6 ms·

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 som

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.
    - hatefulheart 3mo ago
      This is a very cringe take. Me and OP aren’t super heroes, we can’t do what a team of talented individuals created even if that team existed many moons ago. That isn’t the point. We both questioned the tone and the conclusion of the comment.
    - vladms 3mo ago
      Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ? Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.
      - esikich 3mo ago
        Not really, at least not in this discussion. An assembly programmer gets logic gates, a C programmer gets assembly, etc etc. And each one can say to the one above "well you don't really get it if you can't bang out some meaningful work". Otherwise idk what we're even talking about here. Having a vague understanding of something isn't "knowing how it works".
        lelanthran 3mo ago
        Yeah, but if we use your criteria, people have to invent their own atoms out of individual electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc before you'd admit that "hey, they did build a compiler from scratch". I think a fair bar for "from scratch" is stopping at the point they need an expensive fab process (or how else will they reproduce the workings of semiconductors?)
        hparadiz 3mo ago
        Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137909101 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137909101 Explains how to build an 8 bit calculator with wires, switches, and light bulbs and then keeps on going.
  - bix6 3mo ago
    Name checks out
  - apsurd 3mo ago
    come on now. so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing. life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.
    - xpct 3mo ago
      > checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived What exactly about checking out makes it 'more living'? I sense a false dichotomy here
      - apsurd 3mo ago
        easy: we all need breaks. breaks are not bad. living doesn't only mean "doing actions"
        xpct 3mo ago
        I don't think OP argued for any type of relentless work.
- 8note 3mo ago
  how did you make the transistors? made your own vacuum chambers? i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do
  - OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
    We had a photolithography lab when I was at school. It's not that complicated to make a few npn transistors. The difficult part is doing it well.
- saulpw 3mo ago
  You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.
  - jjk7 3mo ago
    Yes, they taught that too.
  - vladms 3mo ago
    I have similar experience with the poster, and the way I read it is, "from the things I build here are some examples". I did learn about advanced physics topics that enable transistors, and even did some experiments, but for fundamental stuff you "don't build stuff". Did I do all physics or all electronic circuit design or all software stacks? Definitely not. But I spent 3 years learning (and building) about lots of stuff.
  - VorpalWay 3mo ago
    When I took software focused computer engineering around 2010, we still had courses that took us all the way down to transistors and even the physics of P and N junctions and how that applies to CMOS. (And even some basic analog electronics.) Did I end up an expert at those layers? Of course not, but I know the basics and I know enough that if I need to I know where to start learning more. Just like I wasn't a C++ or hard realtime expert after university either, but now a decade and a half later I am pretty good at those (and a bunch of other skills that ended up relevant to my line of work). Basically, none of the layers are "magic" to me. Even if I don't know the details of it, I know the general principle and I know I could learn more if I need it. (I think you naturally end up an expert at the layer(s) you work in, and the knowledge tapers off as you go down (or up) the stack. For example, I know a fair bit about how the CPU works (cache coherency, pipeline stalls etc), I can passably read x86 assembly, etc. Because they affect the layer I work at (hard realtime systems C++ and now also Rust). I know far less about web dev than hardware.)
    - rapidaneurism 3mo ago
- everyone 3mo ago
  Yes, thats exactly what uni is for.. To learn all those previous centuries of stuff before you can either start contributing to the corpus yourself, or go get a job (Where you will pick up more immediately useful stuff) We really dont understand how AI is working, even the earliest "genetic algorithms" could be incomprehensible, but computer systems in general, they're not really that complicated.. its like an audio mixing desk..it looks insanely complicated until you realise it's just the same few knobs repeated many times for many channels. High level languages, compilers, assembly, machine code, nand, mosfets. A single person really can understand it all.
AIorNot 3mo ago
Wait a second, its layers all the way down Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong) (ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Programmers https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program...) but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, various models, tokens LLMs etc all work so a new abstraction is born.. layers changes, nerds and ultra-specialist nerds will remain nostaliga is always for the last layer- the one you remembered from your teens and 20s.
- Insanity 3mo ago
  A (sad/funny) anecdote. Someone told me earlier this week "Not using a coding agent today is like using Vim for development instead of an IDE, you're just lagging behind". As someone who's been exclusively using Vim for my development (and can definitely integrate it with AI workflows), that's just an insanely silly opinion. But I guess it shows how the next generation thinks about these tools that they've heard of but never actually bothered to learn.
  - dbalatero 3mo ago
    I just ignore people that can't coherently talk about the pros and cons of Vim.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  Script kiddies didn't look at the .bat files. They ran them without a clue how they worked. There was some respect for the people who wrote those scripts but none for users who couldn't write them
- hexasquid 3mo ago
  I expect 20 years from now there will be people reminiscing "remember claude.md? Back then we knew how it all worked. We had deep control. We counted tokens, chose the model..."
- aaroninsf 3mo ago
xpct 3mo ago
> Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works I'd say it's generally true that the majority of jobs of an era deal with a similar level of abstraction, and that's why most people stay on it. However, I frame this as being born with technical debt, and it's my obligation as an engineer to understand what the previous generations have built, and where it makes sense for me to work, directionally.
thinking_cactus 3mo ago
I think it's more that "Some human some time has known how it works", not that "Any given human knows how it (all) works.". But yea this glosses over a bit trial-and-error designs and, so to speak, "genetic optimization" kinds of designs where we just try random stuff and say "Hey, this works. Not sure why, but it works.".
- vitally3643 3mo ago
  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.
  - budman1 3mo ago
    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.
    - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
      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.
    - neerajsi 3mo ago
      I disagree. For example, the Wright brothers did air foil engineering empirically without full knowledge of the underlying fluid mechanics. Early and innovative engineering will often be less based on existing scientific or mathematical knowledge, while still using some of the methods. It's still absolutely defined as engineering.
    - ranger_danger 3mo ago
spacedcowboy 3mo ago
The level of abstraction when I started was that you had to solder the components (resistors, capacitors, chips - well IC holders, chips were expensive) to the PCB board - that was "building your computer", none of this nancy-boy rubbish of "plugging stuff together" with "slots that can only take one type of card". I'm fairly certain I know how it works. Being a physicist helps with the even-lower-level-details if you want to start talking about transistor doping, or electrical circuit theory, for example
staindk 3mo ago
I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.
  - mrob 3mo ago
    There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism. Only the former can be statistically modeled to characterize and work around the noise with any reliability. If you measure hallucination rate for one prompt it tells you nothing about hallucination rate for another prompt.
    - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism I think I agree, but could you expand? My point is humans have made progress on understanding systems without clean determinism. Genetics and cosmology is technically deterministic, practically speaking, but I don’t think that’s accessible to pre-modern societies. Instead, trends and tendencies were observed, acted and capitalized on.
      - mrob 3mo ago
        One big difference is the former doesn't "know" it's being experimented on. Gregor Mendel was able to grow large numbers of pea plants and identify patterns in their inheritance because the non-determinism followed consistent statistical laws. A plant can't suddenly decide to follow different laws of genetics because it saw a biologist. On the other hand, an LLM "knows" what a benchmark is, and is capable of detecting benchmark-like scenarios. A prompt that appears reliable in testing may fail unexpected in the real world. In this way, an LLM is like a stock market (also composed of intelligent agents): the act of experimenting on it changes its properties. Such systems are never reliably predictable.
Melatonic 3mo ago
I'm not sure that's true - you may be over generalizing Probably not many here know the processes needed to turn sand into silicon and the expertise needed for hand grinding fancy lenses used in lithography. But we do know those things are needed and the approximate philosophical concepts behind these needs. I think the danger comes when or if we fully automate a lot of the low level infrastructure tasks to the point where future generations do not even have the conceptual framework for how the tech they use is created
paxys 3mo ago
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe
OptionOfT 3mo ago
I agree, but having abstractions allow us to learn things in a system that are broadly applied. This is out the door for AI generated systems. Unless extreme care is taken there is is no consistency in these new-found codebases. New paradigms are introduced left and right, because in the eye of the LLM, and the prompter, they worked. It didn't matter that the same pattern was repeated 37 times in a slightly different manner. So your knowledge now is no longer portable. It used to be that you could look at code, and ask why? And usually (not always) the answer was something like: 'I tried x, y, and z, and those didn't work', either by past experience or current experimentation. (we could argue if the current experimentation should be documented). But for LLMs they put in something complex for no other reason than that it does what is requested. Reading a string from a valid source byte by byte until you hit \0 is valid, and it'll work. But if you take a step back at, read the API docs of what you're consuming, and then consider: if the API says X, why am I testing whether that's correct?
munk-a 3mo ago
Exactly, I find this sort of nostalgizing to be unhelpful. I am not _that_ old but I did cut my teeth on C++ and learned about manual memory management, programming language design and had a few (even at the time) esoteric courses about assembly language. I am not assembly fluent and have no desire to be - but getting an understanding of how higher level code compiles into lower level assembly/machine statements is invaluable to get a sense of how performance can be manipulated and the how impactful it can be to do "silly" things like unroll loops to minimize the number of instructions needed for some higher level operation. Issac Newton/Bernard of Chartres said we stand on the shoulders of giants and that allows us to see further afield but it also loses the detail of the ground beneath us - modern folks will no longer have the broad expertise that someone struggling through building a computer from transistors would gain through overcoming that[1], but we should learn about it academically to garner the bits of knowledge that remain salient. It is incredibly useful when experts in these highly specific fields have the communication skills and knowledge to share what is relevant to others without overwhelming them[2] with detail. 1. Real modern consumer grade computers are far too complex to understand fully without dedicating your life (or a significant portion of it) solely to that. It is more pragmatic to allow specialization and small realm expertise instead. 2. Of course, if you want to geek out and learn the minutiae that's awesome - but we can only geek so much in our limited time here.
ryandrake 3mo ago
In 50 years, Gen Z will be retired, and they're going to be complaining: "The new generations don't know how anything works! They don't know how to enter in a prompt or optimize token usage. They don't even remember what keyboards are! They just Neropath into the UltraMind and synthesize facts into their neurons without even putting them to words or reading anything. We have lost something critical!"
- lawrenceyan 3mo ago
  True

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.
  - hatefulheart 3mo ago
    This is a very cringe take. Me and OP aren’t super heroes, we can’t do what a team of talented individuals created even if that team existed many moons ago. That isn’t the point. We both questioned the tone and the conclusion of the comment.
  - vladms 3mo ago
    Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ? Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.
    - esikich 3mo ago
      Not really, at least not in this discussion. An assembly programmer gets logic gates, a C programmer gets assembly, etc etc. And each one can say to the one above "well you don't really get it if you can't bang out some meaningful work". Otherwise idk what we're even talking about here. Having a vague understanding of something isn't "knowing how it works".
      - lelanthran 3mo ago
        Yeah, but if we use your criteria, people have to invent their own atoms out of individual electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc before you'd admit that "hey, they did build a compiler from scratch". I think a fair bar for "from scratch" is stopping at the point they need an expensive fab process (or how else will they reproduce the workings of semiconductors?)
      - hparadiz 3mo ago
        Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137909101 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137909101 Explains how to build an 8 bit calculator with wires, switches, and light bulbs and then keeps on going.
- bix6 3mo ago
  Name checks out
- apsurd 3mo ago
  come on now. so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing. life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.
  - xpct 3mo ago
    > checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived What exactly about checking out makes it 'more living'? I sense a false dichotomy here
    - apsurd 3mo ago
      easy: we all need breaks. breaks are not bad. living doesn't only mean "doing actions"
      - xpct 3mo ago
        I don't think OP argued for any type of relentless work.
8note 3mo ago
how did you make the transistors? made your own vacuum chambers? i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do
- OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  We had a photolithography lab when I was at school. It's not that complicated to make a few npn transistors. The difficult part is doing it well.
saulpw 3mo ago
You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.
- jjk7 3mo ago
  Yes, they taught that too.
- vladms 3mo ago
  I have similar experience with the poster, and the way I read it is, "from the things I build here are some examples". I did learn about advanced physics topics that enable transistors, and even did some experiments, but for fundamental stuff you "don't build stuff". Did I do all physics or all electronic circuit design or all software stacks? Definitely not. But I spent 3 years learning (and building) about lots of stuff.
- VorpalWay 3mo ago
  When I took software focused computer engineering around 2010, we still had courses that took us all the way down to transistors and even the physics of P and N junctions and how that applies to CMOS. (And even some basic analog electronics.) Did I end up an expert at those layers? Of course not, but I know the basics and I know enough that if I need to I know where to start learning more. Just like I wasn't a C++ or hard realtime expert after university either, but now a decade and a half later I am pretty good at those (and a bunch of other skills that ended up relevant to my line of work). Basically, none of the layers are "magic" to me. Even if I don't know the details of it, I know the general principle and I know I could learn more if I need it. (I think you naturally end up an expert at the layer(s) you work in, and the knowledge tapers off as you go down (or up) the stack. For example, I know a fair bit about how the CPU works (cache coherency, pipeline stalls etc), I can passably read x86 assembly, etc. Because they affect the layer I work at (hard realtime systems C++ and now also Rust). I know far less about web dev than hardware.)
  - rapidaneurism 3mo ago
everyone 3mo ago
Yes, thats exactly what uni is for.. To learn all those previous centuries of stuff before you can either start contributing to the corpus yourself, or go get a job (Where you will pick up more immediately useful stuff) We really dont understand how AI is working, even the earliest "genetic algorithms" could be incomprehensible, but computer systems in general, they're not really that complicated.. its like an audio mixing desk..it looks insanely complicated until you realise it's just the same few knobs repeated many times for many channels. High level languages, compilers, assembly, machine code, nand, mosfets. A single person really can understand it all.

AIorNot 3mo ago

Wait a second, its layers all the way down Exactly, I'm over 50 and I remember all the complaints about script kiddies who looked at windows bat files as opposed to all the 'real programmers' who knew C and Assembly and used VIM and linux (which is still going strong) (ie https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Programmers https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/378:_Real_Program...) but now also as an AI engineer we have to learn how harnesses, sys prompts, various models, tokens LLMs etc all work so a new abstraction is born.. layers changes, nerds and ultra-specialist nerds will remain nostaliga is always for the last layer- the one you remembered from your teens and 20s.

Insanity 3mo ago
A (sad/funny) anecdote. Someone told me earlier this week "Not using a coding agent today is like using Vim for development instead of an IDE, you're just lagging behind". As someone who's been exclusively using Vim for my development (and can definitely integrate it with AI workflows), that's just an insanely silly opinion. But I guess it shows how the next generation thinks about these tools that they've heard of but never actually bothered to learn.
- dbalatero 3mo ago
  I just ignore people that can't coherently talk about the pros and cons of Vim.
bluGill 3mo ago
Script kiddies didn't look at the .bat files. They ran them without a clue how they worked. There was some respect for the people who wrote those scripts but none for users who couldn't write them
hexasquid 3mo ago
I expect 20 years from now there will be people reminiscing "remember claude.md? Back then we knew how it all worked. We had deep control. We counted tokens, chose the model..."
aaroninsf 3mo ago

xpct 3mo ago

> Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works I'd say it's generally true that the majority of jobs of an era deal with a similar level of abstraction, and that's why most people stay on it. However, I frame this as being born with technical debt, and it's my obligation as an engineer to understand what the previous generations have built, and where it makes sense for me to work, directionally.

thinking_cactus 3mo ago

I think it's more that "Some human some time has known how it works", not that "Any given human knows how it (all) works.". But yea this glosses over a bit trial-and-error designs and, so to speak, "genetic optimization" kinds of designs where we just try random stuff and say "Hey, this works. Not sure why, but it works.".

vitally3643 3mo ago
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.
- budman1 3mo ago
  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.
  - drdexebtjl 3mo ago
    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.
  - neerajsi 3mo ago
    I disagree. For example, the Wright brothers did air foil engineering empirically without full knowledge of the underlying fluid mechanics. Early and innovative engineering will often be less based on existing scientific or mathematical knowledge, while still using some of the methods. It's still absolutely defined as engineering.
  - ranger_danger 3mo ago

spacedcowboy 3mo ago

The level of abstraction when I started was that you had to solder the components (resistors, capacitors, chips - well IC holders, chips were expensive) to the PCB board - that was "building your computer", none of this nancy-boy rubbish of "plugging stuff together" with "slots that can only take one type of card". I'm fairly certain I know how it works. Being a physicist helps with the even-lower-level-details if you want to start talking about transistor doping, or electrical circuit theory, for example

staindk 3mo ago

I do think there's something to be said for the big difference in the current abstraction layer jump - the loss of determinism. It is meaningfully different.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
Plenty of physical (and biological) processes are subjectively non-deterministic outside clean rooms. Doesn’t mean our ancestors couldn’t forge and selectively breed.
- mrob 3mo ago
  There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism. Only the former can be statistically modeled to characterize and work around the noise with any reliability. If you measure hallucination rate for one prompt it tells you nothing about hallucination rate for another prompt.
  - JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > There's a big difference between "deterministic + noise" non-determinism and "intelligent agent" non-determinism I think I agree, but could you expand? My point is humans have made progress on understanding systems without clean determinism. Genetics and cosmology is technically deterministic, practically speaking, but I don’t think that’s accessible to pre-modern societies. Instead, trends and tendencies were observed, acted and capitalized on.
    - mrob 3mo ago
      One big difference is the former doesn't "know" it's being experimented on. Gregor Mendel was able to grow large numbers of pea plants and identify patterns in their inheritance because the non-determinism followed consistent statistical laws. A plant can't suddenly decide to follow different laws of genetics because it saw a biologist. On the other hand, an LLM "knows" what a benchmark is, and is capable of detecting benchmark-like scenarios. A prompt that appears reliable in testing may fail unexpected in the real world. In this way, an LLM is like a stock market (also composed of intelligent agents): the act of experimenting on it changes its properties. Such systems are never reliably predictable.

Melatonic 3mo ago

I'm not sure that's true - you may be over generalizing Probably not many here know the processes needed to turn sand into silicon and the expertise needed for hand grinding fancy lenses used in lithography. But we do know those things are needed and the approximate philosophical concepts behind these needs. I think the danger comes when or if we fully automate a lot of the low level infrastructure tasks to the point where future generations do not even have the conceptual framework for how the tech they use is created

paxys 3mo ago

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe

OptionOfT 3mo ago

I agree, but having abstractions allow us to learn things in a system that are broadly applied. This is out the door for AI generated systems. Unless extreme care is taken there is is no consistency in these new-found codebases. New paradigms are introduced left and right, because in the eye of the LLM, and the prompter, they worked. It didn't matter that the same pattern was repeated 37 times in a slightly different manner. So your knowledge now is no longer portable. It used to be that you could look at code, and ask why? And usually (not always) the answer was something like: 'I tried x, y, and z, and those didn't work', either by past experience or current experimentation. (we could argue if the current experimentation should be documented). But for LLMs they put in something complex for no other reason than that it does what is requested. Reading a string from a valid source byte by byte until you hit \0 is valid, and it'll work. But if you take a step back at, read the API docs of what you're consuming, and then consider: if the API says X, why am I testing whether that's correct?

munk-a 3mo ago

Exactly, I find this sort of nostalgizing to be unhelpful. I am not _that_ old but I did cut my teeth on C++ and learned about manual memory management, programming language design and had a few (even at the time) esoteric courses about assembly language. I am not assembly fluent and have no desire to be - but getting an understanding of how higher level code compiles into lower level assembly/machine statements is invaluable to get a sense of how performance can be manipulated and the how impactful it can be to do "silly" things like unroll loops to minimize the number of instructions needed for some higher level operation. Issac Newton/Bernard of Chartres said we stand on the shoulders of giants and that allows us to see further afield but it also loses the detail of the ground beneath us - modern folks will no longer have the broad expertise that someone struggling through building a computer from transistors would gain through overcoming that[1], but we should learn about it academically to garner the bits of knowledge that remain salient. It is incredibly useful when experts in these highly specific fields have the communication skills and knowledge to share what is relevant to others without overwhelming them[2] with detail. 1. Real modern consumer grade computers are far too complex to understand fully without dedicating your life (or a significant portion of it) solely to that. It is more pragmatic to allow specialization and small realm expertise instead. 2. Of course, if you want to geek out and learn the minutiae that's awesome - but we can only geek so much in our limited time here.

ryandrake 3mo ago

In 50 years, Gen Z will be retired, and they're going to be complaining: "The new generations don't know how anything works! They don't know how to enter in a prompt or optimize token usage. They don't even remember what keyboards are! They just Neropath into the UltraMind and synthesize facts into their neurons without even putting them to words or reading anything. We have lost something critical!"

lawrenceyan 3mo ago
True