[HN Gopher] Forgetting the Asbestos - how we lose knowledge and ...
___________________________________________________________________
Forgetting the Asbestos - how we lose knowledge and technologies
Author : areoform
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-10-24 18:16 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (1517.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (1517.substack.com)
| krisoft wrote:
| Meh. People are overly worried about forgetting. In my view
| forgetting is a normal part of information processing. You keep
| what is important and chuck out the rest.
|
| Same with technological information. The way you keep information
| is by doing things. You bet that we won't forget how to make
| bricks, because a lot of people in a lot of factories make bricks
| every day all around the world. The Saturn V was a white elephant
| and once the special circumstances which made it viable has ended
| people forgot how to build it. Who cares?
|
| If someone wants a rocket they can design one for themselves. And
| turns out, they do. And those newly designed rockets are better
| for them. Not better in some tech spec sense, but better suited
| for the task they want it for.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The difference is that you don't necessarily know what is
| important until you forget it and try to recall it later. If
| you record everything, then you can make a more informed
| decision later on whether to keep, archive, or delete the
| information.
| elil17 wrote:
| Another, closely related example: A lot of the welding abilities
| needed to build another Saturn V were lost. We couldn't replicate
| the rocket without having a lot of people relearn old welding
| techniques.
| agumonkey wrote:
| aren't there other industries with similar welding skills ?
| nuclear plants seem to have high grade requirements, maybe not
| space grade right off the bat but also maybe not too far off ?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| This seems at odds with the current production of several
| launch systems of comparable or greater size. Do you know which
| parts required these special welding techniques?
| elil17 wrote:
| We have better ways to do things now - adhesives, new welding
| techniques that impose different design constraints, etc.
| IIRC there was some thought of reusing parts of the Saturn V
| design on the Artemis program but it was not practical
| because of the welds involved.
| avmich wrote:
| > We couldn't replicate the rocket without having a lot of
| people relearn old welding techniques.
|
| We can perhaps create sufficiently close replicas, which may
| work well enough, using very different technologies.
| HyperSane wrote:
| Making a Saturn V today wouldn't make sense because
| manufacturing tech has improved tremendously since then. They
| didn't even have CAD! A modern design would take perhaps a
| tenth of the hours of labor.
| pfdietz wrote:
| In particular, and apropos to the comment you are responding
| to, we have a wonderful new way to weld aluminum alloys:
| friction stir welding. It was invented in the 1990s, long
| after Apollo.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Funny since it looks so low-tech at first.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Despite modern techniques being superior, I share the
| sentiment of the author that the lost knowledge is
| something to be mourned. Even though that process wouldn't
| be used in a rocket today, it is possible that technique
| could have inspired a breakthrough for some other new
| process. Like how Gorilla glass, originally developed in
| the 1960's, was seen as a dead-end and largely useless,
| until the iPhone was being designed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_Glass
| MisterTea wrote:
| > And I don't understand why. What did she hear that I didn't?
|
| Easy answer: Her personal zeitgeist. The author seems to focus on
| the lyrical meaning of the song being the root cause for her
| emotion. But her reaction is likely far more complex than "satire
| of communism" but a time capsule or snap shot of memories and
| emotions of her world when she heard this song. It not only
| recalls memories of a painful part of her life but also the
| pleasant parts: friends, relations, family, things and places
| which are long gone; A temporal marker to a place which she
| cannot travel to.
|
| Of course the author kind of explains this in the next paragraph,
| but then seemingly backtracks to her interpretation of the
| lyrics: "We will never be able to truly understand or feel how
| the satire hit under the weight of an oppressive communist
| regime." I highly doubt it was only about the weight of an
| oppressive communist regime.
|
| When I hear "eye of the tiger" I can get a bit emotional. It has
| nothing to do with "Rising up to the challenge" or the band
| Survivor but the whole of the period in which I heard the song.
| It brings back a simpler time: childhood bedroom, my father was
| still alive, the joy of being a kid and discovering rock music.
| It's so much more than the subject of the song and lyrics...
| permo-w wrote:
| am I wrong in thinking that the author is over-estimating the
| ubiquity of the image of the Saturn V?
|
| I googled it, assuming he was talking about this:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Space_Sh...
|
| because for me this is the standard image of a space rocket. I
| don't recall ever seeing a picture of the Saturn V, but perhaps
| this is an age thing?
| linuxftw wrote:
| This fate is befalling the entire post-industrialized world.
|
| Boeing learned this the hard way when they opened up that plant
| in SC. Institutional knowledge can't always be replicated.
| Animats wrote:
| The author of the article does not have a manufacturing
| background. It shows. Knowing about, and measuring, sensitivities
| to process variation is a big issue. Look up Deming, quality, the
| Toyota production system, and such. Manufacturing has random,
| environmental, and systematic variation. Random looks like noise,
| environmental correlates with weather and other external factors,
| and systematic comes from tool and die wear. Statistical quality
| control is about separating those. Do we need to control the
| humidity more tightly, or replace the dies sooner?
|
| (One of the problems the US has in manufacturing is the loss of a
| culture where more people have a clue about a manufacturing plant
| works.)
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| This is an excellent article. It's fascinating (if a bit sad) to
| see examples of what was once common knowledge disappear for no
| good reason.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own
| Stealth Bomber
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39537/the-air-force-ne...
| virgulino wrote:
| They also had to reverse engineer some nuclear warheads.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
| eclipxe wrote:
| That was in the article.
| plasticchris wrote:
| Maybe John Romero can help, he mentioned working on it. I guess
| there's a 6502 in there somewhere
| cogman10 wrote:
| Asbestos encapsulates a problem with society at large. We,
| unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking "Oh,
| asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything
| everywhere".
|
| The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer
| is simply ignored.
|
| This sort of problem exists everywhere. If something bad happens
| or is caused by something (politics, economics, etc) we are
| simply too quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| From a tech standpoint, I see this a lot. Postgres at my current
| company got banned because one team one time had a bad experience
| with it (after they misused it).
| bad_alloc wrote:
| Ironically we might have also forgotten the massive cleanup
| that was needed for or buildings to either remove or
| permanently bind asbestos. How do you drill a hole into a wall,
| do maintenance on cables and pipes or tear down a building when
| it might emit enough asbestos needles to give you cancer at any
| disturbance? It is not sustainable.
| jollyllama wrote:
| A lot of this is a result of culpability/liability/blame.
| Intelligent use of aesbestos will be precluded by extreme legal
| risk. Your coworkers probably avoided repercussions for their
| experiences by shifting the blame to Postgres.
| pixl97 wrote:
| One way to look at this is when process and policy is not
| followed.
|
| In IT we see this when information is lost (no backup
| policy), or information is leaked (no security policy). Using
| technology with no policy/process is almost always a risk
| factor for business. If said posts team had created a policy
| and process it's very likely the incident would not have
| occurred in the first place.
|
| With products control is very rarely tightly held. There is a
| supply chain from where it's mined out of the ground all the
| way to destruction of the product which may be decades or
| even centuries away. Trying to ensure that your customer use
| a product intelligently over that long of time frame is too
| risky for most businesses.
| permo-w wrote:
| the problem there is that if you don't entirely ban asbestos
| and ensure that everyone knows asbestos = cancer, then like a
| cancer, corporate interests and the profit motive will ensure
| that it slips and slides back into usage to the point where it
| becomes a problem again
|
| with public health risks, strong reaction is absolutely fine,
| and I wish we had _more_ tendency towards it, not less. let's
| do something drastic about micro-plastics!
| cogman10 wrote:
| Well, this is exactly the problem, it's completely arbitrary
| and based on public outrage what gets banned and what
| doesn't. If we can't motivate enough people to care about
| something, it won't be banned.
|
| That's not a way to run health policy. I'd certainly like
| more action against PFAS, for example. At very least, more
| science done to know exactly how harmful it is (especially
| given how it's permeated so much of the public drinking
| water).
|
| But, would I ban PFAS all together? Heck no. Rather I'd want
| to have a better understanding of where they should and
| shouldn't be used and how we should treat PFAS chemical
| outputs.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Well, OK, except that there's an infinitely long-lived
| bystander risk to _not_ purging asbestos from all use.
|
| You could (for instance) argue that once the product exists,
| and is in place, it poses no further risk to anyone - this is a
| common suggestion but is demonstrably, dangerously false. It's
| a rock, it never breaks down. Its state never changes over
| mortal timescales. Eventually a building, or a rocket, or a
| train _will_ be refurbished or scrapped - and when that happens
| people in the area are at no less risk than they ever were.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| I think in the case of a non-reusable rocket being launched
| into space there could be an argument for it, assuming
| extreme precautions at installation and some
| calculation/precaution in case the rocket fails in
| atmosphere.
|
| It could even lower the net asbestos on earth :) (not /s,
| though I attempting to add humor)
| areoform wrote:
| Author here, while I agree with some of your points, phasing
| out technologies is less of a problem as much as forgetting
| them. For example, we have far better insulators than asbestos
| now that can serve as thermal protection systems if we ever
| build a rocket of this scale again. One example of these new
| technologies are aerogels. In 2012, NASA showed off the HIAD,
| Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator, it's a flexible
| heat shield that's made out of aerogel,
| https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de...
|
| Plus toxic materials are very much still in use in the space
| industry, including asbestos. They're used as separators in
| fuel cells, insulation for missiles, etc
|
| Asbestos was banned for buildings not for the space industry.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/decades-after-proof-of-its...
|
| It will be replaced slowly as better materials become
| available.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > One example of these new technologies are aerogels.
|
| And, to be fair, if you could use aerogels, you should use
| aerogels. They are way better at insulation than asbestos.
| They are simply cost prohibitive in most cases.
|
| Despite what it may look like, I'm not trying to shill for
| asbestos :D. I just think it's a microcosm of a problem with
| society.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We, unfortunately, are simply too binary in our thinking
| "Oh, asbestos causes cancer? We better purge it from everything
| everywhere"._
|
| The author's point being we not only purge it physically, but
| also culturally and thus intellectually. (I feel like there's a
| meta point around this thread being de-railed by discussions
| about how bad asbestos is.)
| reedf1 wrote:
| Interested to know how one can misuse postgres enough to ban
| it!
| cogman10 wrote:
| They stored data in the array and then did a bunch of queries
| against that array. Queries like "select * from foo where
| array contains value".
|
| Shocker, that's slow.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Funny that this is a query where Postgres can famously and
| singularly be very fast.
| dragonelite wrote:
| nuclear energy is also good example i think.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If gasoline cars were invented today, they would never be
| allowed to be sold to consumers, because gas is too toxic and
| too flammable to allow ordinary people to use it.
| amluto wrote:
| Like how hydrogen cars are in development but are waaay too
| dangerous to sell, so you can't buy one.
|
| Except you can. The Toyota Mirai is available and quite
| heavily subsidized. Whether buying one is a good idea is a
| different question, although the main issues with owning one
| don't involve safety as far as I know.
| Retric wrote:
| Managing complexity is important even if it results in
| suboptimal solutions.
|
| Imagine if when building a house you needed to shape every
| single brick for it's actual load. Sure you end up using less
| materials, but you lost economies of scale and suddenly need
| vast quantities of computing power for minimal gain.
|
| Using uniform bricks and banning stuff may seem wasteful, but
| it enables efficiency elsewhere.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's not what's happening in terms of asbestos. Rather,
| it's more like "Electricity has caused buildings to burn
| down, so lets ban electricity".
|
| Rather than focusing on the safe use of a material, we
| instead lean towards removing it all together. Older
| materials with known faults (such as wood being flammable)
| are deemed acceptable simply due to having known weaknesses
| in a period where we didn't care about safety. If we found
| out wood causes cancer, we'd still use it in building and
| furniture because we've always used it in building and
| furniture.
|
| It's not an economies of scale problem.
|
| When you get right down to it, the people that got
| mesothelioma from asbestos pretty much universally directly
| worked with it (usually in the form of doing things like
| blowing it in loose form for insulation).
|
| Yet we spent an ungodly amount of money and time stripping
| asbestos from buildings that had been there for decades not
| causing any problems. Ironically, directly exposing people to
| asbestos in the process (more than you'd ever be exposed to
| it was left undisturbed).
| brudgers wrote:
| Asbestos is still used when there are not good
| alternatives.
|
| Asbestos is only prohibited where there are practical
| alternatives.
|
| The problem with asbestos is it was used where there was no
| rationale for its use beyond profits as a bulk material.
|
| Those profits were only available because the health costs
| were externalized.
|
| The existence of practical alternatives is the reason
| asbestos abatement is possible. The cost of abatement is
| almost entirely the removal and disposal, the cost of
| replacement materials is not a major factor.
| foobarian wrote:
| > If we found out wood causes cancer,
|
| If the rate was high enough I bet we'd phase it out. Don't
| underestimate the importance of the size of the effect.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Smoke from burning wood causes lung cancer at roughly the
| same rate as cigarettes. Have we banned wood
| stoves/ovens/or fire pits?
|
| I dare say, wood smoke has caused more cancer than
| asbestos ever did. [1]
|
| [1] http://www.familiesforcleanair.org/wood-smoke-
| pollution-kill...
| schwartzworld wrote:
| In my area fire pits are absolutely illegal. It's densely
| populated and people don't want to breathe their
| neighbors smoke.
| lazide wrote:
| They're largely phased out in large swathes of Californa
| due to 'spare the air' days lining up almost perfectly
| with days you'd ever want to use them.
| [deleted]
| chucksta wrote:
| Its a pretty big leap to say we would still use wood to
| build if it came out it caused cancer. Steel framing is
| becoming much more popular now, and is mandatory code for
| the reasons you listed in certain situations.
|
| We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios in an
| attempt to keep the baby and the profits.
| https://www.maacenter.org/asbestos/products/. Talc
| especially has had a lot of attention in the last year or
| so.
|
| I think there is also a pretty big difference between how
| people view a material with undesirable qualities such as
| electric causing fires, or wood being flammable, compared
| to asbestos damaging the individual.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > We (the US) still allow asbestos in certain scenarios
|
| Very few scenarios allow it and there's active lobbying
| to remove it even in those usecases. The guide you linked
| to primarily cites old products still in circulation and
| not new products.
| atoav wrote:
| Thw reason why we don't use asbestos because removing it
| without endangering people sucks. We had a room at our
| university where they discovered an aspestos (or similar)
| ceiling and the removal took a month and had to be done by
| people with respirators, full body suits, air filters and
| hand tools.
|
| If you have to do such a thing every time you are
| rebuilding something it is not going to economic.
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's for loose packed asbestos (common in roofs).
|
| That's not all or the only way asbestos can be packaged.
| Which is my point. If you bind asbestos to vinyl, for
| example, you get a lot of the same insulation benefits
| with none of the problems of becoming a health hazard.
|
| That's the problem. Yes, loose blown asbestos IS a
| problem and a major health hazard, but it's not the only
| form asbestos can take. Hence, baby thrown out with the
| bath water.
| verall wrote:
| What about when you need to drill into or cut the vinyl
| for renovations, or if the house catches on fire, or
| floods? What about the factory workers at the asbestos-
| vinyl plant?
|
| Maybe asbestos binded to vinyl is literally not a health
| hazard in any of these cases, but this needs to be shown
| in a positive way. The reason it's regulated/nearly
| banned is because the default way we treat materials is
| that they are assumed safe until data shows otherwise,
| and we obviously can't treat asbestos as a default
| material.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| > The example is likely subpar as it is a fictional example
|
| Is placing asbestos around the rocket engines a fabricated
| example with photoshopped images, or is the description of the
| design process behind the actual images fictional?
| hnbad wrote:
| > Of course, as you've probably surmised, the song isn't really
| about the color film. It's a thinly veiled satire aimed at the
| communist regime by the artist, toying with everything from the
| regime's attempts to pass its citizens' lives as being nice to
| Western audiences to the drabness of communist Germany.
|
| That's not entirely truthful, though? The artist said that the
| song complained about the drabness of life in socialist East
| Germany and being confronted with the economy of scarcity (making
| a color film hard to replace if you forgot to bring it) even
| present in the moments you escape it (by travelling to places
| with nicer scenery). But the entire jab at "the regime's
| attempts" and "Western audiences" seems to be conjecture on the
| part of the author and isn't in the interview they seem to be
| referencing.
|
| Also for the record, the artist has somewhat disowned the song
| because the song's writer was a child abuser and rapist. Another
| piece of knowledge largely lost to time.
|
| I think the author is a bit too invested in seeing the song in an
| American Cold War context that doesn't match the experiences of
| those in divided Germany for whom the Cold War was more about two
| equally untrustworthy superpowers threatening their annihilation
| over inconsequential power plays and engaging on continuous proxy
| wars.
|
| It reads almost like the author thinks Merkel is weeping over
| memories of how she suffered under the East German government
| when in reality 2020 alone had plenty of reasons for her to feel
| sad and the song represents a tiny act of polite rebellion at the
| end of a reign that culminated in her watching powerless over
| federal ministers making decisions she disagreed with but would
| receive the blame for.
| mhneu wrote:
| _The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer
| is simply ignored._
|
| Asbestos causes a very, very nasty cancer - mesothelioma - that
| causes almost certain death. Painful death. With a very bad
| prognosis. And mesothelioma is caused mainly by asbestos.
|
| There's a reason why we purged asbestos. No one wants to get
| mesothelioma.
|
| https://www.cancer.org/cancer/malignant-mesothelioma/causes-...
|
| _The main risk factor for pleural mesothelioma is exposure to
| asbestos. In fact, most cases of pleural mesothelioma have been
| linked to high levels of asbestos exposure, usually in the
| workplace._
|
| Note that talc is a mineral crystal/fiber a little like asbestos,
| and talc is connected to ovarian/uterine cancer. Let's not play
| around with dusty tiny pieces of rock, they seem to be bad for
| our bodies.
| echelon wrote:
| Asbestos is still being used in industrial settings today.
|
| In undergrad, we used it frequently in organic chemistry for
| thermal reactions like sodium fusion.
|
| We don't see it being installed in places where it can be
| easily inhaled. But it absolutely still has uses.
| joshuanapoli wrote:
| The EPA has an action to ban asbestos more completely.
| https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/epa-actions-protect-public-
| expo...
| areoform wrote:
| Author here, the point of the piece isn't the asbestos. It's
| that we literally (in the original sense of the word) forgot
| the asbestos; asbestos was used as a part of the first stage
| F-1 engine's thermal protection system for the famous Saturn V
| rocket.
|
| As the insulation was applied at the very last step, there
| aren't many photos of the final product. Add the presence of
| the cancer-causing asbestos, none of the existing displays and
| museum pieces show this vital component.
|
| Because the museums don't reflect this fact, it doesn't exist
| in popular culture. And because it doesn't exist in popular
| culture, and that the people who built the Saturn V are dying
| off, we are largely in the process of forgetting what the most
| famous machine of the 20th century looked like.
|
| The point of the piece is the forgetting. Not the asbestos.
| taeric wrote:
| This has my curious. I could have sworn every space museum I
| went to made a point about the asbestos coating. Just an odd
| fake memory of mine? (Sincere question, btw. I have more
| synthetic memories than I'd care to admit.)
| areoform wrote:
| Honestly, unsure! From my (imperfect) memory, the F-1
| engine's thermal protection system usually isn't mentioned.
|
| If it helps, other parts of the rocket were coated in
| asbestos too, btw. The Reaction Control System had
| asbestos, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19730017174
|
| And many, many other parts, including the cabins,
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-
| magazine/a-saturn-v...
|
| Here's a report for the command module, which starts with a
| very funny quote, "The JSC Director waived the use of the
| International System of Units (SI)for this Apollo
| Experience Report because, in his judgment, the use of SI
| units would impair the usefulness of the report or result
| in excessive cost." https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/197
| 40007423/downloads/19...
| themitigating wrote:
| The information on asebestos can be found in some book or
| technical documents
| highwaylights wrote:
| Given that's the case, you didn't need to include Asbestos in
| the title of the article to garner more clicks, as I'm sure
| you must have realised it would have done.
| areoform wrote:
| It's tongue in cheek. I write for myself and to reach out
| to/engage in dialog with interesting people. And to just
| add to the general sphere of human knowledge.
|
| I wrote this because I couldn't find anyone else addressing
| it.
|
| Forgetting the Thermal Protection System (that included
| inconel and asbestos) is a lot harder to read than
| Forgetting the Asbestos.
|
| And I didn't think it would be a problem. Usually on HN,
| people read the article before commenting.
| peterpost2 wrote:
| You've clearly not even read the article.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It was used for snow effects in old movies. Like The Wizard of
| Oz
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pzfTz-tIbTY
|
| Really terrible if you think about it.
| femto wrote:
| A close relative worked for a company that made asbestos
| cement products in the day.
|
| The factory contained an automated production line, about
| 100m long. The first step was a room into which the raw
| asbestos fibre was blown. From there it went into the main
| machine. The door to the room had a glass window, through
| which the "snow storm" inside could be seen.
|
| One of the old hands in the factory related a story whereby
| new people would be locked in the room and their mates would
| crowd around the window to watch the snowman show.
|
| A lot of the people I knew from that company died from
| mesothelioma, including the person who told me that story.
| (My relative was not one of them.)
|
| The upper echelons of the company knew the true risk (as it
| emerged later) but it was downplayed, within the company.
| Most of the workers truly believed that the risk wasn't that
| great.
| oliveshell wrote:
| For the record, talc doesn't seem to be dangerous on its own.
|
| The problem is the geology of many talc deposits. Anywhere talc
| has formed metamorphically, it naturally co-occurs with
| asbestiform minerals. [1]
|
| As a result, talc mined from these sources is unavoidably
| subject to asbestos contamination.
|
| [1]: https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70027257
| mach1ne wrote:
| Although we attempt to store information in external mediums,
| it's humans who make the world go round. Funny to think that, in
| practice, the collective knowledge of mankind is a fuzzy
| imprecise mess coupled with a few scribbled notes.
| Gumbercules wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the world would keep going round if humans did
| not exist.
| leobg wrote:
| True. Engelbart would be appalled to see where things are at in
| 2022.
| Multicomp wrote:
| Documentation can't save us from being human.
|
| No data translated from one medium (brain) to another (paper) and
| back (brain) is 100% efficient.
|
| But documentation is not only 'tutorials' / how to do something.
|
| Documentation is also 'design' / what to do, 'requirements' / why
| we're doing it, 'changelog' / why we are making the tweaks we are
| making in the process.
|
| I'm enough of an antiquarian to be interested in why the phone
| guy who installed the phone lines for the theme parks did what he
| did...turns out burying the phone lines directly in the dirt was
| for a particular reason (cheap / good enough) and for decades, it
| was indeed good enough. But because nobody read the roll up paper
| showing the phone line runs, the lines were destroyed when
| someone came along and installed a roller coaster with a greater
| than 180 degree turn in that spot, cutting the bundle. The
| documentation wasn't missing data, but the humans failed to read
| it.
|
| We do forget things all the time, sure. But don't blame
| documentation when humans don't read it. The weakness in the
| system are humans, always.
|
| Now is not the time to give up documenting things. All salutes to
| the ongoing flamewars over 'code should be self-documenting means
| I never have to write AnYtHiNg down' aside, someone said
| civilization advances by the number of things we can write
| down...because we only have so much wetware / RAM / brain space.
|
| Someone said this and I'm stealing from them: under similar
| conditions, the wimpiest charcoal on the flimsiest napkin lasts
| longer than the sharpest mind.
|
| In this knowledge-based industries, no matter our particular
| focus, we individually would be served better by improving our
| communication skills, namely documentation of more than just the
| brittle business processes and API interfaces, but the
| who/what/when/where/why of what we're doing.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| It's this exact situation that makes me fear the most about
| Copilot how long before all our understanding and knowledge is
| lost, and we collectively descend into superstition that forbids
| tampering at risk of breaking something.
|
| Copilot seems to allow us to write more code, but the problem was
| never the amount of code produced but understanding the code that
| would solve the problem. It worries me what we are losing
|
| But I have faith
|
| 01000110 01110010 01101111 01101101 00100000 01110100 01101000
| 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01101101 01100101 01101110
| 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100
| 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110100 01101111 01101111 01100100
| 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01100101
| 01100001 01101011 01101110 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100000
| 01101111 01100110 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100110
| 01101100 01100101 01110011 01101000 00101100 00100000 01101001
| 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01110011 01100111 01110101
| 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101101 01100101
| 00101110 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100011 01110010 01100001
| 01110110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101
| 00100000 01110011 01110100 01110010 01100101 01101110 01100111
| 01110100 01101000 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000
| 01100011 01100101 01110010 01110100 01100001 01101001 01101110
| 01110100 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110011
| 01110100 01100101 01100101 01101100 00101110 00100000 01001001
| 00100000 01100001 01110011 01110000 01101001 01110010 01100101
| 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000
| 01100101 00100000 01110000 01110101 01110010 01101001 01110100
| 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000
| 01100101 00100000 01000010 01101100 01100101 01110011 01110011
| 01100101 01100100 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100011 01101000
| 01101001 01101110 01100101 00101110 00001010 00001010 01011001
| 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101110
| 01100100 00100000 01100011 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111
| 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101
| 01110010 00100000 01100110 01101100 01100101 01110011 01101000
| 00101100 00100000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01100110
| 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100
| 01101100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100100
| 01100101 01100011 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100001 01101110
| 01100100 00100000 01100110 01100001 01101001 01101100 00100000
| 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110 00100000 01001111 01101110
| 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100000 01110100
| 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01110010 01110101 01100100
| 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101111 01101101 01100001
| 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100
| 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100011 01100001
| 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110100 01100101
| 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001
| 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000
| 01100101 01110010 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100
| 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110111 01101001
| 01101100 01101100 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100111 00100000
| 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100100
| 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110011 01100001 01110110
| 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110 00100000
| 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100001
| 01101101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01110010 01100101 01100001
| 01100100 01111001 00100000 01110011 01100001 01110110 01100101
| 01100100 00101100 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000
| 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100011
| 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011
| 00100000 01101001 01101101 01101101 01101111 01110010 01110100
| 01100001 01101100 10000000100110 00001010 00001010 00101110
| 00101110 00101110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01101110 00100000
| 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100001 01110100
| 01101000 00100000 01001001 00100000 01110011 01100101 01110010
| 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000
| 01001111 01101101 01101110 01101001 01110011 01110011 01101001
| 01100001 01101000 00101110
| c0balt wrote:
| The first part should be (assuming ascii) the Warhammer 40K:
| Mechanicus opening speech
| exar0815 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/WyK7lX4sk0c
|
| I can definitely recommend the music, very atmospheric, very
| alien.
| openrob wrote:
| Is this why when picking up a skill I always head to YouTube and
| forum posts?
|
| Because someone taking through a problem informally always
| reveals something that wasn't clear in text/literature.
|
| Anything from DIY projects to tech to cooking, it's always
| something important
| svnt wrote:
| Clive James wrote a book -- Cultural Amnesia -- that comes at
| this concept from a slightly different angle, but still very
| interesting.
| mrw wrote:
| I liked Jonathan Blow's 'Preventing The Collapse of Civilisation'
| talk on the same topic from 2019. [1] Although, it's more related
| to software engineering. Previously discussed on a couple
| occasions. [2][3]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317
| csours wrote:
| I'm looking at a pile of several hundred shell scripts, and I
| feel this intimately and personally. What was your intention
| script author xb412j?
|
| ---
|
| For a very different example, look to older satire groups like
| The Goon Show or Firesign Theatre or Monty Python. Monty Python
| may not be old to some people reading this, but try to explain
| some of the things they were making fun of. Many of the sketches
| are timeless, but many are very 'of their time'
| abathur wrote:
| There could probably be a form of punishment or a group party
| game based on deciding whether or not a short option in a
| pipeline is a bug or correct (without comments, of course).
|
| Mix legacy/GNU/BSD/*box options if you'd like to ruin
| relationships.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The ending doesn't quite work, and I'd say neither does the
| article as a whole really.
|
| First, we didn't really forget "greek fire" or "roman concrete"
| exactly. We don't know what the formula for "greek fire" was
| exactly because it wasn't recorded. But in modern times we have
| an amazing chemistry and can come up with a hundred formulas for
| napalm -- we just don't know which of those matches "greek fire".
| Nothing was lost but the association between a formula we almost
| certainly know and a name.
|
| Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete
| than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything
| to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to
| it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but
| many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often
| temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet
| residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they
| were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter
| things.
|
| And I'd say the same goes for the Saturn V. We didn't forget
| material science or heat shielding. We launch plenty rockets and
| even landed car sized robots on Mars -- that required excellent
| understanding of heat shielding. If we had any reason to build a
| modern copy, we'd use whatever shielding is required, after
| accounting for modern improved materials. We wouldn't be
| dumbfounded that the thing melted down on the launch pad. That in
| the popular consciousness we see the engines without the asbestos
| covering doesn't really mean much of anything.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever,
| because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of
| the time
|
| Unfortunately...
|
| 1. There's no "we". i.e. the entities choosing concrete
| mixtures and other construction technology do not typically
| share interests with the people / organizations which inhabit
| the buildings, except in some very abstract roundabout sense.
| Which is part of the reason why
|
| 2. Concrete construction is usually not engineered to last even
| a few centuries, let alone "forever". In fact, it is often so
| poorly engineered (or one might argue: misengineered) that it
| won't last even a single century, or less than that. Because
| the principle of costing less money tends to be taken all the
| way to the point of just barely passing regulatory constraints.
|
| 3. ... and those regulatory constraints are often quite
| lacking. I live in Israel, and a constructor is not even
| required to guarantee that their building will not-collapse
| beyond 7 years' time.
|
| 4. Actually, a lot of the mass-made soviet-era residential
| buildings are very well made and almost as good as new (well,
| considering how they often weren't so great when new). This
| depends on the specific country, region, period of construction
| etc.
| taeric wrote:
| I'd say this goes to some odd myth that I see all too often.
| That if "you do it right," you won't have to do it again.
| Somehow, superior technique and dedication of past attempts was
| lost and that modern attempts are doomed to failure. In large,
| paradoxically to the explanation, because we are better at
| building things that just barely accomplish their goals.
|
| That is, it is an odd blind spot to not realize that "barely
| exceeding the goal" is often far far harder than over building.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I'd be interested in making some concrete objects that can last
| 1000 years. Could anyone suggest some resources or search terms
| to learn what 'forever' concrete entails in our modern
| scientific understanding, and how much more it would cost?
| hexane360 wrote:
| I'm a materials scientist.
|
| Part of the problem is "ancient Roman concrete" is the
| epitome of selection bias. We basically know why it's strong,
| and can basically recreate it, but it would take a very long
| period of process optimization and corrosion testing to get a
| consistent product we're sure has a long lifespan.
|
| If you want something to last 1000 years, you may be better
| off cutting it out of a hard, stable stone (like granite).
| einpoklum wrote:
| > a very long period of process optimization and corrosion
| testing
|
| How long? 1 year? 10 years? 100? 1000?
|
| If it's not the last option, isn't it worth figuring out?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Imagine the wonders we could build if we could justify
| the investment based on the lifetime of the structure.
|
| Actually, you don't have to imagine it. Go watch the
| show, "Peripheral". This idea of long-lasting concrete
| was actually what I found myself thinking about just last
| night watching it, in the scenes of future London.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Is there a recipe of 'off the shelf' components that could
| be mixed together by a layperson and have a high likelihood
| of being an order of magnitude more durable?
|
| Or is the tailoring of the mix to the environmental
| conditions going to be a more significant factor than the
| components?
| cpgxiii wrote:
| The answer is simple but impractical:
|
| Grossly overbuild the structure, so that it is lightly
| stressed. Don't use any reinforcing material within the
| concrete (much of the damage that happens to a modern
| reinforced concrete structure is the result of the internal
| reinforcement swelling due to corrosion). Ensure that the
| structure doesn't freeze (water that penetrates the concrete
| and freezes will cause cracking).
|
| Note that following these limitations would rule out the vast
| majority of modern concrete structures.
| johndhi wrote:
| As an in-house lawyer, preserving the why is basically my job. I
| write up 'memos' in which we examine a problem, arrive at a
| solution and recommendation, and make the recommendation. Often
| times the team that makes the recommendation doesn't do a great
| job documenting the 'why' in its Jira ticket and so their
| organization can tend to forget why something is done. I try to
| make sure that doesn't happen, when it comes to important things.
| Unfortunately we aren't always certain of what is important and
| what deserves a detailed writeup.
| munificent wrote:
| The article laments this but I think it's important to understand
| forgetting as an essential part of progress. We all have finite
| mental capacity and attention. Time spent learning outdated tools
| and processes is time not available to use for more valuable
| ends.
|
| We understand this deeply when it comes to software architecture
| where encapsulation and information hiding are fundamental
| principles but it applies everywhere. There is a value in not
| knowing, or not needing to know, because it frees up brainpower
| for other stuff.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| I recall reading that the lack of documentation for the Saturn 5
| was related to politics behind the space shuttle. The accusation
| was that NASA intentionally lost or destroyed the Saturn V docs
| so the space shuttle would be the only option.
| indymike wrote:
| This happens often in the military. For example, shredding the
| machines used to build the F-14 and F-22.
| HyperSane wrote:
| I read that they actually carefully documented how to make
| the F-22 and also stored all the tooling. We could restart
| making them but it wouldn't be cost effective to do so.
| plasticchris wrote:
| And the Blackbird, sadly
| emeraldd wrote:
| The mention of Roman Concrete is interesting. Was it that we
| forgot the recipe or didn't know what was special about the
| recipe in the first place? I can't find the article now, but I
| remember reading a while back that part of the reason it was lost
| was that the materials to make it could no longer be found and
| apparently equivalent materials didn't work the same.
| 8note wrote:
| Material availability is a big deal with Roman concrete. It
| used ash from the nearby volcanoes, which isn't available
| everywhere.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-10-24 23:00 UTC)