I wanted things to be a little easier, but not this easy
Lwerewolf · 2026-06-30 17:59:50 UTC
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.
hootz · 2026-06-30 18:02:28 UTC
Yeah, I don't think human curiosity can be extinguished. It can be disincentivized, yes, but not extinguished. Nerds will always be nerds.
bambax · 2026-06-30 18:01:00 UTC
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.
dbalatero · 2026-06-30 18:09:33 UTC
Maybe the difference is more of the professionals in the field now haven't built that same muscle, as there's a broader group of people working in tech. Whereas the folks that could fix things in the 90s mainly gravitated to computers as a profession. Just random musing though I truly don't now.
tacostakohashi · 2026-06-30 18:12:51 UTC
I feel that things are pretty different. Although the example of interrupts and jumper settings being common knowledge is a bit of a stretch... it's still amazing to recall that MS-DOS was regarded as an end-user / consumer OS, and that, more generally, it really was regarded as totally normal to need to invest some time in learning about the system, files, directories, typing, configuring/customizing settings and network options just to be able to do what you wanted to do.
I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.
PaulDavisThe1st · 2026-06-30 18:14:39 UTC
Compare with what the drivers/operators of the earliest automobiles were expected to know vs. what the same category of people are expected to know today.
There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.
mghackerlady · 2026-06-30 18:50:13 UTC
I think the difference is that with those technologies, not knowing is seen as a hindrance (I imagine most people wished they knew how their engine worked, that's useful) that one can simply live with, whereas with computers nowadays I see people just not care about these skills. When I do something interesting on a computer that other people see, the response isn't "huh, that's a neat skill" it's "why?". People don't care anymore. They don't see knowledge as useful or something that is beneficial to pursue
Stefan-H · 2026-06-30 18:03:22 UTC
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.
dan-bailey · 2026-06-30 18:22:04 UTC
This is definitely true, and we definitely need something similar again. I've been using a game ("The Farmer Was Replaced") as a jumping-off point for teaching the kids Python, but the more I think about it, the more I think that they need some sort of hardware package similar to an old Apple //e that gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. It was easy, back in the day, to learn a ton (even assembler) on a system like that, and I feel like there's some value in rewinding the clock back to that point, forking the experience from there, and seeing what a new generation of kids will cook up.
mdavidn · 2026-06-30 18:27:45 UTC
Zach Barth and his former studio Zachtronics released several entertaining puzzle games based on idealized fake assembly languages. These are a lot of fun and useful for introducing registers and multiprocessing.
Folcon · 2026-06-30 19:38:07 UTC
I keep coming back to the idea of taking that concept and just running with it, IE building up a toolchain alongside some concrete tasks to solve with it and just adding more detail until we reach a reasonably sophisticated level
I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like
mghackerlady · 2026-06-30 18:43:49 UTC
If you want to go the old computer route, find an old vic-20. It has the best manual for any computer ever made imo
tor0ugh · 2026-06-30 18:04:14 UTC
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.
PaulDavisThe1st · 2026-06-30 18:12:58 UTC
> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.
We could do this forever.
zormino · 2026-06-30 18:22:10 UTC
This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.
bluefirebrand · 2026-06-30 18:32:03 UTC
The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else
We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift
jjk7 · 2026-06-30 18:49:03 UTC
(in recent memory). Surely the industrial revolution was a much larger disruption.
bluefirebrand · 2026-06-30 19:20:50 UTC
Maybe? Either way, we're still talking about one of the largest disruptions that global society has ever had
mghackerlady · 2026-06-30 18:26:51 UTC
the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp
ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes
biotinker · 2026-06-30 19:26:31 UTC
It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.
switchbak · 2026-06-30 18:26:52 UTC
Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
apsurd · 2026-06-30 18:37:33 UTC
My read is that there does seem a clear difference between simple -> advanced machines vs simple -> "smart" machines. Nearly every smart machine is bullshit enshitification-in-waiting. Rent-seeking in-waiting. Smart tvs, smart cars with touch-screens. some would argue apple products. These things proclaim advancements but what they really do is black-box and dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, then quite literally impose control over the air, and shove ads to you.
I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.
kibwen · 2026-06-30 18:53:57 UTC
No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.
globular-toast · 2026-06-30 19:22:26 UTC
A person dies every 26 seconds in a road traffic incident somewhere in the world. A big part of that is people using machines they do not understand.
LEDThereBeLight · 2026-06-30 19:31:10 UTC
Almost no part of that is due to people using machines they do not understand.
jfengel · 2026-06-30 19:31:55 UTC
In what sense do they not understand it? What could we teach them that they don't already know?
tines · 2026-06-30 19:53:01 UTC
I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?
dare944 · 2026-06-30 22:38:26 UTC
You mean as a distraction from the point being made?
apsurd · 2026-06-30 18:26:36 UTC
The financialization of everything is what's ruining everything. In the computer and internet realm, there's warm nostalgia from hours spent tinkering, building one's own PC, reformatting C drives due to malware, searching for "snippets" to add a forum or pimp a myspace page. But inevitably the money incentives come to dominate. It's all of our doing, we all dream of a better life to put it charitably.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
footydude · 2026-06-30 18:38:19 UTC
In my mind, 'tinkering for fun and knowledge' was never meant to be profitable - if you're tinkering with the express aim of making a profit i'm not sure you're really 'tinkering' so much as you're trying to create a product/service/output for someone else to pay for?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that - I'm just not sure the 'ethos' of tinkering has anything to do with trying to make money and is usually reserved for describing someone playing about with something for their own enjoyment/fun with no desire to make money.
Now, of course some people did find that their tinkerings were able to make them money, but I think at its base it's a term I'd tend to say implies doing something for fun/for themselves, rather than doing it for profit?
In my experience there's still plenty of people out there tinkering just for their own personal satisfaction, but of course there's almost certain a whole load more people out there 'tinkering' to try make a profit.
apsurd · 2026-06-30 18:43:52 UTC
Agreed, I'd say tinkering for profit has become the defacto optimization and tinkering for its own sake is less fashionable because it commands no attention. and everyone is obsessed with the modern currency: attention.
To be clear, I'm seeing this as an observed phenomenon, not that everyone made up their mind that they hate tinkering and love money. I just think it's getting really really hard to exist in the world as a normal person when the entire human collective is getting pumped commercialized hyper-media from all angles at all times now 100X'd by genAI bots. It's really exhausting and so you either opt-in to the game, monetize your now AI side-hustle to pay the rent, or opt-out and live in the woods. and get packages delivered by Amazon. heh.
lukan · 2026-06-30 19:56:53 UTC
"warm nostalgia"
"reformatting C drives due to malware"
Processing error.
apsurd · 2026-06-30 20:12:14 UTC
hah, that made me laugh. To this day I'm so proud to have learned how to repeatedly just wipe my PC C drive when needed then reinstall XP or whatever. I'm just a web-dev that got their start by googling "how to make a website". As I leaned in there came a turning point where I wanted badly to switch from windows, php, scripts, to Ruby on Rails. But installing ruby at the time just didn't work. I worked up the courage - eventually - to partition my drive and install linux. After that, I got to experience a proper terminal and the rest is history.
overgard · 2026-06-30 20:16:24 UTC
The real problem is the philosophy that arose in the 1970s that "maximizing shareholder value" is the point of business. As a society, we've become obsessed with optimizing this one variable at the expense of all others and "growth" has become a religion. At it's core, the most important thing we should be optimizing for is "does this business improve the world while turning a robust and sustainable revenue stream" not "how much money can we make for investors". The latter will always optimize for incredible wealth disparity, enshittification, and mostly useless people like Elon Musk becoming stupidly wealthy because it's basically impossible for them to lose money no matter how bad their ideas are (once you're a certain level of rich, your passive income is just immense). I'm not saying shareholders/investors shouldn't be considered, but it can't be the only or the most important metric. We've completely lost the plot on the social and market purpose of a corporation.
sph · 2026-06-30 19:59:34 UTC
We are on average losing control, but you individually can choose whether to lose control or not.
Programming languages, UNIX, debuggers aren’t going anywhere. There is more to computing than what your boss demands and what is hyped on tech forums.
In fact I believe the indie/handmade scene will grow substantial if not boom, even if just as a hobby for most. Showing what you have made with your blood sweat and tears will elicit more praise and delight when you could have just asked a machine to do it all along.
bigstrat2003 · 2026-06-30 18:07:10 UTC
> 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.
arm32 · 2026-06-30 18:11:10 UTC
I'm sure this comment will get buried, but I wholeheartedly agree with your take.
Ekaros · 2026-06-30 18:18:01 UTC
I can already see future where there is group of people goading AI to right direction by repeatedly changing what they ask slightly. And then memorise the times when you got right incantation for seemingly right outcome. Without actually understanding or being able to reason about process in the middle. Possibly a seemingly inconsequential misspoken word or typo can lead to better or worse outcome. Or maybe just not saying "Please" will sometimes produce wrong output. and other times you must not use it...
Sounds like absolutely horrifying dystopia.
smsm42 · 2026-06-30 18:24:37 UTC
Welcome to the future. Make no mistakes.
recursive · 2026-06-30 20:02:10 UTC
Communing with the machine becomes spiritual. Computer operators will become a priesthood.
thewebguyd · 2026-06-30 18:23:41 UTC
Imagine if we had LLMs back then to write xorg.conf for you and it hallucinated the modeline and you blew up your monitor.
smsm42 · 2026-06-30 18:23:41 UTC
Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge - I mean, they can generate new arrangements of information, but they have no idea whether any of it real or making sense, unless humans - explicitly or through training - tell them, the more we rely on LLM knowledge the less the quality of it would be. Right now the LLMs are mainly in auxiliary role, so most of the knowledge erosion they generate is laughed at and relatively quickly corrected. But would this hold once the role of generative AIs increases? We already essentially entered the chaos period with news content - there's so much noise that it's basically impossible to know if any news message you read is true or manipulated somehow. This is going to start happening to more fundamental knowledge too, either on purpose or just by the force of the probabilistic nature of generative AI.
Ekaros · 2026-06-30 18:34:38 UTC
I was just thinking. What is the future when LLM is used for both code running itself and then also designing the hardware it runs on? Will it be sustainable? Or will there be some sort of error cascade that destroys the whole thing?
Maybe AGI is impossible with current model as it simply can not reliably improve itself... Enough errors in any part of loop will stop the progression.
simianwords · 2026-06-30 18:54:49 UTC
> Yes. And since LLMs can not improve knowledge
1. GPT proved Erdős Unit Distance Conjecture entirely on its own
2. GPT-5.4 Pro Solves Erdős Problem #1196 (April 2026)
I think what you describe is called the Model Collapse.
simianwords · 2026-06-30 18:52:29 UTC
This comment might have gone hard in 2023. Now it seems out of place. LLM's do hold knowledge empirically. They sometimes give out wrong information, like humans. And you need someone with better knowledge to correct it.
> But we are losing the knowledge
No we aren't and this is spreading FUD. Things have always been like this. Its called specialisation and this is how society progresses. I don't know how the supply chain worked to get the food to my table. That's why its so cheap!
CPLX · 2026-06-30 18:07:25 UTC
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.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but the cost is performance (and falling behind competitors).
fritzo · 2026-06-30 18:14:34 UTC
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.
seethishat · 2026-06-30 19:01:17 UTC
Obviously no one knows every detail all the way down the stack. It's not possible, but having some level of understanding of how a system operates is useful especially if you ever have to fix it yourself or explain why/how it is broken.
bluefirebrand · 2026-06-30 19:03:20 UTC
> "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.
Should we petition to rename this site to "Stone Age News" or something then?
Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought figuring out how things work was pretty core to the Hacker mentality.
tines · 2026-06-30 19:58:36 UTC
If being a Luddite means I'm the only one who cares to understand anything, I'll accept the label gladly.
You: I think it’s good to understand some things.
This guy: If you don’t understand everything then you might as well not understand anything!
Guys like this are a corporation’s wet dream. Total intellectual dependence.
Dylan16807 · 2026-06-30 19:07:59 UTC
It's not hard to understand the physics and fabrication.
The rest of that isn't part of how a computer works.
kzrdude · 2026-06-30 19:45:36 UTC
There is plenty to learn about hardware / integrated circuits.
matheusmoreira · 2026-06-30 20:03:48 UTC
I do at least try to understand all of those things.
joshmoody24 · 2026-06-30 21:32:06 UTC
Obviously it's impossible to understand the whole stack. My rule of thumb is to understand at least two layers of abstraction above and below the thing I'm actively working on.
antisthenes · 2026-06-30 22:03:11 UTC
> "Knowing how things work" is a stone-age attitude.
What absolute nonsense. To openly admit to be proud of one's ignorance.
pram · 2026-06-30 18:14:57 UTC
"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
thewebguyd · 2026-06-30 18:26:44 UTC
Yeah same. I remember playing a bunch of Sierra games on my first PC as a kid on either. Most I had to deal with was installing the drivers for my SoundBlaster card from the included disk. Most I dealt with was putting in the CD, double clicking the installer and entering the product key.
That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
fusslo · 2026-06-30 18:28:07 UTC
Anecdotally, I think it depends on age and family more than anything. I grew up with hand-me-down computers, games because we couldn't afford anything new. Started with win98 and games from the mid 90s, but running them in 2002.
I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
bitwize · 2026-06-30 18:29:41 UTC
Windows 3.x did not cohabitate well with certain games that required nearly the entire 640k of conventional memory to run. These are mainly games from the old DOS days; games that relied on DPMI were largely exempt. But to play certain Sierra titles, for instance, you had to set up one CONFIG.SYS configuration that loaded HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE for Windows and another that left them out to free up that memory for your games. In later versions of DOS you could set up a menu to select the appropriate configuration at boot.
And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.
recursive · 2026-06-30 20:00:23 UTC
If you wanted to play a PC game in the Windows 3 era, you were playing a DOS game. Playing it inside of windows just made it even more difficult.
Finnucane · 2026-06-30 18:15:09 UTC
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.
nostrademons · 2026-06-30 18:18:58 UTC
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.
bryanrasmussen · 2026-06-30 18:30:36 UTC
> 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.
people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.
throeei4 · 2026-06-30 18:21:01 UTC
> 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!
That other post is just plain wrong. LLMs are just about the only thing that can meaningfully benefit from having access to almost all the code your environment is built from. If you're on Linux, the agents not only have all that code accessible in web search, but also almost certainly include most of it in their training data.
If anything, agents are an opportunity for the "Linux year on the desktop". Granted, I don't personally believe Linux needs to have that year; it's just fine without any mass adoption there. It's simply no longer that important a segment. I thought most of the debate around that also died out years ago (perhaps even a decade?)
Still, I recently had the opportunity to compare how Codex configures macOS and Fedora for the same task, and the latter was a bit faster and significantly cheaper (in tokens). That's obviously anecdata - maybe the particular task was overrepresented on one side or something - but I wouldn't be surprised if this was a more general trend.
CommieBobDole · 2026-06-30 18:21:10 UTC
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.
101008 · 2026-06-30 18:34:11 UTC
> 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.
What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that professionally). The same about algorithms, databases, and a lot of things. But now I find it valuable and thankful that my professors (and whoever designed the career) considered important topics that I had to lear.
hatefulheart · 2026-06-30 18:37:46 UTC
Exactly.
Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.
esikich · 2026-06-30 18:47:50 UTC
What's absurd is thinking because you took a logic class and made a flip flop 30 years ago that that is the ground floor and that it means you "understand how it all works". You're not building a CPU from logic gates and you don't know how it works. If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch. I worked with wires and logic too but I'm not arrogant enough to say that I know how it all works.
hatefulheart · 2026-06-30 18:58:12 UTC
This is a very cringe take.
Me and OP aren’t super heroes, we can’t do what a team of talented individuals created even if that team existed many moons ago. That isn’t the point.
We both questioned the tone and the conclusion of the comment.
vladms · 2026-06-30 18:58:28 UTC
Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ?
Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.
esikich · 2026-06-30 19:14:35 UTC
Not really, at least not in this discussion. An assembly programmer gets logic gates, a C programmer gets assembly, etc etc. And each one can say to the one above "well you don't really get it if you can't bang out some meaningful work". Otherwise idk what we're even talking about here. Having a vague understanding of something isn't "knowing how it works".
lelanthran · 2026-06-30 19:23:29 UTC
Yeah, but if we use your criteria, people have to invent their own atoms out of individual electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc before you'd admit that "hey, they did build a compiler from scratch".
I think a fair bar for "from scratch" is stopping at the point they need an expensive fab process (or how else will they reproduce the workings of semiconductors?)
hparadiz · 2026-06-30 19:25:55 UTC
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Explains how to build an 8 bit calculator with wires, switches, and light bulbs and then keeps on going.
hirvi74 · 2026-06-30 19:04:49 UTC
That was one the major criticism I have of my CS degree's program. Perhaps the knowledge I wish for is not truly CS in the mathematical/theoretical perspective, but I believe it would have been absolutely valuable to learn.
lelanthran · 2026-06-30 19:20:25 UTC
> If I put you or OP in a room for a year I highly doubt you could build an 8 bit Atari-like CPU from scratch.
I believe I can, depending on what "from scratch" means. With nothing but transistors, resistors, inductors, coils, capacitors, I can probably do apretty poor general-purpose CPU. Maybe something like a stack-based ISA or, if I had more time, an accumulator-based processor like a 6502, but with an 8-bit bus.
If you're going to ask me to create transistors themselves, well I believe that needs specialised equipment.
ThrowawayR2 · 2026-06-30 20:02:55 UTC
The parent post's argument can be boiled down to "You don't know absolutely everything therefore it's fine to know little or nothing." It's the Chewbacca defense of AI boosterism.
bix6 · 2026-06-30 18:52:10 UTC
Name checks out
apsurd · 2026-06-30 18:52:11 UTC
come on now.
so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing.
life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.
xpct · 2026-06-30 19:11:21 UTC
> checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived
What exactly about checking out makes it 'more living'? I sense a false dichotomy here
apsurd · 2026-06-30 19:20:39 UTC
easy: we all need breaks. breaks are not bad. living doesn't only mean "doing actions"
xpct · 2026-06-30 19:30:01 UTC
I don't think OP argued for any type of relentless work.
8note · 2026-06-30 18:38:33 UTC
how did you make the transistors? made your own vacuum chambers?
i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do
OkayPhysicist · 2026-06-30 18:50:17 UTC
We had a photolithography lab when I was at school. It's not that complicated to make a few npn transistors. The difficult part is doing it well.
saulpw · 2026-06-30 18:41:41 UTC
You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.
Comments
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'm not sure things are very different now.
I find the current expectations around consumer "apps" to be totally infantile in comparison, where everything is now a single-purpose "app" that does exactly one thing when you push a button, and if you want something even a tiny bit different.. you can't, and that even basic things like files and settings are no longer accessible.
There's nothing new about this particular progression - we've been through it in dozens of technologies already.
"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.
I've been staring at 0x10c, carwars and battletech and there's a sense that I could build a sort of programming / engineering Zach like
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.
We could do this forever.
We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift
ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.
Now everything is a means to a commercial end. Tinkering for fun and knowledge just isn't profitable. And it matters less and less what each our stance is on money and capital if the people that optimize for money and capital gobble up all the money and capital. Of all that's going on, the wealth gap is what's most troubling to me, closely followed because it's closely related is "post truth". I think post-truth is roughly caused by the fact that people are happy to believe what they want to believe toward some commercialized and/or idealogical end. You're much more likely to hate and blame your neighbor when you look around and you're the one not doing too well.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that - I'm just not sure the 'ethos' of tinkering has anything to do with trying to make money and is usually reserved for describing someone playing about with something for their own enjoyment/fun with no desire to make money.
Now, of course some people did find that their tinkerings were able to make them money, but I think at its base it's a term I'd tend to say implies doing something for fun/for themselves, rather than doing it for profit?
In my experience there's still plenty of people out there tinkering just for their own personal satisfaction, but of course there's almost certain a whole load more people out there 'tinkering' to try make a profit.
To be clear, I'm seeing this as an observed phenomenon, not that everyone made up their mind that they hate tinkering and love money. I just think it's getting really really hard to exist in the world as a normal person when the entire human collective is getting pumped commercialized hyper-media from all angles at all times now 100X'd by genAI bots. It's really exhausting and so you either opt-in to the game, monetize your now AI side-hustle to pay the rent, or opt-out and live in the woods. and get packages delivered by Amazon. heh.
Processing error.
Programming languages, UNIX, debuggers aren’t going anywhere. There is more to computing than what your boss demands and what is hyped on tech forums.
In fact I believe the indie/handmade scene will grow substantial if not boom, even if just as a hobby for most. Showing what you have made with your blood sweat and tears will elicit more praise and delight when you could have just asked a machine to do it all along.
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.
Sounds like absolutely horrifying dystopia.
Maybe AGI is impossible with current model as it simply can not reliably improve itself... Enough errors in any part of loop will stop the progression.
1. GPT proved Erdős Unit Distance Conjecture entirely on its own
2. GPT-5.4 Pro Solves Erdős Problem #1196 (April 2026)
In fact there's a whole benchmark that's measuring this: https://epoch.ai/frontiermath
> But we are losing the knowledge
No we aren't and this is spreading FUD. Things have always been like this. Its called specialisation and this is how society progresses. I don't know how the supply chain worked to get the food to my table. That's why its so cheap!
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.
Should we petition to rename this site to "Stone Age News" or something then?
Maybe I'm wrong but I always thought figuring out how things work was pretty core to the Hacker mentality.
You: I think it’s good to understand some things.
This guy: If you don’t understand everything then you might as well not understand anything!
Guys like this are a corporation’s wet dream. Total intellectual dependence.
The rest of that isn't part of how a computer works.
What absolute nonsense. To openly admit to be proud of one's ignorance.
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
That said I did run into my fair share of other problems, and that early era of personal computing and my access to machines is the only reason I work in computing/tech today. If my childhood wasn't full of tinkering with these fascinating machines, and I only ever had an iPhone or iPad, I likely would have turned out much different.
I do remember having to look lots of things up and figuring out why some things wouldnt work. Then getting into building our own computers (because it was cheaper) and figuring out how to get halflife mods working...
And of course IRQ diddling was still necessary to configure sound, network, and game controller hardware throughout the DOS era of gaming, which lasted well into the Windows 9x era.
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.
people will hack enterprise pbx systems. The stream just flowed somewhere else.
> 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...
If anything, agents are an opportunity for the "Linux year on the desktop". Granted, I don't personally believe Linux needs to have that year; it's just fine without any mass adoption there. It's simply no longer that important a segment. I thought most of the debate around that also died out years ago (perhaps even a decade?)
Still, I recently had the opportunity to compare how Codex configures macOS and Fedora for the same task, and the latter was a bit faster and significantly cheaper (in tokens). That's obviously anecdata - maybe the particular task was overrepresented on one side or something - but I wouldn't be surprised if this was a more general trend.
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.
What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that professionally). The same about algorithms, databases, and a lot of things. But now I find it valuable and thankful that my professors (and whoever designed the career) considered important topics that I had to lear.
Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.
Me and OP aren’t super heroes, we can’t do what a team of talented individuals created even if that team existed many moons ago. That isn’t the point.
We both questioned the tone and the conclusion of the comment.
Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.
I think a fair bar for "from scratch" is stopping at the point they need an expensive fab process (or how else will they reproduce the workings of semiconductors?)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0137909101
Explains how to build an 8 bit calculator with wires, switches, and light bulbs and then keeps on going.
I believe I can, depending on what "from scratch" means. With nothing but transistors, resistors, inductors, coils, capacitors, I can probably do apretty poor general-purpose CPU. Maybe something like a stack-based ISA or, if I had more time, an accumulator-based processor like a 6502, but with an 8-bit bus.
If you're going to ask me to create transistors themselves, well I believe that needs specialised equipment.
so even if you're right, checking out emotionally and spiritually just means more life lived. That ain't some kind of bad thing.
life is good sometimes. hard sometimes. and it's long sometimes, so give people a break.
What exactly about checking out makes it 'more living'? I sense a false dichotomy here
i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do