Comment by voxleone
4 days ago
The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depends on people willing to go deep, to wrestle with fundamentals, to think in decades rather than funding cycles. If the next generation of capable minds concludes that visibility is more rational than depth, we’re not just changing startup culture. You can survive a lot of hype. You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery.
That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Just look at current software.
Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year.
Linux is still written by a couple of people.
Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire web browser behind the scenes…
Eventually you’ll have lead engineers at Apple who don’t know what computers really are anymore, but just keep trying to slop more JavaScript in layer 15 of their OS.
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.
I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.
Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.
Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.
There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.
Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.
All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.
> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux
Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.
I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.
Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
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> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush.
This is certainly false. There are plenty of young people that are incredibly talented. I worked with some of them. And you can probably name some from the open source projects you follow.
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Young people's brains have always been mush, according to the older generation. Your brain is mush according to those older than you. The term for this is juvenoia, and it's as old as humanity.
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Nah this isn't right. We also have access to a ton of information even regarding arcane things such as writing x86 boot sequence in real mode or writing boot loaders. More now than ever before.
In fact today on GitHub alone you can find hobbyist OSs that are far far more advanced what Linuses little weekend turd ever was originally.
Their success is not gated by technical aspects.
You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.
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> Linux is still written by a couple of people.
How is that? It's easily the software project with the largest number of contributors ever (I don't know if it's true, but it could be true).
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I'm personally not comfortable with the widespread argument (not yours) that moving from a shit-on-shit scripting language to using an LLM to write code is just a matter of degree or just one more layer of abstraction. I think writing code with an LLM severs the logic chain you may have to follow - and hopefully can follow - to get back to the basic principles and root causes you need to understanding what your code is doing.
But the lazy (and wrong) belief by people not committed to exacting standards in their engineering, that AI is just another layer of abstraction or another scripting language, actually obscures a much more unpleasant fact: Performance, as far as the managerial class was concerned, was never about getting the best performance. It was always about whatever was just enough.
We as coders used to prioritize performance because hardware was so limited and we wanted to squeeze the most out of every cycle, every 1Kb of RAM. For some of us, that habit will never die, because we look at a new piece of hardware and realize how much more we can make it do.
But pre-AI slop of backends with huge supply chains and Electron as a frontend arose because memory and compute had become so cheap that acceptable performance required less and less optimization.
That doesn't mean that some of us didn't maintain a niche in making things optimized, but for the past twenty years or so there's been a whole generation of engineers whose priority has been speed of development. And from the perspective of a company that treats engineers as disposable cogs and prioritizes frameworks and assumes Moore's Law, why not?
AI just takes that to the next level. Take the entire chain of existing React slop and create a Markov chain to regirgitate parts of it on cue. And let's be honest: 95% of companies don't need to forge anything particularly new, they just need to cobble existing parts together.
I thought it about 15 years ago talking to CRUD coders who hated their jobs: You're in the wrong business if you're not getting joy out of creating and solving new problems. So in a way, AI just gives everyone who only wanted shitty software the shitty software they deserve? I don't know. I haven't finished thinking about it.
I've worked with many people born post-2000 who could write an operating system kernel. Hell, I have one brewing righ now. It's not rocket science. The machine language parsed by the chip is described in exquisite detail in any processor manual.
Windows is being deliberately enshittified by rent-seekers.
Rent-seeking and Promo-seeking is the only motivation for the people with the power.
None of that class wants to make a better product, or make life better or easier for the people.
If you like dark SF, I'd suggest Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's one of a collection of short stories, but addresses this very idea.
I thought about it recently. Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ). I don't like it. It effectively means we all need PR management.
This is one consequence of removing all gatekeepers. Previously you’d only need to be known by your manager and his manager, or in the arts, by a small group of tastemakers.
Nowadays there are no tastemakers, and thus you need to be a public figure in order to even find your audience / niche in the first place.
> Not that long ago, it was perfectly reasonable to be as invisible as possible. But now, this strategy is not only not easy, but also has drawbacks, when compared to being visible ( and understood as useful by the masses ).
That's always been the case depending on what you're trying to do, though. If you want to be Corporation Employee #41,737, or work for the government, you don't need a "personal brand"; just a small social network who knows your skills is good enough. If you're in your early 20s and trying to get 9 figures of investment in your AI startup, yeah you need to project an image as Roy from the article is doing.
It's amplified a bit in the social media world, but remember that only ~0.5% of people actively comment or post on social media. 99.5% of the world is invisible and doing just fine.
That's a force you move away from, not towards.
Maybe publicly invisible, but a personal network and resume have always been important in a career.
This idea seems to be lost on a lot of people. It's a shame to see mastery (and by extension, quality) becoming an anachronism and frankly, terrifying. There's a certain hubris associated with all of this that seems to be blinding people to the reality that, no, you actually do want humans around who actually know how things are put together and work.
That being dismissed as a "nice to have" is like watching people waving flags while strapping c4 to civilizational progress.
An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank.
He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
> Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails.
This has to be an exaggeration.
I can personally attest that I'll die if my bank's COBOL mainframe fails. Really got a lot riding on this.
If the banking system failed? Would be pretty bad...
You should ask your friend what they do with all of the half cents that are floating around in the banking system.
"It's not a virus, it's a worm!"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bcAACOrgVKE
I agree with your fundamental point. However, I don't think steady erosion of mastery is the only way that these next years have to go, even if it looks the most likely at present. Supposing LLMs or whatever future architecture surpass even the greatest human minds in intelligence, why is that situation fundamentally different to living in a world with Einstein, i.e. a level of mastery I'll never reach before the end of my life? As one interested in the depths, I prefer to live in a world with peaks ever greater than myself---it doesn't prevent me from going as deep as I can, inspired by where they've reached, and doing the things that matter to me.
Turing's view, in fact, is similar: "There would be great opposition [to AI] from the intellectuals [read programmers in the context of this thread] who were afraid of being put out of a job. It is probable though that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do, i.e. in trying to keep one’s intelligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits."
[0] Thomas Bernhard's The Loser is a fantastic account of the opposite standpoint---of the second best piano student, who cannot stand existing in a world with Glenn Gould.
> The folks who keep the power grid running ...
I find this a great choice for an opener. If linesman across the nation go on strike, its a week before the power is off everywhere. A lot of people seem to think the world is simple, and a reading of 'I, Pencil' would go far enlighten them as to how complicated things are.
> secure the internet...
Here, again, are we doing a good job? We keep stacking up turtles, layers and layers of abstraction rather than replace things at the root to eliminate the host of problems that we have.
Look at docker, Look at flat packs... We have turned these into methods to "install software" (now with added features) because it was easier to stack another turtle than it was to fix the underlying issues...
I am a fan of the LLM derived tools, use them every day, love them. I dont buy into the AGI hype, and I think it is ultimately harmful to our industry. At some point were going to need more back to basics efforts (like system d) to replace and refine some of these tools from the bottom up rather than add yet another layer to the stack.
I also think that agents are going to destroy business models: cancel this service I cant use, get this information out of this walled garden, summarize the news so I dont see all the ad's.
The AI bubble will "burst", much like the Dotcom one. We're going to see a lot of interesting and great things come out of the other side. It's those with "agency" and "motivation" to make those real foundational changes that are going to find success.
stacking turtles????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Imagine a space ship, hurtling through space, to some destination unknown to passengers. The systems that maintain the ship were all masterfully designed eons ago and the generations of passengers have no idea how they work, but the creators made sure to make them to be self maintaining in perpetuity. The passengers don’t even think about the systems or even have awareness of them, the knowledge of their construction has long been lost. This is the future of technology, the space ship is Earth.
Without any clue, they mess with air conditioning system and get all baked. No happy end here.
Has it ever been any different? In school, the majority of kids just wanted to have fun. As one example, in 9th grade I took "yearbook class". This was a long time ago, no idea if they do yearbooks still but I'm old and so this was before desktop publishing, it was 1979. In any case, of 30 kids in the class ~3 of them did all the work. The others couldn't or wouldn't follow the print company's instructions for layout.
Maybe it will be worse now but I kind of feel like the 90% is just more visible than it used to be.
I teach computer science at a public university. Every semester I have kids who come to classes but never turn in any homework. They also don't withdraw either. I'm literally forced to fail them because I have nothing to grade them on.
The original system that created those folks was also quite hype driven. I think more signal than "is there a lot of hype" is needed to determine if the system is broken.
You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers that cook themselves and everyone around them. Hurricanes that blow half the grid into the sea in 5 minutes etc etc etc. We learn things the hard way. And always have. There was never any master plan. Beauty happened inspite of it with huge hidden costs that only historians tabulate and very few have the time and luxury to study. Individual Mastery is not magic. Because complexity and unpredictability in the universe is way more than what one 3 inch chimp brain can fully comprehend or ever handle. But we create more problems by pretending limits to what chimps can do dont exist. Look up Theory of Bounded Rationality.
Anyway, the original “power grid” guy was not some master craftsman or engineer, he was the original STEM influencer: Edison. He also popularized short videos.
Tesla was the real power grid guy. The scope of his invention from the generators at Niagara Falls power generation to the transformers to the motors is pretty impressive. More so given that he was eventually given the patents (originally issued to Marconi) for radio transmission.
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Very valuable point!
In addition to the limits of human planning and intellect, I'd also add incentives:
as cynical as it sounds, you won't get rewarded for building a more safe, robust and reliable machine or system, until it is agreed upon that the risks or problems you address actually occur, and that the costs for prevention actually pays off.
For example, there would be no insurances without laws and governments, because no person or company ever would pay into a promise that has never been held.
Exactly. The advent of electriccity was seen as just as much of a threat to everyone as AI is today. The advent of the internet was seen similarly. In each era, those at the forefront of the technology that would fundamentally change the world, were castigated as 'psychosexual' deviants who did not understand the common man. Guess who had the last laugh?
It's not even limited to modern technology. If you go talk to certain grievance-driven individuals from tribal backgrounds (for lack of a better term) who have produced nothing for the last 10000 years, they will levy similar accusations against the very institutions that are providing them with healthcare their ancestors could only have dreamed of. In some areas, even agriculture is seen as suspect. It's ridiculous.
It's scary to me how both sides of the American political aisle have suddenly turned anti-tech and are buying into the same arguments. Gross.
It would all be undergrounded and made resilient, if it weren't for perverse incentives.
This is a tradeoff. There is value in being able to do upgrades to lines above ground. Underground is not automatically better. Like most things, it depends.
Just wanna say, I love this paragraph so much, I created HN account just to upvote it.
Have you seen "Tech Ingredients"? People like that and Dutch scientist/engineer who runs "Huygens Optics"
I love Huygens Optica, but the mastery of one rather old Dutch man isn't really much of a counterexample when we're talking about the generation that is coming up behind us.
No that is an example of the former
The scary part is that you can't just "hire mastery" on demand. You have to grow it
I think it’s opposite. The general population always has nothing with outstanding engineers thru the history. It’s hard to say that VC bubbles of recent decades really drove the amount of outstanding engineers, it’s just an overall increase of prosperity, while hot capital in addition incentivesed quite terrible ways to get rich quick, effectively balancing back this freshly activated dev capital. So now ai takes back monopoly on dev capital from bigbiz, and general youth population is weird like it always has been, but in reality doing less drink/smoke/drugs, and sometimes their values are better than ours, just need some more time to polish. I think we are not doomed.
P.S. but these chinese robots are really scary
I mean I'm literally a compiler engineer who's worked on dependable systems in the past, and I think this article is a load of crock to be honest. As is usual for many Americans (a great disease in the American mind, IMO), they greatly value the random lunatic over the person actually doing something. Calling people driven to do things as having strange 'psychosexual neuroses' is just shaming people without any evidence. What's wrong with having a drive to do things? That is literally what America was set out to do. It's hard to read these sorts of critiques as anything other than racism against the latest class of American migrant (mainly Asians) who are driven to not fall into the very poverty their parents sought to escape. Yes, if the answer is becoming shit-ass poor or being well off via pursuing success, then you are going to be highly motivated to take the route of success.
I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.
I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing
And what value has the current state of AI added to society in any meaningful way? Truly? Even as someone who understands the space very strongly, and has published several top-tier ML papers, I cannot help but to conclude the primary destination of the current tech sector and Silicon Valley is the ruthless exploitation of the rest of society.
Taking a sober look at the state of software, we observe a few things.
The services offered by modern software to users, as a whole, have remained largely the same over the past ~5 years. The state of software quality is in rapid decline, with enshittification and rent-seeking running extraordinarily rampant. Software security has been in the same disaster-state it has been for the past 20 years, where software resilience is in stagnation, governments and private institutions stockpile vulnerabilities, and security researchers and auditors can consistently find new vulnerabilities. The rest of American society outside of the tech sector is currently facing a standards of living nosedive, and clearly they have not benefited from the tech sector's financial proliferation in the AI space.
Realistically, I cannot help the feeling that we're headed towards a reality where the 4th amendment is dead, and machine learning models process everything about you to ultimately extract more from you. No privacy for you! No agency for you! Only indentured servitude, and constant fear.
I fully recognize my take is ahead of its time, but I concur that the systems-oriented point of view is our way out of this hell. Specifically, software should be conceived under the following ideals: (1) software should be as simple as possible, and provide its intended services with as little bloat as possible; (2) specifications of software should be as concise and simple as possible; (3) specifications should be should be expressive enough to capture security-relevant guarantees, e.g. cryptographic security properties; (4) proofs verifying that software satisfies its specifications should live intrinsically to the implementation, and should be as simple as possible; (5) proof-checkers should be verified. I feel the academic Formal Methods, Programming Languages, Systems, Security, and Cryptography communities, as well as the internet standardization community, are slowly converging to this ideology consensus, but I also think in other ways we are farther off than ever. With respect to these ideals, the "building" mindset that twitter has adopted is deeply toxic. And obviously Silicon Valley has their heads in the sand when it comes to this.
I do have faith the state of software (and society) will improve, but whether that future is compatible with the rent-seeking hyper-capitalist reality Silicon Valley and Wall Street have synthesized is yet to be seen.
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It's charitable to frame this as resentment towards capital who gets the "credit". I'm sure people would grumble about this regardless, but the real resentment stems from them systematically eroding our ability to afford housing, healthcare, and retirement.
Their unaffordability is only the last straw that will hopefully break the camel's back and create a counter-force.
Normal people generally don't dream to be ultra rich, they just want to enjoy life (and have enough money to do so). But a small percentage is obsessed with money and they obviously invest much more energy into gaining it.
This dynamic means that people don't get paid according to how much value they produce but according to how good they are at negotiating and at maneuvering themselves into positions of power from which they 1) take a bigger cut than they deserve according to real value produced 2) further entrench themselves.
Salary negotiations are a perfect example of divide and conquer - the employer has more information, more runway, more experience negotiating, etc. And on top they negotiate with each employee one by one. Imagine a reverse situation in which the people doing the real positive-sum work sit together on one side of the negotiation table and ask their new assistant (so called "manager") how much he wants to be paid.
But the real issue is ownership. People who don't do any work get paid (if not in money directly, then by being able to sell the company). And they get to pass this "ownership" onto their children who contributed nothing at all.
I am convinced a lot of these runaway feedback loops would be destroyed if ownership of a company was by law distributed among employees according to the amount of time and skill level they worked there.
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Yes and broadly speaking those concrete concerns can be considered in aggregate as "upward mobility."
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> Those who control capital use their political and economic power to systematically enrich themselves at the expense of those who actually perform useful labor
Huh, I think I read a book about that once. I forget who wrote it. Carl something, I think?
> About fifty years ago
Many things changed around that specific time, and I think it does deserve scrutiny. Implied cultural factors seem to be merely correlates of greater historical tide, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...
My take here is a monetarist.
Yep, that played a significant role in shaping how things turned out. We want a single source to blame, but rarely does history present us with such a neat villain (though god, Reagan comes so close to being one, at least for the specific issues important to me).
Understanding the interconnectedness of systems beyond your own realm of expertise is how you learn what needs to be done to fix issues - and avoid falling for snake oil “silver bullets”/“one weird trick” populist positions.
>The net result is a growing schism of resentment by those who do the work towards those who get the credit, glory, and reward, versus those who bask in stardom and truly believe they can replace the perceived entitlement of labor wholesale with an instant gratification machine and somehow survive the resulting societal collapse such a device would bring about.
Naturally, unmentioned are those shut out of reasonable opportunities for meaningful productivity, regardless of technical potential (but largely in line with (lack of) social capital). A few years of this maybe encourages an entrepreneurial spirit. Two decades is quite convincing that there's no place for them in the current order.
The upwardly-mobile opportunity hoarders need to understand, much as the wealth hoarders ought to, that the whole thing falls apart without buy-in from the "losers".
Tang ping bai lan.
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We have AI now. The machines will manage their own infrastructure.