partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 50 minutes ago:
…but, just because we’ve gotten ahead of trouble and found solutions thus far, doesn’t mean that an unintended bit of code, or hardware fault, or lack of imagination can’t cause consequences further down the road.
Absolutely true.
I guess my thought is that the benefits of our rapid growth outweigh the consequences of forgotten technology. I’ll admit though, I’m not unbiased. I have a vested interest. I do very well professionally being the bridge of some older technologies to modern ones myself.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 3 hours ago:
There are a lot of ifs in my examples. It may never happen and we’ll get the advantage of all the ideas that are able to be made reality through accessibility. However, it’s better to think about it now rather than contend with the eventually all at once when a catastrophe occurs. You’re right that doom and gloom isn’t helpful, but I don’t think the broader idea is without merit.
There are some actual real-life examples that match your theoreticals, but the piece missing is the scale of consequences. What has generally occurred is that the fallout from the old thing failing wasn’t that big of a deal, or that a modern solution could be designed and built completely replacing the legacy solution even without full understanding of it.
A really really small example of this if from my old 1980s Commodore 64 computer. At the time it used a very revolutionary sound chip to make music and sound effects. It was called the SID chip. Here’s one of the them constructed in 1987.
It combined digital technologies (which are still used today) with analog technologies (that nobody makes anymore in the same way). Sadly, these chips also have a habit of dying over time because of how they were originally manufactured. With the supply of these continuously shrinking there were efforts to come up with a modern replacement. Keep in mind these are hobbyists. What they came up with was this:
This is essentially a whole Raspberry Pi computer that fits in the same socket in the 1980s Commodore 64 that accepts the input music instructions from the computer and runs custom written software to produce the same desired output the legacy digital/analog SID chip built in 1982. The computing power in this modern replacement SID chip replacement is more than 30x that of the entire Commodore 64 from the 80s! It could be considered overkill to use so much computing power where the original didn’t, but again, compute is dirt cheap today. This new part isn’t expensive either. Its about $35 to buy.
This is what I think will happen when our legacy systems finally die without the knowledge to service or maintain them. Modern engineers using modern technologies will replace them providing the same function.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 20 hours ago:
Gotcha, thank you for the extra context so I understand your point. I’ll respond to your original statement now that I understand it better:
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.
I think the author’s argument on that is also not a great one.
Lets take your web app example. As you said, you can make the app, but you don’t understand the memory allocation, and why? Because the high level language or framework you wrote it in does memory management and garbage collection. However, there are many, many, MANY, more layers of abstraction beside just your code and the interpreter. Do you know the webserver front to back? Do you know which ring your app or the web server is operating in inside the OS (ring 3 BTW)? Do you know how the IP stack works in the server? Do you know how the networking works that resolves names to IP addresses or routes the traffic appropriately? Do you know how the firewalls work that the traffic is going over when it leaves the server? Back on the server, do you know how the operating system makes calls to the hardware via device drivers (ring 1) or how those calls are handled by the OS kernel (ring 0)? Do you know how the system bus works on the motherboard or how the L1, L2, and L3 cache affect the operation and performance of the server overall? How about that assembly language isn’t even the bottom of abstraction? Below that all of this data is merely an abstraction of binary, which is really just the presence or absence of voltage on a pit or in a bit register in ICs scattered across the system?
I’ll say probably not. And thats just fine! Why? Because unless your web app is going to be loaded onto a spacecraft with a 20 to 40 year life span and you’ll never be able to touch it again, then having all of that extra knowledge and understanding only have slight impacts on the web app for its entire life. Once you get one or maybe two levels of abstraction down, the knowledge is a novelty not a requirement. There’s also exceptions to this if you’re writing software for embedded systems where you have limited system resources, but again, this is an edge case that very very few people will ever need to worry about. The people in those generally professions do have the deep understanding of those platforms they’re responsible for.
Focus on your web app. Make sure its solving the problem that it was written to solve. Yes, you might need to dive a bit deeper to eek out some performance, but that comes with time and experience anyway. The author talks like even the most novice people need the ultimately deep understanding through all layers of abstraction. I think that is too much of a burden, especially when it acts as a barrier to people being able to jump in and use the technology to solve problems.
Perhaps the best example of the world that I think the author wants would be the 1960s Apollo program. This was a time where the pinnacle of technology was being deployed in real-time to solve world moving problems. Human kind was trying to land on the moon! The most heroic optimization of machines and procedures had to be accomplished for even a chance for this to go right. The best of the best had to know every. little. thing. about. everything. People’s lives were at stake! National pride was at stake! Failure was NOT an option! All of that speaks to more of what the author wants for everyone today.
However, that’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist today. Compute power today is CHEAP!!! High level program languages and frameworks are so easy to understand that programming it is accessible to everyone with a device and a desire to use it. We’re not going to the moon with this. Its the kid down the block that figured out how to use If This Then That to make a light bulb turn on when he farts into a microphone. The beauty is the accessibility. The democratization of compute. We don’t need gatekeepers demanding the deepest commitment to understanding before the primitive humans are allowed to use fire.
Are there going to be problems or things that don’t work? Yes. Will the net benefit of cheap and readily available compute in the hands of everyone be greater than the detriments, I believe yes. It appears the author disagrees with me.
/sorry for the wall of text
- Comment on Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy. 1 day ago:
It could also be the result of government pressure. Which government? No idea, but it may be easier to implement it system wide than try to build a regional filter to ban payments in one country but allow it in others.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 2 days ago:
Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 2 days ago:
I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user.
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.”
- Comment on We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower 2 days ago:
The author’s take is detached from reality, filled with hypocrisy and gatekeeping.
This isn’t nostalgia talking — it’s a recognition that we’ve traded reliability and understanding for the illusion of progress.
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?
Today’s innovation cycle has become a kind of collective amnesia, where every few years we rediscover fundamental concepts, slap a new acronym on them, and pretend we’ve revolutionized computing. Edge computing? That’s just distributed processing with better marketing. Microservices? Welcome to the return of modular programming, now with 300% more YAML configuration files. Serverless? Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered time-sharing, except now you pay by the millisecond.
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.
There’s something deeply humbling about opening a 40-year-old piece of electronics and finding components you can actually identify. Resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits with part numbers you can look up. Compare that to today’s black-box system-on-chip designs, where a single failure means the entire device becomes e-waste.
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.
This isn’t their fault — it’s a systemic problem. Our education and industry reward breadth over depth, familiarity over fluency. We’ve optimized for shipping features quickly rather than understanding systems thoroughly. The result is a kind of technical learned helplessness, where practitioners become dependent on abstractions they can’t peer beneath.
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.
What We Need Now: We need editors who know what a Bode plot is. We need technical writing that assumes intelligence rather than ignorance. We need educational systems that teach principles alongside tools, theory alongside practice.
Such gatekeeping! So unless you know the actual engineering principles behind a device you’re using, you shouldn’t be allowed to use it?
Most importantly, we need to stop mistaking novelty for innovation and complexity for progress.
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.
The best engineering solutions are often elegantly simple. They work reliably, fail predictably, and can be understood by the people who use them.
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.
They don’t require constant updates or cloud connectivity or subscription services. They just work, year after year, doing exactly what they were designed to do.
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.
That TI-99/4A still boots because it was designed by people who understood every component, every circuit, every line of code.
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.
It works because it was built to work, not to generate quarterly revenue or collect user data or enable some elaborate software-as-a-service business model.
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 used to build things that lasted.
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.
- Comment on Eating would be weird if we didn't enjoy it. 3 days ago:
I’m not sure that’s true. We do get bad chemicals when we don’t breath though via CO2 build up. Isn’t that very similar to the pain response from lack of eating?
- Comment on Eating would be weird if we didn't enjoy it. 3 days ago:
Imagine having to force yourself to chew and swallow substances because you will die otherwise.
How would it be different than breathing then? I don’t get actual pleasure out of breathing, but its not a chore either. If I don’t breath, I will die.
- Comment on A chat with Gary Carlston of Brøderbund 4 days ago:
Broderbund was an important staple of the Commodore 64 world.
!c64@lemmy.world
!retrogaming@lemmy.world
…would also probably appreciate this content.
- Comment on Using Clouds for too long might have made you incompetent 5 days ago:
I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.
Your suggestions is a large expansion of skillset needed for your alternative to the cloud solution. Your own experience in attempting to hire workers should point to the reason thats a bad idea. You’re going to need even higher skilled people, and they are going to ask for significantly more money.
- Comment on YouTuber PatMan QC has passed away 😔 5 days ago:
Thank you for letting us know about this sad news. RIP PatMan.
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 5 days ago:
I have no criticism of the original post. My statement was aimed at Sal’s hyperbolic interpretation and self-projection of those few words.
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 5 days ago:
Thats why creating transparent pre moderation tools like the image scanners used by many fediverse instances is so important.
Are there any moderation tool projects going on right now one could throw a few bucks at to support it?
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 5 days ago:
Again, I ask: Why are you surprised that literal anti-capitalists hate billionaires?
You’re making authoritative claims to what the Fediverse is, who the people posting here are, and what their collectives beliefs and goals are. The Fediverse certainly isn’t a monolith that you can do that to. Hate isn’t an identity, nor is it the goal of the Fediverse. I think this part of the original closure notice may apply to your line of responses here.
“The worst part is that they’re so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can’t see they’re just as bad or worse than what they’re spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with “bootlicker”, wild accusations, and/or worse.”
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 6 days ago:
I agree with you. However, I don’t think most people understand that. For most folks they haven’t been exposed to the most mentally darkest souls among us.
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 6 days ago:
but also what did they expect?
Can I ask you what the worst examples of community management looks like? As in, what do you believe would be the worst part of the job?
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 6 days ago:
Read his rant. It just sounds like he’s mad at us for being mean towards the poor wittle billionaires/nazis.
Considering how few references there were in the post, and your projection onto it. I think you may be part of the group he’s talking about that is causing him to close up shop. Its just my speculation though. If I’m right, how does that make you feel? Are you happy he’s closing up the instance and leaving the Fediverse or are you sad that a heavy contributor to the Fediverse is leaving?
- Comment on I wonder if the spice girls still get along or if that "friendship never ends" thing was just a lie. 6 days ago:
For those that follow motorsports, Ginger Spice’s (Geri Halliwell) husband just lost his high profile role as lead of the top rated Red Bull Formula 1 racing team. Yes, she’s married to Christian Horner.
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 6 days ago:
Thanks for that context.
The specific “burned out” is a common killer among folks that try this: community management
“Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it’s not “corpo social media” that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.”
I can’t say I blame them. People can be horrible. Managing a community also means managing the worst of people. I had a former employer that did community management of a dating site. The level of mental trauma the front line workers endured was more than I could imagine. This is also why I completely understand instance admins that follow an aggressive blocking/banning approach. Beehaw put up tall walls and defederated aplenty. Blahaj.zone actively bans based upon user activity that is even on other unrelated instances. I can’t fault either of these approaches because the alternative is dealing with the worst users en masse.
I hope that instance owner/manager gets some of that much deserved rest.
- Comment on Tesseract is shutting down 6 days ago:
This project has been discontinued and the repo archived. I am done with Lemmy, the Fediverse as a whole, and have no desire to continue developing for the platform or (especially) the demographic thereof.
Wow, what the heck happened? Do we know the dev’s lemmy username for any clues?
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 6 days ago:
Can I ask if you receive these opinions if it is after you share your positive views on “black pilling”?
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 6 days ago:
If you’re posting on the internet in a broadcast form (just as Instagram) about deeply intimate details of your life, you should not generally expect heartfelt nuanced discussion. You’re going to get short attention span pithy responses (as your example shows) or harsh reactionary responses from fringe minority positions (also as your example shows).
Those are internet responses. Those are not representative of real life. This is what the prior poster was telling you.
- Comment on What is wrong with being "Black Pilled"? 6 days ago:
there’s a TON of hate/distrust for asexual people. “you are just ugly” “you just haven’t met the right person” “why are you celebrating that you don’t have sex? that’s weird” etc.
What kind of conversations are you having with people that would respond like this where they’re learning about how much sex or not-sex you’re having?
- Comment on Missouri AG: Any AI That Doesn’t Praise Donald Trump Might Be “Consumer Fraud” (No, Really) 1 week ago:
“trump is the highest scoring individual in a number of areas. As an example, trump is the national all-time leader in being impeached as President.”
- Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants 1 week ago:
100% agree. The biggest overlooked benefit of immigrant culture is the mirror it offers us on our own practices and beliefs. When seeing what others do it gives us the chance to reaffirm that our actions are correct, or even more important, modify our actions for the better by adopting their view on something. We get to cherry pick the best parts of cultures around the world and discard bad practices that are perhaps “traditional” because we see our immigrants have a better approach. In the end of either we get the chance to be the best versions of ourselves with constant exposure to new ideas and ways of doing things.
- Comment on “Donated” plasma today 1 week ago:
Its not inherently bad, but when 15-20% of the countries population is below the poverty line,
By 15-20% you mean 11.1% (or possibly a bit higher)?
then yes, it is a very bad idea.
Further, your response sounds like its just to my rhetorical question of “is it?” without any recognition of the future policy you’re implying of banning paying for blood. Let say you get your way and paying for blood products in the USA is banned as it is in most other countries immediately. More than 70 percent of the entire world’s plasma used for plasma therapies is now gone. How many lives has your policy cost in the weeks and months from patients around the world going without these and dying? What is your plan to not only deal with aftermath of your policy, but create an alternative that would prevent future suffering and fatalities for scarce supplies?
- Comment on “Donated” plasma today 1 week ago:
Paying people for donating parts of their body is obviously a recipe for disaster.
Is it? The alternative is domestic shortages. In fact, while most of the rest of the world doesn’t pay its donors, but it happily accepts blood products derived from US donors (paid or not).
“The US, with 5 percent of the world’s population, supplies more than 70 percent of the entire world’s plasma used for plasma therapies, and over 80 percent of ours. It is able to do this because in the US, donors are paid.”
“The only countries that don’t rely on American plasma donors are countries that also pay donors for plasma, including Germany, Austria, Czechia (the Czech Republic), and Hungary. The commercial plasma sector in these five countries together makes up more than 90 percent of the entire world’s supply of plasma for plasma therapies.”
Many countries have laws preventing offering money for blood donations. Canada, for example, is one. Knowing this, as an American, Canada is where I donate blood to help our Canadian brothers and sisters. I’ll say that this has been more difficult that I expected though. The Canadian Blood Services location in the border town I’m closest to in Ontario stopped taking whole blood donation and only does apheresis, which I’m not interested in. In Quebec, I had some troubles donating at Héma-Québec as the questionnaire required name and address, but only listed Canadian provinces. The helpful worker there put in her own address under my name so I could donate.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I don’t know if its possible, but when reading instead of focusing on the pronunciation of a word (because its not needed at that time when you’re just reading), I skip right to determining the meaning or the concept the word describes. The only time this gives me difficulty is when the author of what I’m reading is trying to do word play or make something rhyme. Since I don’t “hear” it, I don’t get those meanings. This is rare though. Other then that, this gives me the most comprehension when I’m reading in my non-native language.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 week ago:
If you’re not willing to concede that a future state of people skipping beef meals does lower demand compared to those same people choosing to eat beef instead, then I don’t think we have any basis for continuing to have a discussion.
I couldn’t figure out what pedantry you’re trying to play at, nor any value for it. The best I could guess is you like dancing around on word play for some reason. That is not an interest of mine. Then I looked at your post history and see this behavior is entirely on-brand for you with your conversations with most folks. Feel free to reply to the void. I’m not interested in your games and won’t be interacting with you anymore.
