We are barbarians occupying a city built by an advanced civilization, marveling at the hot baths but know nothing about how their builders keep them running. One day, the baths will drain and anyone who remembers how to fill them up will have died.
I thought about my cave men ancestors who during such a storm if they needed water would have to go out and get it, getting themselves soaked.
If I wanted water, the tap in the kitchen would give it to me, in a nice controlled fashion. If I did feel like having water rain down upon me, my shower would do that, again in a controlled fashion, and I could select the water temperature.
If they wanted the cave to be warmer, they had to burn something and deal with the smoke. And they might have to work hard to obtain whatever it is they burn.
If I wanted my apartment warmer, I just had to turn the knob on the thermostat.
They were at the mercy of their environment. My environment is mine to command. I was feeling pretty superior to my cave man ancestors.
Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.
I'm really just a cave man that found a nicer cave.
Commit and push often.
We had solar panels and a generator we used only when absolutely necessary. We were never without power, but we lived with the constant anxiety of optimizing our energy consumption. Some stuff we could only do during the day and at night we only used devices with batteries.
For a couple of weeks we didn't have running water in the cabin because we were rebuilding our water deposit tower. We used buckets for everything.
That was almost a decade ago and I still feel grateful at having unlimited energy or running water on demand.
I also feel guilty at times when doing power hungry stuff like playing video games, knowing electricity production is by far the biggest driver of climate change.
I think everyone ought to do a week in an RV with no connections to utilities. Not to take away from your story, but a similar scenario comes up when we "dry camp" (no water or electrical connections): resources are not unlimited. We have solar panels, big-ass inverter and big-ass battery to go with it. But if we want lights at night, best not run that 1100W microwave for too long, because the panels won't keep up and the battery isn't that big. We have a built-in generator, but unlike most RV owners, we are loathe to use it. It's almost like a game, and if that generator fires up then we've lost.
You want to let the water run while you brush your teeth? Go right ahead, our water tank is plenty big...oh, wait, but the holding tanks aren't. Shut that tap off before there's dirty water coming up through the shower. Speaking of showers, use the outside shower, as the holding tanks won't hold enough for your 30 minute, piping-hot shower.
Point of it all is that it one quickly learns that it all has to come from somewhere, and it has to go somewhere after you've dirtied it. I'd like to think that it has made the both of us more conscious of our usage.
There's nothing like being at sea, 100+ miles from civilization, reliant on the limited capacity systems on your vessel. You manage your food, you manage your water consumption, fuel, electrical usage, you're closely attuned to the weather, the sea state, the charts. There are no other visible people or people-made objects out to the horizon in all directions. If something breaks, you'd better know how it works and be able to fix it, or go without. It feels very freeing, but also provides a "back to basics" accountability.
Standing under a hot water shower with unlimited water in a spacious home shower afterward feels luxurious.
What's probably closer to truth is that many humans were forced to join farming communities. Stronger individuals or tribes probably enslaved others, and then forced them to build and produce.
The patterns of inequity and the march toward hyper-specialization we still see today make sense in that context.
As a tangent, if anyone is interested in that "cavemanness" deep in our DNA, check out the idea of primitive camping. That was my first experience camping, and I expected an idealized tv-ad experience. The trip was not framed as "primitive camping" to me.
I was dealing with intense burnout, stress, ADHD symptoms, immune problems, trouble sleeping... And I was thrown into the desert in the summer with a tent and some beer. It fucking sucked sooo bad. It fucking sucked sooo bad that I forgot every stupid problem I had, because I spent the entire time in survival mode. Setting up camp. Hauling equipment up and down dunes. Staying hydrated in the 100f+ heat. Making food. Making sure my wife and friends were ok. Strategizing how to defend our camp from bugs and psychos.
I really have not had such an existentially-dense experience as that one. And no, I didn't take any mushrooms, as the rest of the group did. I wanted to be lookout. Maybe I come from a long line of hyperaware sentries.
AFAIK humanity is yet to produce a society where the majority of farm laborers are fully free to leave the land they work on (whether via having their papers confiscated, their wages held until the season ends, by having transport provided to a remote farm but the trip back withheld etc). We've seen improvements in the degree of freedom, particularly over the past century and especially the past 50 years, but it's still very low compared to urban dwellers.
1: "Against the Grain", James C Scott
> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.
I'm sure if you just sat down with a pen and paper you could come up with a DIY solution.
I used to have this joke(?) with my friends: remember Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur Court"? The titular Yankee basically upends the (faux) medieval society he gets transported to, "inventing" all sorts of technological miracles.
Well, I'm a software developer but don't come from an engineering background (I mean actual engineering, not programming). I don't even understand how electricity or the telephone work (I mean, old fashioned telephones, let alone current mobile networks). If I was transported to 2 or 3 centuries to the past, I wouldn't be able to explain modern technology to other people, let alone actually build it.
I sort of understand how steam machines work, and I could "invent" the printing press. I guess. But anything related to circuitry, electricity, chemistry, engineering of any sort, I wouldn't be able to even begin explaining them to King Arthur.
My introduction to the knights of the round table would go something like this:
"We are questing for the Holy Grail, oh noble stranger from a far away land! How can you help?"
"Depends, which version of Python are you running?"
[I only liked the first four books, but that's enough to cover the original story arc]
Fun fact: printing rates increased from about 120 sheets/hour to over 1 million over the course of the 19th century. Those began with wooden screw presses that differed little from Gutenberg's to cast iron, rotary, steam and later electric powered, and web (continuous paper feed) presses, and from matrix plates (with individual type set in blocks) to offset Linotype (in which the entire print block was cast as a single sheet through multiple stages from the original matrix characters).
Thought just occurs: the falling characters of the iconic Matrix screen somewhat resemble the individual type elements flowing and falling through a Linotype machine. I don't know if that is a deliberate or incidental reference, but it's an interesting one.
https://topatoco.com/products/qw-cheatsheet
And the T-shirt's companion bandana and spin-off book:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a23286104/how-to-in...
Wing is no problem as long as one can calculate how to make it stiff enough and of a right shape.
If I were a bit more clever, or maybe if I was 50 years older and had played with this kind of stuff growing up, I'd probably try to make a spark-gap transmitter. That seems to be in a sweet spot of not requiring too many super clever bits, and having obvious applications.
Not trying to glorify off-the-grid living or anything, but I think it's interesting to think that in some (very specific) ways, the cavemen were actually superior to us.
>It seems that someone asked the great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “What is the first sign you look for to tell of an ancient civilization?” The interviewer had in mind a tool or article of clothing. Ms. Mead surprised him by answering, “a healed femur (thigh bone)”. When someone breaks a femur, they can’t survive to hunt, fish or escape enemies unless they have help from someone else. Thus, a healed femur indicates that someone else helped that person, rather than abandoning them and saving only themselves.
You aren't really - most cavemen didn't even understand that fire is possible, and wouldn't be able to consistently operate a lighter if they found one (it'd probably be put on an altar and worshipped instead, as it should). You might not be able to build your entire cave, but your education alone is a _huge_ advantage!
Toilets are amazing and I feel privileged every time I use one. Girlfriend thinks I'm nuts.
I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down. What I think happens mostly is the skilled dev can use his experience to know where to investigate and where to look for solutions.
The question is organisational. Might it be that certain orgs have gotten so convoluted that they cannot do this investigation on an org level? Essentially, letting the right people look in the right places, unhindered by politics, legitimate security concerns, and practicality?
You'd think there'd be a limit to scale at some point. A bit of redundancy makes sense. There's probably a lot of people with multicloud setups patting themselves on the back at the moment.
For instance, I manage a team that does "full stack" development, where full stack means I regularly interact with mechanical and manufacturing, operations, electrical engineers, battery and radio people, embedded developers, mobile, and most aspects of backend engineering. We had an issue where one of our chip suppliers changed their FW, didn't tell us, and we literally were taking apart units to get to the bottom of why units off the line weren't working properly. We go pretty deep. Still, at some point we throw our hands in the air and say "Hardware is hard, it's in the name."
So you are disagreeing with this statement and saying that, in fact, you are the person who knows how the whole thing works?
I knew tech work produced some large egos, but sheesh.
But even if I didn't mean that, there still is nobody who could do it.
I'm saying no such person, even one who built up a team that they taught, exists for the modern computer.
But I am also incredulous by the parent.
I wouldn’t be able to diagnose traces on a motherboard or a defective (but partially functioning) CPU.
I wouldn’t be able to diagnose irregular voltage conditions or drop offs.
The amount of stuff that I know I couldn’t diagnose is absurdly high, but the amount I don’t even know that I can’t diagnose is higher still.
And my job, like the parents, is to drill down and spend time in specifics.
You know how AWS virtualization works and how to diagnose a problem with the AWS networking stack? Yes, and yes assuming that everything AWS is responsible for is operating within spec. Obviously, I don't have access to their switches, and cannot see anything at layer 1 or 2.
Knowing how it works, and being able to build a new one, are also two very different problems. For example, there are plenty of Computer Science folks who learned how to design chips (layout the circuits, write the microcode, etc) - but you need a whole extra background in EE and Physics to be able to fab said chip...
The problem is that this is really only possible with a toy model of a computer and very simple programs. Modern chips with their branch prediction and caching and threading and advanced vectorized operations and so on are vastly more complex. The 6502[2] was perhaps the last chip that one person could fully grok. Maybe a chip designer at Intel or AMD could understand the whole circuit in detail but no one else has the time - it would literally be a full time job. The same thing is true for operating systems - even if you're Raymond Chen, you can know a lot about Windows, but you can't know everything.
We learn just enough about the other parts of the system to convince ourselves that we understand the principles. We build the basic mental model we need to interact with other systems but all we can really do focus on our own specialized areas and hope that everyone else is doing their job. This works well enough until something like Spectre[3] or Meltdown[4] crops up and that's when we realize that we've been building castles in the sand.
[1]: https://www.nand2tetris.org/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...
We really depend on three things - knowledge (stored collectively and in various media eg books), materials (tools and manufactured precursor goods, available via active supply chains or existing stores), and most importantly having our basic needs met trivially so that all our time is not sucked up addressing them.
A scenario where someone has a 'wasteland' to pick over for their basic needs, knowledge and materials looks quite different to a return to primitive living where what nature provides is all their is to work with. 'if you want to bake an apple pie, first you must invent the universe' or however it goes...
Then of course there's the question of why someone would have any interest in obtaining computing power were either of those scenarios to occur. Much like the 'how do we warn future civilisations about our nuclear waste' problem perhaps it is acceptable to not bother, they'll figure it out again on their own eventually given enough time.
This stuff is fun to think about at 6am when hay fever is preventing my sleep :)
And there's probably an equal number troubleshooting why it didn't failover the way it should, while their upper management starts questioning what they're paying for.
I've met a few people who can rightfully lay claim, but yeah, an incredibly rare set of skills.
That said, there is a recent revival in building systems from the ground up. While you can't manufacturer your own transistors, it is quite possible to understand everything from simple logic gates to ALUs to older style CPUs and memory buses.
I eventually got a fully-functioning 32-bit cpu with instruction pipelining, two levels of cache, DMA input/output, an asynchronous bus, a custom assembly language with an assembler written in python, and got the Game of Life running on it.
It ran about 2kHz with 8kb of memory or so.
I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.
However, I can teach advanced maths to a largish group of students without much trouble.
Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. Avoid berries that resemble blueberries or currants unless you're able to identify the plant: we grew up with blueberries and know the leaves, but we avoid anything currant-like because we'd have no idea if they're actually, say, chokeberries. Avoid anything that looks like baneberries.
Here in Maine, we forage for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and (mostly low bush) blueberries, but don't risk others.
I know nothing but that still seems too generalized that it doesn’t have an exception somewhere in the world.
Historically here in Maine, the core diet seems to have been seafood, freshwater fish, maize, Capreolinae, game birds, eggs, honey, roots, and greens. While only a tiny fraction of fish/seafood remain, deer are over-populated and make a fine sustainable food source, the limitation mostly being the contemporary appetite for venison.
1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/indigenous-peoples...
Yes, that is a lot of time to go hungry and testing just one item. And then you still don't know what actually gives you nutrition vs just not killing you (for example leaves that you can break down such as leaf lettuce, vs eating grass).
The prevalence of meat comes from a society of abundance.
Example source:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247
A contradictory source says meat was less prevalent but still at 40-50%:
https://asu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/the-diet-body-...
Both of these estimates are way higher than what we know people eat today, where meat and dairy are 18% of worldwide calorie consumption (27% in the US).
So I think the abundance we see today is actually due to the availability of non-animal dietary sources.
Source - used to teach these skills before it was cool to be a "survivalist" on TV and social media.
These items aren’t in my earthquake bag (I have enough energy bars to last until the National Guard shows up). Instead these are for a Carrington Event type of solar storm, civil war or some sort of other long-term disaster.
Eat a small amount and see if you get sick? Science in the wild...
i wonder if there's anything like that for adults
But somehow there are multiple organizations that "know" how to build another hot bath, and newer and bigger baths are continuously being built all across the Empire.
And occasionally one of them stops working and thousands of citizens are angry, because they feel, being honest citizens of the Empire, they are entitled to enjoy these hot baths. Sometimes their very livelihood depends on the baths running.
Then the bath is fixed, and all is well again.
Sometime in the next few months, I've to troubleshoot and fix the broken 2 yr. old refrigerator. Someone came and fixed it once, now it's out of warranty and fixing it would cost about 50% of its cost. Meanwhile I'm glad I didn't throw away the 10 yr old refrigerator and just moved it to the garage. We just have to keep going to the garage.
I also have to play the accountant for my consulting business pretty soon. This is a task I had outsourced for years and have now started doing myself.
As stuff gets more specialized, I've started noticing that I'm able to do moderately complicated things better than professionals paid at the 50th - 70th percentile. If I want to get a really good job done, my rule of thumb is to be ready to shell out money in the 90th percentile range and look for references.
In case of AWS, I guess the Greasemonkey scripts are getting too complicated ;)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
See also Foundation by Asimov.
Most of these people just happen to be employed at AWS or azure right now.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+cam...
Maybe we need more baskets to distribute our eggs amongst?
It’s an easy target to romanticize but realistically, any alternative is basically a way of saying: “let’s stop evolving.”
Wanting to evolve differently doesn't mean halting.
It's a call not to devolve.
From my perspective, we require abstractions in order to free our intellectual capacity up for the next layer of complexity.