Hacker News Reader

Comment by weli | Hacker News Reader

> I started programming when I was seven because a machine did exactly what I told it to, felt like something I could explore and ultimately know, and that felt like magic. I’m fifty now, and the magic is different, and I’m learning to sit with that.

Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.

Kids growing up nowadays that are interested in computers grow up feeling the same magic. That magic is partly derived from not truly understanding the thing you are doing and creating a mental "map" by yourself. There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys, in 50 years there will be old programmers reminiscing of "Remember when all new models were coming out every few months and we could fiddle around with the vector dimensionality and chunking length to get the best of gpt-6.2 RAG? Those were the times".

View on HN

> There is nothing intrinsic to computing nowadays that makes it less magic than fiddling around with config.sys

There definitely is: the rent-seeking behavior is out of control. As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.

>As a kid I could fiddle with config.sys (or rather autoexec.bat) while nowadays wrestling a file path out of my phone is a battle and the system files of my phone are kept from me.

I think the magic happens at different levels of abstraction as time goes by, and it's easy to get stuck.

Us kids could fiddle with autoexec and config to get DOOM going, today's kids can fiddle with a yaml and have a MMORPG that handles 10 000 users from all over the world going.

It's not the same but I can easily imagine it feeling at least equally magical for a kid today.

Why do you allow a mobile handheld computing and communication device to define "computing" ? I understand that they are important devices and lots of people with a hacker mentality would like to be able to hack them the way old folks once hacked DOS. But the current computing environment is much, much wider than iOS/Android, and if you're going to complain about just one aspect of it, I think it would be better to acknowledge that.

In many ways, things like RPi and Arduino have actually massively expanded the realm of totally hackable computing beyond what was even possible for early personal computer users.

For the same reason computing used to be defined by a Commodore 64 more than by an IBM System/370-XA mainframe from the same year — they're the most commonly and most easily accessible computing devices.

Old farts like us think the desktop is the default kind of computer, but it isn't. Most computers are phones, followed by tablets and laptops with touchscreens, and desktops are the weirdest ones.

It's not a question of what's the most common. It ought to be a question of what capabilities do you think of when you think of "a computer". Most people do not think of their phone as "a computer", even though us tech heads all know that it is literally just that.

We need to follow the lead of most people here, and recognize that the phone is a deliberately limited device and its capabilities do not define what "a computer" is or should be or could be.

As others have said, it's not so much that tinkering opportunities don't exist. It's more there's a slump in the market of doing relatively easy jobs for money. You can hack on esp32 all day, but there aren't many ways to make money doing so. Making software for the iPhone was (and is still, at this point) a pretty good gig.

I figure auto mechanics contended with this 25 years ago. Now it's hard to find someone to replace your water pump, if your vehicle even has one. Like auto mechanics, though, these machines still exist and there's still a big market for those skills. It might just require more legwork to find that work.

> Don't take this the wrong way but this is more of an age thing rather than a technology advancement thing.

I am much younger than the poster you are replying to, but I feel much the same.

LLM are not AI, but are a great context search tool when they work.

When people first contact ML, they fool themselves into believing it is intelligent... rather than a massive plagiarism and copyright IP theft machine.

Fun is important, but people thinking zero workmanship generated content is sustainable are still in the self-delusion stage marketers promote.

https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

I am not going to cite how many fads I've seen cycle in popularity, but many have seen the current active cons before. A firm that takes a dollar to make a dime in revenue is by definition unsustainable. =3

"The Ice King"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HVYHNTDOFs

I like coding AIs because they're plagiarism machines. If I ask you to do some basic data manipulation operations, I want you to do it in the most obvious, standard way possible, not come up with some fancy creative solution unless it's needed for some reason.

If I'm dockerizing an app, I want the most simple, basic, standard thing - not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized" version that I can't understand.

> not somebody's hand-rolled "optimized" version that I can't understand.

In general, it takes around 10 months for people to realize something about probabilistic markdown definitions, and maintenance cycles.

You may miss learning from skilled people someday. =3

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

config.sys was understandable. Now your computer has thousands (probably more) of config.sys-sized components and you are still only one person. The classic UI may improve your ability to find the components (sometimes) but can't reduce the complexity of either the components themselves or their quantity. AI makes it possible to deal with this complexity in a functional way.

Your last point is probably correct though, because AI will also allow systems to become orders of magnitude more complex still. So like the early days of the internet, these are still the fun days of AI, when the tool is overpowered compared to its uses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com