seeing someone demonstrate an old craft or reenact how a craftsman did their job. For example, in my town there is an old, water-powered corn mill that still runs and sells corn meal.
• andai 3mo ago
  @ryancbriggs - 18 Oct 2024 > When I was young I fixed my parents’ computer and now that I’m older I fix computers for my kids. Are we the only generation that knows how computers work? https://x.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844 https://x.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844 https://xcancel.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844 https://xcancel.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844
  • WJW 3mo ago
    No, that person is just the only one in his family who knows how computers work. There's plenty of people in generations both older and younger that know too, just apparently not his parents or his kids. Some of the most impressive assembly written today is by people younger than 20. It'll be fine.
    • mywittyname 3mo ago
      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 it's a skill which needs to be taught.
      • Legend2440 3mo ago
        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.
        • StanislavPetrov 3mo ago
          >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.
• bT3xgGVF 3mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Bough_Breaks_(Star_Tr...
  • hootz 3mo ago
    Amazing how we always have a Trek episode for everything.
• daverol 3mo ago
  I'm still nostalgic for the times when I had to enter the bootloader using the keys on front panel of the PDP-11 to then loaded the OS from paper tape. (not to mention multi pass compilers using paper tape between the phases...)
• c7b 3mo ago
  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".
  • matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    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.
    • c7b 3mo ago
      Desire to learn is deeply ingrained in humans and hard to root out. The education system does a pretty good job at it, unfortunately, but nothing ever is 100% effective.
  • phainopepla2 3mo ago
    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.
• Brendinooo 3mo ago
  >What is dying is acquaintance. The plain, unglamorous intimacy of having fought a particular machine, and lost, and gone back, and finally felt the thing give. I think this is a universal feeling that accompanies any technological innovation. My phrasing is that new technology unbundles the thing people want from the craft that was formerly required to get it; any craft requires someone to learn and achieve through struggle.
• eric_pro 3mo ago
  Yes, it was not easy to install and play a game on the computer in the 90's. Today, we also don't want to wait for the game to boot.
• docproof 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• conartist6 3mo ago
  Competence Does Not Mean What You Think it Means. Please don't fucking tell people that AI is competent. It is not and it cannot ever be because it is not alive.
  • CharlesW 3mo ago
    AI can't be a competent person, but inanmate things can be competent. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/competence https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/competence
    • conartist6 3mo ago
      I disagree wholeheartedly. I do not give a fraction of a flying fuck what MW thinks competence is. I'm a goddamn engineer and I know what it means
      • recursive 3mo ago
        If you use your own definition for words, don't be upset when there's confusion about what they mean when you try to communicate.
        • conartist6 3mo ago
          Sure, but don't think I'll be impressed by pedantry when there is no real doubt what I mean.
• kjs3 3mo ago
  The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. I dunno. I suspect it'll be slightly different in the OSS world[1]. There will be some folks who can climb down there and fix it, but since that skill is no longer valued (as in, being able to do that isn't valued by most users now, much less in some hypothetical future). And they will be expected to do that, now, without thanks. And when they say "I'm too old for this shit...you can go pound sand" because this was one unpaid insult too many, users will shrug their shoulders and load windows or buy a mac because those companies are paying & tasking people to keep things running. And by inches oss ceases to be a thing. [1] Yes, I know there are many oss devs who get paid for their work. Many critical contributors do not.
• roywiggins 3mo ago
  A shame that Pangram flags this as AI. https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-026956f08bc3 https://www.pangram.com/history/c0a9cde2-7a5c-4588-83a3-0269...
  • hackmack10 3mo ago
    Damn, that is depressing. What a shitshow we've created.
  • cylo 3mo ago
    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.
    • blks 3mo ago
      “Pure AI” so you haven’t used any LLM at all, or just partially?
    • no_multitudes 3mo ago
      It is interesting that your recent posts have much more LLM style tics than your post on the same site from 2023. Are you deliberately imitating LLM writing quirks?
      • MajesticHobo2 3mo ago
        Why does it have to be deliberate? It's not surprising that people exposed to output from LLMs will unconsciously pick up their linguistic habits.
        • no_multitudes 3mo ago
          Maybe it isn't deliberate! I was asking out of curiosity. This reads as extremely LLM-y to me, so if it was purely human-written I am curious about the process.
• mohamedkoubaa 3mo ago
  Some of the best systems programmers are under 20 years old what do you mean
• pseudosavant 3mo ago
  I can't help but think this type of step function change has happened with computers before. The change from punch cards to magnetic storage certainly made it so you didn't have to "know how it works" for every single bit. The change from machine code to a language like Fortran brought about such an abstraction that a Fortran dev didn't "know how it works" at that same level anymore. At this point, the layers of abstractions between using a React component and something being rendered is immense. React VDOM, the real DOM, browser render engine (which sits on abstractions like ANGLE, skia, etc), calls OS APIs, which call driver APIs, and the lowest level of anything it is still C/C++ that is compiled (abstracted) to something closer to what the hardware expects. I won't bore you with the ChatGPT output details, but it estimated at least 35 meaningful layers of abstraction between a React component and being rendered to the screen. LLMs seem to be the latest level of abstraction to make it so we "know how it works" less than before.
  • legobmw99 3mo ago
    It's hard to articulate why, but 35 layers of deterministic abstraction feels very different from 1 layer of nondeterministic one. In particular, I think every developer has experienced the need to jump "down the stack" to debug or understand something (even if not all the way down). Certainly, I think any senior developer should be at least conversant in the first few levels below wherever they "live". But this seemingly ends up looking fundamentally different in the interaction mode of an LLM, because you'd just ask it to jump down the stack for you
    • pseudosavant 3mo ago
      I still see this more like there will be "devs" that only know how to use LLMs and not any layer under it. Just like there were web devs that only knew jQuery but not any actual JS. Game devs that know only Unreal Engine or Unity but nothing about DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan. C/C++ devs that know nothing about LLVM IR or the actual bits their compiler generates. It can also be a poor understanding of the layers in the abstractions above you too. I find a lot of value in being able to understand levels beneath the layer I'm mostly working in. There are things, even/especially with LLMs, that I can grasp because of my deeper understanding. But there have been plenty in our field that have only known their level of the abstraction for quite a long time. Every time there is something introduced that lowers the barrier to entry to making things, there is a version of this "but they don't know how it really works..."
• VorpalWay 3mo ago
  > They will have a tool that does everything and asks for nothing, and they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about. Oh come on! Of course I wondered how a light switch work, and I then learnt. I remember taking apart broken electronics as a kid, and that later morphed into also trying to repair things. Including the computer (both hardware and software wise). I remember ending up reinstalling the OS so many times as a kid on the computer I had access to when I broke it in various ways past what I was able to fix. Sure, not everyone will have that drive to understand how the world around them works under the hood. But for engineers and scientists I would expect a far higher percentage to have that sort of personality. It doesn't matter if it isn't "pushing back", just that I don't understand it is enough to catch my interest and a reason to go poking at the thing.
  • Andrex 3mo ago
    The thing is, yes it will still happen, but at substantially decreased rate. Groups of people banding together to solve a problem or figure a solution will slowly stop forming. Everyone will be out there learning just for themselves. The collective knowledge of people will likely ebb. Things will be different and individuals will have to adapt.
    • VorpalWay 3mo ago
      There is a lot of useful information on how things work out there, if you want to learn. YouTube videos took the place of popular science magazines largely, and perhaps it will be some different medium tomorrow. But the knowledge is there, and just like in the past you have to go and look for it, just in different places. There are also still courses you can take to learn practical skills, I for example took a short blacksmithing course a few years ago. A lot of fun and way harder than it looks (at least if you want to get good at it, my goal was just to give it a try and have fun, and 5 evenings was enough for that).
• deweywsu 3mo ago
  I may not be a "typical" engineer as much anymore, in that I don't seem to be excited by knowing the intricate details of how things work as much as I enjoy knowing the capabilities of the systems that enable the projects I work on, and working at a higher level that might be more abstract and conceptual. AI enables that very well in that it enables jumping between paradigms and enabling creativity by removing a lot of the grind that was necessary in gathering technical details. I find it less appealing now to get into the weeds of how a thing works, even though at 10 I very much did. Like the author, I dug into the details of exactly which bits needed to be activated to make a particular program work. But as I aged, I was drawn to higher levels of abstraction, I think because I realized I could do more overall by piecing together bigger blocks. Yet I know colleagues who like to be involved in a very granular level of detail. I have many friends who almost revel in their knowledge that they are the ones who know precisely why something works the way it does. I think about the story of the NASA engineer on the Apollo 11 program who understood the assembly so well that he could confidently answer on the spot the moment the radar overload "1201 alarm" error flashed that the mission was still good to go. Some folks get so deep in this perspective that it almost seems like an affront to suggest they may be wrong about one of those details. And well they should, because precise people are very much needed to understand intricate systems. But it makes me wonder how they feel with AI being an indeterminate system - one where you can never really know what the answer will be every time. Likely still correct, and getting better every day, but also possibly different every time. Added to that, it's exponential spread across the software engineering domain. For me, even as someone who likes high-level systems, I still relate to the feeling that the detailed part of me that still likes some of the internals may be less focused on in the future. Even for me that's kind of sad. But I am also curious about my colleagues who are super detail oriented - how do you feel about AI and how it changes the focus on that detail aspect?
• watmm 3mo ago
  People nerd sniping the op add nothing of value to the discussion. Take a break from HN if you’re just going to shitpost.
• throawayonthe 3mo ago
  > The machine was made of edges and you cut yourself on them, and that is how you found out where they were > ...having fought a particular machine, and lost, and gone back, and finally felt the thing give mayhaps this is because our computing paradigms are stuck in the 70's
• Bender 3mo ago
  This and it was demonstrated in Star Trek The Next Generation: Season 1 Episode 17 "When The Bough Breaks" [1]. They did not know how to fix their computer system or even where it resided. It did everything for them but was also killing them and making them sterile. There was nobody left to figure this out until the Enterprise crew happened along. This could happen on Earth. Who will save us? [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWyKQThSKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WWyKQThSKg
• flax 3mo ago
  Gee, I sure hope pump 6 never fails.
• cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
  Why do you have to know how the whole thing works? You can know how your entire farm’s water system works. But a city? Somewhere in between those extremes, you just have to let go.
• nemo136 3mo ago
  This is also a fear I have, I am answering it with building bigger things with AI: what I loose in expertise in the details, I gain in the pleasure of architecturing bigger things.
• mikewarot 3mo ago
  >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. If this were only about competence, it would be the most secure moment in the history of computing. Obviously this person doesn't have enough experience with the current crop of AIs. This is the exact reason why we should be concerned in the first place. Someone has to design and build the next version of everything, and AI isn't qualified to do the job, and might never be. >What is dying is acquaintance. The plain, unglamorous intimacy of having fought a particular machine, and lost, and gone back, and finally felt the thing give. This is true. But then again, who among us had to get up in the middle of the night, and trudge out to an outhouse? Who had to shovel a bit more coal into the furnace? Who had to pump water, and heat it on the stove? Who had to split wood, and stack it for the winter? There are many, many things we're no longer acquainted with, and that's sad, but still ok. What's not ok is losing the competence required to maintaining the infrastructure and supply chain supporting society and civilization.
• woodruffw 3mo ago
  > You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them. Sometimes you built a boot disk for a single game. A floppy whose entire reason to exist was to start the computer in the configuration that one program demanded. Is the premise here correct? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a 1990s computer user who knew how to edit autoexec.bat or insert a floppy to boot their computer "knew how it worked" in a meaningful sense. The stack of abstractions is deeper now, and all indications suggest it's not going to stop deepening. But I think the abstractions were already quite deep by the 1990s. (I think the classic error here is a demographic one: computer nerds always poke through abstractions, because they do it for fun. I don't think that's going to stop, anymore than web browsers stopped people from writing kernels. If anything, we write more low-level code than ever, because access to the prerequisite knowledge is less gatekept than before.)
  • Rekindle8090 3mo ago
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  • sublinear 3mo ago
    This isn't said enough. The most vocal demographic on HN right now is not the nerds. The entrepreneurs and grifters are desperate to find footing somewhere. They continue to double down on the alleged impact of "AI" and are now asking that their followers remember the moments they are most nostalgic for, assume everyone else was doing what they were back then (fumbling and confused), and ignore all the rest of history.
• causality0 3mo ago
  When I was young I was so naïve. The whole world seemed to be barreling straight towards the things I liked and was interested in. Every year there were more and more nerds, more people with computers, more people playing video games. It felt so much like I was the future, that in a couple of decades everyone would be chit-chatting about what was coming, buying and comparing devices, etc. I could not have conceived that people younger than me would have less computer knowledge than me. If at twenty you had told me that I would wake up one day and teenagers no longer knew what a file extension is I would've asked you who won World War 3.
• kev009 3mo ago
  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 computers worked, and I don't intend that to be particularly pejorative, it's just that it's been somewhat easy to carve out a niche doing something to do with programming while having little understanding of the small or big picture.. all heuristics and applying working patterns.. for a few decades. You can still understand whatever you want, today, with added tools. It's just a choice to turn your brain on or off. I think LLMs are perfectly fine as a learning tool to interrogate a subject, do comparatives, and then formalize your understanding by reading the sources. At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.
  • doitLP 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • kev009 3mo ago
      Sure, humans are attracted to laziness by default and at its best technology must be used to lower toil and suffering (unfortunately there are unintended consequences etc for philosophical debates). The bigger issue with brain rot is attention spans. Social media has ruined attention spans.
• overgard 3mo ago
  This might just be a personality trait of me, but I really like technology that's transparent enough that I can fix/modify/understand it. Opaque technology gives me an ick. It's not really a complexity thing -- Linux has this property of being transparent even though it's extremely complex. The way he describes old computers.. man, I loved that about them, there was nothing _secret_ going on, you weren't worried about telemetry or weird background processes. Then again, I still drive a manual transmission internal combustion car in 2026, so maybe I don't represent the world. Then again, maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel. Even though AI boosters kind of annoy me, I do appreciate that they're tinkering and hacking and working to understand the technology on some level. I think there's always going to be some small number of people that are like this, in the same way there are still people that look at disassembly and understand CPU caches.
• charcircuit 3mo ago
  There are more important battles for humanity to fight than someone trying to figure out how to configure Linux correctly for their hardware. I won't miss the need to waste time fighting the computer going away.
• buescher 3mo ago
  Just wait until they shred all the old useless books
• no_multitudes 3mo ago
  >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.
  • maciekkmrk 3mo ago
    We have very different perception of the same shared reality. I read the entire blog post and it didn't cross my mind that it was AI written.
  • busymom0 3mo ago
    Hmmmm, I didn't read that as AI. What gives?
    • b40d-48b2-979e 3mo ago
      Perhaps that's a you issue? but it has tells all throughout the text.
      • busymom0 3mo ago
        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.
        • no_multitudes 3mo ago
          > "they will be as easy with it as you are with the light switch you never once thought about." This metaphor doesn't really feel coherent. > "What is dying is acquaintance." This is a very odd topic sentence. > "The kids coming up will not feel this as a loss, and they are not wrong not to." Claude loves stacking big piles of negatives and arguing both sides of everything. > "I went looking the other night for a recording of a modem connecting. People keep them around like pressed flowers." No they don't?? People don't keep recordings of modems connecting around like pressed flowers. I, of course, understand that this is a simile. The simile just does not make sense. > "I played one back for no reason except to hear it." Again, note the unnecessarily florid negative phrasing. It would be much more parsimonious to write "I played one back just to hear it" > "I know that sound by heart. People will never know the machine that just played the sound back to me. Not the way I knew the one that used to make it." > "The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium." The X -was- the Y, twice in short succession, to say the same thing.
• adverbly 3mo ago
  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.
• blks 3mo ago
  With how seriously rise of LLMs damages schools and university education, and thus next generation of comp sci graduates, at least we can hope to secure our arcane knowledge jobs for long.
• obloid 3mo ago
  >To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked. As someone who played plenty of computer games as a teen in the 90s I assure you that I did not know how it worked. I learned how it worked later when I got a CS degree at university. Following the instructions from the booklet that came with the game may have helped me to get it working, but there was minimal understanding.
• sublinear 3mo ago
  Does anyone have a list of all the times this sentiment has been incorrect over the decades? There's no arguing down that we have a greater amount of information about old hardware and software easily available now compared to back then, and there are many more enthusiasts as well. This kind of cognitive dissonance has been going on in other disciplines, like music, since their inception. Guess what? There's thousands of highly talented young people on social media covering it all. What people are actually upset about is that there isn't new "old stuff" and they can't make money off what can now be thoroughly understood by anyone. Don't get me wrong, AI is a total shitshow and we're entering another winter, but there's also no reason to be jealous of what is making money right now.
• ars 3mo ago
  I recently had a run-in with security restrictions at work that only blocked the abstraction layer at the top, and were utterly surprised to discover that if you go down one level none of their restrictions did anything. They eventually decided to keep their head in the sand and pretend like their restriction was useful. The issue was a complete lack of knowledge of how the system actually worked one layer down.
• firefoxd 3mo ago
  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.
• stevage 3mo ago
  >The modem sang its negotiation out loud, and that shriek was two machines arguing about how to speak to each other, and after enough times you could hear when the argument was going south and the call was about to drop. You set little jumpers on drives with your fingernail. You knew which interrupt your sound card answered to, because if you guessed wrong it answered to nothing. The machine was made of edges and you cut yourself on them, and that is how you found out where they were. Wow. I had literally all of these experiences. I remember how you used to have to remember the Sound Blaster interrupt settings and pass them to any game that used it. And I'd completely forgotten about IDE jumpers, but yep - how fiddly it was when you wanted to put 4 hard drives in the same computer, figure out which were slaves and masters, etc etc.
• beej71 3mo ago
  The thing that freaks me out about "the end of programmers" is that we're going to introduce a knowledge gap. And I'm unaware of any knowledge gaps in anything else we do. For any technology we use, we have humans who can work together to build it from dirt. When no one knows how to program the tools that we rely on to fly our passenger planes, drive our cars, and manage our bank accounts, what happens when the LLM gets it wrong?
• DicIfTEx 3mo ago
  I think back to this 2019 talk about software engineering by Jonathan Blow, entitled ”Preventing the Collapse of Civilization”, more and more often lately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
• deleted 3mo ago
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• bigggbob 3mo ago
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• SenseOfIrony 2mo ago
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