I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

Really depends on where the bug lives.

I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n²) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.

You’re better for it.

The majority of posters are indistinguishable from bots

You’re not missing anything. Reddit is the embodiment of Empty Internet Theory. If you’re a human posting on that site, you’re a statistical anomaly. And not for long, because everyone’s getting booted.

Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn’t know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.

Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!

LintCoin’s value is through the roof, though. You’d be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.

And don’t even get me started on TulipCoin.

Idk if I’d call it a “strength”. Feels more like a weakness.

But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus… as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.

Those telephone systems still work because someone knows how each part works.

I’m more than confident that - if you actually went down to AT&T HQ and really dug into the weeds - you’d find blind spots in the network created by people leaving the company and failing to back-fill their expertise. Or people who incorrectly documented this or that, forcing their coworkers to rediscover the error the hard way.

I think we do underestimate how many systems are patched over, lost in the weeds, or fully reinvented (by accident or as a necessary replacement) because somebody in the chain of knowledge was never retained or properly replaced.

I would be very dubious of the theory that anyone at AT&T could recreate their system network from the 1980s, without relying on all the modernizations and digitized efficiencies, for instance. No way in hell they could reproduce the system from the 1940s, because all that old hardware (nevermind the personal) has been rendered obsolete ages ago. But I’m sure there are still lines in the ground that were laid decades ago that are still in use. Possibly lines that they’ve totally lost track of and simply know exist because the system hasn’t failed yet.

I remember talking to Brendan Gregg about how he conducted technical interviews, back when we both worked at Netflix. He told me that he was interested in identifying the limits of a candidate’s knowledge, and how they reacted when they reached that limit. So, he’d keep asking deeper questions about their area of knowledge until they reached a point where they didn’t know anymore. And then he’d see whether they would actually admit “I don’t know the answer to that”, or whether they would bluff. He knew that nobody understood the system all of the way down.

I think this is the nut of building out a skilled development team. You need different people at different levels who know their area of expertise well and who are willing to admit where it ends, such that they can reach out to the next guy to step in and assist.

But also, you need the Full Code Stack as it were. Or, at least, you need a way to know where your blind spots are and understand the limit of your capacity. Otherwise, you run the risk of an “innovator” asking why they can’t just dump canola oil into their gas tank or how come you can’t just use hydrogen instead of helium for your balloon. And worse - plowing ahead because nobody outside of their cubicle stepped in to stop them.

You run the risk of destroying a lot of your own hard work - and possibly a lot of other people’s hard work - because you didn’t realize your own limits or know where to go to exceed them.

I think some people look at this arrangement and say “This is unsustainable, the cards have to come down at some point”, because it is a fucking stupid way to run an economy.

But, like… the money keeps flowing. And it keeps flowing because the Fed and the Treasury are implicitly backstopping the malinvestment. And their pockets are functionally endless.

I wish you could just roll your eyes and make these abhorrent economic decisions stop. But I’m afraid these people might legit die trillionaires without a regret in the world (other than failing to solve Immortality Science with an LLM), because we’ve stacked the economic deck so high up in their favor.

Which means now our tax dollars won’t just be used for data centers, they’ll be used for power plants too.

Sure… maybe…

Part of the problem with power plant construction is that our production capacity is largely maxed out. If you want a new gas power plant, you go on a waiting list that’s two years long (conservatively). Wind and Solar production are also at their domestic limit. Nuclear continues to be a pipe dream.

And, again, it cannot be overstressed that turning on a data center means a net-negative cash flow. These facilities cost more to operate than they earn, even under a ludicrously generous state contract. Why would you want to power them on these terms?

You gotta at least give yourself a full Friedman Unit.

We’re still only 3 days into this war.

The second big Iran-Israel conflict in less than a year.

And yet this is already manifesting right now in real life as we debate it on the internet.

Ah yes. A total nosedive of 0.30%.

This is the Uno-Reverse “Why you complaining when the DOW is over 50,000!” line. Any token sell-off gets reported on like it’s Black Friday.

Because Trump does not have control over the interest rates.

He’s lining up his pick to replace Powell as we speak.

Data centers in Silicon Valley stand empty, awaiting power

One of the more curious artifacts of the recent surge in data center construction has been filling these megaliths with hardware and then… not plugging them in. Either because turning them on would flatten the local electrical grid or because they’re loss-leaders for which data cycles only cost the company money.

So you’ve got this multi-billion dollar paper asset that wows investors while it gathers dust. And then you go off to build another one, because people will fling their unlimited borrowing power at you to reap another quarter of double-digit growth in speculative valuation.

the economy and stock market taking a huge hit

Two things that have also failed to manifest, in large part thanks to the prolific state spending following COVID.

Keep in mind, the event that really knocked over the tower of cards in 2008 was Greenspan’s decision to raise interest rates (very sharply) in 2007. Trump’s very obviously not going to do that. If anything, he’s been working overtime to get interest rates lower, because he knows cheap money = high (raw) GDP growth and low unemployment.

What we’re seeing isn’t recessionary. It’s a glacial shift in the economic priorities of the US, from a post-Reagan titanic banking juggernaut to a post-COVID more-WW2-style global arms depot. The US economy increasingly makes cops and bombs and machines that assist cops and bombs. And there’s no recognized upper limit for demand on these goods and services. Not under current geopolitical conditions, anyway.

I’ve had “AI Bubble Burst” on my bingo card since 2023.

Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.

Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.

“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”

reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware

“… which I literally cannot live without”.

:-/