We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How

Generational knowledge loss is often either discarded as irrelevant, illusory or misunderstood.

It is not a new phenomenon and can easily be traced back to antiquity.

Because _reality has a surprising amount of details_ the entire humanity knowledge at any given time is living in our memories, not written, and even if we had the time and will to try and formalize it, language is not complete enough and we lack the ability to fully introspect what we know.

You can ask a professional Tennis or Chess player to formalize his expert knowledge and it may contains some useful insights, but far from enough to replicate his skills.

So learning is re-discovering many things, a Sysphean task, and the majority is lost, we managed to keep just enough thanks to the invention of writing and books to reach a kind of slow escape velocity.

Because technology is constantly evolving, what is lost is not systematically relevant, like writing poetry in ancient Greek.

But there is the risk of losing too much, too quickly. As a veteran of the videogame industry I can attest that many mistakes that are made today were solved before, but the good designs and principles were largely lost.

Newcomers are not inherently less smart than their parents, quite often they just don't learn because the incentives changed.

I am not entirely convinced the emergence of "vibe coding" and other assistants will be a net gain.

Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.

Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....

The core problem is the quixotic quest for efficiency. Right now I'll blame JIRA because that's the latest incarnation of this beast, but it's the mindset behind thinking that's a good idea in the first place. As long as I've been working I've been under artificial, meaningless time constraints that seem to only exist to catch cheaters, but that actually serve to make experimentation impossible.

From the video: https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?t=1942

  32:22 It's time to be honest. As engineers, we are not known to be effective communicators. That's just not a strong suit of an engineer.

  32:29 It is time to lay out and systematize the communication so that every organization that's involved knows far more information than they need. We have actual targets and dates that are actionable and they don't depend on a miracle in technological innovation occurring at some point on the Gantt chart.

  32:48 We actually have actionable things that have to happen in certain time frames. And if something doesn't happen, a critical technology isn't in development, we communicate that there's a schedule slip to everyone.

From what I've seen of recent very large engineering projects, saying "we need Gantt charts" is a good way to get sidelined/fired?

It seems that modern organizations absolutely loathe up front systems engineering and planning?

I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.

> Destin pointed them at NASA SP-287, a document the Apollo engineers wrote and left behind specifically so the next generation wouldn’t have to rediscover everything from scratch. The title is “What Made Apollo a Success.” It has been sitting there, public, for decades. Most of the people in that room had not read it.

> The principle at the center of that document is blunt:

> “Build it simple and then double up on as many components or systems so that if one fails, the other will take over.”

Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing!

Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.

I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software.

We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore.

From day one I had the expectation that my knowledge would become obsolete and that I needed to keep learning. That new tools will constantly replace me, my knowhow for doing things manually, and that I will need embrace and learn how to take advantage of new levels of automations.

Frankly my experience of AI hasn’t been much different from when React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust came in for instance, some random examples. You just keep learning and embracing the new technologies. Yes they automate some of what you were good at doing and that part of you is no longer needed, that’s the whole point.

I think we will be totally fine as software engineers, not because we are not being replaced, but because replacing ourselves and adapting to it is the core of what we do!

Gptzero and Pangram both say this article was AI-generated. Seems we've forgotten how to do other things as well.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sp-287.pdf sent back an error.

Error code: 404 Not Found

The SLS is a real debacle compared to Saturn V

We sacrificed everything at the altar of shareholder value. What we received is a dystopian hellscape.