Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies | Hacker News Reader

Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies

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283 pointsareoform209 comments

The ending doesn't quite work, and I'd say neither does the article as a whole really.

First, we didn't really forget "greek fire" or "roman concrete" exactly. We don't know what the formula for "greek fire" was exactly because it wasn't recorded. But in modern times we have an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for napalm -- we just don't know which of those matches "greek fire". Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost certainly know and a name.

Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

And I'd say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn't forget material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a modern copy, we'd use whatever shielding is required, after accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn't be dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos covering doesn't really mean much of anything.

I'd say this goes to some odd myth that I see all too often. That if "you do it right," you won't have to do it again. Somehow, superior technique and dedication of past attempts was lost and that modern attempts are doomed to failure. In large, paradoxically to the explanation, because we are better at building things that just barely accomplish their goals.

That is, it is an odd blind spot to not realize that "barely exceeding the goal" is often far far harder than over building.

I'd be interested in making some concrete objects that can last 1000 years. Could anyone suggest some resources or search terms to learn what 'forever' concrete entails in our modern scientific understanding, and how much more it would cost?

I'm a materials scientist.

Part of the problem is "ancient Roman concrete" is the epitome of selection bias. We basically know why it's strong, and can basically recreate it, but it would take a very long period of process optimization and corrosion testing to get a consistent product we're sure has a long lifespan.

If you want something to last 1000 years, you may be better off cutting it out of a hard, stable stone (like granite).

> a very long period of process optimization and corrosion testing

How long? 1 year? 10 years? 100? 1000?

If it's not the last option, isn't it worth figuring out?

Imagine the wonders we could build if we could justify the investment based on the lifetime of the structure.

Actually, you don't have to imagine it. Go watch the show, "Peripheral". This idea of long-lasting concrete was actually what I found myself thinking about just last night watching it, in the scenes of future London.

Is there a recipe of 'off the shelf' components that could be mixed together by a layperson and have a high likelihood of being an order of magnitude more durable?

Or is the tailoring of the mix to the environmental conditions going to be a more significant factor than the components?

Aluminum hydroxide and phosphoric acid, I think, mixed with enough suitable aggregate that it doesn't explode when you mix it. Look up recipes for castable refractory. Refractory materials aren't always more durable at ordinary temperatures — olivine sand in particular will serpentinize if allowed to weather — but many of them are.

There are actually lots of artificial materials that weather more slowly than rebar-reinforced portland-cement concrete. But buildings are huge — a small house commonly contains many tons of building materials, and a large building contains thousands of tons — so the overriding consideration for building materials is that they be cheap as dirt.

In fact, buildings — then and now — are to a very large extent literally made of dirt. And rocks. Bricks? That's clay, which is a kind of dirt. Mortar? That's sand, which is a kind of dirt, glued together with typically a small amount of ordinary portland cement with an even smaller amount of additives. Drywall? That's gypsum, which is the kind of dirt White Sands National Monument is made out of (as well as, in its mineral form, many stunning ancient Egyptian vases) although a significant amount of modern gypsum is sourced from flue-gas desulfurization. Plaster? That's sand glued together with cooked gypsum, except when it's sand glued together with quicklime, which is made by cooking chalk. And of course adobe is sand glued together with unfired clay.

The issue is that costs that seem totally reasonable when you're dealing with gram or kilogram quantities of a material become totally unmanageable when you need a hundred tonnes of it. You can use glass, wood, or steel (the cheapest metal) in more modest amounts, but they generally can't replace OPC.

So, there's a pretty short list of materials that are both strong enough and cheap enough to use as building cements, and which can additionally be synthesized on a building site between grains of sand (as opposed to, say, in a furnace isolated for oxygen, or at 500°). You have:

· the above gypsum, quicklime, ordinary portland cement ("OPC"), and unfired clay;

· tar (asphalt);

· geopolymer cements (milled metakaolin polymerized with waterglass);

· waterglass itself;

· Sorel cement (magnesium oxychloride);

· magnesium oxysulfate;

· calcium aluminates; and

· the phosphates of aluminum, magnesium, and occasionally calcium or even zinc.

Of these, some have worse weathering properties than OPC: unfired clay, Sorel cement, magnesium oxysulfate, and (if cured improperly, in a famous nationwide disaster in Spain a few decades ago which wasn't discovered for years) calcium aluminates.

But there are all kinds of extremely stable materials that would last much, much longer than concrete in the weather, but which are just too expensive to make buildings out of, or which nobody knows how to make big enough pieces of. Soda-lime glass (though foamed glass and fiberglass have uses), aluminum, titanium, aluminum bronze, epoxy "granite", gold, silver, polytetrafluorethylene, sapphire, yttria-stabilized zirconia, yttria, carborundum, silicon, the rubber used for car tires, and so on.

The answer is simple but impractical:

Grossly overbuild the structure, so that it is lightly stressed. Don't use any reinforcing material within the concrete (much of the damage that happens to a modern reinforced concrete structure is the result of the internal reinforcement swelling due to corrosion). Ensure that the structure doesn't freeze (water that penetrates the concrete and freezes will cause cracking).

Note that following these limitations would rule out the vast majority of modern concrete structures.

Don’t try to make a single piece of forever concrete. Make tons of the stuff and spread it around, particularly in places conducive to long life for concrete. Then let survivor bias sort it out.

Consider it done :-)

O/T, but materials longevity is a trigger for me.

Raise the bar and use diamond.

I used to be in the CVD diamond world. On my honeymoon nearly 30 years ago, my wife and I were hiking in the Himalayas, in Sikkim.

My Dad loved diamonds and used them in his work (geophysical drilling, using diamond bits). He passed a year before my marriage. I wanted to leave a rem meminisse eum a in his honor.

So I grew a 2mm thick x 2.5cm diameter diamond disc. I used some nucleation art to make his first name appear as a texture variation in the faceted growth surface. I left it on a protected ledge at ~ 19,000 feet, with a note that just said “Thanks, Dad”.

That disc, or its fragments, will be around until that mountain gets covered by a lava flow or subducted into the mantle.

Concrete? A thousand years? Let's aim higher. :-)

K what? You... grew a diamond.. disc?! I'm really curious to know more, or see any photo(s) if you have something shareable! Intriguing indeed haha

Not GP, but here's a photo from Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond#/media/Fil...

Ahhh cool! thanks, very interesting

That's an awesome tribute. I'm sure your dad would be proud.

No magic formula--just do maintenance every couple of years and rebuild every couple of hundred.

Structures that lasted from ancient times to today were either made out of giant slabs of stone or had maintenance done on them repeatedly over the years.

Talk to a civil engineer or architect and they can point you to the right mixes. A lot of it really depends on what sort of wear and stresses the structure will undergo.

> We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time

Unfortunately...

1. There's no "we". i.e. the entities choosing concrete mixtures and other construction technology do not typically share interests with the people / organizations which inhabit the buildings, except in some very abstract roundabout sense. Which is part of the reason why

2. Concrete construction is usually not engineered to last even a few centuries, let alone "forever". In fact, it is often so poorly engineered (or one might argue: misengineered) that it won't last even a single century, or less than that. Because the principle of costing less money tends to be taken all the way to the point of just barely passing regulatory constraints.

3. ... and those regulatory constraints are often quite lacking. I live in Israel, and a constructor is not even required to guarantee that their building will not-collapse beyond 7 years' time.

4. Actually, a lot of the mass-made soviet-era residential buildings are very well made and almost as good as new (well, considering how they often weren't so great when new). This depends on the specific country, region, period of construction etc.

In chemistry in general, a lot of times, minute impurities can have a massive role on the properties of materials (this is especially apparent in food, were flavors are basically entirely defined by chemicals found in ppm quantity). Modern process control essentially works by having the needed and acceptable impurities measured in precise amounts, and relying on chemists and metallurgists to monitor how these impurities come about, but this kind of control has only really been possible for a century or maybe two.

In more ancient times, the process control instead basically relied on "get your ingredients from this well/mine/whatever". So while we actually have a decent idea of what Greek fire is (it's a kind of napalm), we don't have any way of knowing what their actual source of naphtha was, so we don't know what the precise impurities that gave it its best kick were. (I'll also opine that there were probably several different formulas in use, and we may be ascribing properties of different kinds of Greek fire to the same one, which would mean that the search for "the" formula for Greek fire could only ever be a failure.)

The real secret to Greek fire was the Byzantine's unusually advanced "siphon," which heated the mixture in a pressure vessel to allow it to spray fairly long distances. The main use was on ships of course, but there was also a man-portable flamethrower version, which is quite strange to think about someone in AD 900 wielding.

This ship-borne version only worked in calm conditions, otherwise fireships were just as likely to set themselves on fire. However, it did do pretty well in the sheltered Sea of Marmara around Constantinople. The fireships probably saved the empire from the Caliphate during the 719 siege of Constantinople by destroying the much large Muslim fleet. That occurred at a nadir of Byzantine power and the height of Caliphate power. Western Eurasian history would have looked very different if the Caliphate got control of the Bosporus then, as opposed to the Turks 700 years later.

Yes, exactly, the same story is with the Damascus steel. We now know that the secret to it, beside the cool look, was that it contained many carbon nanotubes in steel that greatly improved the performance of the blade. That was achieved by a combination of special properties of the iron ore (supposedly sourced from somewhere in India) and the technology itself that got lost over the time. Of course, modern steel is way better and we now actually understand the tech behind the carbon nanotubes, but the old masters were achieving it all by simply conducting many, many experiments.

Something curious to me in materials science/pharmaceuticals/etc. is how difficult it is to replicate the natural laboratory in an artificial one. This is another way in which humanity is losing knowledge, but here it's even dressed up to look like the accumulation of knowledge!

Author here, based on my reading of your comment, I think we're talking at cross purposes.

Your comment seems to be about how these technologies aren't useful for us in the present. AFAICT, it doesn't dispute that the knowledge was lost.

An additional interpretation is that you're interpreting my writing as being from someone who thinks that "the Romans clearly built it better" etc.

That's not the point I'm making.

Yes, we have napalm and recipes for it. Yes, we have digital computers that are incalculably better than the Antikythera mechanism. Yes, we can trivially manufacture better concrete.

And that's amazing, for us today, but how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

The loss in knowledge doesn't matter (as much) anymore in the present, but it has held us back, measurably so. For a thousand years, between the Antikythera mechanism and a few hundred years ago, we somehow lost their equivalent of Kepler's laws, some version of calculus, precision machining, mechanical computing etc. For over a thousand years, we have no records of anyone producing devices that approached or surpassed its capabilities.

What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?

That's the point here.

The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them.

Happy to hear how I could make the ending better though!

>"The point is that those technologies were exceptional at their time, but were still lost, and we are poorer for it, because it took away hundreds of years of erstwhile progress that could have been made had we remembered and kept building on them."

I agree with you point. On the other hand I think if we did not forget anything and kept improving while still having medieval views we might have had exterminated ourselves already.

I really enjoyed the post, even though I wasn't clear what part was fictional and what part was truthful.

You might be interested in Lucio Russo's book The Forgotten Revolution. He describes how the Hellenistic scientific and technical culture which gave us Heron's aeolipile, Greek fire, the Antikythera mechanism, Archimedes' method of exhaustion, Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's size, Eucid's axiomatization of geometry, etc.†, was lost. Basically what happens was that when centers of science like Syracuse and Alexandria were conquered by the pre-scientific Romans, the philosophers who weren't massacred were dispersed to the four winds, preserving their knowledge in foreign lands if at all. In later generations, Christian fanatics lynched Hypatia and threw down the Egyptian temples, extinguishing the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphics.

Russo reaches some conclusions that aren't generally accepted, but much of the history he reviews in the book is uncontroversial, if little-known — but starkly horrifying.

It wasn't a gradual process of forgetting, but a series of genocidal catastrophes. Similar processes obliterated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Maya codices, the khipu, and in our own time most of the world's languages and folklore, much of the Timbuktu libraries, the Afghan relics of early Buddhism, and the collections of the archaeological museums in Iraq.

______

† I have omitted Roman cement and the separation of gold from silver because I don't have any reason to believe they came from the Hellenistic world.

Exactly. When you look at the actual history of scientific progress or lack thereof, the reasons it stops/regresses are never technical or about people forgetting.

They're about invasion, shifting power centers, economic collapse, societal decay, religious zealotry, and whatnot.

And indeed, many of the moments where massive progress was made were flukes, not the norm -- very happy coincidences that were unlikely to continue for long.

So the idea that we've lost progress due to "forgetting" makes as much sense as saying that a company shut down because the engineers forgot how to work with the codebase. No -- it was all about much larger events. The forgetting was a result, not a cause.

To be honest, I thought long and hard about bringing up what happened at Alexandria, but I thought against it. I wanted the piece to be more solution focused.

The act of preservation in the now, making copies etc. is kind of like a prophylaxis against an adverse event. We are doing the mundane to prepare for the insane.

The solutions for gradual forgetting and catastrophic forgetting are very different, though.

Let's consider the problem of media longevity — while, as you point out, it is not by itself sufficient to preserve knowledge, it does seem to be necessary, at least as we currently understand things. (Scholars of songlines may disagree, but of course oral traditions like songlines are even more vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting; even half a century of prohibition can obliterate them.)

If you preserve data on Flash, you need to refresh it every few years before the stored electrons leak away; standard datasheet retention times are 10–20 years, though presumably that's at 80°, so maybe you'll get a few centuries at room temperature. If you can trust in continuity of institutions, this is not a big problem; you just have an endowment sufficient to support a small number of sysadmins who make sure the SSD arrays get resilvered at the right interval, replace broken devices, etc.

But if your preservation medium has to survive the PRC nuking TSMC 18 months from now — or an invasion by a military dictatorship of genocidal religious fanatics who hunt down and kill the sysadmins and burn the archives, as happened with the Maya codices — Flash looks much less appealing (though perhaps still viable; see http://canonical.org/~kragen/eotf/ and https://dercuano.github.io/notes/atmospheric-pressure-harves...).

— ⁂ —

I think this also bears on the question you're focusing on in the post, which as I understand it is more a question of curriculum design than of preserving physical storage media. If the target audience for the curriculum is the next generation, or three generations down the line, you can assume a lot of shared cultural background: shared celebrities, shared neologisms and modisms, shared values in a lot of ways. Hipparchos, by contrast, was writing for Ptolemaios, though he didn't know it. He died in 0120 BCE, and Ptolemaios was born in 0100 CE, 220 years later. Hipparchos was the most recent astronomer he could find to cite in the Almagest.

Amongst the civil warfare of the late Ptolemaic dynasty, none of the succeeding eleven generations had produced new astronomical observations, and the line of philosophical mentorship was broken, at least within the Hellenistic world. This bears quite directly on the problem of lost tacit knowledge you focus on in your post. Even Hipparchos was only able to do his work because he lived in Rhodos, on the periphery of the Alexandrian scientific world, which was sacked by Cassius in 043 BCE after a century of gradual reduction to servitude by Rome.

How do you design a curriculum so that it is still intelligible after eleven generations of cataclysmic cultural collapse, largely under a prescientific genocidal military dictatorship like that installed by the Roman invasion? The solution might look more like the Rosetta Project or the Cult of the Bound Variable and less like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. If Hipparchos had done a better job, maybe Ptolemaios (and consequently Colombo) wouldn't have gotten the size of the Earth so badly wrong. Maybe Ptolemaios, like Archimedes before the Romans killed him, would have followed the heliocentric model Aristarchos had developed 500 years before him (though Hipparchos did not.)

We really need to continue this conversation over email. The egg of the phoenix piece is spectacular.

One of the things I really like about the work that the Long Now Foundation has done and does is that they've defined their threat model and retrieval requirements with precision. They're okay with things being inconvenient to retrieve in the short term as long as they can be retrieved by beings with extremely different tooling in the long-term.

I think depending on the model, the threat form can change. The implicit assumption that I was thinking about while trying to come up with a "solution" (I did emphasize that it's a solution, and not even a good one at that, just my stab at it) was that the information would be for the world of 2070. Or, 2080.

I chose that for two reasons, one was that a lot of people have done long-term things, and depending on how long-term you go, you start getting into really interesting territory. And the second is that there's a need to start from a positive place/assumption (i.e. it's implicitly baked in that our civilization will still be around and kicking at said time without a catastrophic collapse) to make it more relatable for the reader so that they're likely to do something. Even if that something is a half-hearted attempt at documenting their personal projects with a higher degree of fidelity.

Depending on the threat model, the following would change,

    - the information encoded/form of encoding

    - how many copies would be necessary

    - maintenance specs

(the LoC was used as an example as their entire being is a shrine to American and human endeavor, but it's tied to the health of the US as a whole)

I don't have the answer to the fascinating question that you've mentioned. I need to think about it more and we should continue this conversation. Lemme know how I can connect. I'm available via twitter etc. (see profile)

Hey, thanks! I'd like that very much too. I hope you didn't feel I was attacking your thoughts on solutions, which I think are interesting and worthwhile; I was just pointing out the likely relevance of catastrophic forgetting. Send me an email that says "areoform".

Not at all! I've deeply enjoyed engaging with you. It's why I write.

And will do :)

Don't see any email yet!

Your comment just gave me an epic story idea. Where our society collapses and far into the future, there are only stories about our age. Then they manage to build a computer, and watch a movie about space (with aliens!) Thinking there are people waiting for them in space, all of humanity gets behind creating an interstellar civilization…

So thanks for that.

But this is predicated on a non falsifiable claim that we could have built on these technologies. That they weren't extended to better things just a easily hints at them being technological dead ends.

Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.

In the case of asbestos and leaded paint, lives and damage done by having used them.

Now, I do believe we should have people study the past. I still like reading on old programming techniques. But progress is not necessarily held back by not building on what came before.

>Consider the massive costs that went into many old structures. Often you could measure them in lives lost during construction.

Or the simple fact that laborers were not paid. Hard to compete against literal slave labor

Volunteer labor is a thing. That’s how many cathedrals were built.

If you volunteer enough, your salvation is all but assured.

Doesn't exactly sound like volunteering to me.

As a matter of fact, at least here in Germany a lot of cathedrals took decades, some even centuries to build - the Cologne Cathedral, for example, took way over six hundred years. Additionally, they were often built in "batches" and expanded and modified, schedule pretty much depending on some emperor or volunteer donations providing enough funds for the next section.

Me and my s/o, who actually studied a lot of the German cathedrals for her master's degree, went on a tour across a lot of the cathedrals this summer with the 9-euro flat train ticket... it's utterly amazing what medieval people could pull off. If you're interested in old buildings, wait until the successor of the 9-euro ticket comes next summer and go on a trip yourself, it's definitely worth it.

Just because there's something in it for them doesn't mean it's not still volunteering.

Do you also apply such a standard to modern examples of volunteering?

Sadly, I posit that that is the modern definition of volunteering. Doing something without getting paid, typically means no monetary value. And since money is fungible for value in general, it means doing something where you get no value out of it. And there is obvious value in salvation.

That said, I think this is just a misalignment in what "volunteer" means. Historically, it was more like "volunteer trees", in that you didn't specifically recruit or hire them. It did not mean that they did not get benefit out of it.

Cathedral builders were among the most sought after, and highest paid, workers and artisans in medieval Europe. They had de facto unions, free week ends, limited work hours and basic health care. They could enforce that because there were only so many qualified people to build cathedrals back then.

Servitude labour was more of a thing for castles, Cathedrals were build in towns and cities, with free citizens. Castles were build by nobles and those had servitude populations to draw labour from.

This is... probably misalignment with modern definitions. Volunteer for the time was not at all the same as what we think of today. To wit, many of the "volunteers" were as likely getting the only form of compensation that they could get by being there to build something.

Specifically, if there was a local market, it would have been near the cathedral. And if you didn't have a reliable farm or other plot of land to provide food, seems reasonable to assume your best bet was to be compensated in some form for manual labor.

Roman concrete is simply concrete made by pozzolan cement. You make pozzolan cement by grinding quicklime together with volcano ash, fly ash from coal power plants, or metallurgical slags.

But the author’s point still stands. That knowledge was lost and then rediscovered.

> What if the knowledge behind that device hadn't been lost and we were 1k years further along into our understanding of mathematics and computing?

I believe that knowledge is overrated on the long run. It is methods for knowledge creation what really matters. And incentives to apply the best known methods.

Had you read Bret Devereaux talking on an absence of Roman Industrial Revolution?[1] No practical steam engine before it's time has come. Knowledge is created when it is needed. I believe the same stands for computing. It must be some new demand for calculation that created computing. Probably the development of economics.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Computing was created because of the demand for calculating artillery trajectories and code breaking in the 1940s

The Z3 was made for aerodynamics calculations, and more generally civil engineering.

I'm not sure that this is the whole story. Analytical Engine of Babbage was designed at 1830. It was not built at the time of course... But the idea was tried again and again unless it made it's way into practical applications. It seems to me that there was a demand. Probably not economics but engineering?

Distribution of knowledge is the only way forward. There where probably only a few people that had key knowledge to these technologies. Once they disappeared, so did the technology.

>Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

Dead from climate change most likely.

I still don't think it quite adds up. You're mixing two different things together because they look kinda similar on the surface but aren't.

If you want to make the point that "what if we developed steam power sooner", then sure, that works so long you keep talking about steam power in Ancient Greece. Yes, knowledge did get lost there.

But that's not what happened with the Saturn V. The knowledge didn't really go anywhere. We still have the engines and the designs, they're just technologically obsolete. We're not making them not because it's some lost wonder-technology we forgot how to make, but because it costs a lot of $$$ and there's no profit to be made by sending another lander to the Moon and science funding is scarce. That we don't see the asbestos covers much doesn't really mean anything because the actual knowledge is in the fields of heat management and materials science, and not magazine cover photos.

Thanks for engaging with the piece so deeply! Really appreciate it.

Just as legacy tech isn’t automatically better than today’s technology, today’s technology isn’t always better than legacy tech. The agency has gone back to the Apollo well many many times for these “technologically obsolete” designs because they effectively solved problems that we haven’t faced in decades.

Example, the CSM’s umbilical connection was a work of art, it had to be reverse engineered from museum pieces for current gen spacecraft, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/umbil...

The F-1 engine’s turbopump and gas generators had to be taken apart by hand because we haven’t built anything close to their throughput for decades, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/f1_sls.html

Apollo’s phenolic resin heat shield led to the Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) that was then studied by SpaceX to develop their current PICA-X heat shield.

IIRC, there’s a fairly direct line between the Apollo parachutes and SpaceX, https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/t_3.html

There are many more big and small examples that I can’t name off the top of my head. From the thermal roll to core sampling, having that knowledge allows us to learn from their experience and do better.

Hundreds of thousands of extremely smart people worked on the program and they came up with some extremely interesting ideas along the way. It’s faster/more useful to have a library of their work to draw from rather than going to the well again and redoing it from scratch.

> how much better would it have been if we hadn't forgotten about these technologies in the first place and had continued to improve on them? Heron of Alexandria described building steam engines, what if we had continued to experiment on them for over 2k years? Where would we be now?

I don't think this is a possible world in the first place. The knowledge of steam engines and intricate mechanical machines wasn't "lost" by accident: it was lost because there was no good reason to develop it further. The Greek steam engine was a cool demo, neat little piece of stage magic for the temple whose doors it powered, but there weren't any practical applications in sight. I bet it also was a hell of a maintenance burden.

The unfortunate reality of our lives seems to be that technology only propagates as long as there's enough funding for it. That means at least several people have to need it very much to support a single inventor. Many more people if there's a need for extra labor, or expensive resources (such as metals). That's as true today as it was 2000 years ago.

What I'm saying is: the reason the Greek steam engine was forgotten is that there was no demand for it back then, and that's because of a combination of factors, such as:

- It could do only so much, because other important technologies - such as precision manufacturing - weren't in place;

- The things it could do could be served better and cheaper by other means - such as hired, slave[0] or animal labor;

Learning history on my own[1], past the school curriculum, I was surprised to discover that a lot of technology was always there in the background. Medieval times weren't just a long period of stagnation - it's when the building blocks for industrial evolution were slowly invented. A lot of important developments happened in mining, where increasingly powerful and reliable pumps allowed people to dig deeper. The progress here was sustained, because it was paying for itself.

The industrial revolution happened when things aligned just right. The steam engines could be manufactured cheaply and robustly enough, and put to important enough work, that they paid for themselves - which financed their improvements, which opened more net-profitable applications, and so on - creating a positive feedback loop that run so long, it triggered more feedback loops, and turned humanity into proper technological civilization.

Note that there's a lot hiding in the "put to important enough work". The overall political and economic situation of the era was what created the "jobs" for steam engines, and that situation is downstream from technologies developed for sailing (progress in astronomy, healthcare and shipbuilding), communications (the printing press), and many others.

Point being: inventions aren't islands; they can't sustain their existence if there isn't a need for them. The question "where would we be if we didn't forget ${technology that we 'forgot' and 'rediscovered' centuries later}" doesn't seem valid to me.

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[0] - There's an argument I see raised every now and then that historically, technology made jumps when labor was expensive; conversely, cheap labor meant it was cheaper to just throw more bodies at any problem.

[1] - I'd like to say "studying history", but what I really mean is just occasionally watching some high-quality documentaries and reading blog posts by people who (claim to) know this stuff.

It's amazing to me how eloquently you explain what I understand to be exactly the author's original point. You're right, the knowledge doesn't just disappear, it is forgotten because it doesn't serve any obvious short-term purpose. The author argues that, on the time scale of humanity, we would be better off if we didn't let such myopia force us to start anew every time the cycle repeats.

I'm not personally convinced of the specific proposed solution, since it's "Just Another Technology", but I wholly agree that the problem exists, and I think you argue effectively for some of the reasons why.

> Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

Practical Engineering has a good video on Roman concrete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0BB2PRY7k

>Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things.

Yet still better than US suburbia.

Asbestos encapsulates a problem with society at large. We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer is simply ignored.

This sort of problem exists everywhere. If something bad happens or is caused by something (politics, economics, etc) we are simply too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

From a tech standpoint, I see this a lot. Postgres at my current company got banned because one team one time had a bad experience with it (after they misused it).

Managing complexity is important even if it results in suboptimal solutions.

Imagine if when building a house you needed to shape every single brick for it’s actual load. Sure you end up using less materials, but you lost economies of scale and suddenly need vast quantities of computing power for minimal gain.

Using uniform bricks and banning stuff may seem wasteful, but it enables efficiency elsewhere.

That's not what's happening in terms of asbestos. Rather, it's more like "Electricity has caused buildings to burn down, so lets ban electricity".

Rather than focusing on the safe use of a material, we instead lean towards removing it all together. Older materials with known faults (such as wood being flammable) are deemed acceptable simply due to having known weaknesses in a period where we didn't care about safety. If we found out wood causes cancer, we'd still use it in building and furniture because we've always used it in building and furniture.

It's not an economies of scale problem.

When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).

Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).

> If we found out wood causes cancer,

If the rate was high enough I bet we'd phase it out. Don't underestimate the importance of the size of the effect.

Smoke from burning wood causes lung cancer at roughly the same rate as cigarettes. Have we banned wood stoves/ovens/or fire pits?

I dare say, wood smoke has caused more cancer than asbestos ever did. [1]

[1] http://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wood-smoke-pollution-kill...

In my area fire pits are absolutely illegal. It's densely populated and people don't want to breathe their neighbors smoke.

They’re largely phased out in large swathes of Californa due to ‘spare the air’ days lining up almost perfectly with days you’d ever want to use them.

Yes they are absolutely banned in lots of places.

And there are whole programs designed to reduce worldwide deaths from smoke, precisely because it is a major problem. It's something we're actively working on because it's so serious and plausibly fixable.

So what on earth are you trying to say?

> Have we banned wood stoves…?

wood burning stoves are absolutely required to be updated now with certified emissions stoves. all four wood burning stoves/fireplaces in our cabin had to be replaced before we could finalize the purchase. also it would have been considered uninsurable if the stoves were not updated to meet the new wood burning standards.

these weren’t like antique stoves either, if i’m remembering correctly they were new in like 2000ish.

honestly, the region of our cabin is noticeably more pleasant to be in since they started requiring this—when i used to go there as a kid, the air was just awful to breathe when everyone was using the previous gen wood burning fireplaces.

How much higher is treated wood vs firewood?

> Dr. Smith has spent decades studying the health effects of indoor air pollution due to biomass burning on women and children in developing countries.

Your link is talking about indoor fires. Outdoor fire pits wouldn't concentrate the smoke in the living area. I have no idea what the total effect would be for outdoor fires, but it isnt' the same as the indoor burning biomass stoves

Its a pretty big leap to say we would still use wood to build if it came out it caused cancer. Steel framing is becoming much more popular now, and is mandatory code for the reasons you listed in certain situations.

We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios in an attempt to keep the baby and the profits. https://www.maacenter.org/asbestos/products/. Talc especially has had a lot of attention in the last year or so.

I think there is also a pretty big difference between how people view a material with undesirable qualities such as electric causing fires, or wood being flammable, compared to asbestos damaging the individual.

> We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios

Very few scenarios allow it and there's active lobbying to remove it even in those usecases. The guide you linked to primarily cites old products still in circulation and not new products.

Thw reason why we don't use asbestos because removing it without endangering people sucks. We had a room at our university where they discovered an aspestos (or similar) ceiling and the removal took a month and had to be done by people with respirators, full body suits, air filters and hand tools.

If you have to do such a thing every time you are rebuilding something it is not going to economic.

That's for loose packed asbestos (common in roofs).

That's not all or the only way asbestos can be packaged. Which is my point. If you bind asbestos to vinyl, for example, you get a lot of the same insulation benefits with none of the problems of becoming a health hazard.

That's the problem. Yes, loose blown asbestos IS a problem and a major health hazard, but it's not the only form asbestos can take. Hence, baby thrown out with the bath water.

What about when you need to drill into or cut the vinyl for renovations, or if the house catches on fire, or floods? What about the factory workers at the asbestos-vinyl plant?

Maybe asbestos binded to vinyl is literally not a health hazard in any of these cases, but this needs to be shown in a positive way. The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the default way we treat materials is that they are assumed safe until data shows otherwise, and we obviously can't treat asbestos as a default material.

> What about when you need to drill into or cut the vinyl for renovations

Wear a mask. But also, you likely aren't going to be affected. The risks are primarily for people working heavily with the stuff. Similar to how you could get silicosis cutting concrete but you likely won't get silicosis because you don't do that enough daily.

> if the house catches on fire

The neat thing about asbestos is it doesn't burn. That being said, the fumes from a fire are toxic without the asbestos so it's not exactly like it's making it more dangerous. (perhaps cleanup is what you're referring to?)

> or floods

Getting asbestos wet keeps it from Aerosolization. In fact, it's recommended to do that anyways if you are removing asbestos. (though, water isn't good enough to make it completely safe, it's better than nothing). [1]

> The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the default way we treat materials is that they are assumed safe until data shows otherwise, and we obviously can't treat asbestos as a default material.

The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the asbestos industry hid the dangers of it and got exposed in a very public way which generated heavy public outcry. We treat it like this not because it's rational, but because of public outrage. Asbestos has become synonymous with unsafe, no questions asked. [2]

Mercury and lead have similar more well known public health problems, yet purchasing CFLs and lead water pipes remain everywhere. Why? because there's not nearly the same level of outrage.

[1] https://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/guidance/em5.pdf

[2] https://www.asbestos.com/featured-stories/cover-up/

The problem with “wear a mask” is that people often won’t even know it’s there.

If you're doing construction activity that generates dust you should be wearing a mask, regardless of which fibers are present.

> The reason it's regulated/nearly banned is because the asbestos industry hid the dangers of it and got exposed in a very public way which generated heavy public outcry. We treat it like this not because it's rational, but because of public outrage.

I recently learned that in the mid 20th century there was a huge scandal when it came out that TV game shows were rigged. The public was outraged and a law was passed prohibiting the fixing of "purportedly bona fide contests of intellectual knowledge or intellectual skill". You can go to prison for up to a year for this.

Because we need to be protected from that. ( https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/509 )

Fixing a purportedly bona fide professional wrestling match was and remains completely legal, of course, because that's not a contest of intellectual skill. Fixed quiz shows are a scourge upon the public, but fixed sporting events are just good fun.

This whole thread is such a great example of itself!

Asbestos is still used when there are not good alternatives.

Asbestos is only prohibited where there are practical alternatives.

The problem with asbestos is it was used where there was no rationale for its use beyond profits as a bulk material.

Those profits were only available because the health costs were externalized.

The existence of practical alternatives is the reason asbestos abatement is possible. The cost of abatement is almost entirely the removal and disposal, the cost of replacement materials is not a major factor.

> When you get right down to it, the people that got mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like blowing it in loose form for insulation).

Yeah, cause they often (as I understand) were not using proper protective measures to keep from inhaling the dust particles. A common thing I have seen on construction sites of all sorts, is the workers refusing to use some thing or the other, because it makes them uncomfortable, or harder to see (but still can) or harder to breath (but still can) or some other jackanapes idea like that.

> Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to it was left undisturbed).

This is where things get real fun. When moist or absolutely damp/wet, asbestos is basically harmless (to the lungs) because it's almost impossible to breath it in at that point. If you somehow manage to breath that in, you have to basically be trying to do it. When it is dryer than chalk on a hot summers day with 0% humidity though, then yeah it can cause all sorts of problems. But even then, people removing it tend to do the thing that the other prior mentioned construction workers (often) won't do.

They wear gloves, have masks on; and even are running some form of proper ventilation. And so much of the issue is averted.

Then comes the media and government. They take edge case scenarios like these, and hype them up; whilst mixing in the prior construction workers into the data. This makes things look worse than they really are.

It's not just Asbestos you can find this sort of thing with them. You can find media and government doing this with many things if you look carefully.

But that being said, none of this is to say that Asbestos isn't a problem at all. It's just to say that Asbestos gets the treatment it does for the same reason we have warning labels on nearly everything.

We placate and protect the stupid... stupidly.

The problem is that mesothelioma (the worst case) is a particularly nasty cancer, and the more common things it causes, like lung cancer and asbestosis aren't fun either. We still get people contracting these diseases decades after doing home renovations here in Australia because it was in so many building materials for decades here. They just didn't know about the danger (despite massive publicity campaigns).

And for what? In 99% of the uses of asbestos domestically and commercially there are safe products that can do just as good a job, perhaps just requiring things to be slightly thicker to get the same insulating value... Sure there are some niche industrial and scientific applications where it's still potentially the best performing option but so much of what it was used for, it just didn't need to be...

I originally replied to you with a long comment, but I saw that I angered the mob.

I think I'm done with this site.

I think the era when you could have nonvonforming views on this site is long over. People now use voting as an opinion aggrement token.

People have always done that, but down votes don’t actually matter so why worry about it?

I make plenty of comments knowing people will downvote them based on content and still ended up so much positive karma it would take serious effort to burn it all.

I think the overall vibe is quite different from what it was in 2010 say? It used to be 'post erlang' when there was too much off topic posting, but these days discussions seem to be highly dominated by people who are 'tech adjacent' and have no idea how to code or build products, and no experience outside of big, crappy, late-stage 'tech' companies.

downvotes cause you to be essentially a lite-shadow ban if they happen enough, especially if in a flagged thread/comment. You get rate limited, which means only 5 comments per day allowed. Max.

So, sorry, but while I didn't downvote you, I do disagree with you; entirely. Validly.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

______________

> TL;DR: apparently this can happen due to an account being "rate-limited". Rate-limited accounts can post a max of five posts within 24 hours.

See : https://hn.nuxtjs.org/item/15507821

Specifically this bit:

dang 1018 days ago

That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

The thread also has interesting discussions on other mod tools: shadowbanning, IP bans, and the like.

Apparently the way to un-rate-limit an account is to send in an email and mention that you will "stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Some amount of convincing prostration may be required, as a sort of high-level turing test. There does not seem to be a way to do this while not giving away your email address (which was not required at signup).

The moderator mentioned something about repeated, human-written warnings before rate-limiting, but this does not seem to be the case now (2020) - rate limiting seems to be a milder, less-known variant of the shadowban.

________________

That’s not a function of receiving downvotes alone.

Downvoting, flagging, and moderator actions are three different things.

Posting something people disagree with isn’t the same as a flame war. Keeping things civil is a requirement, which trips people up.

Look. All I know is what I looked up, and have read in the past; and that I wasn't rate limited until after I commented on a thread that suddenly got mega-flagged and I deleted my comment to try to be safe. Wasn't fast enough I guess, cause either an auto-bot just rate limited everyone in it; or a mod did.

Prior to that, I wasn't rate limited. After that, I was. Make of it what you will.

Which is why I'm probably going to ditch this site as far as commenting goes.

I'll still use it to see what people think, but that's about all its good for in the comments section now; just like Reddit, Twitter, and others.

But at least the links are still interesting.

P.S. I'm mostly only commenting still right now because

A: I haven't made my decision yet and

B: It would be rude to ignore those who did reply to me kindly.

The whole “just leave it and it’s fine” just isn’t practical for a lot of it though. I’m going through it right now, we’re leasing a new lab/workshop which will have some offices etc. in an older building. We literally can’t change any lighting fixture or add any WiFi access points without drilling through asbestos cement ceiling tiles and creating dust. So instead we’re having them removed, because any tiny subsequent change we’d need to do would expose employees to asbestos dust…

It’s just not worth having in any building you want to ever make any alterations to… And the only reason to have it would be just to have the same insulation value with a slightly thinner panel than what we’ll replace it with!

Working with old buildings require a compromise mindset.

No you don't want to drill the asbestos tiles, but you can install poles standing on the floor with lights and wifi access points.

No, it requires a cost/benefit mindset, like everything else.

There's nothing special about old buildings requiring compromise. Asbestos is just particularly costly. It sucks, and often it's more benefit in the long run to just rip that band-aid off now rather than live with suboptimal compromises for decades to come.

Yeah, that's it. Luckily it's not actually too hard to remove the ceiling tiles - they're not standard size grid but are drop-in, so nothing has to be cut to remove them and we can have new ceiling tiles made with a non-asbestos fibreboard with an insulation panel glued to the back of it. We'll probably end up removing about a fifth of the tiles in strategic locations for access and ceiling mounted things, because the disposal cost is so high to do all of them. Ideally we could get it all gone but as you said, it's just finding the cost/benefit balance.

A lot of this is a result of culpability/liability/blame. Intelligent use of aesbestos will be precluded by extreme legal risk. Your coworkers probably avoided repercussions for their experiences by shifting the blame to Postgres.

One way to look at this is when process and policy is not followed.

In IT we see this when information is lost (no backup policy), or information is leaked (no security policy). Using technology with no policy/process is almost always a risk factor for business. If said posts team had created a policy and process it's very likely the incident would not have occurred in the first place.

With products control is very rarely tightly held. There is a supply chain from where it's mined out of the ground all the way to destruction of the product which may be decades or even centuries away. Trying to ensure that your customer use a product intelligently over that long of time frame is too risky for most businesses.

the problem there is that if you don’t entirely ban asbestos and ensure that everyone knows asbestos = cancer, then like a cancer, corporate interests and the profit motive will ensure that it slips and slides back into usage to the point where it becomes a problem again

with public health risks, strong reaction is absolutely fine, and I wish we had more tendency towards it, not less. let’s do something drastic about micro-plastics!

Well, this is exactly the problem, it's completely arbitrary and based on public outrage what gets banned and what doesn't. If we can't motivate enough people to care about something, it won't be banned.

That's not a way to run health policy. I'd certainly like more action against PFAS, for example. At very least, more science done to know exactly how harmful it is (especially given how it's permeated so much of the public drinking water).

But, would I ban PFAS all together? Heck no. Rather I'd want to have a better understanding of where they should and shouldn't be used and how we should treat PFAS chemical outputs.

Yes, ban/restrict PFAS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32980712

I think you’re overestimating the degree to which these decisions are made logically based in a desire to avoid problems, and overly quick to dismiss different opinions on acceptable levels of risk as arbitrary or outrage-driven. There’s a long history of companies claiming to be doing the smart thing but cutting corners ruthlessly - for example, here’s a story I read last week contrasting how they told regulators they worked versus the actual plant conditions:

https://www.propublica.org/article/asbestos-poisoning-chemic...

To illustrate this: Asbestos is only banned in spray-on insulation, pipe insulation, paper, flooring, and new uses. The actual reason its not used as much (and it certainly is still used) is because of the public opinion and threat of lawsuits.

https://web.archive.org/web/20121022215630/http://www.epa.go...

> EPA does NOT track the manufacture, processing, or distribution in commerce of asbestos-containing products. It would be prudent for a consumer or other buyer to inquire as to the presence of asbestos in particular products.

Interested to know how one can misuse postgres enough to ban it!

They stored data in the array and then did a bunch of queries against that array. Queries like "select * from foo where array contains value".

Shocker, that's slow.

Funny that this is a query where Postgres can famously and singularly be very fast.

nuclear energy is also good example i think.

If gasoline cars were invented today, they would never be allowed to be sold to consumers, because gas is too toxic and too flammable to allow ordinary people to use it.

Like how hydrogen cars are in development but are waaay too dangerous to sell, so you can’t buy one.

Except you can. The Toyota Mirai is available and quite heavily subsidized. Whether buying one is a good idea is a different question, although the main issues with owning one don’t involve safety as far as I know.

Cars in general are extremely dangerous. I can’t think of anything else we allow that’s as bad.

Alcohol perhaps

Well, OK, except that there’s an infinitely long-lived bystander risk to not purging asbestos from all use.

You could (for instance) argue that once the product exists, and is in place, it poses no further risk to anyone - this is a common suggestion but is demonstrably, dangerously false. It’s a rock, it never breaks down. Its state never changes over mortal timescales. Eventually a building, or a rocket, or a train will be refurbished or scrapped - and when that happens people in the area are at no less risk than they ever were.

I think in the case of a non-reusable rocket being launched into space there could be an argument for it, assuming extreme precautions at installation and some calculation/precaution in case the rocket fails in atmosphere.

It could even lower the net asbestos on earth :) (not /s, though I attempting to add humor)

Author here, while I agree with some of your points, phasing out technologies is less of a problem as much as forgetting them. For example, we have far better insulators than asbestos now that can serve as thermal protection systems if we ever build a rocket of this scale again. One example of these new technologies are aerogels. In 2012, NASA showed off the HIAD, Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, it's a flexible heat shield that's made out of aerogel, https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de...

Plus toxic materials are very much still in use in the space industry, including asbestos. They're used as separators in fuel cells, insulation for missiles, etc

Asbestos was banned for buildings not for the space industry. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/decades-after-proof-of-its...

It will be replaced slowly as better materials become available.

> One example of these new technologies are aerogels.

And, to be fair, if you could use aerogels, you should use aerogels. They are way better at insulation than asbestos. They are simply cost prohibitive in most cases.

Despite what it may look like, I'm not trying to shill for asbestos :D. I just think it's a microcosm of a problem with society.

I think more to your point, specific government secrets get forgotton because they are closely kept under punishment, open access science, by letter or by journal has been going well for 600+ recorded years. Trades even longer by apprenticeship. Clockmakers and any other as well.

Ironically we might have also forgotten the massive cleanup that was needed for or buildings to either remove or permanently bind asbestos. How do you drill a hole into a wall, do maintenance on cables and pipes or tear down a building when it might emit enough asbestos needles to give you cancer at any disturbance? It is not sustainable.

Forgotten? We have just started doing that

> We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

The author's point being we not only purge it physically, but also culturally and thus intellectually. (I feel like there's a meta point around this thread being de-railed by discussions about how bad asbestos is.)

> We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

I don't think this has anything to do with the OP. It is focused on the process of knowledge being lost simply through the raw fact that nobody remembers it. This is applied to everything:

> We have lost more than 50% of all feature films made before the 1950s

The message of the piece is that we've forgotten the asbestos because, when you go to look at the preserved rockets today, it isn't there.

when you go to look at the preserved rockets today, it isn't there.

...probably because it was removed for aesthetic and health reasons.

The thing is that it poses a risk that can be avoided, since there are alternative materials with the same (or better) properties that doesn't cause cancer.

Asbestos was widely adopted because it was a very cheap material, they did know that it was dangerous but that fact was hidden by the companies selling asbestos containing materials for profit. There is no reason to use it.

Not only asbestos, for example in the past they used to put radioactive material in daily life object, such as clocks, dials, etc to illuminate them in the dark. Obviously it was not a good idea, since the risk it poses didn't justify the purpose. Same thing with smoke detectors, now we are no longer using radioactive particles in them, basically because we have better electronics that not only can replace radioactive material but can be more effective in detecting a fire.

Most professionals who work with asbestos don't recommend "purge it from everything everywhere." Rather, the usual recommendation is to leave it intact and don't touch it, unless it's going to be disturbed in a way that'll release the fibers anyway (eg. imminent renovation or demolition, accessible to small children). Even then, oftentimes abatement consists of encapsulation, i.e. just wrap it in some physical barrier that will prevent it from being disturbed. It's banned in new construction, but choosing to use something different when building anew is a lot less expensive than ripping it out of existing construction.

> Asbestos encapsulates a problem with society at large. We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything everywhere".

There is actually a good reason for this: the slippery slope is not always a fallacy.

I worked with a guy like that once, anything he’d tried and it didn’t work perfectly was forever forbidden as “tried that, didn’t work.” Nobody else was allowed to attempt it.

The article laments this but I think it's important to understand forgetting as an essential part of progress. We all have finite mental capacity and attention. Time spent learning outdated tools and processes is time not available to use for more valuable ends.

We understand this deeply when it comes to software architecture where encapsulation and information hiding are fundamental principles but it applies everywhere. There is a value in not knowing, or not needing to know, because it frees up brainpower for other stuff.

Although we attempt to store information in external mediums, it's humans who make the world go round. Funny to think that, in practice, the collective knowledge of mankind is a fuzzy imprecise mess coupled with a few scribbled notes.

I'm pretty sure the world would keep going round if humans did not exist.

Yeah, but once the humans are gone, why keep the simulation running?

Cockroaches

True. Engelbart would be appalled to see where things are at in 2022.

The author of the article does not have a manufacturing background. It shows. Knowing about, and measuring, sensitivities to process variation is a big issue. Look up Deming, quality, the Toyota production system, and such. Manufacturing has random, environmental, and systematic variation. Random looks like noise, environmental correlates with weather and other external factors, and systematic comes from tool and die wear. Statistical quality control is about separating those. Do we need to control the humidity more tightly, or replace the dies sooner?

(One of the problems the US has in manufacturing is the loss of a culture where more people have a clue about a manufacturing plant works.)

The general loss of knowledge is something I've only personally started to notice during the last 2-3 years.

For most of my life I didn't even think that we were still at a stage where we could lose valuable knowledge.

But it clearly is everywhere, including basic everyday technology such as Electronics, Software, Wood working or even Cooking.

My gut feeling is that the knowledge loss that occurs at every generation is non-linear depending on the field, but it is higher than 75% overall, and probably more.

The loss rate could be reduced by increasing healthy lifespan.

I liked Jonathan Blow’s ‘Preventing The Collapse of Civilisation’ talk on the same topic from 2019. [1] Although, it’s more related to software engineering. Previously discussed on a couple occasions. [2][3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

I recall reading that the lack of documentation for the Saturn 5 was related to politics behind the space shuttle. The accusation was that NASA intentionally lost or destroyed the Saturn V docs so the space shuttle would be the only option.

This happens often in the military. For example, shredding the machines used to build the F-14 and F-22.

I read that they actually carefully documented how to make the F-22 and also stored all the tooling. We could restart making them but it wouldn't be cost effective to do so.

And the Blackbird, sadly

Documentation can't save us from being human.

No data translated from one medium (brain) to another (paper) and back (brain) is 100% efficient.

But documentation is not only 'tutorials' / how to do something.

Documentation is also 'design' / what to do, 'requirements' / why we're doing it, 'changelog' / why we are making the tweaks we are making in the process.

I'm enough of an antiquarian to be interested in why the phone guy who installed the phone lines for the theme parks did what he did...turns out burying the phone lines directly in the dirt was for a particular reason (cheap / good enough) and for decades, it was indeed good enough. But because nobody read the roll up paper showing the phone line runs, the lines were destroyed when someone came along and installed a roller coaster with a greater than 180 degree turn in that spot, cutting the bundle. The documentation wasn't missing data, but the humans failed to read it.

We do forget things all the time, sure. But don't blame documentation when humans don't read it. The weakness in the system are humans, always.

Now is not the time to give up documenting things. All salutes to the ongoing flamewars over 'code should be self-documenting means I never have to write AnYtHiNg down' aside, someone said civilization advances by the number of things we can write down...because we only have so much wetware / RAM / brain space.

Someone said this and I'm stealing from them: under similar conditions, the wimpiest charcoal on the flimsiest napkin lasts longer than the sharpest mind.

In this knowledge-based industries, no matter our particular focus, we individually would be served better by improving our communication skills, namely documentation of more than just the brittle business processes and API interfaces, but the who/what/when/where/why of what we're doing.

"The day-to-day compositions were recorded in a notebook, but the why behind it and the how were a closely guarded secret."

This has become more and more apparent to me over my career. Having a document that describes the steps to get to the end product is not useless per se, but it lacks context.

Anyone coming in anywhere from 6 months to 6 years later could maybe reproduce the steps, but anyone who has considered such problems at all would realized that rote reproduction doesn't get very far.

What your future self cares about is how and why you came to the end you did. Why did we use an unsigned int here instead of signed? Why is the field exactly 13 bytes?

The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39537/the-air-force-ne...

They also had to reverse engineer some nuclear warheads.

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

That was in the article.

Maybe John Romero can help, he mentioned working on it. I guess there’s a 6502 in there somewhere

Another, closely related example: A lot of the welding abilities needed to build another Saturn V were lost. We couldn’t replicate the rocket without having a lot of people relearn old welding techniques.

> We couldn’t replicate the rocket without having a lot of people relearn old welding techniques.

We can perhaps create sufficiently close replicas, which may work well enough, using very different technologies.

This seems at odds with the current production of several launch systems of comparable or greater size. Do you know which parts required these special welding techniques?

We have better ways to do things now - adhesives, new welding techniques that impose different design constraints, etc. IIRC there was some thought of reusing parts of the Saturn V design on the Artemis program but it was not practical because of the welds involved.

Isn't the Starship simply being welded together from stainless steel sheet metal?

Making a Saturn V today wouldn't make sense because manufacturing tech has improved tremendously since then. They didn't even have CAD! A modern design would take perhaps a tenth of the hours of labor.

In particular, and apropos to the comment you are responding to, we have a wonderful new way to weld aluminum alloys: friction stir welding. It was invented in the 1990s, long after Apollo.

Funny since it looks so low-tech at first.

Despite modern techniques being superior, I share the sentiment of the author that the lost knowledge is something to be mourned. Even though that process wouldn't be used in a rocket today, it is possible that technique could have inspired a breakthrough for some other new process. Like how Gorilla glass, originally developed in the 1960's, was seen as a dead-end and largely useless, until the iPhone was being designed.

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

We didn't lose the knowledge of making chemically hardened glass. It just didn't have a lot of uses until everyone had touch screen cell phones that needed to be scratch resistant.

Patents are supposed to document inventions well enough that they can be reproduced. But I wonder if the background knowledge can decay enough that this stops being true. And I wonder if enough decay occurs, could things that were previously unpatentable for obviousness now become patentable again?

Lets see your fancy friction welding work on compound curves you might see on a rocket engine.

"United Launch Alliance applies FSW to the Delta II, Delta IV, Atlas V, and the new Vulcan expendable launch vehicles along with their Cryogenic Upper Stages, and the first of these with a friction stir welded interstage module was launched in 1999. The process was also used for the Space Shuttle external tank, for Ares I until the project was canceled in 2012, The SLS Core which replaced the Ares, and for the Orion Crew Vehicle test article and the current model of the Orion at NASA, as well as Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets at SpaceX.[53] The toe nails for ramp of Boeing C-17 Globemaster III cargo aircraft by Advanced Joining Technologies[7] and the cargo barrier beams for the Boeing 747 Large Cargo Freighter[7] were the first commercially produced aircraft parts. FAA-approved wings and fuselage panels of the Eclipse 500 aircraft were made at Eclipse Aviation, and this company delivered 259 friction stir welded business jets, before they were forced into Chapter 7 liquidation. Floor panels for Airbus A400M military aircraft are now made by Pfalz Flugzeugwerke and Embraer used FSW for the Legacy 450 and 500 Jets[8] Friction stir welding also is employed for fuselage panels on the Airbus A380.[54] BRÖTJE-Automation uses friction stir welding for gantry production machines developed for the aerospace sector, as well as other industrial applications.[55]"

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

We're talking about Apollo. Which rocket engine there was made of aluminum? The F-1 was made of Inconel, the J-2 of stainless steel.

aren't there other industries with similar welding skills ? nuclear plants seem to have high grade requirements, maybe not space grade right off the bat but also maybe not too far off ?

It seems off-target to get an emotional response from pointing out that millions of people have a slightly wrong picture of what a Saturn V rocket looked like. This is trivia. Most of those people aren't rocket engineers. Having a better idea of what it looked like would help you draw one slightly more accurately, and that's it.

It doesn't help us understand how much important knowledge was lost by the people who really should know how to do it. It seems like SpaceX is doing okay?

This fate is befalling the entire post-industrialized world.

Boeing learned this the hard way when they opened up that plant in SC. Institutional knowledge can't always be replicated.

I'm looking at a pile of several hundred shell scripts, and I feel this intimately and personally. What was your intention script author xb412j?

---

For a very different example, look to older satire groups like The Goon Show or Firesign Theatre or Monty Python. Monty Python may not be old to some people reading this, but try to explain some of the things they were making fun of. Many of the sketches are timeless, but many are very 'of their time'

There could probably be a form of punishment or a group party game based on deciding whether or not a short option in a pipeline is a bug or correct (without comments, of course).

Mix legacy/GNU/BSD/*box options if you'd like to ruin relationships.

The mention of Roman Concrete is interesting. Was it that we forgot the recipe or didn't know what was special about the recipe in the first place? I can't find the article now, but I remember reading a while back that part of the reason it was lost was that the materials to make it could no longer be found and apparently equivalent materials didn't work the same.

Material availability is a big deal with Roman concrete. It used ash from the nearby volcanoes, which isn't available everywhere.

am I wrong in thinking that the author is over-estimating the ubiquity of the image of the Saturn V?

I googled it, assuming he was talking about this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Space_Sh...

because for me this is the standard image of a space rocket. I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of the Saturn V, but perhaps this is an age thing?

The Saturn V was the first and second stage of the system that sent humans to the moon as part of the Apollo program, that's why a huge number of people knew about it. I'm not sure what you mean by "an age thing" (are you too young? too old?), but it's in the "current" paper copy encyclopedias (most even have images) that I assume most schools still have, and encyclopedias from the 1980s and 1990s appear to as well, so it's not just a 1970s thing.

The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer is simply ignored.

Asbestos causes a very, very nasty cancer - mesothelioma - that causes almost certain death. Painful death. With a very bad prognosis. And mesothelioma is caused mainly by asbestos.

There's a reason why we purged asbestos. No one wants to get mesothelioma.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/malignant-mesothelioma/causes-...

The main risk factor for pleural mesothelioma is exposure to asbestos. In fact, most cases of pleural mesothelioma have been linked to high levels of asbestos exposure, usually in the workplace.

Note that talc is a mineral crystal/fiber a little like asbestos, and talc is connected to ovarian/uterine cancer. Let's not play around with dusty tiny pieces of rock, they seem to be bad for our bodies.

Author here, the point of the piece isn't the asbestos. It's that we literally (in the original sense of the word) forgot the asbestos; asbestos was used as a part of the first stage F-1 engine's thermal protection system for the famous Saturn V rocket.

As the insulation was applied at the very last step, there aren't many photos of the final product. Add the presence of the cancer-causing asbestos, none of the existing displays and museum pieces show this vital component.

Because the museums don't reflect this fact, it doesn't exist in popular culture. And because it doesn't exist in popular culture, and that the people who built the Saturn V are dying off, we are largely in the process of forgetting what the most famous machine of the 20th century looked like.

The point of the piece is the forgetting. Not the asbestos.

Given that’s the case, you didn’t need to include Asbestos in the title of the article to garner more clicks, as I’m sure you must have realised it would have done.

It's tongue in cheek. I write for myself and to reach out to/engage in dialog with interesting people. And to just add to the general sphere of human knowledge.

I wrote this because I couldn't find anyone else addressing it.

Forgetting the Thermal Protection System (that included inconel and asbestos) is a lot harder to read than Forgetting the Asbestos.

And I didn't think it would be a problem. Usually on HN, people read the article before commenting.

I understand your point and that of the person you're replying to, but I have two points:

1) I read your comment before the article

2) Despite feeling pretty familiar with the subject matter, I don't think I know what inconel is

It was you comment that led me to commit to reading the article, because I'm not interested in yet another article about asbestos but I am interested in the Thermal Protection System.

Sample size of one, but, you know.

With respect, I was pointing out that the word asbestos has certain gravity that would have attracted clicks.

To suggest I didn’t read the article is in bad faith. I did read it, and quite liked it as it happens (I had no idea of the extra heat shields over the engines and how that detail had been lost to time). It just could’ve done without the clickbait title is all.

This has my curious. I could have sworn every space museum I went to made a point about the asbestos coating. Just an odd fake memory of mine? (Sincere question, btw. I have more synthetic memories than I'd care to admit.)

Honestly, unsure! From my (imperfect) memory, the F-1 engine's thermal protection system usually isn't mentioned.

If it helps, other parts of the rocket were coated in asbestos too, btw. The Reaction Control System had asbestos, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19730017174

And many, many other parts, including the cabins, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/a-saturn-v...

Here's a report for the command module, which starts with a very funny quote, "The JSC Director waived the use of the International System of Units (SI)for this Apollo Experience Report because, in his judgment, the use of SI units would impair the usefulness of the report or result in excessive cost." https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19740007423/downloads/19...

Asbestos was used pretty much everywhere you wanted to contain heat. I recall watching videos of people with a fabric of it on their hands and a butane torch aimed at it, to show how effective it was. Usually in lectures that were explaining why it was used in applications like jets/rockets. :D

I am probably closer to one of the "mini-cult of adherents who worship it with near-religious fervor" than I'd like to admit, but I make a kind of pilgrimage to sit under and stare at the F1 engine at my local museum every now and then. It's very much wormed into my consciousness _without_ any asbestos or foil wrapping:

https://steelcityelectronics.com/2017/02/07/powerhouse-museu...

(Not my pic, just one I found on DDG that fits with my memory of it)

As a cultist, I recall a similar story to the Fogbank one about the fuel pumps for thoe F-1 motors. Apparently in spite of having all the docs, we still needed to reverse engineer them from museum pieces to find out how to build new ones:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the...

Why was NASA working with ancient engines instead of building a new F-1 or a full Saturn V? One urban legend holds that key "plans" or "blueprints" were disposed of long ago through carelessness or bureaucratic oversight. Nothing could be further from the truth; every scrap of documentation produced during Project Apollo, including the design documents for the Saturn V and the F-1 engines, remains on file. If re-creating the F-1 engine were simply a matter of cribbing from some 1960s blueprints, NASA would have already done so.

A typical design document for something like the F-1, though, was produced under intense deadline pressure and lacked even the barest forms of computerized design aids. Such a document simply cannot tell the entire story of the hardware. Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was "good enough."

Further, although the principles behind the F-1 are well known, some aspects of its operation simply weren't fully understood at the time. The thrust instability problem is a perfect example. As the F-1 was being built, early examples tended to explode on the test stand. Repeated testing revealed that the problem was caused by the burning plume of propellent rotating as it combusted in the nozzle. These rotations would increase in speed until they were happening thousands of times per second, causing violent oscillations in the thrust that eventually blew the engine apart. The problem could have derailed the Saturn program and jeopardized President Kennedy's Moon landing deadline, but engineers eventually used a set of stubby barriers (baffles) sticking up from the big hole-riddled plate that sprayed fuel and liquid oxygen into the combustion chamber (the "injector plate"). These baffles damped down the oscillation to acceptable levels, but no one knew if the exact layout was optimal.

Much <3 to a fellow cultist <3

There are dozens of us!

I mean... I know that the rockets that are on display don't have asbestos. That isn't my assertion. My assertion is that I could have sworn plaques and whatnot mention it.

Now... most of my memory for rockets is from when I did space camp way back in the mid 90s. So... Yeah, I don't have picture perfect memory of that.

This just feels like when I'm told that CS majors don't learn about the involvement of women in computer science. By and large, that is not totally accurate. It is accurate enough for the point, which is that there is sexism. But, as the software person in the room that went to college, I was almost guaranteed to be the only one that knew the names of the women that our education supposedly skipped on.

The information on asebestos can be found in some book or technical documents

It was used for snow effects in old movies. Like The Wizard of Oz

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pzfTz-tIbTY

Really terrible if you think about it.

A close relative worked for a company that made asbestos cement products in the day.

The factory contained an automated production line, about 100m long. The first step was a room into which the raw asbestos fibre was blown. From there it went into the main machine. The door to the room had a glass window, through which the "snow storm" inside could be seen.

One of the old hands in the factory related a story whereby new people would be locked in the room and their mates would crowd around the window to watch the snowman show.

A lot of the people I knew from that company died from mesothelioma, including the person who told me that story. (My relative was not one of them.)

The upper echelons of the company knew the true risk (as it emerged later) but it was downplayed, within the company. Most of the workers truly believed that the risk wasn't that great.

I hope they gave everyone radium for their health afterwards! :P

Have you read the Wizard of Oz books? Radium is presented there as a cross between a magical source of power (more or less correct, in hindsight) and a medical panacea (nope). This also occurs in old Conan the Barbarian stories.

Read old stories, and you can't help bumping into some very different worldviews.

You've clearly not even read the article.

For the record, talc doesn’t seem to be dangerous on its own.

The problem is the geology of many talc deposits. Anywhere talc has formed metamorphically, it naturally co-occurs with asbestiform minerals. [1]

As a result, talc mined from these sources is unavoidably subject to asbestos contamination.

[1]: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70027257

Asbestos is still being used in industrial settings today.

In undergrad, we used it frequently in organic chemistry for thermal reactions like sodium fusion.

We don't see it being installed in places where it can be easily inhaled. But it absolutely still has uses.

The EPA has an action to ban asbestos more completely. https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/epa-actions-protect-public-expo...

No, it's no longer produced anywhere in the world except Russia.

New industrial projects don't use asbestos. Existing installations are replaced with rockwool, fiberglass or kaowool once it need replacement.

Your undergrad professor wasn't up to date. Kaowool is a drop in replacement.

This is an excellent article. It's fascinating (if a bit sad) to see examples of what was once common knowledge disappear for no good reason.

> The example is likely subpar as it is a fictional example

Is placing asbestos around the rocket engines a fabricated example with photoshopped images, or is the description of the design process behind the actual images fictional?

As an in-house lawyer, preserving the why is basically my job. I write up 'memos' in which we examine a problem, arrive at a solution and recommendation, and make the recommendation. Often times the team that makes the recommendation doesn't do a great job documenting the 'why' in its Jira ticket and so their organization can tend to forget why something is done. I try to make sure that doesn't happen, when it comes to important things. Unfortunately we aren't always certain of what is important and what deserves a detailed writeup.

Clive James wrote a book — Cultural Amnesia — that comes at this concept from a slightly different angle, but still very interesting.

Meh. People are overly worried about forgetting. In my view forgetting is a normal part of information processing. You keep what is important and chuck out the rest.

Same with technological information. The way you keep information is by doing things. You bet that we won’t forget how to make bricks, because a lot of people in a lot of factories make bricks every day all around the world. The Saturn V was a white elephant and once the special circumstances which made it viable has ended people forgot how to build it. Who cares?

If someone wants a rocket they can design one for themselves. And turns out, they do. And those newly designed rockets are better for them. Not better in some tech spec sense, but better suited for the task they want it for.

The difference is that you don't necessarily know what is important until you forget it and try to recall it later. If you record everything, then you can make a more informed decision later on whether to keep, archive, or delete the information.

Have you never found yourself in need of a backup or wishing you had one?

I think, asbestos is a good example of gone by times. Same as leaded gas, or benzol. They are superior products from simpler times.

There were made with a singular purpose and everything else was sacrificed to that purpose, even the health of us all.

Ironically I think the article is a good example of why we forget things. It's more desireable for the author to write a longwinded article about how we forget, than to try and put effort into ensuring society remembers important things. In essence, societal maintenance isn't sexy. The final solution provided is for thr author to better preserve their own output, which isn't a very good solution unless the author is producing important breakthroughs. To better preserve knowledge, people need to be happy to spend effort maintaining _other people's discoveries_.

> Nothing we have tried in the past two hundred thousand years of our species’ existence has successfully captured and preserved sufficiently complex knowledge for future transmission.

I would argue that DNA has done an admirable job in this regard and I would deem it successful at capturing and preserving complex knowledge for future transmission.

I enjoyed the post and enjoyed its thought provocative stance. I feel like recording the “why” is important, not to facilitate recreating a given “thing” but rather to help our future creativity by staying aware of past inspiration triggers.

Is this why when picking up a skill I always head to YouTube and forum posts?

Because someone taking through a problem informally always reveals something that wasn't clear in text/literature.

Anything from DIY projects to tech to cooking, it's always something important

Was the documentation a failure? Or did the US save untold amounts of money because of the mothballing->documentation? The failure of the 20M attempt doesn't mean the overall strategy was bad nor that the documentation was net negative.

Reading this made me think of how newer homes and furniture burn faster, giving you less time to escape a fire. Research shows that 30 years ago, you had about 17 minutes to escape a house fire. Today it's only 3 or 4 minutes.

In EU we have fire code for house furniture. Often the furniture doesn't burn, but only the light synthetic materials. I don't know how it is in US, but I think the 17 minutes vs 3 minutes you say comes from this video:

https://youtu.be/bSP03BE74WA?t=165

which depicts a typical American setting.

A sufficiently smart and malicious AI could wipe out most of our knowledge, now that everything is stored on electronic devices.

Little trivia piece: it is said that Iranian shah Khosrow II used to entertain his guest by cleaning his asbestos napkins in fire.

> And I don’t understand why. What did she hear that I didn’t?

Easy answer: Her personal zeitgeist. The author seems to focus on the lyrical meaning of the song being the root cause for her emotion. But her reaction is likely far more complex than "satire of communism" but a time capsule or snap shot of memories and emotions of her world when she heard this song. It not only recalls memories of a painful part of her life but also the pleasant parts: friends, relations, family, things and places which are long gone; A temporal marker to a place which she cannot travel to.

Of course the author kind of explains this in the next paragraph, but then seemingly backtracks to her interpretation of the lyrics: "We will never be able to truly understand or feel how the satire hit under the weight of an oppressive communist regime." I highly doubt it was only about the weight of an oppressive communist regime.

When I hear "eye of the tiger" I can get a bit emotional. It has nothing to do with "Rising up to the challenge" or the band Survivor but the whole of the period in which I heard the song. It brings back a simpler time: childhood bedroom, my father was still alive, the joy of being a kid and discovering rock music. It's so much more than the subject of the song and lyrics...

> Of course, as you’ve probably surmised, the song isn’t really about the color film. It’s a thinly veiled satire aimed at the communist regime by the artist, toying with everything from the regime’s attempts to pass its citizens’ lives as being nice to Western audiences to the drabness of communist Germany.

That's not entirely truthful, though? The artist said that the song complained about the drabness of life in socialist East Germany and being confronted with the economy of scarcity (making a color film hard to replace if you forgot to bring it) even present in the moments you escape it (by travelling to places with nicer scenery). But the entire jab at "the regime's attempts" and "Western audiences" seems to be conjecture on the part of the author and isn't in the interview they seem to be referencing.

Also for the record, the artist has somewhat disowned the song because the song's writer was a child abuser and rapist. Another piece of knowledge largely lost to time.

I think the author is a bit too invested in seeing the song in an American Cold War context that doesn't match the experiences of those in divided Germany for whom the Cold War was more about two equally untrustworthy superpowers threatening their annihilation over inconsequential power plays and engaging on continuous proxy wars.

It reads almost like the author thinks Merkel is weeping over memories of how she suffered under the East German government when in reality 2020 alone had plenty of reasons for her to feel sad and the song represents a tiny act of polite rebellion at the end of a reign that culminated in her watching powerless over federal ministers making decisions she disagreed with but would receive the blame for.

Equally untrustworthy? You must consume a very large amount of Russian media evety day to be able to say that in earnest.

Russian media hates the Soviet Union other than the vague idea of it as a continuation of a pan-Russian empire, so I'm not sure how you're jumping from "Cold War era US was untrustworthy" to me being pro-Russia (which I'm not, Putin is a fascist). I'm not even pro-Soviet Union or pro-German Democratic Republic (because I'm not a fan of oppressive governments even if they get a red coat of paint).

We have a lot more transparency and insight today (in part thanks to the advancement of modern technologies like the Internet) and Germany has matured beyond being a direct pawn in an international conflict (in part because the US won the Cold War and Russia is politically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things). But projecting the current state (and the public perception of it) back on the Cold War era is ahistorical.

Did you forget the purge of leftist (not just Soviet-aligned) organizations both under McCarthy but well into the Civil Rights era? The US participation in the Vietnam War, which was protested worldwide not just in the US? The Cuban Missile Crisis? I realize many of these events were perceived very differently in the US but from the POV of a country stuck right in the middle of the two world powers the US was just as likely to pull the trigger (or provoke the other party into doing so) as the Soviets.

The Cold War was decidedly not a "just war" (unlike WW2, arguably) but a power play between two nuclear super powers continuously threatening to end the world as we know it at a whim. The fear of nuclear annihilation is why there's still a strong bias against nuclear energy to this day. Positive public perception of the US in Germany was largely an aftereffect of the post-war era and a response to fear of possible Soviet revanchism for German war crimes.

Heck, the Marshall Plan was publicly perceived as an act of charity when in reality it was a loans program strongly tied to anti-communism (again exceeding mere "anti Soviet influence" but targeting leftist politics in general) and had the goal of building up Western Europe and West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Say what you will about Americans, US organizations or even how the US government has changed since then, but the Cold War era US government was scary and much like the Soviet Union felt more like a force of nature than a diplomatic ally you could reason with.

It's this exact situation that makes me fear the most about Copilot how long before all our understanding and knowledge is lost, and we collectively descend into superstition that forbids tampering at risk of breaking something.

Copilot seems to allow us to write more code, but the problem was never the amount of code produced but understanding the code that would solve the problem. It worries me what we are losing

But I have faith

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The first part should be (assuming ascii) the Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus opening speech

https://youtu.be/WyK7lX4sk0c

I can definitely recommend the music, very atmospheric, very alien.

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