Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.
I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn’t boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn’t anything too important on it that I hadn’t backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the “black box” nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn’t turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to “fix” including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there’s zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn’t work, trash it.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
The author’s take is detached from reality, filled with hypocrisy and gatekeeping.
It absolutely is nostalgia talking. Yes your TI-99 fires up immediately when plugged in, and its old. However my Commodore 64 of the same era risk being fried because the 5v regulator doesn’t age well and when fails dumps higher voltage right into the RAM and CPU. Oh, and c64 machines were never built with overvoltage protection because of cost savings. So don’t confuse age with some idea of golden era reliability. RAM ICs were also regularly failed in those age of computers. This is why you had RAM testing programs and socketed ICs. When was the last time, Mr author, you had to replace a failed DIMM in your modern computer?
By that logic, even the TI-99 he’s loving on is just a fancier ENIAC or UNIVAC. All technology is built upon the era before it. If there was no technological or production cost improvement, we’d just use the old version. Yes, there is a regular shift in computing philosophy, but this is driving by new technologies and usually computing performance descending to be accessibly at commodity pricing. The Raspberry Pi wasn’t a revolutionary fast computer, but it changed the world because it was enough computing power and it was dirt cheap.
I agree, there is something appealing about it to you and me, but most people don’t care…and thats okay! To them its a tool to get something done. They are not in love with the tool, nor do they need to be. There were absolutely users of TI-99 and C64 computers in the 80s that didn’t give two shits about the shift register ICs or the UART that made the modem work, but they loved that they could get invoices from their loading dock sent electronically instead of a piece of paper carried (and lost!) through multiple hands.
Mr. author, no one is stopping you from using your TI-99 today, but in fact you didn’t use it to write your article either. Why is that? Because the TI-99 is a tiny fraction of the function and complexity of a modern computer. Creating something close to a modern computer from discrete components with “part numbers you can look up” would be massively expensive, incredibly slow, and comparatively consume massive amounts of electricity vs today’s modern computers.
Ugh, this is frustrating. Do you think a surgeon understands how a CCD electronic camera works that is attached to their laparoscope? Is the surgeon un-educated that they aren’t fluent in circuit theory that allows the camera to display the guts of the patient they’re operating on? No, of course not. We want that surgeon to keep studying new surgical technics, not trying to use Ohm’s Law to calculate the current draw of the device he’s using. Mr author, you and I hobby at electronics (and vintage computing) but just because its an interest of ours, doesn’t mean it has to be of everyone.
Such gatekeeping! So unless you know the actual engineering principles behind a device you’re using, you shouldn’t be allowed to use it?
Innovation isn’t just creating new features or functionality. In fact, most I’d argue is taking existing features or functions and delivering them for substantially less cost/effort.
As I’m reading this article, I am thinking about a farmer watching Mr. author eat a sandwich made with bread. Does the Mr author know when to till soil or plant seed? How about the amount of irrigation Durum wheat needs during the hot season? How about when to harvest? What moisture level should the resulting harvest have before being taking to market or put in long term storage? Yet there he sits, eating the sandwich blissfully unaware of all the steps and effort needed to just make the wheat that goes into the bread. The farmer sits and wonders if Mr author’s next article will be deriding the public on just eating bread and how we’ve forgotten how to grow wheat. Will Mr Author say we need fewer people ordering sandwiches and more people consulting US GIS maps for rainfall statistics and studying nitrogen fixing techniques for soil health? No, probably not.
Perhaps, but these simple solutions also can frequently only offer simple functionality. Additionally, “the best engineering solutions” are often some of the most expensive. You don’t always need the best, and if best is the only option, then that may mean going without, which is worst than a mediocre solution and what we frequently had in the past.
The reason your TI-99 and my c64 don’t require constant updates is because they were born before the concept of cybersecurity existed. If you’re going to have internet connected devices they its a near requirement to receive updates for security.
If you don’t want internet connected devices, you can get those too, but they may be extremely expensive, so pony up the cash and put your money where your mouth is.
It is a machine of extremely limited functionality with a comparably simple design and construction. Don’t think even a DEC PDP 11 mainframe sold in the same era was entirely known by a handful of people, and even that is a tiny fraction of functionality of today’s cheap commodity PCs.
Take off the rose colored glasses. It was made as a consumer electronics product with the least cost they thought they could get away with and have it still sell. Sales of it absolutely served quarterly revenue numbers even back in the 1980s.
We don’t need most of these consumer electronics to last. Proof positive is the computer Mr. author is writing his article on is unlikely to be an Intel based 486 running at 33Mhz from the mid 90s (or a 68030 Mac). If it still works, why isn’t he using one? Could it be he wants the new features and functionality like the rest of us? Over-engineering is a thing, and it sounds like what the author is preaching.
Apologies if my post turned into a rant.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
“Opinionated” is another term - for friendliness and neutrality. Complaining about reality means a degree of detachment from it by intention.
When was the last time, Mr commenter, you had to make your own furniture because it’s harder to find a thing of the right dimensions to buy? But when that was more common, it was also easier to get the materials and the tools, because ordering things over the Internet and getting them delivered the next day was less common. In terms of managing my home I feel that 00s were nicer than now.
Were the centralized “silk road” of today with TSMC kicked out (a nuke, suppose, or a political change), would you prefer less efficient yet more distributed production of electronics? That would have less allowance for various things hidden from users, that happen in modern RAM. Possibly much less.
I think their point was that there’s no architectural innovation in some things.
Maybe those shifts are in market philosophies in tech.
There’s a screwdriver. I can imagine there’s a fitting basic amount of attention a piece of knowledge gets. I can imagine some person not knowing how to use a screwdriver (substitute with something better) is below that. And some are far above that, maybe.
I think the majority of humans is below the level of knowledge computers in our reality require. That’s not the level you or the author possess. That’s about the level I possessed in my childhood, nothing impressive.
It would seem we are getting a better deal from the same amount of energy spent with modern computers then. Does this seem right to you?
It’s philosophy and not logic, but I think you know that for getting something you pay something. There’s no energy out of nowhere.
Discrete components may not make sense. But maybe the insane efficiency we have is paid for with our future. It’s made possible by centralization of economy and society and geopolitics, which wasn’t needed to make TI-99.
A surgeon has another specialist nearby, and that specialist doesn’t just know these things, but also a lot of other knowledge necessary for them and the surgeon to unambiguously communicate, avoiding fatal mistakes. A bit more expense is spent here than just throwing a device at a surgeon not understanding how it works. A fair bit.
Why not:
Such respect! In truth, why wouldn’t we trust students to make good use of understanding of their tools and the universe around them, since every human’s corpus of knowledge is unique and wonderful, and not intentionally limit them.
Is change of policy innovation? In our world I see a lot of that. Driven by social and commercial and political interests naturally.
A basic touch on your thoughts further is supposed to be part of school program in many countries.
Does more complex functionality justify this? Who decides what we need? Who decides what is better and what is worse?
This comes to policy decisions again. Authority. I think modern authority is misplaced, and were it not, we’d have an environment more similar to what the author wants.
Not all updates are for security. And an insecure device still can work years after years.
Willpower is a tremendous limitation which people usually ignore. It’s very hard to do this when everyone around doesn’t. It would be very easy if you were choosing for yourself without network effects and interoperability requirements.
So your argument for me doesn’t work in your favor, when looking closely. (Similar to “if you disagree with this law, you can explain it at the police station”.)
There’s a graphical 2d space shooter game for PDP-11. Just saying.
Also on its architecture some Soviet clones were made, in the form factor of PCs. With networking capabilities, they were used as command machines for other kinds of simpler PCs, or for production lines, and could be used as file shares, IIRC. I don’t remember what that was called, but the absolutely weirdest part was seeing in comments people remembering using that in university computer labs and even in school computer labs, so that actually existed in the USSR.
Kinda expensive though, even without Soviet inefficiency.
Yes, which leads to different requirements today. This doesn’t stop the discussion. That leads it to the question what changed. We are not obligated to take the perpetual centralization of economies and societies like some divine judgement.
Who’s we? Are you deciding what will Intel RnD focus on, or what will Microsoft change in their OS and applications, or what will Apple produce?
Authority, again.
Yes. It still works for offline purposes. It doesn’t work where the modern web is not operable with it. This in my opinion reinforces their idea, not yours.
These are my replies. I’ll add my own principal opinion - a civilization can be as tall as a human forming it. Abstractions leak, and our world is continuous, so all abstractions leak. To know which do and don’t for the particular purpose, you need to know principles. You can use abstractions without looking inside them to build a system inside an architecture, but you can’t build an architecture and pick real world solutions for those abstractions without understanding those real wold solutions. Also horizontal connections between abstractions are much more tolerant to leaks than vertical ones.
And there’s no moral law forbidding us to look above our current environment to understand in which directions it may change.
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I came here to post a screed a bit like this, but you did it so eloquently I don’t have to, so thanks! A perfect take, imo.
BorisBoreUs@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
I like a lot of your responses. I agree about nostalgia being a main driver of his article. However, i think the bits about how a doctor needs to know how a medical tool functions etc, is a little misplaced. I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user. I ALSO think the author would prefer more broad technical literacy, but his core arguement seemed to be that those making things dont understand the tech they’re built upon and that unintended consequences can occur when that happens. Worse, if the current technology has been abstracted enough times, eventually no one will know enough to fix it.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Just to make sure I’m following your thread of thought, are you referring to this part of the author’s opinion piece or something else in his text?
“This wouldn’t matter if it were just marketing hyperbole, but the misunderstanding has real consequences. Companies are making billion-dollar bets on technologies they don’t understand, while actual researchers struggle to separate legitimate progress from venture capital fever dreams. We’re drowning in noise generated by people who mistake familiarity with terminology for comprehension of the underlying principles.”
Pichu0102@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
There’s also that things have shrunk enough and that takes more precision and specialized tools to repair. And there’s also that some people, myself included, have absolutely no business messing around with capacitors and the like. It is just not everyone’s skillset, and that’s okay, we live with other people who cover what our personal skills don’t, and it comes with very lethal consequences if messed up. Which is also another reason that companies don’t like people tinkering with the insides of things; electricity does not care who you are and if not respected it can and will kill you, start a fire, etc. It’s one of the reasons companies don’t like people messing with the insides of electronics; bad PR and lawsuits if someone gets hurt.