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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

Understanding would be an overstatement, but there's a mental model in my head about the interaction between personal liberty, privacy, automation, encryption, state power, human psychology, and the feedback loops that connect them that I sometimes get larger glimpses of. Then again, that feeling of occasional clarity is probably how a crank feels.

But in terms of stuff I struggle to get my mind around, that is the most complicated thing by far I have ever tried to understand. That and the grammar of numbers in Slavic languages.

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That's probably some issue with the OP's choice of words, not on his meaning, but one can never really understand anything that is complex. This is implicit on the meaning of that word.

But everybody has some understanding of some systems that involves humans. Most even have the capacity of predicting a lot of group behaviors. It's just that the understanding is not complete.

> This is implicit on the meaning of that word.

I was still in pre-school, watching a documentary about uranium. I asked my mother what uranium was, she replied "a silver metal used for electricity generation". That answer felt deeply unsatisfying, but that's the best answer a todler could get from a village housewife in the year the internet was invented. But I learned that "understanding" doesn't have an objective benchmark; we understand a concept when we subjectively feel confident about our knowledge regarding that concept, no matter how ill deserved the confidence.

> that feeling of occasional clarity is probably how a crank feels

I felt like that when I learned about magamps last year... they were hiding in plain sight for my entire life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_amplifier

Dude, I am probably as hardcore as electrical engineers come (define your metric, I will (probably) beat it :-) )... I learnt about magamps from your post today. Thanks

I repaired a lot of Westinghouse Industrial Control Modules that were built in 1964 with early transistor technology as a rule,

The most interesting was a magnetic amplifier module, it had 4 windings as inputs, each thus DC isolated from all of the others, AND it worked all the way down to DC... which I didn't expect. The drive frequency was about 10 Khz.

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In the 1950s, transistors weren't yet reliable enough for computing, so they invented a solid state computer in the 1950s that ran at 1Mhz, had few transistors, and a few big tubes driving the clocking, it used magnetic amplifiers for logic gates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_Solid_State

That is seriously awesome. Touched by history.

> the interaction between personal liberty, privacy, automation, encryption, state power, human psychology, and the feedback loops that connect them

Is that all? Let us know when you figure it out. I'm joking, but I really like your take on digital privacy and related matters.

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