Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

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Reminds me of similar concerns around understanding our infrastructure systems and the built environment.

In the Industrial Revolution through New Deal days, innovations were coming and going, and novel and exciting for the time, but still based on simple enough principles that most people understood the basics of the emerging technologies even if they had to be reminded of the dangers. Nowadays I imagine it'd be hard for someone to give a cogent answer to the question "where does your trash go when the garbage people pick it up?"

This isn't to promote some "kids these days" narrative but rather to help us understand how layers of complexity and nuance are added on top of existing technologies relatively quickly.

Simple, effective systems are attractive because they can be comprehended. Complex, gargantuan systems are attractive because of the monumental amounts of resources they can coordinate.

Still, as then, it is today a civic duty to understand your contributions to the systems you inhabit and to act as a good faith steward for the sustainability and efficacy of those systems.

To me one of the biggest changes was LPs and then CDs to flash drives for portable data storage (now just cloud). With an LP you can actually see the grooves and how the stylus rides in it. You can hear the vibrations, if you listen closely, and imagine how the sound is recorded (even for stereo). With CDs you can still see the diffraction patterns and grooves, even if it takes a microscope to spot the little pits and the little lasers are invisible, and there was a metaphor to LPs (where for a short time there were laser stylus as well).

Now it's just black boxes. Shove it in and magic happens. You're not going to figure out a multilayer high density flash even if you have an ion beam cutter and an electron microscope. Your best bet is figuring out the electrical protocol on the USB, though with multi-level differential embedded clock 40Gb/s links that's almost hopeless. I feel a bit sad for those just learning how things work. Software is the only system "simple" enough to wrap your head around, and that has just allowed the actual implementations to be ever more complex.

But isn't most hardware today defined using "software", with desired logic coded in Verilog or VHDL and then just realized using billions of tiny transistors?

I’m a senior citizen and I couldn’t enjoy the end of LPs and cassettes fast enough. LPs scratched and skipped and wore down. Cassettes stretched and broke and wore down. I thrill to the idea that I can get a perfect rendition of the bits every time (modulo lossy compression or poor remastering).

I don't think anybody's disagreeing that you get better audio reproduction and less fragility from CDs. Just that they aren't learnable or hackable, and learners and hackers lose something (something separate, and maybe even less valuable, than audio reproduction but still something of value)

The abstraction of individual contributions is problematic when you end up with huge swathes of rent extraction justified by capitalist meritocracy. As a society, we don't need so many (any?) of our best and brightest wrangling zero-sum financial algorithms, yet that's where we are. These very clever people basking in their smug wealth whilst the poors outside actually dig up the streets to repair the water mains or produce the food they eat.

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