[HN Gopher] Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
___________________________________________________________________
Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
Author : pabs3
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-03-04 07:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (viznut.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (viznut.fi)
| grrdotcloud wrote:
| I am not sure when it happened but I discovered that every game I
| played over the last twenty years, reduced to it's bare minimum
| functional components, was aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and
| pressing the correct button within a time window.
|
| The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is
| often lost because the output does not last longer that the work
| required to generate.
|
| Computers are tools. They are used as toys, or at best,
| substitution of physical activities. Thankfully I only print
| paper twice a year. Yet why at all? Clearly I'm trusted enough to
| enter into a contract with companies yet can't be trusted to
| complete trivial tasks like sending a package without paperwork.
|
| I'm curious if we reserved computers for qualified owners and
| operators like firearms or vehicles. I personally would love to
| operate one but without certification or training the ability to
| have negative impact upon the population or needless self harm
| outweighs the enjoyment of <current popular social media app>
|
| I started driving at ten. I was also a teen with unfiltered
| internet over dial up but that isn't the same as personalized
| curated streaming video aligned to my habits or an exploitative
| corporate/State.
|
| If we can not determine when we're getting manipulated, can not
| agree on what truth is nor speak against the authority without
| being labeled an enemy how we can adapt as a people to the
| growing power of computers in every pocket?
| alar44 wrote:
| [dead]
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Sports are just a series of muscle contractions with timing;
| music is just different accelerations of the air; ... I think
| these statements, and yours concerning video games, are overly
| reductive.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct
| button within a time window
|
| Heroes of Might and Magic III are somewhat older than 20 years
| but they are super different than that.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Yeah I can think of a few games that this doesn't describe,
| Disco Elysium for example as it has nothing to do with
| "timing", as they have described it.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Reminds me of Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines
| nayuki wrote:
| > It is commonly thought to be futile to even try to make
| youngsters interested in computers - they simply don't yet have
| the required patience or concentration. There's no addictivity or
| instant gratification, nothing flashy or punk that fascinates the
| young mind. The appreciation and understanding of computers is
| something that develops slowly over years, often via gateway
| interests such as [...] pure mathematics. The kind of people who
| want to settle in a monastery and dedicate their lives to science
| or art may also develop an interest in computing.
|
| This part is already true about the study of theoretical computer
| science today. People view algorithm design, big-O, proofs,
| recursion, automata, Turing machines, etc. as a chore.
| satisfice wrote:
| This is a story, not a thought experiment.
|
| To be an experiment there must be some sort of question to
| explore, after specifying some sort of condition.
|
| This is a set of assertions from beginning to end.
| brazzy wrote:
| And half the assertions are at odds with what computers _are
| and can do_ rather than just our culture around them.
| lambdaloop wrote:
| All the comments here are so negative for such a beautiful essay!
|
| This paragraph at the end in particular really struck a chord
| with me:
|
| > In the real world, people associate computers with many
| different things: corporate dehumanization, overwhelming consumer
| capitalism, alienation from the material world, shortened
| attention spans, ridiculously short obsolescence cycles, etc.
| etc. It is often difficult to tell these cultural biases apart
| from the "essence" or computing, and it is even more difficult to
| envision alternatives due to the lack of diversity. Thought
| experiments like this may be helpful for widening the
| perspective.
|
| Computing is a fundamental part of the world and crazy exciting
| to play around with. It allows us to experience whole new
| spectrums of reality! At its core, isn't this the essence of the
| hacker ethos?
| rektide wrote:
| Strongly agree!
|
| This post so wonderfully blends a hypothetical with where we
| really are, what computing has in fact become. Computiung is in
| fact vanishing, hidden inside massive data centers (temples) &
| behind firewalls. Applications offer packaged consumer
| experiences, but actual computing recedes, gets further off, &
| few people experience it. Real connection to computing is slow
| & takes concentration & will to develop; it's not fast.
|
| This project to invert common conceptions actually reveals a
| lot of truth.
|
| The final summation is great.
|
| > _So, what is the "essence" of computing then? I'd say
| universality. The universality of computing makes it possible
| to bend it to reflect and amplify just about any kind of
| ideology or cultural construct._
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > It is commonly thought to be futile to even try to make
| youngsters interested in computers - they simply don't yet have
| the required patience or concentration.
|
| You say that, but I find it far easier to explain how to solve
| computer problems over the phone to older people than younger
| people.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I would just be happy if the circuit board in my furnace would
| last longer than 5 years and wouldn't cost 10x more to replace
| than it probably should.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| It's a good story but it kind of ignores something fundamental.
| Most early writing systems were created for accounting, like Bob
| gets 5 wheat, Doug gets 5 sheep, etc.
|
| In a world where computers are some ancient artifact, they would
| still have significant value as calculators and accounting tools.
| It's likely some scribe class would emerge around using them to
| manage the day-to-day of whatever social hierarchy is present.
|
| Visicalc will never die!
| thriftwy wrote:
| Make everyone a long-range telepath.
|
| You eliminate most of mundane uses of computers (such as
| Whatsapp, buying stuff and getting news) since you can almost
| immediately do this person to person.
|
| To use computers, you need to learn to read (most people can't),
| which is esoteric by itself. Computers are used to store
| knowledge too fragile to be transferred via pollination, and for
| computations. Obviously, you need a lot of concentration to use a
| computer in such a world, and will be considered loony.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Computers are seldom privately owned - they are considered
| essentially communal rather than personal
|
| This struck me as true of most people's use of computers now.
| Almost everyone I know who isn't either an old fashioned
| developer or a gamer uses a mobile phone or tablet merely as a
| graphical terminal; the actual computer is some mysterious entity
| elsewhere on the Net.
|
| The golden age of computing when 'everyone' had one of their own
| that was useable offline is now long past.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's "long past", but rather in its last gasps
| outside of niche hobbyist communities. There are plenty of
| people whose primary computer use is still local, they're just
| considered old-fashioned
| beardog wrote:
| Likewise Gen Z and Alpha are not very technical. Many teens and
| 20 somethings have a hard time with seemingly basic tasks like
| finding files. As a 20 something myself, my public school did
| not offer any 'technical' courses beyond office programs and
| keyboarding.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| In fairness, modern mobile devices seem to be determined to
| make how the filesystem works as opaque as possible.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Files and folders are based on a metaphor applying to
| paper-based organizational systems. People used to have
| typewriter printouts that they used to mark up by pen and
| place into folders, then file away into filing cabinets. Is
| there really a need for a filesystem other than in the
| vestiges of what we consider an operating system?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Each generation consists of roughly 90% of people who are
| completely clueless about anything computer related. Those of
| us that work in the field usually can't even conceive of it
| but it's true.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Replace 'computers' with 'open source software' and you are
| something closer to an uncomfortable truth. Open source has been
| critical to the advancement of our world but people who go out of
| their way to use and encourage open source past the basics (even
| fdroid or Firefox not even getting to hardware and full software
| stacks) are treated as oddballs even by the tech community.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Please enumerate the demonstrable advancements of society
| attributable to open source software.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Ok so gcc and Linux don't exist in your world.
| bee_rider wrote:
| They are just describing how computing works in an academic
| system if you've run out of HPC cluster credits and haven't
| gotten a grant for a new system recently.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| This kind of speculative fiction doesn't work. Usually the
| template is described as: take some part of the world and tweak
| it and then press play and see what the world looks like now.
|
| Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no
| sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective
| intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture
| which would preserve this property without asserting a global
| belief in the community isomorphic to the alteration. You haven't
| altered the culture. You'd just asserted a group of unthinking
| zombies.
|
| So when I read:
|
| > Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever
| you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient
| and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen,
| they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
|
| I can't conceive of such a world. Its incoherent. I also can't
| imagine a world where no one likes metals for whatever reason.
| You can't just assert a fact like that and press play. It's
| nonsensical.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| You're basically missing the whole point of speculative fiction
| in this style, which is "we start with imagining a world which
| has these conclusions. Trying to imagine it forces us to try to
| make sense of what could lead to those conclusions."
|
| You assert it's incoherent. That's part of the point: it's
| incoherent with your current understanding of our current
| world. There might be other circumstances that lead to a such
| world without being incoherent. If the conclusions in a piece
| of speculative fiction are appealing, it may be worth thinking
| of what it takes to reach those conclusions.
|
| The thought exercise of trying to make it coherent is part of
| the point.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The parent is describing an inductive approach to
| worldbuilding, while you are describing a deductive approach.
| Two sides of the same coin.
| gweinberg wrote:
| No, the point is it can't be done. It's like cleaning your
| house with an 100 year old tortoise: you absolutely would do
| that, if tortoises were plentiful and do a good job cleaning.
| Why would anyone clean their houses themselves, when there
| were all these old tortoises willing and able to do the job
| for them? Now if the tortoise moves all your crap around so
| you can't find it, leaves streaks on your mirrors and
| windows, fire his scaly butt!
| [deleted]
| sleepybrett wrote:
| This is not unlike the speculative future of Anathem.
| tobr wrote:
| Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the
| starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that
| someone would write a piece where computers were inherently
| old.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's
| one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso
| than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just
| asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world
| around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and
| history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools
| and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require
| a lot of changes. We've been automating, forgetting, copying,
| and maintaining technologies for as long as our history.
|
| Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for
| me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes
| sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would
| discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they
| didn't communicate regularly with.
| jhbadger wrote:
| To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the
| idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would
| posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a
| culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens,
| gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a
| different history and traditions than their own. Of course
| they, like many speculative writers today, were really
| writing about how they wished their own society worked.
| Jiro wrote:
| It's like asking "would you believe in homeopathy if doctors
| all told you that it was correct?"
|
| To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons.
| You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think
| without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is
| actually true, and that would be such a weird world that
| science in it would be unrecognizeable."
|
| (And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire
| question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I
| could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an
| incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful
| insights from it.")
| andai wrote:
| Expert prompt crafting!
| code_duck wrote:
| I got some pretty interesting sci-fi type results for that
| in Stable Diffusion. It helped to negative-prompt titles,
| text, words, etc
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I'm so mad you made this comment before me.
| [deleted]
| shagie wrote:
| A sci-fi magazine has cut off submissions after a flood of
| AI-generated stories -
| https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-
| chatgpt...
|
| > The science fiction and fantasy magazine _Clarkesworld_
| has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from
| writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-
| generated stories.
|
| > The magazine officially shut off submissions on February
| 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-
| chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.
| didericis wrote:
| It's not just speculative. It's a retrospective on the early
| mainframe era.
|
| The nitty gritty punch card programming was something
| stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early
| computers were massive and housed in what could be considered
| temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture.
| They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods
| of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large
| mainframe systems still exist today for that reason).
| Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would
| last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day
| using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on
| them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time
| meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language
| and meaning.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Step 1: for some reason, the world stops making computers, but
| keeps the ones that already exist
|
| Step 2: 100 years pass
|
| Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept
| going only by a small group of people who understand how to
| care for the machines.
|
| Was that so hard?
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you
| stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply
| not believable: a society that _has_ machines that could, at
| the minimum, help solving complex calculations and
| engineering problems much better than humans decides to
| completely ignore them. That 's not how societies work.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Step 1 and 3 are, arguably, quite probable to happen in the
| future. I don't think you're appreciating just how many
| circular dependencies we have in the global supply chains.
| We're one big cataclysm or global war to reverting back to
| _pre-industrial times_ , and if that were to happen, we'd
| likely be stuck there for quite a long time. Consider the
| following observations:
|
| A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve tooling and
| processes. This creates circular dependencies that make our
| civilization non-restartable.
|
| As a toy example, imagine we made tool A, which let us
| create tool B, which let us, among other things, upgrade A
| to A'. A' can still produce B, but can also produce
| upgraded B'. B' obviously lets us make A'', but also C',
| and A'' + C' let us make B''. Rinse, repeat for a hundred
| years. The result is that the whole industry relies on
| tools A'''''''''' and B''''''''''. The hobbyists still play
| with A and B, maybe even A' and B', but there's nothing
| between A' and A'''''''''' in actual use or production, nor
| anyone who remembers their design, because they've all been
| made obsolete long ago. If the calamity hits, and we can no
| longer make new A'''''''''' and B'''''''''', we don't get
| to downgrade a step or two - we go back all the way to A'
| and B'. And all the other tools and technologies that also
| relied on our advanced capacity - they all stop working and
| go "back to beginning" in lock step.
|
| B. Making and operating tools involves ever increasing
| energy use.
|
| C. We've used up all easily-available high-density energy
| sources long ago. Both our renewable tech and our fossil
| fuel mining and combustion processes are A''''''''''-level
| tech.
|
| With that in mind, it's not that big of a stretch to write
| a plausible backstory for a culture as described in the
| article.
| naravara wrote:
| I can imagine it, but it would require a lot of
| worldbuilding to explain.
|
| I reckon the primary means of computing for the lay person
| becomes interacting with prompts to make the computer do
| what you want, but the actual knowledge of software
| engineering and computer science is gone. Even the prompts,
| due to linguistic evolution, are in a language that regular
| people don't understand and people's mastery of the
| language is akin to moderns trying to reconstruct something
| like Akkadian. We sort of know what specific words mean and
| the general grammar, but we simply don't know 90% of the
| vocabulary to express most ideas. Whatever the language
| model was populated on training data from an archaic
| language and is also full of weird idioms and phrases and
| misspellings that we can't reconstruct in an organized way.
|
| In this context, the computers might be able to solve some
| basic problems for us, but everything we do with them is
| basically just received incantations from other crusty old
| people. Innovations keep happening, but they're small scale
| and mostly revolve around finding out new ways to tweak the
| incantations to do novel things. But the most we can do is
| say, like, "draw a picture" or "sort this list."
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Unless they have other means of solving those calculations
| better than computers; in that case, call those other means
| "computers" and the study of older computers "retro-
| computing".
| em-bee wrote:
| something like the amish, relying on 100 year old
| technology developed by humans instead of those
| newfangled tools that aliens brought that no human can
| understand.
| kaoD wrote:
| As I was reading the post I assumed (1) happened because
| something better came and completely replaced computers:
| magic, raw energy manipulation, biomachines, hextech...
| something like that.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making
| new ones is very very hard, especially compared to
| scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing
| ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties
| looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers,
| decades later.
|
| Such a society could probably make new computers, but the
| cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not
| be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers
| can be found and repaired.
|
| Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-
| ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a
| big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a
| central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as
| terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer
| terminals at public libraries connected to copies of
| WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things.
| :-)
| olddustytrail wrote:
| No it isn't (No1 easy to imagine). Computers are only
| useful because we have a stable society that we can build
| on. Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use
| for computers.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Post-apocalyptic doesn't necessarily mean unstable. We
| weren't post-apocalyptic back in the 1930s or 1950s, and
| computing machines had plenty of uses already (and even
| earlier).
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Post apocalyptic societies have zero practical use for
| computers.
|
| Post global nuclear war reconstruction would really
| benefit from having even a simple spreadsheet program to
| aid with resource allocation, wouldn't it?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Whatever you do with them [computers] is automatically
| seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition.
|
| During a nuclear war reconstruction scenario, computing
| wouldn't be seen as ancient or unchanging. We'd be in a
| transitory period where we try and recreate computing
| infrastructure with what we have and the power sources we
| have access to. But we wouldn't develop an ancient
| tradition or anything.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 1 happens every fucking day, hell wasn't there an article
| today about people who have older equipment that depend on
| floppy disks and how hard it is to find reliable disks
| these days? The article discussed an older embroidery
| machine, the only way to supply it with patterns to
| embroider was 3.5 inch floppy. His are starting to fail.
| But this is also true of older samplers, drum machines,
| synthesizers, etc.
|
| Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of
| retro components or things to replace the retro components
| (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace
| floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb
| sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts
| for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records,
| etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply
| needs to be scavenged.
|
| So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the
| things we are doing with some new technology that is not
| digital silicon based computers that run on electricity.
| But there will be edges where the new technology is not
| compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this
| kind of speculation.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| hell the living computer museum in seattle, before it's at
| least physical closure by the sister of paul allen, is/was a
| bit like this. They have a bunch of vintage big iron that
| they have restored to working condition and allow members of
| the public to use. Some of these are still available on the
| internet.
|
| https://www.livingcomputers.org/
|
| https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-
| Collection/Online-S...
|
| Hell deep in the chip shortage I talked with more than one
| person that were buying up electronics at thrift shops and
| ebay that they knew contained chips they could not source at
| the time.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Imagine a world where everybody simply has an AI assistant in
| their pocket, that simply tells them anything they might need
| to know. Design programs for you. Draw you any image. Perhaps
| even construct virtual worlds. We are almost there already.
|
| Only weird old people would bother to learn how to program dumb
| desktop computers.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| There's a lot of people who feel disquieted by the pace of
| software systems and aspire to do work in software that feels
| similar to the more methodological, slower paced work of more
| mature fields like HVAC engineering or structural
| engineering. These folks find solace in this kind of
| speculative fiction.
|
| I feel their disquiet is misplaced. Any young, fast-moving
| field is going to be full of the same issues that software is
| in now. You can look back at the history of mechanical
| engineering during the industrial revolution to see many
| similar problems we had with unsafe projects, hyped-up snake
| oil, or iteration for the sake of iteration. The history of
| automobiles and aviation was also marked by similar issues.
| Slower paced engineering fields are more mature and have gone
| through decades or centuries of iteration before coming up
| with tried and true solutions. But fundamentally fiction
| speaks to the soul more than it speaks to any measurable
| outcome. Truly the only fix for this disquiet is to search
| inside rather than look out. Fiction can be a great tool for
| that.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Good speculative fiction at least tries to give some reason why
| something might come to be the case. This article just says
| "pretend computers are old; old things are like X today;
| therefore, computers are going to be just like X," while
| ignoring all the things that are different.
| [deleted]
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Computers are, essentially, fast, iterative, extremely useful for
| automated and communication tasks, and naturally attract young,
| detail focused minds based on these qualities. Those essential
| qualities lend themselves to computer culture. Inherent qualities
| lead to cultural connotations, not the other way around.
| ruined wrote:
| always coming home
| mikewarot wrote:
| I've watched over time as the desktop stopped being the primary
| computing device of choice for many people. I've grown far too
| accustomed to the power and flexibility of a nice keyboard and
| 32" monitor, and virtually endless storage and general purpose
| compute _that I own_ to fall into that usage pattern, but I
| understand the appeal.
|
| No Wednesday morning headaches from Microsoft, no applications
| breaking with the new Python revision, etc. Just apps from the
| app store that work (mostly).
|
| So, the Server Farms that comprise the cloud aren't ancient, but
| they might as well be remote temples just like those we had in
| the 1960s.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| * * *
| aj7 wrote:
| I don't think much "computing" is done, in our sense of the
| word, on tablets and phones. Personally, I've found that almost
| any slightly complex, has-to-be-done-once-and p-right, action
| is better performed on an actual computer. And that's not even
| considering writing new programs.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience. I'm able to be surprisingly
| effective on my smartphone. I've constructed trip
| itineraries, balanced outing budgets, shared shopping lists,
| designed room layouts, computed food and drink recipe ratios,
| built DJ sets, laid out wood pieces, and read books using my
| smartphone. Coding is probably the only thing that I find
| unparalleled with a keyboard and a seated position than my
| smartphone. I used to game more often when I was younger and
| I still generally prefer to game in a seated position though
| I have gamed on my smartphone before.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Solid-state computer components, on the other hand, have no
| mechanical decay, so they are practically eternal._
|
| I _wish._
|
| Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of
| about 10-20 years, transistors _do_ wear out, electromigration is
| a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed,
| and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of
| "solid state" electronics that mean they're not going to last
| hundreds of years without some pretty massive heroics - and
| that's when you can repair it at all.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [flagged]
| camtarn wrote:
| Let me Google that for you:
|
| "All electrolytic capacitors with non-solid electrolyte age
| over time, due to evaporation of the electrolyte. The
| capacitance usually decreases and the ESR usually increases.
| The normal lifespan of a non-solid electrolytic capacitor of
| consumer quality, typically rated at 2000 h/85 degC and
| operating at 40 degC, is roughly 6 years. It can be more than
| 10 years for a 1000 h/105 degC capacitor operating at 40
| degC. Electrolytic capacitors that operate at a lower
| temperature can have a considerably longer lifespan."
|
| ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague )
|
| "Electromigration decreases the reliability of integrated
| circuits (ICs). It can cause the eventual loss of connections
| or failure of a circuit. Since reliability is critically
| important ... the reliability of chips (ICs) is a major focus
| of research efforts. ... With increasing miniaturization, the
| probability of failure due to electromigration increases ...
| In modern consumer electronic devices, ICs rarely fail due to
| electromigration effects. ... Nevertheless, there have been
| documented cases of product failures due to
| electromigration."
|
| ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration )
|
| Before dismissively replying, maybe do your research.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| Can you explain what you mean?
|
| In 100,000,000 years I can almost surely guarantee that your
| hard drive will be nonexistent. Surely there is a point
| between "fresh off the assembly line" and "disintegration"
| where the drive can be considered to be "worn out."
| jdiff wrote:
| Electrolytic capacitors can dry out, boil out, oxidize,
| generally break down. There's many failure modes for them
| that can be caused by wear, age, or unuse.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Nope.
|
| > Nope.
|
| > None of these things "wear out".
|
| Would you perhaps like to present any evidence or even
| argument whatsoever?
| popotamonga wrote:
| My schneider 286@12Mhz from 1990 with 40MB huge hdd still
| running fine, all original components.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Older hardware tends to be more resilient due to wider
| traces, which means lower susceptibility to ESD and
| electromigration. But eventually the last atom will get
| eroded out of a critical trace and the thing will fail.
| Nothing lasts forever, especially when made to be as cheap as
| possible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I recently had to replace an SSD that was only 3 years old;
| it's dead-dead, as in, slowed down one day and then wouldn't
| boot. I've never had an HDD die this fast in my life. I know
| this is only one example but I'm curious if anyone else has a
| similar experience.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| * * *
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Have a virtual memory pagefile on it?
| [deleted]
| anthk wrote:
| Postmodernism is bullshit. Grow over it. Embrace utilitarism.
| Design durable, low powered and hackable computers with easy
| protocols to exchange data over a flakey network.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Embrace utilitarism._
|
| As long as _everyone else_ embraces it, we seem to be doomed to
| a market economy, that (all its virtues notwithstanding)
| unfortunately makes:
|
| > _Design durable, low powered and hackable computers with easy
| protocols to exchange data over a flakey network_
|
| not possible. As long as _other people_ also take utilitarian
| approach, then the only things we can get are "low powered"
| and "flakey network". Durability, hackability and easy
| protocols are anathema to those who make money on technology at
| scale.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Ha, possible if all the lunatics who want us to be marked a
| Professional Engineer to program have their way. We must fight
| them at every turn.
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