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Comment by pantulis | Hacker News Reader

This is the harbinger that announces that, as a technologist, the time has come for me to witness more and more things that I cannot understand how they work any more. The cycle has closed and I have now become my father.

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The difference is that now nobody really "understands" what's going on, it's just that some know how to build these.

How is that new? People built a gnomon, a stick was thrust into the soil and ta-da. No doubt it happened far before any writing system was out there. So it still took human quite some time to come with a compelling helio-centric model to cast some grabbable explanation of it all, even if you take Aristarchus of Samos as a pionner in this field.

It's new for computing.

Ok, maybe on some perspective I’m with you here. There are things happening no-one even those on the edge of the fringe can understand anymore how it works while it does. Or at least that is how it seems to be from my narrow perspective on AI.

On the other hand, I don’t feel like you need to know how a compiler work, let alone the hardware architecture it targets, before you can go through your first hello world program or even build some useful software on top of frameworks/library treated at blackboxes. So "I have no idea what I’m doing" in this perspective is probably as old as CS/informatics.

There's a huge difference between "I don't understand how X works", and "Nobody understands how X works".

Also, every single abstract is leaky, so often it's a difference between "I don't need to know how X works now", and "I can never find out how X works because it's simply not knowable".

My dad is 80 and willingly loves to listen to me explain how neural networks work, then he also read about them, busy beaver functions, kafka, and all kinds of crazy shit I tell him abour. This is all in your mind. You are as young as your mind is.

Not the original poster, but the more frightening part of the sentence, is the "not understanding how something works part" over the "becoming my father"

Getting to a point where realistically you're not able to know something deeply but then still use it is pretty frightening.

When I say deeply I don't necessarily mean that for every device you need to know about all of its atoms, but to have a pretty good framework for how the thing works deterministically, and how it can fail.

> Getting to a point where realistically you're not able to know something deeply but then still use it is pretty frightening.

This now applies to most things in modern industrial society. We operate our daily lives at a crazy high level of abstraction. I think for a lot of us on HN, we "know too much about what we don't know", and that is ... overwhelming.

Funny enough, most people are actually able to operate at these higher levels of abstraction without worrying too much, because they don't know enough about what they don't know.

> Not the original poster, but the more frightening part of the sentence, is the "not understanding how something works part" over the "becoming my father"

That was my point, exactly.

So unless you have a solid grasp of quantum mechanics and solid state physics, using any electronic device is frightening?

Thankfully it's nothing magical. But are you willing to learn about it or not?

Think about animation, how a program can generate a sequence of a bouncing ball between two key frames. Think about what defines a video. The frames right? From there I can try to imagine.

> But are you willing to learn about it or not?

This is the key. I have enough curiosity to want learn the stuff from the ground up, just as I did with other technologies. But man do I have the stamina today? Not so sure!!!

This book is great: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730887/understandin...

It's comparatively easy to understand and it does cover everything from basic networks to LLMs and Diffusion models.

Thanks for putting this into words. Its a very off-putting feeling for me, and couldn’t exactly figure out what that feeling was. It both scares me and excites me in a way that only makes me subconsciously anxious. Time to deep dive before I become what I always feared, which is being technologically left behind.

This comment describes with precision what I was feeling and was unable to name or frame. Marvelous times for sure.

This is likely a wild guess on my part but i've faced a similar feeling lately. If this comes from the realm of Webdev, React, SSR and all the F'ing acronyms that we need to learn today and you want to feel like you've "caught on": My advice would be to avoid NextJS at all costs. It's too bleeding edge.

Opt for a sane option instead to get started, likely one of these: (Astro, SvelteKit or Remix).

Lol there's a massive difference between a framework that generates javascript, a language which has existed for 30 years at this point, and a magic LLM that no one on earth understands the internals of.

It is all just a mindset and how much you want to be involved.

Here is an inspirational story for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288139

I'm on the very cusp of this, you helped me realize. Thanks.

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