The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without having to unlearn a lot of what we know now.
I'm old enough to see this process in action; I used to be young and in possession of esoteric knowledge that made me infinitely in demand and now most of the things that young people have esoteric knowledge about is things that I don't particularly care about, and I'm left with a lot of finely honed skills to solve problems that have mostly been abstracted away.
“The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.”
I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals.
You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results.
And this degrades with compression and time.
There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”
I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.
For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.
Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).
With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.
The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.
Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.
The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works".
I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated content, curated interfaces - everything that resembles some kind of hardship ironed out in thousand steps of iterations to appease the market which means the lowest common denominator.
But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.
The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.
Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp
ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes
This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.
There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the computing environment, instead they operate now at the highest levels of abstraction we are capable, so called "natural language".
"The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium. You only ever know the things that you can lose to."
We who grew up in this era formed a hands-on engineer's knowledge of these systems, built from experience and practice, learning these layers of abstraction as the bleeding edge developed. Many these days have entered into a world where there are easy answers abound, they just might not be right, and one has to gauge how much they care about correctness.
This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.
Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
I resonate with every example given - setting jumpers by hand, sound card interrupts, autoexec.bat. I'm also a happy user of LLMs and agents. This article captured for me what is lost - which, as others point out, has long since been lost, if ever had, in other fields (e.g. modern cars vs. the Model T). I wouldn't go back, but I can still have a sense of loss.
I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.
Modding communities are still going. Kids, afaik, are still playing around with hosting minecraft servers or whatever is en vogue/cool/meta/etc nowadays. DIY 8-bit computers are gaining popularity.
IMO the fact that something's become very mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's been watered down for everybody. There will always be people with various levels of curiosity and enthusiasm.
> The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. Maybe. But I think competence is the part that’s fine.
> knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever
If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amazing and how Linux sucks. Kids like that in 1990ties would buy expensive consoles, and would not deal with hack PC's to get free games.
Many people today are still dealing with cheap shitty hardware, 7 years old Android phones and sketchy ROMs... Just because there is no other option!
I wouldn't calling it learning more and more like "cycling through SoundBlaster DMA and IRQ options until the sound work". Still, there was an intrinsic curiosity that isn't as prevalent.
This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939.
I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.
I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.
It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.
> And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.
people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.
We always were the only people who ever knew how it worked. In 1990 people fellow students called me to fix their computer, they had absolutely no idea how any of this worked. No. Idea. Yes, the machine was being difficult; but their reaction wasn't to fight it, or understand it. It was to call someone to do it in their stead.
Maybe the difference is more of the professionals in the field now haven't built that same muscle, as there's a broader group of people working in tech. Whereas the folks that could fix things in the 90s mainly gravitated to computers as a profession. Just random musing though I truly don't now.
I feel that things are pretty different. Although the example of interrupts and jumper settings being common knowledge is a bit of a stretch... it's still amazing to recall that MS-DOS was regarded as an end-user / consumer OS, and that, more generally, it really was regarded as totally normal to need to invest some time in learning about the system, files, directories, typing, configuring/customizing settings and network options just to be able to do what you wanted to do.
I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.
Compare with what the drivers/operators of the earliest automobiles were expected to know vs. what the same category of people are expected to know today.
There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.
"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked.
So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them."
Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol
Anecdotally, I think it depends on age and family more than anything. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, games because we couldn't afford anything new. Started with win98 and games from the mid 90s, but running them in 2002.
I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
Yeah same. I remember playing a bunch of Sierra games on my first PC as a kid on either. Most I had to deal with was installing the drivers for my SoundBlaster card from the included disk. Most I dealt with was putting in the CD, double clicking the installer and entering the product key.
That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
Windows 3.x did not cohabitate well with certain games that required nearly the entire 640k of conventional memory to run. These are mainly games from the old DOS days; games that relied on DPMI were largely exempt. But to play certain Sierra titles, for instance, you had to set up one CONFIG.SYS configuration that loaded HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for Windows and another that left them out. In later versions of DOS you could set up a menu to select the appropriate configuration at boot.
And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.
This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.
> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work.
That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot, actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information (and they always will, by their very nature), you need someone with actual knowledge to be able to recognize the BS and correct it. But we are losing the knowledge, and unless things change we will be no better off than the people in dystopian sci-fi stories who pray to the machine god because nobody knows how it actually works.
Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge - I mean, they can generate new arrangements of information, but they have no idea whether any of it real or making sense, unless humans - explicitly or through training - tell them, the more we rely on LLM knowledge the less the quality of it would be. Right now the LLMs are mainly in auxiliary role, so most of the knowledge erosion they generate is laughed at and relatively quickly corrected. But would this hold once the role of generative AIs increases? We already essentially entered the chaos period with news content - there's so much noise that it's basically impossible to know if any news message you read is true or manipulated somehow. This is going to start happening to more fundamental knowledge too, either on purpose or just by the force of the probabilistic nature of generative AI.
I can already see future where there is group of people goading AI to right direction by repeatedly changing what they ask slightly. And then memorise the times when you got right incantation for seemingly right outcome. Without actually understanding or being able to reason about process in the middle. Possibly a seemingly inconsequential misspoken word or typo can lead to better or worse outcome. Or maybe just not saying "Please" will sometimes produce wrong output. and other times you must not use it...
There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC.
Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.
As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing.
Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide.
The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles.
So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.
I'm old enough to see this process in action; I used to be young and in possession of esoteric knowledge that made me infinitely in demand and now most of the things that young people have esoteric knowledge about is things that I don't particularly care about, and I'm left with a lot of finely honed skills to solve problems that have mostly been abstracted away.
I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals.
You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results.
And this degrades with compression and time.
There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”
For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.
Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).
With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.
The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.
Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.
I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
We could do this forever.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes
"The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium. You only ever know the things that you can lose to."
We who grew up in this era formed a hands-on engineer's knowledge of these systems, built from experience and practice, learning these layers of abstraction as the bleeding edge developed. Many these days have entered into a world where there are easy answers abound, they just might not be right, and one has to gauge how much they care about correctness.
Beautiful writing.
IMO the fact that something's become very mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's been watered down for everybody. There will always be people with various levels of curiosity and enthusiasm.
> knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever
If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amazing and how Linux sucks. Kids like that in 1990ties would buy expensive consoles, and would not deal with hack PC's to get free games.
Many people today are still dealing with cheap shitty hardware, 7 years old Android phones and sketchy ROMs... Just because there is no other option!
https://unix.foo/posts/it-will-never-be-the-year-of-the-linu...
I worry more about whether people care and consider it a problem when they don't know.
I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.
I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.
It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.
people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.
I'm not sure things are very different now.
I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.
There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.
So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them."
Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol
I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.
That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot, actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information (and they always will, by their very nature), you need someone with actual knowledge to be able to recognize the BS and correct it. But we are losing the knowledge, and unless things change we will be no better off than the people in dystopian sci-fi stories who pray to the machine god because nobody knows how it actually works.
Sounds like absolutely horrifying dystopia.
There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC.
Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.
As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing.
Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide.
The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles.
So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.