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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

This might sound like a flippant question, but it's not.

Isn't the point of tech to tinker? When did problems become problems that you shouldn't try to solve, instead of a reason to learn about the tech?

I've really been down about technology lately, after working with 6-12th graders. They just don't get how anything works, if it doesn't immediately work for them. They don't want to take it apart and figure it out.

This blog piece just seems like more of that. Why bother with figuring out how things work when you can just throw them away?

Now get off my lawn, I guess.

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> Isn't the point of tech to tinker?

What no extremely not. It's to... do things? Tinkering with tech is cool if that's your hobby but it's not mine and I'm trying to do shit not pick up another hobby here.

It's like the people that argue that cars have lost something intrinsic in recent decades and now no one knows how to do work on their own vehicles. That standard was an artifact of unreliability, not something to be applauded.

Tech should get out of the way and let you do what you're trying to do. If "tinker" is that thing then sure have fun. But for most people that's not the point at all.

I think the op was close. I don't expect everyone to tinker with something. Not everyone needs to be interested in cars, or computers, and want to build and maintain them. But, I think people need to put in a little more effort to have a general understanding of the tools they entrust with their life and use constantly. If you interact with a computer all day, every day, you should dedicate some time to understanding more about how it works. That's not saying you're tinkering with it or it's your hobby. But, when it's a main part of your life, not knowing anything is just bad planning. When things go wrong you're now screwed. It's just survival planning, you don't need to be an expert, but knowing a little bit puts you ahead of 90% of users.

How much do you know about metallurgy, plastics, concrete engineering, hydrocarbon refining, etc etc etc all the thousands of extremely specific domains of expertise that modern society is built upon?

The fact that you can possibly get more out of some tech by knowing how it works is because most of it is very new, which is basically just an anomaly that is fading. Eventually how computers work will be like those other things: expert domains that we rely on but users don't need to understand.

It's already largely like that and that is good. I get that everyone here is a nerd and grew up tinkering with their computers and this makes them sad.

I'm not sure there is an agreed point. The industrial revolution is still young. Most people made a substantial portion of the goods they use historically. Even when trading for goods, it often was for intermediate inputs like cloth rather than fully finished items.

But even then, I would say no, tinkering was the point of hobbyist tech, or professional/craftsman tech. But the recent history of "consumer goods" hasn't been about tinkering ... I think the key difference in the past few decades is maintenance. Even in the era of consumer goods in the past hundred years or so, maintaining your possessions was expected. Some might pay a professional for specialized work, but since most things were maintained a large fraction of the work fell on the owner ... and this also leads to tinkering, not as an expectation, but an outcome.

Consider darning your socks, or sharpening your hatchet. Shining ones shoes or replacing a sparkplug.

> Isn't the point of tech to tinker?

No.

We claim to be building tools, but nothing we build operates like a tool does. My hammers don't randomly lose their heads. My vise grips don't every so often fly apart into a collection of oddly shaped bits of metal, and require I painstakingly reassemble them by hand. My benchtop power supply doesn't require constant calibration. Even my oscilloscope, which actually is a computer that just happens to be built for signal processing, functions in a way that's predictable and reliable. And if any of these did misbehave in the ways I describe, I'd regard them as unfit for purpose and, while I would likely be able to repair them and put them back in service, the ideal outcome would be replacement with something that didn't require the same effort just to make it able to do the job it is sold as being able to do. Tools exist for the sake of making other tasks easier, not as a source of tasks in themselves.

There is definitely failure happening here. But it's not on the part of people who are upset to have been told what they're buying are tools, only to have them turn out not to be.

Nowadays most software doesn’t let you tinker with it. Want to tinker with your chat client? Too bad, everything (that any of your friends actually use) is closed source and proprietary now. Frustrated with social media? Unless you can convince all your friends to switch to mastodon, you’re stuck with whatever Facebook/Instagram forces upon you. Excited about the future of virtual reality? Hope you don’t mind playing by Facebook/Oculus‘s rules. Want to fix an annoying issue with how your email client categorizes email? Well there’s no way to integrate with that system, google barely supports standards like pop and imap anymore, and outlook is transitioning away from a powerful plug-in system to a silly new web-based model.

A very specific example: Something that’s been frustrating me for years is Google photos on iOS does not synchronize whether I have starred/favorited a photo on iOS‘s photos to google photos. I tried fixing this myself with a helper program, but the Google photos API does not let you set whether a photo is marked as a favorite, and you cannot manually add photos to the favorites album via API. I’ve tried several hacky workarounds but I simply cannot build the simple UX fix that seems obvious to me, nor can I get anyone from Google to acknowledge my many suggestions to them to implement this obvious feature. I looked into trying to use Plex or Microsoft onedrive as an alternate photo backup system, but they are much worse than Google Photos in terms of reliability and UX. I’ve looking into open source solutions to replace this whole workflow, but the amount of time and effort and money and compromises required for a system like that simply isn’t worth it. So I put up with the annoyance, since there’s effectively nothing I can do about it.

I used to love programming because it made me omnipotent, I could change things as I wanted and tie together systems exactly the way I liked. But now I keep hitting brick walls, most of which are imposed because of business models and not for purely technology reasons. The frustration adds up, to the point where I no longer enjoy bothering to try at all. Now I am only involved in technology to the extent that I make money from it, and I’m in the process of transitioning my career away from tech altogether. So much potential squandered.

that's why i use Free Software and Open Source. same bugs and same irritations, but at least i have the feeling that i could do something about it.

instead of feeling helpless i get to make a calculation: ok, so to fix this issue i have to get the source version, identify the problem, figure out how to fix it, submit the fix upstream.

hmm, 5 hours of work? do i have the time? can i pay someone to do it? is it worth it?

if the answer is 'no' then i made a conscious decision to tolerate this issue, because i considered the tradeoff.

because i have this choice, i feel empowered, even if i decide not to do anything about it.

with closed source software i don't have this choice and any issue i run into makes me feel helpless.

People want to drive cars, not all of them want to be mechanics.

People want their phones and software to just work. Or at the very least not get bricked every friggin update.

I think that is a terrible analogy. A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B. If you only are capable of utilizing the bare minimum it's going to make life a lot harder. Take excel for example, the people who are able to reason about and write their own advanced excel spreadsheets in the workforce have a huge leg above those who only can do what the UI lets them do on their phone. There is a lot more to computing than treating it like a hammer.

You can’t say that they have a leg up in general because It Depends. I’m an engineer and my job is computational fluid dynamics (CFD). My dissertation involved developing highly parallelized solution algorithms for a specific type of problem. As such, I am quite well versed in low level Fortran/C code and MPI because I wrote code to do that, “that” being to solve an equation. I know this set of equations like it was second nature because of how much time I’ve invested in it. Not only that, but I would consider myself somewhat of an “expert” in the underlying mechanisms to solve these equations. Those being finite element methods. I can talk to you about tensor spaces and discretization and derivation of the numerical algorithms to solve these problems. I’d consider the code that I wrote/extended to be tech.

My current job role is “just” an engineer working for a company where all I basically do is run and analyze models using commercial software. Even though I know the underlying low level code/algorithms of what I’m doing, I would be the first to tell you that a 21 year old mechanical engineering graduate could do my job as effectively and as completely as I could. Because none of the above paragraph actually matters in what I do. Maybe it gave me a leg up in the hiring process, but the knowledge I am applying for my job (which I enjoy) is what you’d learn in a 4 year degree with electives in eg numerical methods and fluid dynamics.

> A car for the most part has a single purpose. Technology offers humans a lot more than just getting from point A to point B.

Sure, a car is just one example of technology. Technology in general is responsible for everything we have and everything we do. Here are some other technologies:

- farming

- weaving

- plastic

- glass

- ceramics

- steel

- cooking

To the nearest 0.0001%, 100% of people need these things to work and don't -- and can't -- understand why or how they work. That's the point of technology.

Way too broad of a definition. I clearly meant computing and how a person interacts with their devices as that was the discussion at hand.

Why would this differ from any other technology?

I'm really surprised to hear you question how computing is different from any other technology? General purpose computing is extremely broad in scope. It's used in everything from finance, design, manufacturing, communication, engineering, medical, entertainment - pretty much every field or industry in the world has been impacted by it. More so than any other technology in existence. Even something like gasoline has had less impact than computing. Being able to take advantage of this powerful tool is a huge leg up on life. There are countless applications of computers in our daily lives. To just ignore that and use them for their bare minimum function is quite sad!

.. sure, until you have to do something for realsies and the tech is the only way to do it. Then it's just fucking your life over.

Explain further, please. I don't think I'm following you.

It's one thing to tinker with Linux to learn how the OS works and another thin to troubleshoot it just as you are about to give a presentation.

Got it. Thanks.

Here's an example. I use Discord for keeping in touch with friends, running D&D sessions, etc. Discord on Linux has a random crash whenever in a voice call. I've followed up on threads, and others have this same issue, possibly related to glibc, but there aren't any definitive solutions yet. So, instead, I tinker. I make a quick two-line python script to launch discord repeatedly every time it crashes. Discord reconnects to the voice chat on restart, and all is well. Usually, people don't even notice that I've dropped out of 1-2 seconds.

But Discord does more at startup than just reconnecting. It also checks for new updates, and refuses to start if there is an update waiting. So now I've dropped out of a call, I have self-opening popups letting me know that there is an update available, and I'm trying to download/install the .deb update before the D&D players get bored and start making puns. Nothing good happens when the players have started making puns.

I like tinkering. I really do. But I like tinkering in order to solve my own problems, and to make my life easier. I don't like tinkering on limited time in order to add yet another support to a house of cards that is gently swaying in the breeze while I'm trying to hold a D&D session in the top room of that card-house.

The point of technology is to enable us to do things that we either can’t or don’t want to do. This ranges from simple time savings (don’t want to do/make things easier) to things we literally can’t do (high precision timing for example).

Tinkering is a hobby, your hobby.

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