We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works. We might have some understanding of one or two previous levels, but that decreases the farther down you go. We might understand the next level, and some of the next after that, but eventually people will be making things that we don't have the context to understand without having to unlearn a lot of what we know now.

I'm old enough to see this process in action; I used to be young and in possession of esoteric knowledge that made me infinitely in demand and now most of the things that young people have esoteric knowledge about is things that I don't particularly care about, and I'm left with a lot of finely honed skills to solve problems that have mostly been abstracted away.

Moral panic. We all have private tutors on every subject at our disposal now. It takes some special kind of mental gymnastics to conclude from this that no one will learn anything anymore henceforth. The article is just a long-winded way of saying "Kids today have it too easy", or, equivalently, "I'm getting old".

It is no small feat to put in words that we are losing something almost as quickly as we are gaining something. The undertone, despite leaning into nostalgia boils down to losing control and this uneasiness I feel growing daily. It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a computer in the narrow sense because all they ever learned was touch interfaces and apps. Curated content, curated interfaces - everything that resembles some kind of hardship ironed out in thousand steps of iterations to appease the market which means the lowest common denominator.

But I also see that the people who can create the absolute most and the good things and the working things and the maintainable things nowadays are the people that have gained a tool, but not lost the knowledge of the medium we are using it on because we are tied to this old world so perfectly put under the spotlight in this blog post.

There was a sweet spot with computer technologies for some decades where hobbyists could afford to experiment and even push the envelope in the nascent field of computing - similar to genetic radiation, many niches were formed and rapidly filled. The computing biome has evolved to the point where most entities are not operating at the low-level abstractions that were once the only means of interacting with the computing environment, instead they operate now at the highest levels of abstraction we are capable, so called "natural language".

"The difficulty was the knowledge. You came to know that machine the way you come to know anything that pushes back. The resistance was the whole medium. You only ever know the things that you can lose to."

We who grew up in this era formed a hands-on engineer's knowledge of these systems, built from experience and practice, learning these layers of abstraction as the bleeding edge developed. Many these days have entered into a world where there are easy answers abound, they just might not be right, and one has to gauge how much they care about correctness.

@ryancbriggs - 18 Oct 2024

> When I was young I fixed my parents’ computer and now that I’m older I fix computers for my kids. Are we the only generation that knows how computers work?

https://x.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844

https://xcancel.com/ryancbriggs/status/1847391612428517844

I'm one of the greybeards who has the 2400 BAUD modem negotiation tone sequences emblazened in my neurons.

For a while I've been meaning to set up some Wireguard connections among some of my systems. Being as busy as I am with work and family, I've relinquished that to Tailscale for now.

Sure, I could have sat down and jumped through the hoops to get everything set up and working across my various hosts, including network routes, firewall rules, key pairs, systemd units, and so forth. But the "cheap and easy" alternative was right there and worked (except when it forces re-authentication).

With LLM agents, I was able to effortlessly analyze my existing network and produce tailored scripts to do precisely what I wanted. All I had to do was review the scripts for potential security issues and what not. Looking at the script, there are 3 or 4 specific tweaks that needed to be made to my network routing rules given my network topology. I could have read a few man pages and iterated on the script by hand to eventually get there after maybe an hour or two of futzing.

The availability and effectiveness of the agents is simply too tempting for me. I'm not sure what this means about my skillset, or if that even matters any more. I am fairly confident that, so long as my brain still works well enough, I'll always be able to RTFM and figure things like this out myself. At this rate I wonder whether my kids will have the same ability. And I also wonder how much that will matter.

Regardless, I'm still helping them figure things out the "old way" without over-reliance on LLMs. One thing I'm fairly certain about is that failure to develop problem-solving skills can only put them in a worse position in life, no matter how capable AI becomes.

I'm still nostalgic for the times when I had to enter the bootloader using the keys on front panel of the PDP-11 to then loaded the OS from paper tape. (not to mention multi pass compilers using paper tape between the phases...)

Modding communities are still going. Kids, afaik, are still playing around with hosting minecraft servers or whatever is en vogue/cool/meta/etc nowadays. DIY 8-bit computers are gaining popularity.

IMO the fact that something's become very mainstream doesn't necessarily mean it's been watered down for everybody. There will always be people with various levels of curiosity and enthusiasm.

I resonate with every example given - setting jumpers by hand, sound card interrupts, autoexec.bat. I'm also a happy user of LLMs and agents. This article captured for me what is lost - which, as others point out, has long since been lost, if ever had, in other fields (e.g. modern cars vs. the Model T). I wouldn't go back, but I can still have a sense of loss.

Beautiful writing.

I doubt you ever understood the solid state physics, semiconductor fabrication processes, supply chain logistics, monetary policy, shipping routes, mining engineering, etc. "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.

“The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.”

I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitted. It will regurgitate something that looks like a training manual. Or whatever fits your query about training manuals.

You still have to push back on them sometimes when you spot an error. And you can only spot them if you already know what you’re looking for and should expect. Otherwise you have to ignore the output and just get the links which… could be outdated or made up as well. You’ll never know until you verify the results.

And this degrades with compression and time.

There’s no royal road. I agree that trying and getting frustrated and having to take the effort to understand something pays off in spades. I just think it’s still worth it and vastly under appreciated in this era of “everything fast, now.”

Two thoughts:

1: This is why I prefer console games. I just want to have fun without fighting with the machine.

2: There are plenty of people who appreciate old techniques and methods; and keep them alive. Think of going to a museum and seeing someone demonstrate an old craft or reenact how a craftsman did their job. For example, in my town there is an old, water-powered corn mill that still runs and sells corn meal.

> The graybeards are aging out, nobody compiles their kernel anymore, and someday something deep will break and there will be no one left who can climb down and fix it. Maybe. But I think competence is the part that’s fine.

> knew a beige computer in 1995 that wouldn’t run a game until I had rearranged its bits by hand. More dependent than ever

If you look at previous article from this author, it says how Mac is amazing and how Linux sucks. Kids like that in 1990ties would buy expensive consoles, and would not deal with hack PC's to get free games.

Many people today are still dealing with cheap shitty hardware, 7 years old Android phones and sketchy ROMs... Just because there is no other option!

https://unix.foo/posts/it-will-never-be-the-year-of-the-linu...

I worry less about whether people know how it all works.

I worry more about whether people care and consider it a problem when they don't know.

I wanted things to be a little easier, but not this easy

This is sort of the story of the telephone system of the 1950s-1970s, or electricity in the early 1900s, or cars from 1950-1980s, or airplanes from 1910-1939.

I have no idea how an electrical transformer works (well, other than the bare theory I learned in physics courses), or how power gets from the power company to my house, or how the circuits in my home are setup. I plug something in, and it works, and occasionally I throw a breaker if something is malfunctioning. There's no resistance there (pun not intended), and there shouldn't be. People got killed trying to wire their own homes.

I used to read about phone phreaks from the 1970s that could do black magic to get free long-distance phone calls. When I grew up in the 80s, that was basically gone. You picked up the phone, got a dial-tone, and called. And now it's really gone, with everyone having an encrypted cell phone connection over 5G, and your IMEI and IMSI being phoned home to every tower you connect to.

It's the nature of technology and capitalism. As the technology matures, it gets hidden away to become increasingly invisible to the end user, so you just do what you want to do with it. And then the engineering resources get spent on new problems.

I wouldn't calling it learning more and more like "cycling through SoundBlaster DMA and IRQ options until the sound work". Still, there was an intrinsic curiosity that isn't as prevalent.

We always were the only people who ever knew how it worked. In 1990 people fellow students called me to fix their computer, they had absolutely no idea how any of this worked. No. Idea. Yes, the machine was being difficult; but their reaction wasn't to fight it, or understand it. It was to call someone to do it in their stead.

I'm not sure things are very different now.

Folks who keep mentioning that this is no different than any previous upward leap of abstraction in human history are missing a key point that the frontier labs are certainly not missing: this is the first time in computing that you are becoming completely dependent on a _subscription service_. I don't need to know how my CPU works because it continues to work once built. Once I outsource all cognition to a billable service, I am forever and continuously in thrall to someone else's revenue strategy.

"To play a computer game in in the 1990s, you first had to understand how the computer worked.

So you learned. You opened files like autoexec.bat and you read them."

Ehh I dunno about that. I rarely, if ever, had to mess with any of that junk after Windows 3... I also didn't have to deal with any IRQ issues. So seems like it was already mostly abstracted in the "1990s" lol

I've been thinking that there might not be new programming languages. The amount of code in the current popular ones will explode, so that's what all LLMs will be trained on.

Good luck coming up with a new language and getting enough content out there that LLMs will be fluent with it.

If true, I think that's a shame. There's plenty of innovation still to be done.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but the cost is performance (and falling behind competitors).

Paging Vernor Vinge to the white courtesy phone.

This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.

> The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads. They will recite, flawlessly and forever, exactly how all machines work.

That's wrong, and that's exactly why the loss of knowledge is such a problem. LLMs do not, and cannot, actually know a single thing. They are a statistical model, not knowledge. When they give out wrong information (and they always will, by their very nature), you need someone with actual knowledge to be able to recognize the BS and correct it. But we are losing the knowledge, and unless things change we will be no better off than the people in dystopian sci-fi stories who pray to the machine god because nobody knows how it actually works.

Who cares?

There have always been layers of abstraction. I've been around for a while, and when I was a kid, the two choices I remember seeing were assembly code and simple semantic languages like BASIC.

Assembly seemed like too cryptic for me to really even follow and I never really did learn it, but at the time I remember people would say that assembly was easy and basically plain English compared to machine code.

As recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, I would occasionally check in and think of how unbelievably far away we had gotten from how the computer actually works. Like, you can just write "open window" and a window opens. Amazing.

Of course, those people writing machine code didn't need to really understand what P and N were in a transistor, let alone how an integrated circuit pulls it all together. And I'm not sure how much those guys knew about silicon dioxide.

The more complex things get and the more layers of abstraction there are, the more impossible it gets to really master things all the way down to first principles.

So what? People can carve out whatever chunk of the stack they want to really understand if they want to focus their lives on it. And for everyone else who's just trying to accomplish some other goal with computers as the tool, they will naturally use the highest level of abstraction and the simplest one for them to use, which is exactly what they should do.