
There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore - snadahalli
http://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tech-expert-anymore
======
knorker
That's a really long article to say what we already know: That "expert" means
to know in detail a narrow thing.

It hasn't been possible to be a true polymath in like 500 years. Surely this
isn't news to the author?

There's no such thing as "an expert on everything"? Yeah, no shit. It's almost
tautology, due to the limitations on human brains and the advancement of
science since the renaissance.

Another way I think this article misses the point is that they're not dragging
Sundar in front of congress because he knows everything about Google (he
can't), nor for the congresspeople to learn it (they can't, even if Sundar
knew, and could convey, and had infinite time).

They do not start from "let's understand everything first", because they
can't. They are dragging them in to answer a question.

You don't need to know the lunch schedule of the San Bruno office, or how many
registers the x86 processor has, to answer the question of how political ads
should look in today's world (or whatever the question is).

So the article doubly misses the point.

~~~
Barrin92
Yes. If you go to one of the first legal definitions of the term expert, that
is what you get

 _" person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a
subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in
a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from
ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts"_

Regulators are not experts and they're not meant to be experts, they may
consult experts if they require their knowledge. I'm also not sure what the
point of the entire discussion is, I hope nobody believes that regulators
somehow need to be quantum physicists and physicians and computer scientists
and artists at the same time to make judgements about tech or anything else.

------
djcapelis
US society, discourse, media, and government structures have sidelined experts
to the extent we’ve finally managed to forget they exist. Instead we’re left
with reporters who write articles that bemoan that since they’re lost and
unable to determine truth in a sea of technology, we all must be.

~~~
opportune
Yeah, to me this just looks like a journalist complaining that they shouldn't
be expected to understand the things they write about. There are hundreds of
people who more or less understand any given product or project with large
impact. Society just doesn't care what they think.

Why listen to an accomplished engineer who might very well have lots of
opinions on the impact of technology, when we can complain that our graduate
degrees in American studies [0]didn't prepare us to understand the complex
systems in the technology industry?

[0] Not trying to strawman here, but since the author of TFA thought it was
relevant to include, I think it's fair game

~~~
syshum
>>journalist

I dont think we have any of those any more, if we do they are few and far
between and I would venture to guess that none of them work for Wired

~~~
chiefalchemist
You're spot on.

This is a great reference, especially when I try to to reason with people who
misuse and misunderstand the word.

[https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-
journalism-1](https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1)

------
andersco
This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech.
In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of
all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them
conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people
ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their
minds.

~~~
goatinaboat
_This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech_

No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as
micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one
person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to
make HTML look pretty.

In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did
understand it all. But not any more.

~~~
ekidd
_In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from
the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty._

The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-
adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP,
how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures.

Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a
primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features
to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common
undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from
debugging packet dumps to writing CSS.

I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will
absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly
possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and
React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics
at an introductory level.

~~~
Izkata
That describes a CS degree heavily biased towards practical application
instead of towards theory, like mine was. We only had a couple of the things
in your lists.

Anything that involves the physical world went in the engineering degrees - we
didn't do circuits, assembly, or programming a robot. Likewise networking I
think was an elective, as might have been kernels (though I don't recall that
one, and didn't take either of those myself). We did talk about kernels in our
systems programming course, but the extent of practical work was things like
creating our own malloc and creating a simple shell.

Web apps were in the ITM courses (Information Technology _something_ ), which
was where people learned specific practical skills and most people doing CS
degrees didn't touch - I took one out of curiosity and it was so absurdly low-
skill-level: The first assignment was creating mockups for site, then imagine
spending the next few months on just HTML and CSS implementing it.

One specific example of the theory-vs-practical-application difference between
our CS degrees, we didn't do compilers, we did programming language design.
Parsing theory, grammars, and after learning Scheme we used it to implement an
interpreter for our own language.

~~~
ekidd
I feel like I ought to defend the honor of my school's theoreticians. :-)

Their CS program had two theory-heavy courses. In the harder of the two, the
homework worked out to 10 pages/week of proofs written in LaTeX. Honors
students could also take a functional programming course early on, where they
usually got to write a metacircular evaluator.

The same CS program also had a software engineering course that required a
5-student team to spend half a term building a group project. (Teams were
picked by the professor, for that real-world feel.) This usually required a
UI, which meant that we got to learn Motif or web programming or something.

This has always seemed like a sensible way to organize a CS curriculum:
Everyone needs to write proofs, and everyone needs to write code. Then you can
throw in kernels or networking as electives.

------
Hippocrates
This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech
issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact,
this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather
than a tech journalist.

~~~
almost_usual
The argument is no one knows the exact details of the whole system.

That is obviously true, the only experts at these companies are the engineers
who write code. There are still details they don’t understand.

An expert would have to be the collective knowledge of every engineer that
worked at the org and there would still be missing detail and ‘bugs’.

This is literally why the security industry exists, bugs are inevitable.

I don’t think the argument is ‘crazy’, it’s accurate when speaking about data
protections.

To assert your data is safe is to assert there are no security issues with
your software.

The only way of asserting this is to either encrypt everything or not store it
at all.

These companies will never do that so we end up with these complex arguments
in Congress justifying it’s ‘safe’.

~~~
_jal
The implicit argument is that one must wholly comprehend the exact details of
a company's systems in order to meaningfully control them.

This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers
doing exactly that right now.

CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in
hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry
viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.

~~~
almost_usual
> This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers
> doing exactly that right now.

Managers don’t know the details of any system unless they wrote it when they
were an engineer (and it hasn’t been modified). They are trusting their
engineers’ interpretation of the system, which is a game of telephone up the
management chain.

> CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in
> hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry
> viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.

The largest account takeover incident recently was an unsophisticated social
engineering attack executed by a 17 year old.

I’d argue most system and data vulnerabilities aren’t sophisticated or
complicated yet companies like the idea of this because it makes them seem
more improbable.

Vulnerabilities happen because security guarantees and understanding cost time
and time is limited when shipping a product faster than a competitor.

In reality if Congress wants an expert they need to have a team of engineers
at the company performing audits and code reviews.

------
mlazos
This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details
of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you
understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car
engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed
society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook
have lowered the bar on journalism so far that this is considered publishable.

~~~
hurrdurr2
Totally agreed. What drivel. I couldn't even finish reading the article.

We have senators grilling tech CEOs that don't understand the difference
between an iPhone and an Android device. This is unacceptable to say the
least.

~~~
flohofwoe
To play devil's advocate: What _is_ the difference between an Android phone
and an iPhone phone, and if there is, what does it matter to a customer? Both
can make phone calls, both can display web pages, both can run apps. There's
one fairly irrelevant difference because it's an historical accident so it
will probably be eliminated soon: one platform owner already controls the
platform completely, and the other not yet.

~~~
ben_w
For a normal customer with no tech skills? Android is the one which comes in a
full range from “cheap” to “premium” while Apple only comes in “premium”.

You also get to choose which app store you get, Apple or Google, but I’m not
sure if normal people know what one of those _is_.

~~~
Nursie
The new iPhone SE is definitely a mid-market play, blurring it further.

------
scarface74
Is it too much to expect that a representative knows that Zuckerberg runs
Facebook and not Twitter?

[https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-
donald...](https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald-trump-
jr-censorship-antitrust/)

Or to know enough to know which tech CEO to subpoena in the first place?

[https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-
senat...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senate-
confusion/index.html)

But let’s look at the last two major tech anti trust cases and what came of
them.

Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000 and had a monopoly
on computer operating systems, productivity apps, and web browsers. In 2020,
Microsoft still has the same share in operating systems, office productivity
and no one cares about browser market share but Google. MS is now the 3rd most
valuable company in the US.

Before that the government sued IBM for being a monopoly in 1969. The suit was
dropped in 1982 and nothing came of it.

Most recently, the CEO’s of the four biggest tech companies came before
Congress and people everywhere are saying that they (at least FB and Google)
are threats to Democracy. Then the government goes after TikTok and WhatsApp.

Edit: WeChat.

~~~
poisonborz
Is it too much to expect that a commenter knows that the government went
against WeChat and not WhatsApp?

~~~
DecoPerson
Yes, it is.

When preparing notes for a congressional hearing, you’d hope they carefully
triple check everything. Not just by re-reading, either, but also by cross-
referencing with other documents and asking others to proof-read.

I don’t expect a commenter on any forum to do more than a cursory re-read for
spelling errors.

------
sien
Yes there is. It's everyone on Hacker News!

Just post about about some Unicorn here and at least half a dozen people are
pretty confident they know more about the company in question than the
founders or the people running it.

In the future Congress can just post questions here.

~~~
mdoms
I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN,
where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was
destined to fail.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
sien
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

[https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-
releases-i...](https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-
iPod)

~~~
starky
And for many years after the release of the iPod it was "lame" compared to
other products on the market. It was really the introduction of the iPod Nano
that was the first product that improved on the competition. But Apple markets
well and was able to get the market share (and really it was only the click
wheel ones that were really popular).

------
hyko
“I am not a tech expert” != “There’s no such thing as a tech expert”.

Edited to add: all of science is beyond the comprehension of one person, but
we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore.

I think the shock experienced in these kind of hearings has more to do with
leaders and law makers being hopelessly out of touch with common technologies
that are used by most people every day; it’s akin to them puzzling over how to
operate a flushing toilet. They don’t need to interact with the world as other
citizens do, because they have layers of abstraction shielding them from it.
Not a good thing.

The example of the B-2 Spirit is such a strange one, given the complete
absence of civilian oversight to the programme. It was essentially built for
military experts by engineering experts.

Non-experts are expected to provide oversight in highly technical issues, but
they should be working closely with advisors who have cutting edge domain
knowledge and can translate that into policy implications. The leaders and law
makers do not need specialist knowledge, but they - _do_ need to be on top of
their brief as it relates to society and the laws that govern it. A person of
reasonable intelligence can provide essential oversight to a machine like
Google, even if they could not construct such a machine themselves. Nobody can
even create a human being themselves from scratch, but that’s not an excuse
for being a bumbling lawmaker.

~~~
aaron695
> but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore.

Yes we do.

They don't exist as we have romantically understood them. Scientists used to
take risks, play with the entire world, question things, actually be open,
actually play with science as a child.

Now they join the Facebook group "Fuck I love science" and be done with it
because they are pushed into STEM as an ultra narrow career and don't actually
understand or want to understand science. The real scientists may still exist
hidden somewhere but you never see them.

For Tech, I've never seen a correct understanding of the Russians online
influence during the 2016 elections on HN. I don't know what it is, and I've
never seen anyone explain it with authority other than vague hand waving
trying to sound like they know, this is from both links and comments on HN.

~~~
9HZZRfNlpR
Read Muellers report, it's rather good and detailed. It just your "normal"
meddling, the difference is that thanks to internet its so much cheaper and
easier. Muellers report also revealed that Russians ran biggest BLM social
media to they can divide you, should give you an idea what is going on right
now in your country. Strangely enough media doesn't talk about it. There is no
Russian connection there, it's all 'grass roots'.

~~~
mistermann
Can you reference the section of the Mueller report that covers BLM?

~~~
scrps
"Initially, the IRA created social media accounts that pretended to be the
personal accounts of U.S. persons.[44] By early 2015, the IRA began to create
larger social media groups or public social media pages that claimed (falsely)
to be affiliated with U.S. political and grassroots organizations. In certain
cases, the IRA created accounts that mimicked real U.S. organizations. For
example, one IRA-controlled Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purported to be
connected to the Tennessee Republican Party.[45] More commonly, the IRA
created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots
groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party
activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political
activists." [1]

[1] Page 22:
[https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf](https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf)

~~~
mistermann
Is any of the evidence supporting these claims of IRA actions disclosed, or is
that to be taken on faith?

I ask because having been through the aluminum tubes, baby incubators story a
few years back, I now have fairly strict epistemic standards when it comes to
military related matters. I realize skepticism of one's government isn't a
terribly popular stance here on HN, but to me it is important.

~~~
mistermann
It appears (discussion on such topics seems taboo) that a faith based approach
is in play - which is fine, I'm just suggesting that it may be worthwhile to
explicitly realize and acknowledge the true nature and contents of one's
belief system.

------
qPM9l3XJrF
Yes, and there's no such thing as a medicine expert because no single person
knows every little detail of how your body works.

------
camillomiller
The argument this piece is built around is flawed on so many levels.

1) the author conflates tech basic literacy and preparation on the specific
topic by the congress members and marks them as “being a tech expert”. Nobody
asks them to know the ins and outs of the companies they’re scrutinizing, but
just to be prepared about the matter that’s being discussed and to show some
minimal tech literacy.

2) the author proceeds to switch to a different meaning of “expert” with a
falsely modest tirade about he himself not being an expert. Sure you are, by
all common meanings of “expert”, as you immodestly point out namedropping all
your publications and collaborations.

3) after all this, the author settles for a meaning of expert that makes
absolutely no sense: an all-knowing being that, thanks to some genius-like
trait, is able to see everything from the outside and know the very specifics
of everything they run.

Once he sets this new meaning nobody has ever agreed on, he proceeds to point
out no such person exists. Maybe it could exist, but such a CEO-savant would
be anti-economical to any company, a horrible stickler with a micromanaging
obsession, that would spend time about knowing every new detail of his company
(just check the amount of patents these companies file every year) instead of
focusing on the vision and the long term.

The piece also completely disregards the fact that humanity has evolved to the
point where we are right now exactly because humans are very good at building
unsupervised complex system that don’t rely on the knowledge of the individual
to function. We, as societies, are fundamentally primed to do that. Our social
systems are exactly that. Now, Silicon based technology has brought us another
step forward in this, and we feel lost as we fail to grasp the enhanced
complexity of what underlies out lives. I don’t see it as something new, and
humans will evolve to adapt to this new layer of technology.

What I just read is a piece that tries to bend the meaning of “expert” to
prove the point that nobody knows what tech is doing, as if big tech was just
perpetuating itself as a sentient being. It’s a very slippery slope, that
could be used to justify the people that physically drive the decisions of
these companies. Decisions that are strategical, political, and above all
taken by humans, not machines, who are well aware how to drive complex and
multifaceted organizations to maximize profit and return to their investors.

~~~
neohed
Exactly right. As an experienced software developer, there's a ton I don't
understand about the intricacies of OS kernels and integrated circuits, but I
don't need to know that stuff and nobody can learn everything. Popular science
books can explain quantum theory well enough for a layperson to at least get
enough of a clue to have an opinion. All politicians need is enough knowledge
to make an informed decision about the effect of various technologies on
society.

------
sradman
> Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re
> supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else.

Siva Vaidhyanathan [1], the author of this Wired article, seems to be a fine
representative of the humanities half of what C.P. Snow called _The Two
Cultures_ [2].

The ability to craft sentences is an admirable skill, one I wish I had, but
innumeracy and the inability to grasp causation seems to be a badge of honor
among the non-STEM elite.

The question is not whether regulators understand tech, it is whether they
understand the principles that limit regulating consenting adults.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures)

------
neohed
I had an issue with this:

"while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer
science was a method of understanding much like many others . . . I’d also
misunderstood coding as a craft instead of a field of knowledge and inquiry."

I agree that computer science is a field of "knowledge and enquiry" (aren't
all academic disciplines?) but disagree with his conflation of CS and
"coding." Computer science has little to do with most software development
which is very much a "craft"

~~~
lordgrenville
This sentence seems like a bizarre _non sequitur_. Absent some explanation of
how American Studies connects to CS (perhaps this is obvious to American
Studiers?), it reads like the equivalent of "while backpacking through Laos, I
realised the New York subway system was in urgent need of repair".

------
Guthur
The problem described here is only tangentially connect to technology. All
that is described is really the challenge of complex systems and that could
exist in any domain whatsoever. The inner workings of oh so human system of
the UK government sometimes baffles me. And it exists in nature where the
complex interactions of many diverse organisms converge to form a complex
ecosystem.

There might be problems of a lack of understanding in certain cases but what
this journalist is describing is complex systems not technological problems.

------
decasteve
Tech has become a marketing term. Might as well call them synergy companies.
There's a conflation of concepts and how the various "tech" companies make
their money. How can anyone keep track when "tech" is such a broad brush to
paint with?

------
Fricken
It's getting disingenuous to call it tech. At the point of interface it is
media. The effects of these new media have on society are not well diagnosed
by tech experts, who specialize in understanding how a thing works, less so
with how it affects.

------
loopz
This article is really about possible _social consequences_ of tech like
Facebook and Twitter, not about knowing all the technical implementation
details. A "tech expert" speaking in front of congress would be expected to
answer to how the tech affects governance and civic matters.

Nobody know the consequences in full, and how effective mass-communication
might affect society. It's problematic when the leaders and overseers seem
unfamiliar or uncertain with the overall operation of these tools, and even
abuse them for egotistical benefits, instead of acting as elected servants of
the people.

------
Aeolun
I do not expect Congress to know _how_ a B2 works, no. That would certainly be
asking too much.

What I do expect them to know is _what_ it is/does.

------
galaxyLogic
"Nobody understands the tech-companies, but they sure do understand us"

------
starky
The author seems way too focused on the exact meaning of "expert" without
thinking about what they actually need from a subject matter expert for a
specific hearing. Who you need for an ethics hearing will likely be different
than who you need for a political hearing even though they are both "experts".

A subject matter expert before a political hearing needs to understand the
societal and financial decisions of a class of technology and be able to
explain it in a way that others can understand. Pretty much any tech leader
should be able to do this. A major issue with this is that politics in the US
(and plenty of other countries) are so driven by money that you end up with a
bunch of politicians that are willfully ignorant of the sectors they are
supposed to legislate for because they are paid to just do what the people
with the money want you to do.

------
fizixer
This is bs.

In order for outsiders to understand tech, you need to invite
engineers/researchers, not CEOs.

And you need marathon sessions, not sprints.

Go figure!

------
LockAndLol
> We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit
> “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage
> depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works. Yet we
> justifiably expect our government to regulate them.

Indeed, that's not what I'd insist. I'd insist on elected officials to have a
team surrounding them who they can ask and who in turn can ask others when
decisions have to be made.

In other words, leaders have to know how and when to delegate. If they don't
know how to do that, then I assert that they aren't and cannot be good
leaders.

------
bubblethink
>Last week’s effort by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary
Committee was no exception. "The technological ignorance demonstrated by our
elected officials ... was truly stunning,"

I skimmed through parts of the hearing, and I found most of it alright. I
don't remember anything glaringly bad. There was a minor gaffe about twitter
v/s facebook, which everyone mocked on the internet, but even that wasn't so
bad. The efficacy of the hearing wrt any outcome is a different matter. What's
the author talking about ?

------
say_it_as_it_is
So, a politician, who is usually an attorney, doesn't understand the business
that tech companies engage in and therefore no one understands the business?

------
shekharshan
I think the author meant to say even developers do not understand the
decisions some of the ML algorithms make. Anyone who had to debug ML may
partially agree with that.

But this doesn’t mean people don’t understand infrastructure. Fundamentally we
are dealing with compute, storage and networking. We just combine them in
different ways to come up with solutions optimized for different workloads.

------
almost_usual
The article is true, there isn’t an expert or collective group of experts that
can guarantee a complex system’s behavior.

This is why bugs exist, why there is a security industry, why these companies
have bug bounty programs.

The safest way of protecting information is not creating it or using strong
encryption.

------
polynomial
It's like the inimitable Buckminster Fuller's analysis of the _cost_ of
expertise hidden in the dangers of specialization never happened.

------
amelius
We should also update the definition of tech.

Every company has a website these days, but does that make them "tech"
companies?

------
Invictus0
It's almost as if the author is projecting his own imposter syndrome on the
Congress.

------
aronpye
Oh God, another wired article. This is written in a similar vain as “What’s a
computer?”

------
TomMarius
So what do you call a (tech) (expert) if not a (tech expert)?

------
makach
only a fool would call himself an expert.

What others call you is a different matter.

------
logicslave
Theres definitely experts, if youre an above average developer, you meet one
once a decade.

------
known
Sounds like sarcasm;

------
monadic2
Why is there no ideology in tech culture?

~~~
scollet
What do you mean by ideology? I think I have a response, but I would like to
know this first.

------
cblconfederate
Ha! Imagine writing this about medicine. Computers are 100% deterministic,
from top to bottom. Even their effects of society can clearly be tracedback.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom.

Not in every respect. Concurrency and C's undefined behaviour spring to mind.

~~~
grayhatter
It's still deterministic. It doesn't randomly do something different with the
exact same IO. Just because it's hard to recreate the exact same state with
concurrent processes on a modern CPU doesn't change it's determinism.

Also, undefined behavior in C only means a compiler can do what ever it likes.
It doesn't make it random. People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic.
It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's
already part of your program. GARBREPLEDFAH.../rant

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Sure, but in both cases, the way to model it is with something like
nondeterminism. Computers have no nondeterminism, but computer science does.

Formally verified C code is guaranteed to be free of UB, as this is necessary
in order for there to be guarantees about the behaviour of a program written
in standard C. The underlying compiler and hardware are still deterministic.

A similar thing happens with concurrency.

> People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete
> your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your
> program.

It probably won't delete your hard-disk, but complacency with UB is still a
bad idea. C is a strange language. UB is permitted to travel back in time. [0]
Even in the absence of UB, the optimiser is permitted (but not obligated) to
eliminate empty infinite loops, so even a basic property like whether your
program will ever terminate, may be up to the whims of the optimiser. [1]

Anyway that was a long way of saying I agree, computers are deterministic, but
something akin to nondeterminism can happen in the abstractions we use.

[0]
[https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/](https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636)

~~~
grayhatter
That's exactly what I mean about UB in C. I mean I agree with you If you don't
know exactly what your compiler will do with the UB, (or if you ever might
want to use a different compiler and or comp options) you probably want to
avoid writing any UB. But it's not magic, and it can't time travel. That
segment makes explicit that UB doesn't need to create a sequence point around
UB. This is important because if it did need to do that (to protect the non-UB
code) the compiler would need to keep a list of all UB. I'm pretty sure that
if you're going to create a list of _all_ undefined behavior, you might as
well just define it. It's not magic, it's just allowing the compiler to YOLO
it, using optimizations it already knows how to do.

I have a really cool example of how/why this is actually a good thing for
compilers if you're interested.

------
jondubois
I think that's the point. No one in these big corporations understands what
they're doing... They don't know half of the story. But they're so large and
powerful that this doesn't prevent them from succeeding anyway. That's the
danger.

Also there is no incentive for anyone to understand what they're doing. It's
like that saying that people tend to not understand things when good
performance at their job depends on them not understanding things.

------
ElFitz
Lazy so-called journalist, I'd like to present to you... _drums rolling..._
Ben Thompson of Stratechery[1]! Followed by.... _rolling drums..._ John Gruber
of Daring Fireball[2]!

And quite frankly, these two are just the ones I thought of, from the top of
my head.

And, I couldn't say why, I think nowadays the Financial Times could write
pieces on the matter more interesting than nearly anyone at Wired could.

[1]: [https://stratechery.com/](https://stratechery.com/)

[2]: [https://daringfireball.net/](https://daringfireball.net/)

