Comment by mikewarot
1 day ago
Having worked in a job shop, a factory that did gears down to quantity one, I became quite aware of the differences between IT, my previous job, and actual physical production.
The machine tools were all made 50+ years ago. Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups that are done a few times a year in quantity, to fail, erasing the profits for the job, and possibly losing customers.
The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”.
Of course, this could simply be the perspective of someone turning 50 this year.
People here also don't understand machine shops.
My dad ran a job shop focused on small jobs and the economics are different.
A lot of his work was keeping other local shops / industrial equipment up and running. So there is a lot of variety of work but very low throughput and kind of by deffintion you have the capabilities to fix your own machines.
Programing a CNC machine makes it east to make a lot of the same part but if you only need one it may be quicker to just knock it out manually.
A 50 year old mill or lathe is easy to keep up and running, can be upgraded with a Digital readout or even CNC controls if desired. A tool in a shop like this likely won't see the cycles one on a factory floor constant uses sees but may be worth keeping around since it offers a unique capability...he had a large ww ii surplus lathe for jobs that wouldn't fit on the smaller more modern machines for example.
> What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools
My students are shocked (horrified?) to learn that they're basically running 50-yr old Fortran code when they use scipy.minimize to train their fancy little neural nets.
I always chuckle at how Python became the dominant language for AI / ML / data science etc but wonder why it is that Fortran and Python became the golden combo, it could have been done with any other language, no complaints, I love Python, but its just amusing to me.
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No one uses scipy for anything serious anymore in AI research or on any type of modern models.
You're setting your students up for failure if this is how you are teaching neural networks to them. You should switch to pytorch or at least something like tensorflow or jax or you are actively doing intellectual disservice to them and leading them to be actively noncompetitive both in AI academic paper writing/grad school and in the job market.
Similarly, use of sklearn considered harmful in a world where CuML/CuPY/Nvidia RAPIDS exists.
And also, knowledge of conda/pip/poetry considered harmful in a world where UV exists.
Teach MODERN tools please.
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To be fair, a lot of the tools we use as developers have 30-40 year heritage's themselves. The things that most people depend on and are in the background.
Relational databases are from the 70's
I'm somewhere in the middle, young enough that almost everything I've seen new is disposable crap (including the tools), old enough that I have had an interest in things from before and noticed that they really were built much better, or at least heavier, back then.
I've made the comment on here before that I believe it's short term energy optimisation, in that it used to be seen as reasonable to much heavier objects around. We've made everything so light we've lost the infrastructure for moving heavy stuff around when we might need to.
Kids today have no concept of how heavy workstations, TVs or monitors used to be, and they think it's exaggeration. Let alone tools, cars, appliances etc.
Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people
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Cars haven't gotten any lighter. Rather the reverse. Battery packs are quite heavy.
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I don't know where I fit on that spectrum, my first thought was there's probably nobody around anymore to replace these fifty year old tools, and/or they'll price it at a level that would wipe all profits for the next 10 years when replacement will be needed.
Our field also have these IBM AS/400 or older running for 30+ years in a server room at the back of an office floor. They are more feared than revered.
I rather think of the maintenance nightmare. You can't change anything - not cause the existing system is good but because there are no people left that understand the whole thing.
But then I've got a few years to reach 50. Perhaps my views will change.
The gear cutting machines almost never had mechanical failures. As long as they keep them lubricated, and occasionally muck out the sumps, the machines should still be going in the year 2100.
The other thing about gear cutting is that hobs only cut one size/profile of tooth. Some of the cutting tools I was using dated from before WW1, for odd sizes that didn't get used much.
Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.
This happens in tech as well. It's called COBOL and it refuses to go away, despite lots of people's best efforts.
The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be still good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use (say, compared to a lathe).
This is the whole idea of industrialization - moving away from having skilled artisans, into machines that encode the skill to reproduce the article.
The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the production methods remained static (of course, if the production machines are good enough already, then investment into new machines don't bring in new profits).
As someone who grew up in a machine and wood working shop and now builds, repairs and retrofits machinery, I can say that 50 years old is nothing and absolutely fine.
> The thing is, those 50 yr old machine tools might be still good, but the more recent CNC machines are much more efficient, and require way less manual dexterity to use (say, compared to a lathe).
I assume you are referring to manual operated machinery vs CNC machinery? Otherwise there is little to no efficiency gained from a new CNC machine. I've run both and the setup of a CNC for simple jobs that can be done on a manual isn't worth the effort. CNC's really shine at high production and very complex parts.
> The fact that machines that are 50 yrs old are still in operation is quite a feat but also an indication that the production methods remained static
If the requirements haven't changed, e.g. machining flanges that meet ASME B16.5, and the production methods are already optimized, why even bring this up?
> (of course, if the production machines are good enough already, then investment into new machines don't bring in new profits).
Right. If the specs didn't change then why bother investing in pointless upgrades?
The ONLY reason companies toss out machinery: it's no longer useful to the company, or so hopelessly broken that it cant be fixed. And there is very little that can render a machine scrap unless something catastrophic happened. And there is very little preventing old machinery from being retrofitted with new controls.
I think it is not always about an age gap. A friend has a distribution company with many trucks and many times they need to use a manual machine, and soldering for fixing truck issues.
> There is a really interesting generation gap issue in the replies to your comment. What I perceive as younger people are horrified at the idea of fifty year old tools while the older folks are thinking (I imagine) “if the tools have lasted that long they must be well-honed and very good”.
It's like when someone wants to choose a brand new web framework that isn't battle tested over one of the most battle tested web frameworks. You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
> You can hire way more developers with battle tested tooling, than some bleeding edge thing you don't know if it can even scale.
There's a crucial difference!
You can hire expensive developers on battle tested tooling... or you can hire a shit ton of juniors that want to work on $BUZZWORD for cheap in exchange for the CV creds of "worked on $BUZZWORD".
Resume Driven Development...
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This is known as the Lindy Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Roller coaster tycoon is good.
The business software I have to work with from the 80s is a straight up nightmare. And I'd say most old software is in this camp.
Well, most new software is a nightmare too. And recently a lot of it started to try to do the wrong thing by design, what's an extra step into nightmare scenario beyond anything from 80s.
I'm a nearly 50 year old tool myself.
Yeah I have students who ask me "Why are we learning C++? My dad said it's older than him!"
Ask that question in language arts, and you'll get some very weird looks.
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Less interested in America's expensive and slow manufacturing than in Chinese processes. They can retool faster, handle far more volume, and except for specialized industries (medicine, aerospace) their quality is better.
How old are you? Do you not understand business cycles? Life cycles? 'Baggie pants are the future, anyone wearing tired out old non-baggy pants, it's over grandpa, for we have, for the first time, discovered baggie pants are cool and modern'
It's all fun and games when everything (your trains, your new bridges, your manufacturing process) is the brand new cool version. I went through that cycle (starting family, brand new house, new cars, new boat, high paying tech job working on early 2000s cutting edge tech). Our house was the cool house for a bit. Then is was just another house. Then is became a burden with maintenance expenses on top of the mortgage. I became a grey beard with legacy tech skills.
For China, what happens when things settle more? The market flushes out half the companies making the tools (there's tons of companies during the 'fill out' cycle, but at some point that slows/industry consolidates), or new product lines replace the old, now your factory is on borrowed time until the machines break down, you aren't the new hyped cool kid (I'm talking about you USA as a country/Ruby on Rail devs/Angular devs). Like with a new home, slowly your mortgage gets supplemented with appliance repair bills and other maintenance, what was cool and new is outdated and replaced with 'better'. China is doing good with robots, but what happens next gen when roboto/AI interaction is native built in. Does China scrap their entire 2025 robot infra and replace it with 2030s? Or does someone else gain the advantage of not having those 'legacy' slower to retool, slower volume Chinese 2025 robots/infra?
It's wild how smart people don't seem to understand basic cycles anymore. China is in a growth cycle and everyone is going to their 'new home party' and saying man this is all great (it is awesome. It is amazing how China went from poverty to current success, so many improved lives I love it) and we are acting like this is the first time someone bought a new home ever and the home will always be perfect and new and cutting edge.
Let's just celebrate that so much poverty and suffering has been eliminated in China, and wish them well and continued improvements especially as they transition from the generations that suffered to their newer generations without all that trama. That is also tricky to navigate for a society as life expectations become wildly different.
My first thought is: "when that wears out or fails what the fuck are you replacing it with".
Something newer. The reason that 50-year-old machine tools are still around isn't that they can't be replaced. It's that there's often no reason to.
To use OP as an example, in a lot of places, you'll find an ancient milling machine or a lathe that's dedicated to running a single job a few times a year. The machine was depreciated decades ago, but it can still do that job and there's no reason to get rid of it.
What modern tools give you is speed and flexibility. Many shops need neither.
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A shockingly rare question to be asked. As best as I can tell, the biggest threat to civilization isn't AI, it's our culture of "that's not my problem" leaving otherwise patch-able holes in critical systems.
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You machine a new part.
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Sourcing via eBay.com
As an older folk, I perceive 50 year old tools as likely worn out and in desperate need of replacement. However often nobody makes the tool anymore and so we are willing to spend a lot to maintain them instead. (I drive a 25 year old car - this is only possible because I can get a rebuilt transmission, but my maintenance costs over the last 10 years would have bought much newer/nicer used car, and I'm getting close to where I could buy a new car)
The other possibility is the tool isn't used much and modern accountants would never allow you to buy it in the first place because of all the cash tied up. (that is the work the tool did over those 50 years wasn't enough to pay for the cost of the tool and the space to store it)
I was recently talking to the head clockmaker at the Chelsea Clock Company, one of the very few, if not the only, remaining original New England clock companies still operating. He showed me some pictures of clock making tools being used during WWII, and then the very same tools in perfect shape still being used today. He also had one tool that dated back to when they were the Boston Clock Company (circa 1894) that was still in active use. In this new world of disposable tools, it was pretty neat to see.
That sounds like a result of brain drain, honestly. The people who stood up that hardware 50 years ago are 50 years older now.
By contrast, the Chinese have mastered process knowledge, transferring from one domain to the next. If we want to compete with them, it’s worth knowing what doing well looks like.
They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.
How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.
We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.
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Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.
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~~~~~we could just hire them and buy their knowledge if it weren't for trade wars~~~~~~~
No the point is "overhead". You don't disturb working setups because you will cause engineering time to update the setup, that engineering time is added to the cost overhead of a job. Time is literally money, even if the employee(s) are salaried, their time is factored into the cost of a job.
The knowledge is still there, but American labor is expensive as hell compared to overseas competitors and so any shop in the US has to contend balancing their profit margin and costs to remain competitively priced.
When doing machine shop jobs, it's far easier to bury the cost of initial tooling/fixturing in the initial first job as a separate line charge for NRE. It's alot harder to sell to customers that you will charge them that cost on subsequent orders. You can charge customers for "setup overhead" on subsequent orders but that should be the cost of putting any existing tooling into service, not engineering new ones because you decided to change shit on a whim.
> The knowledge is still there
Tell that to the people who lost FOGBANK, or rather, the knowledge and most importantly the practical experience on how to make it. Or Emmentaler cheese - the one with the bubbles. Turns out, you need something only discovered when someone noticed the bubbles began to vanish... small contaminations from microscopic hay particles [1] that went away when manufacturing switched to fully sealed vats.
There is always, always undocumented steps and unknown implicit assumptions involved in any manufacturing process. No matter how good the documentation is, you need the practical experience.
And that, in turn, is also why the US is producing so much military surplus - should there ever be a full blown war with Russia or China, or there be any other need for a massive invasion land war for whatever cause, there is a shit ton of stuff on stockpile and the production can be rapidly scaled up by experienced personnel training fresh recruits. That would be outright impossible to do if there were no experienced personnel.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mystery-of-disappearing-hole...
Modern shipbuilders know all about that.
Smarter Every Day did a great video on that.
what's it?
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Changing anything was a dangerous thing to do, because you might cause jobs that have known and reliable setups
I am reminded of some of the very finest semiconductor plants. Where parts could in theory be swapped out and replaced, but to do so would break everything. Mirrors aligned to sub-nanometre precision. Lasers and optics where picoseconds matter. Where parts are effectively custom-tuned for this machine only, allied with all these other parts also custom-tuned for this machine only. The US has a challenge on its hands to develop within the US everything and everyone needed to simply getting these systems actually working.
I'm not arguing with your overall conclusion.
However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
Unless that was your overall point, that capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
"If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation."
This is the opposite of brittle. You say this as if those things are desired here. Those things would be a net negative to a well known production process for complex parts.
After years, that process has been refined to basically the limits of the machines and the physics involved, to optimize cost vs speed.
There is no "tinkering" or "innovation" necessary, and it would be highly detrimental. The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
Also - not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done. Even if you could make them slightly better, it's not worth the overall cost over time for everyone. Being "better" is not enough, it has to actually be worth being better. Even things that are worth it, if you want customers to use your new thing, you have to support their old thing, even if that's painful or annoying for you.
This is something that lots of ecosystems used to know (fortran is a good example, which is why NETLIB code from the 70's is still in wide use) but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
'brittle' here, I interpret as: not simple to restore, the knowledge to get them stood up again is brittle. A bus factor of one, to get back in SWE parlance.
If that factory burns down or a forklift crashes into the machine, it might be gone with no chance of recovery because the knowledge is gone.
It is brittle, or at least it's got a limited life. When you don't have these things, you lose the knowledge that set up the system in the first place, and you can be SOL when something breaks. I'm not saying just change things willy-nilly, but if you don't have an active process of understanding and interacting with the way that your factory is set up, you're going out of business, you just don't know when.
This is fascinating. I really don't know much about the world you're describing, so thank you for sharing your perspective.
Don't customer needs change over time? How would one adapt to shifting demand, or new materials becoming available, or old materials going out of supply.
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> but some newer ecosystems can't understand.
The ecosystems are an approximation of the people that run them. The ecosystems want to get rich quick and cash out with no regard for economic sustainability in the medium or long term because that's what the people who run them want.
> not everything requires improvement or tinkering. Some things are just done.
For sure, but how do you know?
If it's only via:
> The experimental part is done until a new machine might provide some benefit (Often this is done by the manufacturer trying to sell them). Then you would test it out on that machine, not fuck up an existing well-running process.
...then I worry about the efficiency of improvement. Sure, manufacturing equipment salespeople definitely are in touch with what consumers want ("Everyone is buying lamb now, buy our new breed of high-birth-rate sheep!"), but that's under the assumption that manufacturers never improve/iterate on their own processes ("Our farm is competitive because we've found that feeding sheep our special high-protein diet increases birth dates").
Rather than relying on the consumers-experimenters-manufacturers game of telephone, it seems likely to me that many manufacturing improvements have been driven by marginal tweaks/improvements made on the factory floor.
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> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic
Isn't the entire point of a machine shop to be these things?
> capacity in hardware manufacturing has rotted away to the point where things are hanging on by a thread.
You cannot make a profit on a manufacturing line that is not being utilized. Keeping spare tools around and functional just in case is very expensive insurance policy.
Semiconductor manufacturing follows these rules as aggressively as possible. The entire line is built based on the speed of the highest cost tools. There are cases where having redundant tooling would definitely prevent some scrap events, but the premium on this options contract is never worth it on average.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.
It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.
Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.
I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
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That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
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I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me.
It is very britlle.
The situation described is what happens when there is significant loss of knowledge, little pressure to improve productivity and low products turnover. You start to fear changing things because you doubt you would be able to get back to the previous situation. That's a huge red flag because you are one unexpected incident/failure away from a very difficult situation.
That's why someone mentioned process knowledge in another thread. If you have mastery of the process required to setup a manufacturing chain, you are far less afraid of changes and that's indeed key to being efficient and innovative.
But the original commenter is also right that volume is key here. If your volumes are so low that short time unavailability or a small amount of failures is life threatening, you simply don't have the breathing room to properly operate.
You don't tinker, explore or innovate live in prod with the root account either.
There are general purpose machines that you can make new parts on, and you open a pilot plant if you want to experiment with new manufacturing techniques.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering
For plenty of industries, margins dictate that this is the desired outcome. The goal is to optimise output, not react quickly to changes.
There are factories that work to order and can change to adapt to customer needs. These are fewer and further between, and tend to be more expensive as they aren't (by design) able to take advantage of economies of scale.
> If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
for many machine shops the level of physical risk is > 0, often by a large amount.
making widgets for X means handling large quantities of red hot metal; even simple stuff that's easy to get your hands around often shoots tons of oil, gas, and metal shavings in volumes that could hurt or cripple people.
if my dev VM gets borked I reboot or revert it, but factories aren't so simple
I find your perspective to be very software centric, and I expect many people who work in heavy industry to have a very different perspective about this.
I was on the implementation end of a considerable amount of industrial automation and technological advancement about 10 years ago. When we were on site the result of making mistakes started at the death of a team member. There were a plethora of things that could kill you horribly, falls, hazardous environment, rotating equipment, etc.
Yet we all survived overhauling processes in hundreds of plants. Working in hazardous environments isn't untenable, or even particularly difficult to do safely. In fact we worked at a much faster pace (with fewer mistakes) than corporate world I work in now.
Nothing has changed, people behave the exact same way then or now. People value longevity and quality only when the innovation pace is slow.
Rapid innovation by definition comes with rapid changes. Rapid changes does not always mean it is planned obsolescence or just poor quality.
In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
The best recent example is Smartphones, early 2010s everyone updated their phones almost every year standing around the block on release. Today it is maybe once 3-4 years, there is very little reason to. The incremental changes are not meaningful and devices have become lot more reliable and rugged and of course expensive.
We do value quality if features are not going to improve much.
> In 1975( 50 years ago when the tooling you cite was built), nobody would want to fly in 20 year or 10 year old aircraft, today we don't care how old the air-frame we fly are.
Given the DC-3 is still(!) in service, and there were surely a ton more of them flying in 1975 than today, I'm not sure that's true. And that's far from the only example of a more-than-10-years-old-in-1975 aircraft that was certainly still in wide use in 1975.
Any big shift around then was probably because of the development of high-bypass turbofan jet engines. Not so much driven by "old airframes seem risky" as "pre-high-bypass jet engines are enough more-expensive to operate that airlines will abandon them rapidly". Those engines went into wide use in the 1970s (developed in the '60s). We (demonstrably) had "reliable, long-lived airframe" figured out by the '30s, with some refinement through the '40s but nothing that rendered those '30s models necessarily obsolete (see again: the DC-3, a 1936 design). More-efficient subsonic jet engines were what caused turn-over in a certain segment of the market in the '70s, not so much "I won't trust an old airframe".
DC-3 was an exception[0]
The point was not on any specific technical or economic factor. It was to illustrate that rapid evolution in comfort, or speed and also safety[1] means people will prefer adoption of newer tech quickly and not be concerned about longevity and actively devalue slightly older products.
When the improvements start becoming marginal only then longevity start to matter. The planes developed from 90s to now have lot to offer operators but not much new[2] to passengers, we are still designing(not just operating) new 737 variants after all. Most people cannot tell the age of the plane if the cabin has been refreshed.
This preference for newer generation of tools has little to do with previous generations having different values as nostalgically some like to ascribe to, but simply to technology maturity was my point.
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[0] As impressive the 100 year history and the longevity of a pre-war design has been. We have to keep in mind the dynamics of unpressurized plane operating at less than 300 knots with a service ceiling of less than 25,000 feet is hardly comparable to that of any modern passenger aircraft cruising at 0.90+ mach for 12-15+ hours daily at 37,000 feet going through tens of thousands pressurization cycles.
[1] Airframes perhaps were not a popular safety concern directly, pressurized and reduced noise in cabins were major selling points.
Air safety regulations were famously said to be written in blood. It is undeniable that was massive drop in fatalities in 80-90s from 60-70s after safety became concern and everyone held both operators and manufacturers accountable.
[2] Improved range or better engine reliability that meant we can do longer ETOS on twin engine etc do benefit passengers indirectly.
It's wild to think we used to build things to last decades. Now we build them to chase benchmarks for the next quarter
Did we, though? I am just not convinced.
A lot of cheap stuff through history that was definitely not made to last. I had paper dolls as a child. So did my mother. Probably her mother too - I'd ask, but she's dead.
How long do you expect a car to last? 100k miles (160k km), at least? It wasn't all that long ago that they were dead at 100k.
They used to add talc and sawdust to bread because they were cheaper than flour. Talk about chasing a quick buck. I very highly doubt they even cared about the next quarter. More realistically, things were built using the cheapest parts they could to make what they wanted - and they wanted things that would sell. Sure, some made things nicer than others but that's no different now.
Most of the things that we have now - old fridges, chairs, and so on - are flukes. They survived despite the odds.
Would most people even know if an MP3 player was built to last? How about an ink pen?
I think a lot of people conflate "built to last" with "ability to be repaired by yourself."
To continue the car analogy, I could replace almost any part easily, with simple tools I have at home, on my 1990 GMC 1500 truck. Parts are plentiful and cheap, plenty of room to work on the engine, nothing is hidden inside black boxes. It's got 280k miles on it and still running great.
To contrast that with my 2020 Subaru Crosstrek hybrid, is much more difficult to work on, can't even fit my hands to access anything that's not on the top of the engine, other repairs requiring full engine removal and specialized tools. There's more electronics and more completely sealed systems.
Same can be said about some household appliances, and even computers. Not only were things, generally more repairable, but repair didn't require specialized tools in most cases, we didn't have to first melt glue, resolder SSDs, etc.
My old compaq Armada may not have been built to last at the time, but it was certainly stupid easy to repair and replace every single component in it.
Good furniture was inherited and lasted a very long time even across generations.
For a while I still used a wonderful and thick winter (loden) coat originally owned by my great-grandfather, from the early 20th century.
Dishes and silverware. Toys, books. Tools. A modern hammer looks much more fancy but it works no better than an ancient dwarven-made one that gives you +10 strength when used. Musical instruments. Some kitchen utensils, especially ones used for traditional cooking and food preservation methods.
Boots and shoes! They were repaired repeatedly (that also means they were easily repairable, not so easy with current shoes and their materials and layers).
Computing hardware has always been on 3-5 year depreciation schedules. Not because it doesn't last, most of it will last decades, but because the next generation is so much better that your total costs for the next three years are lower if you buy new gear and throw the old stuff away.
And that's not just because of the rapid advances, but also because servers are expensive to run relative to their purchase price, and setup costs are cheap. For machining tools setup costs can be substantial, and the cost of keeping an old machine around is small
We still do. I think the Service Life of a Toyota Landcruiser is still 25 years. As a software developer, I've written control code for instruments that are expected to be on the market for at least 15-20 years from initial release and we have to plan Support and spare parts accordingly.
It's just that the fast-paced, built to last 6 months stuff gets all the good press.
Deregulation and firms like Bain capital (Romney) parted out all those corporations to china.
You see the same process that destroyed Toys r Us and Sears more recently.
This was all on purpose to extract whatever could from the corpse or USA manufacturing
I have a 4790k based machine standing unused by my desk (going to get the data off it and then get rid of it). Today's processors are so much better that if you used this one you'd be losing money on power.
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
There's a sort of collective ADHD where we as a culture or economy collectively chase the latest shiny bauble in the hopes of getting rich without having to expend any effort. It often ends badly for the economy and then we go through a phase where we collectively are forced to slow down and reflect on our mistakes vowing not to repeat them... only to do so a decade or two later. The older you get, the more you notice this pattern. We did it in 2000 with the dotcom implosion and then again in 08 with housing and shady mortgages. This time it's overbuilding AI; putting way too much capital into infrastructure that has short useful lifetime.
Arguably this boom bust cycle is more of a intentional feature than a bug. Thanks to the cycle private actors are able and to capture the benefits of the boom, but when the bill is due the downside falls on the general public or taxpayers at large, basically Ersatz Capitalism or Lemon Socialism. 08 is the clearest example but they're all generally fueled by credit cycles creating exuberance.
There's also a element of lost collective memory via generational change providing a new supply of optimists.
They can stop using the screwdriver, wrench, and hammer and see how far they can get.
Or keep changing those tools to better fit the job.
Progress continues with continual process improvements.
> hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months
What hardware is this? Most hardware including GPUs are cycled between 5 and 8 years.
A gpu from 8 years ago is cost competitive, efficient and "worth using" for modern tasks?
I don't want to be picky, but there is still a lot of value left in "not modern" tasks, like video encoding/transcoding. If somewhere the trickle-down effect is real, then it is computing hardware. Take Hetzner's server auction. If the hardware is physically deployed and running, you just need to find appropriate payloads/customers. https://www.hetzner.com/sb/
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The V100 is ~8 years old and AFAIK mostly not that common anymore, but the A100 is ~5.5 years old now and is still very commonly used, it's maybe the most common HPC cluster GPU. On the consumer side, 3090s are still very popular, representing a good balance between cost, performance and efficiency (this is mostly due to 4090s and 5090s being much more expensive).
The GPUs have a much shorter lifecycle, on the order of ~3 years.
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Data centre hardware is more like 3 years.
No they don't. 5-8 years is common. The source for the 3 year number is an unnamed random person claiming to be a Google engineer, and Google specifically reached out to all the journalists publishing that claim with this response.
> Recent purported comments about Nvidia GPU hardware utilization and service life expressed by an “unnamed source” were inaccurate, do not represent how we utilize Nvidia’s technology, and do not represent our experience.
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So like, up to 100 months.
The heavy presses produced in 1955 are still in use today https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr...
> The rush to fill brand new high energy intensive data centers with hardware that has commercially useful lifetimes measured in months (instead of decades for machine tools) seems quite short sighted to me.
The only way "number goes up" capitalism continues to work is with planned obsolescence and things that need to be replaced regularly. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. Nvidia (and all of their investors) love the fact that the stuff they make now will be outdated or broken in a few years.
If things last forever and never need to be replaced the only way to continue to increase profits is to have more people buying them. And global population appears to be peaking, at least in western countries, so that's not going to happen.
Is it sustainable? Probably not. But everyone seems to have their heads buried in the sand at the obvious dangers of what we're running into.
That's backwards. If you can amortize $70k in a few months you're doing extremely well.