[HN Gopher] Transparent Like Frosted Glass
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Transparent Like Frosted Glass
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 25 points
Date : 2024-09-18 18:33 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (explaining.software)
(TXT) w3m dump (explaining.software)
| uoaei wrote:
| 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.
| kurthr wrote:
| 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.
| Gare wrote:
| 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?
| tomcam wrote:
| 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).
| hgomersall wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> "average application engineer"_
|
| Boy, that brings back memories. In The Days of Yore, there was an
| implicit caste system, where "application engineers" were
| considered "lesser beings."
|
| Having done both systems engineering, and application
| engineering, I like application engineering, a lot more. I don't
| particularly care, whether or not anyone looks down their nose at
| me.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I always find it funny how engineers have a caste system.
| Systems engineers look down their noses at application
| engineers, everyone looks down at web developers. But it used
| to be that mechanical engineers looked down at electrical
| engineers, who looked down at all software engineers. I like to
| imagine a Roman engineer judging a medieval siege engineer by
| whether they can build an aqueduct or not, and the siege
| engineer judging a Victorian civil engineer by whether they
| know how to make a simple, run of the mill catapult.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Why are web devs at the bottom of this totem pole? It's a
| very multi-disciplinary job, often requiring expertise in a
| handful of languages, UI, design, distributed systems, etc.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Web devs, these days, are a very different animal, from the
| old HTML jockeys.
|
| Most rich Web sites, nowadays, have quite a bit going on
| (and that is often reflected in massive page loads).
| karaterobot wrote:
| I don't think they should be, and I don't think that belief
| is as prevalent anymore. But when I was starting out, there
| was a real divide even between people who wrote server code
| and people who wrote front end code for the same product,
| let alone among programmers who worked on lower level or
| more abstract things. I assume because the web jobs were
| newer, and more people back in the 90s-00s had moved into
| those jobs from places other than the traditional CS or
| engineering professional tracks. But I always felt like web
| development was really, really hard to be good at.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Web dev looks sort of like graphic design without the
| artistry, from an outside point of view.
| bee_rider wrote:
| When doing an EE undergrad, the ranking I saw was:
|
| ChemE > EE > MechE > Civil.
|
| I guess there could be a bias, maybe MechE's would swap their
| spots and ours. But I don't think it is a totally universal
| thing. The fact that ChemE was some impossibly difficult
| magical alchemy stuff that nobody outside of their program
| could understand was universally agreed upon though.
|
| I mean, it's all goofy inter-field teasing and anybody who
| takes it too seriously is a dummy anyway.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I would say that civil engineers probably have more on the
| line, than anyone else. They can kill people, and go to
| jail, more often, than any of the others (where doing so is
| more of an exception, and with civil engineers, it's the
| norm).
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's probably why they don't do anything cool. :p
| jph wrote:
| The article starts with Sherry Turkle, who is a genius IMHO. She
| discusses transparent versus opaque, in terms of computers, and
| is quoted in the NY Times about it.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/07/books/books-of-the-times-...
|
| Ms. Turkle adds two computers to the list of test objects: two
| contrasting machines, the I.B.M. PC and the Macintosh. The
| former, she explains, was for users who wanted to see into "'the
| guts' of the machine." It was transparent and invited analysis.
|
| "In contrast the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh's iconic
| style presented the public with simulations (the icons of file
| folders, a trash can, a desktop) that did nothing to suggest how
| their underlying structure could be known." It was opaque, and
| invited a belief in what William Gibson, in his novel
| "Neuromancer" (1984), termed "cyberspace." ...
|
| One therefore pays close attention when she explains how the
| shift to postmodernism has been reflected in a new outlook on
| artificial intelligence. No longer are designers striving for an
| overarching theory of mind. More and more they see hope in
| computers that can learn, or what she terms "emergent A.I.,"
| which, as she writes about it, accords with the fragmented,
| "decentered" self posited by postmodernism.
|
| (If you're curious to know more about Dr. Turkle, this TED talk
| is good IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtLVCpZIiNs)
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