Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent piece on how lead and silver are refined and about the possibility of anyone fully understanding a modern cellphone. This lead to Al wondering at the complexity of the constructed world in which we live: If you think hard enough about anything around you right now, you’d probably be able to recreate about 0% of it again from first principles.
Smelting lead and building a cellphone are two sides of coin, in my mind. The process of getting lead out of galena is simple enough to comprehend, but it’s messy and dangerous in practice. Cellphones, on the other hand, are so monumentally complex that I’d wager that no single person could even describe all of the parts in sufficient detail to reproduce them. That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech – the only way to build a cellphone is to split the complicated task into many subsystems.
Smelting lead is a bad DIY project because it’s simple in principle, but prohibitive in practice. Building a cellphone from the ground up is incomprehensible in principle, but ironically entirely doable in practice if you’re willing to buy into some abstractions.
Indeed, last week we saw a nearly completely open-source build of a simple smartphone, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. The cell modem, for instance, is a black box. It’s an abstract device that you can feed data to and read data from, and it handles the radio parts of the phone that would take forever to design from scratch. But you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where the limits of DIY are in your project, where you’re willing to accept the abstraction and move on, can be critical to getting it done.
Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want the cell modem to be like smelting lead – something that’s possible to understand in principle but just not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are some folks out there who hack on cell modem firmware and others who could do the radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I’d have to admit that the essential complexity of the module simply makes it worth treating as a black box. It’s very probably the practical limit of DIY.
When I read “Al and I” — I of course read that as “Artificial Intelligence and I.”
“That’s why they’re made by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of experience with the tech”
I thought they were made by companies with hundreds of industrial spies.
We have been living in the “blck box” paradigm for some time. I used to hold to the idealist notion that you should understand the inner workings of what you are doing. But a briliant friend of mine corrected me, he said:
“That was in the past, now things evolve so fast that you dont have time to keep up with in depth knowledge. Your job demands a quit development process, so you glue together some components or libraries that do the job, just understanding the minimum necessary to make it work. Chances are that you will never need to go back to it anyway. ”
Things dont get repaired, and companies actually discourage repairing because they make more money selling you new stuff. That is why you dont have schematics, parts or any support with firmware for “old” stuff (like the previous version of the product, maybe 1 or 2 years old…)
Software is actually the worst case, with fast iterations of any application or OS, making obsolete the concept of “full knowledge” of the system. I still remember the addresses for important stuff on the ZX Spectrum (23606 and 23607…) and we had books called “ROM disassembler”.
The last OS that I had deep knowledge was the DOS! How useful is that today?
So, it is not only a DIY issue, it is a general issue.
“The last OS that I had deep knowledge was the DOS! How useful is that today?”
It depends. The DOS commands in Windows NT or OS/2 are similar, still.
Also, DOS isn’t dead per se. There are a dozen systems that are DOS ABI compatible, MS-DOS is just one of them. FreeDOS and PC-MOS/386 are open source.
Multiuser DOSes like Real/32, DR Multi-User DOS exist, as well.
Then there are various single tasking DOSes, such as Paragon DOS, Datalight ROM DOS and so on.
Likewise, OS/2 still is pretty alive. It brcame eComstation first, now it’s ArcaOS.
And ArcaOS supports modern UEFI firmware, USB and 64-Bit CPUs.
All without loosing DOS and Win-OS/2. IBM Windows 3.1 still lives on in the DOS VM of OS/2.
With ODIN, Win32 applications like IrfanView or Winamp can be run on OS/2. Works similar to WINE on Linux.
Really, it’s almost like with Linux distros. There are many DOSes.
It might be niche, but it’s not dead. DOS is used by x86 single board computers. Just look for 486 SBCs.
You are saying that there is room for the “specialist” that is the rare individual with in depth knowledge of a legacy system. And that person can make a good income, while such systems still exist.
That is true but with some caveats: mostly niche applications and possibly short lived. COBOL programmers might make a good living in banking for some time, but for how long?
Besides, if my experience shows anything is that my “in depth knowledge” is as useful as that stock of electronic components in storage for decades; management just said that after 5 years it should be disposed of. Now we dont have resistors or capacitors, not that anyone needs them anyway… in a maintenance division… Just swap a board (not that you could fix the modern boards without the proprietary chips).
I used once my DOS expertise to recreate a Novell server, because I found a legacy ISA ethernet board that was supported by Novell drivers. But that system is now gone, the old hardware was trashed, and the floppy disks would be unreadable. Even the OS/2 servers had to be retired because there where no drivers for modern hardware. There goes the (more limited) OS/2 knowledge.
We where stuck with IBM AIX 5 because of the cost of upgrading to newer versions, and end up upgrading directly to Linux; there goes the (much more limited) AIX expertise…
Your friends point of view seems to be a lame excuse for not keep thinking for himself anymore. Or maybe he’s just jealous about you.
Understanding base principles should always be a goal, at least. Black boxes or not.
Once we loose interest in the basics, we will end up like those poor souls in dystopian science fiction novels.
If you want a recommendation, stick to your previous mindset and keep going! 🙂👍
It doesn’t have to be all too sophisticated anymore, maybe, but the technological concept should remain clear to you.
Once we loose this understanding, we become slaves to technology and those who make it.
Btw, on a side note, it’s common these days that optimists are being almost instantly greeted with negativity.
It’s the current Zeitgeist. People feel miserable and want to drag others down.
That’s how science fiction series such as STD come to be.
Everything is made bleak and hopeless, with short moments of hope that will be crushed in an blink of an eye.
The message seems to be “see? your life is miserable, but others have it worse. your sad life isn’t that bad, thus.”
Sadly, such a mindset doesn’t make for a better future. In the 80s and 90s, people had to fear WW3 but enjoyed life, nevertheless.
I hope that the next decades will have more optimistic people again, who enjoy technology and open software/hardware.
In ham radio we don’t have this issue. In principle, we can build our radios from scratch and our infrastructure is independent.
And I really mean this literaly. You can build wires, resistors, caps, speakers, relays, microphones and diodes from materils found in the woods and mountains.
It’s just a task that needs a few weeks to complete, maybe.
A crystal oscillator is more complex, but it can be substitued by a conventional oscillator.
Heck, even an electron tube can be built in a medieval village.
It just needs patience and a vaccuum pump. A water-based one can be used, for example. Needs no electricity.
So really, all it needs is a village with a blacksmith and a glassblower and a shoe maker or clock maker.
Or some individual who has similar tools. Medival monks in a cloister are more than qualified to build a crystal radio or a simple tube transmitter.
That only works because it’s 100 year old technology that you could use to talk to other people using 100 year old technology. I’m not saying it’s useless, especially if a real large-scale catastrophy would happen, but that’s not what the author said. He said modern technology is nearly impossible to reproduce from first principles.
Could you make a MOSFET from scratch? How about an LED? Logic gate? All the way up to a very simple microcontroller flashing an LED? That would be incredibly difficult, and still be very close to useless.
That ancient technology is compatible with any modern 80m band radio.
Morse telegraphy and AM are no problem. FM, neither.
Creating SSB signals is more complex, merely. Needs filters.
A negative zinc resistance diode can be made from scratch and be used to create an oscillator.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfKlE4gze5o
A radio tube is doable, too. Amplification factor might be humble at first try, but good enough for an audio amp or RF oscillator.
With a lot of practice, the tubes get better.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulkGX0cK5-Q
But seriously, what to expect here? 🤔
That someone builds an ARM chip at the kitchen table?
And if he can’t, then DIY is pointless alltogether?
Recreating modern technology after an catastrophy is possible, but it had do be done step-by-step.
Which is possible if we start thoughtfully from beginning and improve over time.
Once basic infrastructure and school labs or university labs are rebuilt,
people could recreate an 6502 equivalent within 10 years using modest machinery.
From there on, with simple computers becoming available again, more complexer designs can be made each time.
– I mean, just look at how East Germany had managed to build Z80 compatibles and KBit chips using 50 to 80 years old factories (in the 80s).
If there are individuals out there who still remember the basics of math, electronics and know a bit about chip design,
the time for rebuilding can be shortened a lot.
And that’s my point, really.
If people keep being interested in technology they can contribute to rebuilding, join teams.
Optimism and patience is a key element here.
If you’re an optimist, you can perhaps fail or get stuck, but as an pessimist you never get started, even.
Easy question, just go to reddit, enter the Diwhy subreddit and take a look. DIY should end before any of the things you see in Diwhy