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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

A bit of an aside, but your comment made me realize how much we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization.

We (laymen) have no idea about the incredible complexity behind manufacturing a single CPU chip.

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> we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization.

It's been like that for a while. That's why we need everyone else to function as a society.

I've watched a couple blacksmithing videos on youtube but I still don't really know how smelting iron works, and I wouldn't be able to produce a steel if my life depended on it. That's literally 2500+ year old tech.

What's even crazier is it's 2500+ year old tech that we turned into science in a period of about a hundred years (1860s-1960s).

More like labeled it as science.

Kinda like all these “doctors” who just swaggered in and labeled brain surgery as science, we’ve been trepanning for thousands of years!

It was science back then, it is science now. Using technologies at the time. 2000 years from now, some people will look at our era as barbarian and unscientific.

Many years ago I sat next to the CTO of Broadcom on a plane. We struck up a conversation and when I learned he worked for a chip designer I asked the question that I assumed was the most difficult part. I asked how the engineers laid out the circuits physically on the chip. He laughed and told me the engineers write software that defines the parameters and functions and the software lays out the chip (I know I am oversimplifying). I was dumbfounded to learn that hardware design was really software development. Today I think Google has an open chip design effort where you write chip specs in Python (from memory).

This was probably not true many years ago, or at least was a simplification. Even with some automated routing, there are many subtleties like high frequency electronics; not trying to have your radio equipment routing through your power supply, etc.

They even have their own languages for coding the chip logic ( Verilog is one). My partner did chip design and layout. The used a tool call magma (We have some mugs from a conference she went to) but they got bought by synopsis. Very expensive, very specialized software

https://www.synopsys.com/#

It is a mix: digital logic is almost entirely laid out by machine, but analog circuits and the underlying logic cells (as well as certain specialised digital blocks like memories) are a lot less automated. The most expensive part isn't doing that: it's doing the validation and simulation of the design so that it'll have the best chance of working after you've spend 5-6 figures and many months on actually building it (and then there's the cost of testing it in reality and figuring out what isn't actually working and how to fix it: the first batch of chips still extremely rarely works).

I think you are really overshooting.

Most people don't even know where their water comes from. Most people that drive do not know how a combustion engine works. Even people watching TV are only vaguely aware it's a series of static images chained together to make it look like its moving.

Wait, how am I overshooting? Reading your comment it seems like we are both in agreement. Or did I read you wrong?

I think they're trying to say that "people don't understand CPUs" is almost over-optimistic given how many much simpler things they don't understand.

Would perhaps have been better phrased as "Absolutely true, but it's even worse than that" ass-u-ming I parsed it right.

People in general have a barely functional understanding of computing devices, let alone their operating systems or hardware components, at an usage level.

Their fabrication process is so far removed that I don't think most people would even be able to know where to look for the information, even if they could access and understand all of it.

You're in agreement, they are additionally implying that the bar is much lower than you set it though.

Yes I'm agreeing with you, I think the situation is much worse than that though.

Ah I see now. Thanks to everyone else who chimed in.

Reminds me of Jon Blow’s talk about the collapse of civilization:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&pp=ygUmam9uYXRoYW4...

Oh boy, you should check out the show "Connections" by James Burke

That also reminded me of _Connections_, which notably made the same point in _the late 1970s_! It isn't like technology's gotten any easier to understand -- in total, "top to bottom" -- since then.

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