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Comment by voxleone | Hacker News Reader

The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

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> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.

That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.

Just look at current software.

Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.

Linux is still written by a couple of people.

Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.

All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…

Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.

I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.

I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.

Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.

Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.

There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.

Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.

All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.

> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux

Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.

I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.

Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.

> Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence?

I was there in the DOS days. I was there when Windows 3.1 came out (others too but I didn't use them). I was there when Windows 95 came out.

Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds it produced that ran on cheap beige PCs. Not excellence. Mediocrity. Cheap, but mediocre.

At some point 95% of all machines sold with an OS had Windows and the times were incredibly dark. Thankfully things changed and now Windows is only present on something like 11% of all devices sold yearly that have an OS.

We dodged a big one and many of us shall never ever forget how slow, insecure, horrible and mediocre the products of that company were.

> Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds

Microsoft's goal was to make machines everyone could afford. Their mission statement was a desktop in every home and they pulled it off.

They didn't pull it off by making an OS that needed a boat load custom chips (Amiga), or that required a huge beefy system to run (OS2, Unix).

They did it by making compromises that kept costs down and made computers accessible. They pushed for multimedia standards when the technology was appropriately matured, and their consumer OSes evolved in maturity as Moore's law progressed. Even then everyone complained about "ever growing" system requirements, especially when the move to XP happened, and then again when Vista came out with its improved security model.

Those fancy slick Sun OS boxes cost a fortune compared to a Windows box of the same time. Sure the Windows box crashed, but as a kid growing up in a working poor family in the 90s I was able to afford Microsoft's imperfect OS, because they had purposefully built an entire ecosystem that was designed to be affordable.

Microsoft pitted every PC OEM against each other in a race to the bottom, until margins approached and then fell below 0 for a new PC.

I've used tons of different systems. Thanks to the efforts of Valve desktop Linux is now usable, but it still has a thousand stupid bugs, many of which I wouldn't have tolerated on Windows 20 years ago. MacOS is very black box-ish and despite daily driving it for 6 or so years now the machine doesn't feel like it is "mine" in the same way a Windows 7 or Windows 2000 machine did. The old 16bit graphic power house machines were sexy but those custom chips don't age well and there was no way they could compete with an open standard like the PC.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Microsoft very much made software that was good enough, but the truth is good enough is also admirable. Good enough is affordable, it is quick to market, it is adaptable, it is usable by the masses in a way that perfect isn't.

> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.

This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.

I have some level of faith here. Those kids you mention may not be visible online, but they certainly deliver. Honestly, it is not a good example, because that name is well known, but Gerganov came out of the blue for me.. I am not saying we don't lose more to the social media and whatnot.. but they are there.

Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.

Regardless of what old people say for young people, which are after all still developing and not so bright or word-wise, there's also actual turning to mush going on. TV, social media, now AI all contributing to further mush-ying.

There's also some specific measurable "turning to mush" going on, like reduced literacy rates, and lowering of IQs (slowing/reversing of the Flynn effect)

And yet, when they worried about what television would do to a generation of brains, they were right. The Boomers, as a generation, never became wise, and their brains are mushier than ever.

Nah this isn't right. We also have access to a ton of information even regarding arcane things such as writing x86 boot sequence in real mode or writing boot loaders. More now than ever before.

In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.

Their success is not gated by technical aspects.

You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.

And they get paid squat compared to their brainrotted silly-valley webshit-slinger counterparts. Can we pay these fine folks, as well as people in professions like teaching, more?

I mean... no? I've worked on chips for basically my entire career, and I get paid a more than when I briefly worked in web stuff. Not sure where this idea has come from. My previous startup I worked for just got acquired for 10s of billions of dollars, which is a higher valuation than my friends who have gone through acquisitions in the web-dev / SaaS space

I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff, but there's an entire industry of deep tech software and the payouts are excellent.

When I lived in the northeast, every time I saw an opportunity for embedded work, or traditional UI work (Qt, etc., almost invariably for things like screens on medical or scientific equipment and almost never for desktop applications) it paid 1/2 to 2/3 the going rate for a midlevel webshit engineer. Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Go to Silicon Valley VC backed firms. That's my general advice for any sort of tech work that you want to be paid well. Tech is -- overall -- not paid well. In general, most work is not. VCs are rich and the trickle down effect is large in those places where they operate. Many people are resistant to moving to California because 'cost of living' or some stupid explanation like that. This is genuinely retarded. There is no better place in the world to start a tech career (or really any corporate career), just due to how much money there is.

People confuse the 'webshit' engineers (your words, not mine) with being interested in technology. They're not. They're interested in money. I am too. I just happen to be interested in deep tech stuff as well. A lot of people in tech don't seek compensation and then complain about it. Always go for compensation, startups, and high risk ventures (i.e., go into a good business). That's my advice.

> Maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places.

Did those places have the potential to IPO / exit for multi-billions of dollars? If not, yes, you were looking in the wrong place.

The question I ask myself is, do I want to live in California? The answer is no. Not even for a short time.

Well then there's the answer as to how much money you're going make. The us is a rich country because a few states are rich not because everywhere is rich

The U.S. is certainly not a wealthy country, and California most definitely is not, when measured by miles of homeless camps, crime, hobos, pollution.

There's a reason why the crowds are moving out of California and similar places and into my region over the past 5-6+ years.

The country as a whole is covered in abandoned factories and homes. Not exactly the picture of a healthy and prosperous nation. Turns out you can't print prosperity.

I'm fine where I'm at, thanks.

> Linux is still written by a couple of people.

How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).

Most of them work in drivers for devices, not Linux proper.

I've worked with many people born post-2000 who could write an operating system kernel. Hell, I have one brewing righ now. It's not rocket science. The machine language parsed by the chip is described in exquisite detail in any processor manual.

Windows is being deliberately enshittified by rent-seekers.

Rent-seeking and Promo-seeking is the only motivation for the people with the power.

None of that class wants to make a better product, or make life better or easier for the people.

I'm personally not comfortable with the widespread argument (not yours) that moving from a shit-on-shit scripting language to using an LLM to write code is just a matter of degree or just one more layer of abstraction. I think writing code with an LLM severs the logic chain you may have to follow - and hopefully can follow - to get back to the basic principles and root causes you need to understanding what your code is doing.

But the lazy (and wrong) belief by people not committed to exacting standards in their engineering, that AI is just another layer of abstraction or another scripting language, actually obscures a much more unpleasant fact: Performance, as far as the managerial class was concerned, was never about getting the best performance. It was always about whatever was just enough.

We as coders used to prioritize performance because hardware was so limited and we wanted to squeeze the most out of every cycle, every 1Kb of RAM. For some of us, that habit will never die, because we look at a new piece of hardware and realize how much more we can make it do.

But pre-AI slop of backends with huge supply chains and Electron as a frontend arose because memory and compute had become so cheap that acceptable performance required less and less optimization.

That doesn't mean that some of us didn't maintain a niche in making things optimized, but for the past twenty years or so there's been a whole generation of engineers whose priority has been speed of development. And from the perspective of a company that treats engineers as disposable cogs and prioritizes frameworks and assumes Moore's Law, why not?

AI just takes that to the next level. Take the entire chain of existing React slop and create a Markov chain to regirgitate parts of it on cue. And let's be honest: 95% of companies don't need to forge anything particularly new, they just need to cobble existing parts together.

I thought it about 15 years ago talking to CRUD coders who hated their jobs: You're in the wrong business if you're not getting joy out of creating and solving new problems. So in a way, AI just gives everyone who only wanted shitty software the shitty software they deserve? I don't know. I haven't finished thinking about it.

If you like dark SF, I'd suggest Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's one of a collection of short stories, but addresses this very idea.

I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.

This is one consequence of removing all gatekeepers. Previously you’d only need to be known by your manager and his manager, or in the arts, by a small group of tastemakers.

Nowadays there are no tastemakers, and thus you need to be a public figure in order to even find your audience / niche in the first place.

> Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ).

That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing.

It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.

That's a force you move away from, not towards.

Maybe publicly invisible, but a personal network and resume have always been important in a career.

This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.

That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.

An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.

He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.

> Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails.

This has to be an exaggeration.

I can personally attest that I'll die if my bank's COBOL mainframe fails. Really got a lot riding on this.

If the banking system failed? Would be pretty bad...

You should ask your friend what they do with all of the half cents that are floating around in the banking system.

"It's not a virus, it's a worm!"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bcAACOrgVKE

I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future architecture surpass even the greatest human minds in intelligence, why is that situation fundamentally different to living in a world with Einstein, i.e. a level of mastery I'll never reach before the end of my life? As one interested in the depths, I prefer to live in a world with peaks ever greater than myself---it doesn't prevent me from going as deep as I can, inspired by where they've reached, and doing the things that matter to me.

Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."

[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.

> The folks who keep the power grid running ...

I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.

> secure the internet...

Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.

Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...

I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.

I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.

The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.

stacking turtles????

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

Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.

Without any clue, they mess with air conditioning system and get all baked. No happy end here.

Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.

Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.

I teach computer science at a public university. Every semester I have kids who come to classes but never turn in any homework. They also don't withdraw either. I'm literally forced to fail them because I have nothing to grade them on.

The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.

You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.

Anyway, the original “power grid” guy was not some master craftsman or engineer, he was the original STEM influencer: Edison. He also popularized short videos.

Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.

The fact that Edison is pervasively over-credited is really another example of the highly visible executive claiming personal credit for the labors of employees.

Two others who come to mind are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Scott_(engineer)

Steinmetz contributed heavily to AC systems theory which helped understand and expand transmission. while Scott contributed a lot to transformer theory and design (I have to find his Transformer book.)

Very valuable point!

In addition to the limits of human planning and intellect, I'd also add incentives:

as cynical as it sounds, you won't get rewarded for building a more safe, robust and reliable machine or system, until it is agreed upon that the risks or problems you address actually occur, and that the costs for prevention actually pays off.

For example, there would be no insurances without laws and governments, because no person or company ever would pay into a promise that has never been held.

Exactly. The advent of electriccity was seen as just as much of a threat to everyone as AI is today. The advent of the internet was seen similarly. In each era, those at the forefront of the technology that would fundamentally change the world, were castigated as 'psychosexual' deviants who did not understand the common man. Guess who had the last laugh?

It's not even limited to modern technology. If you go talk to certain grievance-driven individuals from tribal backgrounds (for lack of a better term) who have produced nothing for the last 10000 years, they will levy similar accusations against the very institutions that are providing them with healthcare their ancestors could only have dreamed of. In some areas, even agriculture is seen as suspect. It's ridiculous.

It's scary to me how both sides of the American political aisle have suddenly turned anti-tech and are buying into the same arguments. Gross.

It would all be undergrounded and made resilient, if it weren't for perverse incentives.

This is a tradeoff. There is value in being able to do upgrades to lines above ground. Underground is not automatically better. Like most things, it depends.

Just wanna say, I love this paragraph so much, I created HN account just to upvote it.

Have you seen "Tech Ingredients"? People like that and Dutch scientist/engineer who runs "Huygens Optics"

I love Huygens Optica, but the mastery of one rather old Dutch man isn't really much of a counterexample when we're talking about the generation that is coming up behind us.

No that is an example of the former

The scary part is that you can't just "hire mastery" on demand. You have to grow it

I think it’s opposite. The general population always has nothing with outstanding engineers thru the history. It’s hard to say that VC bubbles of recent decades really drove the amount of outstanding engineers, it’s just an overall increase of prosperity, while hot capital in addition incentivesed quite terrible ways to get rich quick, effectively balancing back this freshly activated dev capital. So now ai takes back monopoly on dev capital from bigbiz, and general youth population is weird like it always has been, but in reality doing less drink/smoke/drugs, and sometimes their values are better than ours, just need some more time to polish. I think we are not doomed.

P.S. but these chinese robots are really scary

I mean I'm literally a compiler engineer who's worked on dependable systems in the past, and I think this article is a load of crock to be honest. As is usual for many Americans (a great disease in the American mind, IMO), they greatly value the random lunatic over the person actually doing something. Calling people driven to do things as having strange 'psychosexual neuroses' is just shaming people without any evidence. What's wrong with having a drive to do things? That is literally what America was set out to do. It's hard to read these sorts of critiques as anything other than racism against the latest class of American migrant (mainly Asians) who are driven to not fall into the very poverty their parents sought to escape. Yes, if the answer is becoming shit-ass poor or being well off via pursuing success, then you are going to be highly motivated to take the route of success.

I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.

I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing

And what value has the current state of AI added to society in any meaningful way? Truly? Even as someone who understands the space very strongly, and has published several top-tier ML papers, I cannot help but to conclude the primary destination of the current tech sector and Silicon Valley is the ruthless exploitation of the rest of society.

Taking a sober look at the state of software, we observe a few things.

The services offered by modern software to users, as a whole, have remained largely the same over the past ~5 years. The state of software quality is in rapid decline, with enshittification and rent-seeking running extraordinarily rampant. Software security has been in the same disaster-state it has been for the past 20 years, where software resilience is in stagnation, governments and private institutions stockpile vulnerabilities, and security researchers and auditors can consistently find new vulnerabilities. The rest of American society outside of the tech sector is currently facing a standards of living nosedive, and clearly they have not benefited from the tech sector's financial proliferation in the AI space.

Realistically, I cannot help the feeling that we're headed towards a reality where the 4th amendment is dead, and machine learning models process everything about you to ultimately extract more from you. No privacy for you! No agency for you! Only indentured servitude, and constant fear.

I fully recognize my take is ahead of its time, but I concur that the systems-oriented point of view is our way out of this hell. Specifically, software should be conceived under the following ideals: (1) software should be as simple as possible, and provide its intended services with as little bloat as possible; (2) specifications of software should be as concise and simple as possible; (3) specifications should be should be expressive enough to capture security-relevant guarantees, e.g. cryptographic security properties; (4) proofs verifying that software satisfies its specifications should live intrinsically to the implementation, and should be as simple as possible; (5) proof-checkers should be verified. I feel the academic Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Systems, Security, and Cryptography communities, as well as the internet standardization community, are slowly converging to this ideology consensus, but I also think in other ways we are farther off than ever. With respect to these ideals, the "building" mindset that twitter has adopted is deeply toxic. And obviously Silicon Valley has their heads in the sand when it comes to this.

I do have faith the state of software (and society) will improve, but whether that future is compatible with the rent-seeking hyper-capitalist reality Silicon Valley and Wall Street have synthesized is yet to be seen.

We have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.

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