Not future-proofing | Hacker News Reader

Not future-proofing

kk.org

46 pointsgalfarragem33 comments

KK> I am trying to think of examples of successful future proofing. Where someone figured out what was coming and built something ready for it. Do you know any examples?

Commercial construction.

Don't try to predict the future. Reduce the structural essentials to their minimum requirements (columns, beams, trusses, pans), and make it easy to adapt the finish layer to changing preferences or use cases.

Drop ceilings, non-load bearing walls, conduits for power and signal, locate services (plumbing, HVAC, power, etc) in a centrally-located stack to minimize the horizontal runs to arbitrary locations.

I wish these ideas were more common in residential construction. Most are easy to apply, although there would be a slight bump in cost (10%?).

Would you really want to live in a building like that?

Doesn't seem like it would be pleasant

You can still use dry wall later and if you use decent noise dampening and insulation between two layers of drywall, it should work.

It will be expensive for sure though. I think huge building with electrical wiring, plumbing (including waste?) and networking at every pillar, and independent ductwork/sensors for climate control from the to be drop ceiling so I can essentially remodel however I want for the next owner sounds like a dream but a very expensive dream.

It actually adds more flexibility to the finish layer and layout design.

If you want to make things look like a traditional stick-built house with load-bearing walls, you can do that. It's not the only way, but it's an option.

If the next owner wants something different, that's also available -- and not very expensive to change. Non-load-bearing walls and drywall and cheap and quick to demo/rebuild. Flooring material is a bit more effort and cost, esp if not carpet or polished concrete.

Literal drop ceilings with those fiberglass panels are pretty ugly, but there are many other options. I like wood, but it's expensive. You can always do drywall though, it's familiar, and relatively cheap to modify.

I wish more apartments were built like this. There's somewhat a construction boom in my country and a lot of residential spaces seem to try to be as beautiful (and modern) as possible to drive up prices. In the end, most units end up looking the same and quite restrictive. As a person who does DIY projects, it's very hard to fully maximize a space built like it's meant for a showroom.

Even though I generally like the sentiment, replacing the cat-5 cable with a newer one should be a pretty fast task, and wired ethernet always is better than wireless.

Agreed. Maybe there will be entangled particles in the future that get shot out down wires and then allow you to instantaneously communicate with people after you receive them.

The right future oriented mindset in terms of building a house would be to make it easy to install wires. Or pipes. Or whatever.

Just in time hardware is only useful if you have a place to put it. That’s the tricky part; trying to figure out how to make sure you stay compatible with whatever new stuff comes along.

Uh. You can't shoot a particle down a wire. The electron that comes out the far end is not the same one that went in.

Darn, and here I thought he solved massively distributed quantum entanglement based networking in a one sentence throw away line on an internet forum

You eventually get the electron that went in after a few hours. Well if it is direct current.

No, there won't be entangled particles that allow instantaneous communication. Per the No Communication Theorem, information cannot propagate faster than light speed, end of story.

As you can probably tell, I don’t know much about particle physics and am not looking to get into a debate about that specific hypothetical, was just saying wires (or small tubes) might be useful for future stuff and it’d be nice if they were easy to put on/take off of buildings.

I remember having to redo all the heads because we only connected 5 wires initially, but the next speed level needed all 8. Still, a few hours work for a 10x upgrade, so I couldn't complain!

I like KK's work, but the first part of this article is weird. It's more of an argument for why you should leave pull strings in your empty conduit.

That said, I agree with the idea of generally buying only what you need and buying it at the time you need it.

I agree, he seems to argue for conduit, making the house more configurable and thus better able to 'learn'.

This is a BBC documentary of Stewart Brand presenting the ideas in "how buildings learn" which makes the same point through examples of what architecture works and what doesn't, over time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maTkAcDbrEY

It's possible to "future-proof" A BIT, in the term of simplicity of design, small scale of the final product, cheapness of it.

Or, please make simple houses, give them large space for any new gear and make them last a human life, at the heritage the old house should be unmounted, recycled and rebuilt with current tech being upgradable enough for another human life. Made simple software that can be easily changed like classic Smalltalk/Lisp systems. Made things easy to recycle etc

Similar things happen in various domains: in the past we rush to made megaprojects, now we prefer smaller ones. That's the future-proofness: it's always a miss and hit scenario, but in most cases a small miss is not costly, a hit is just nice. Short terms can be predicted a bit, long terms demand simply the ability to evolve.

In the mid 1990s when my parents were building their house, I absolutely could not understand why my dad had me spending the weekend pulling a cat5 cable and 2 coax cables through the studs. The coax ended up being a bad bet, by we got a LOT of value out of that cat5. Even with the advent of wireless much later, we still needed Ethernet to connect access points to the main router.

That was probably our only good bet, though, so I still agree with the punchline!

I ran the conduit vertically: from box in the room's wall down into the basement where it was just open. That made it easy to run whatever I wanted, and to change the wiring if needed.

I did have two conduits to the patch panel for each wing and a conduit connecting the two panels. But these ones weren't terminated by boxes, they were just open.

I had to install a 35’ HDMI cable through my walls and attic 11 years ago. I bought the highest quality, largest wire gauge, cable Monoprice had. I just upgraded my receiver and TV to 4K HDR. Guess what, that HDMI cable that was bought before 4K HDR even existed, works perfectly. I don’t even have to use chroma subsampling to bring the required bandwidth down. Oddly enough, the one thing it can’t do, that the new replacement cable, that I haven’t installed yet, can do is 1440p. 1080p and 2160p are fine. Even though 1440p even at 120Hz is less bandwidth than 4K @ 60Hz. Go figure.

I don’t use my CAT6 as much as I used to, but where I do, it is amazing. Wired connections are essential for remote work IMO.

Broadly agree, though getting a Mac five minutes before you need it isn't viable anymore given the two month backorder on many of them :-)

Just in time provisioning certainly worked a lot better pre 2020! Nowadays people are having to go to all sorts of odd lengths just to pick up a games console released 18 months ago..

That was my thought as well since post is 23rd June 2022 - like author missed what is going on with a lot of stuff.

I found this part puzzling: "And the one place in my office I still use wires — my desktop — the existing cat5 ethernet cable was not fast enough for the new speeds of fiber optic."

What would fiber speeds be useful for in a home office? It seems like for most people, Ethernet would still be fine?

10 gigabit still only needs cat 6A. 25 and 40 gigabit takes cat 8, (and only goes out to 30 meters) while 50 gigabit is fiber-only.

It's... physically possible Kevin is doing something that requires 50 gigabit, but he's certainly not doing it with a normal wifi setup.

Between "buy the perfect cable you would bury in the wall" and "buy [almost any] fiber" and thr weird things you sometimes need to do to route the cables in the house (I swear, people who design them aren't from this planet) sometimes it would be easier to just lay the fiber (and eat cost with media converters and such) than to gamble on Cat6, IF you really need more than 1Gbit reliably.

But you did use use your copper telephone line during the emergence of digital bits and bytes. Someone planned ahead for you. Do the same.

Another take on future proof is around designing to avoid unwanted obsolescence; we have finite resources on this big rock, use what you can. Get creative. Not planning for the future will see you under water.

reminds me of the trend to containerize/micro-service/lambda things for *scale* - its usually just introduces unecessary complexity

used to work at AWS where I've worked with (and created) legacy services that failed to scale with rising usage (a good problem to have). Its not that these services were badly designed - rather, they were designed to meet the scale and constraints at a point in time. And that's okay

The future is hard to predict - so make it easy on yourself and solve the actual problems you have today vs hypothetical ones that might never materialize.

Especially in tech, by the time you do need to solve that problem, there will probably a better (serverless AI blockchain) technology that you can use to do it

At least in the houses I grew up in. It is very easy to rewire everything. We went from cat5-cat7 (my dad still has the same house). Though we use it more as a wireless trunk.

We can change the definition of "future-proof" -- your cable was future proofed in that if you were using it for hundreds of years, it wouldn't require any maintenance and if the age of wireless tech never came, your cables would be relevant

Extreme example: not future-proofing cables would be like laying them out above ground where the weather/ elements will destroy them before a year's end

But agreed that buying for your immediate need, with a little bit of futuresight is helpful

The exception is with software. You can future proof by making something into a general purpose computer that can be updated.

Also, by modularity, and by choosing up and coming stuff that is clearly going to be big(Like the next generation of an existing technology).

Buying something before you need it can definitely be a High Crime against your own happiness.

But future proofing can sometimes be a tool to avoid owning more "Stuff" without giving up functionality.

I just bought a MOLLE backpack. I expect the webbing standard to be around, and that possibility in the future I might want to briefly carry more stuff than normal, but I don't need to buy anything but the pouches I want right now.

I also bought a solar generator. I was sure to choose one with LiFePo4 and USB-PD inputs(Unfortunately, it still comes with a dedicated DC power adapter that I do not want, but is otherwise wonderful).

Of all the tech items I own, my phone and laptop probably inspire the most confidence. I also like my Fire Stick. I rarely regret buying something that's just a general purpose computer in disguise.

They have the adaptability built in, without the need to add hardware.

I also rarely regret choosing modularity.

Not so much in software, I don't do UNIXy stuff, because even a dozen large apps is still a trivial amount of storage on a modern disk.

But with hardware, the more standard all the connections are, the less I have to own. If I use something once a month, I don't want to drag out a special charger. I don't want adapter dongles in my ports. I don't want uncommon consumables that only come from one company.

My idea of future proofing is to mostly avoid dedicated hardware.

My experience has been that software is where this is the strongest. The term YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it) is very much a precursor to this mindset, but I have found that you can go further by just trying to write software that's easy to change and update. However you should not do that by preemptive interface-design, etc, you should just focus on what actually makes it easier to swap things out.

Yes modularity and standardization is the key to longevity, because it gives you flexibility, upgradability, repairability, etc.

I can still use all my home's wiring and light switch boxes, even though I now have LED lights, and various dimmer, electronic and remote light switches. Because it is all standard and modular.

In contrast I have to junk my entire blender, including the perfectly functioning base/motor unit, because a small plastic catch which secures the bowl to the base snapped off. Since the whole thing is proprietary, not a standard connection, replacements are not available economically. If it were standard, I can imaging all kinds of specialist bowls being available, with new designs being created to cater for the latest cooking fashions.

Standards are one of the things that really defines modern tech.

It's usually fine when they change, because adapters will be made, as long as the new thing becomes the most common standard, so they don't even block innovation, in fact they probably create more innovation that nonstandard designs, because you can do things that requires huge volumes to do cheaply.

If blenders were standard, knife sharpeners would probably use the same base too. If it had a power connections vacuum blender bowls would use it. If it had digital control, you'd have baseplates to use magic bullet cups on a normal blender with the same push to activate system.

The world could have a lot less junk in it. I wish the government or some foundation would start a department of standards development, and teach consumers why they should choose approved gear that uses all the relevant specs.

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