In the 2020s most old generation people are retiring and not only the replacement generations smaller but there is gap in generational knowledge transfer. What do you think is important tech out there in which are we are losing our collective knowledge and hard won wisdom?
Educational games. Hear me out. The way we teach us basically how we did it 500 years ago. This is stupid, boring and not scalable. We dont have enough teachers, attention span is short, education is costly. So we need something that scales, is fun and involves all types of media plus gamifies education. Think Skyrim or GTA meets MS Encarta
I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?
It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.
It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational.
Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.
You should check out Death Stranding! It has a unique asynchronous multiplayer model that rewards collaboration.
Players can place items and structures as they walk from place to place and you can see stuff placed by other players as you bring each in-game area "online". These items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle, or even entire roads/highways stretching across a landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can give them likes. Note that you never see another player's character.
It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's not much combat in the game because it's generally easier to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.
Tens of millions buys and plays truck simulators, so these games already exists. You have many other kinds, but the truck simulator one is the most popular. This type of game is much more popular in Europe than in USA though.
GTA 5 roleplaying servers are getting pretty popular now and do what you want. I haven't tried them yet but I've wanted what you describe and it might be fun to check them out.
It’s on PC, Xbox and PS at least, not sure about others. Really cool experience because it also includes pictures of artifacts and audio commentary from scholars. They did the same for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla aka Viking Simulator.
Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?
The sequels have this too.
(And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).
I don't believe at all in gamification in education. The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases. Even chasing grades is a perverse incentive IMHO.
Educational games are not the same as "gamification" as an incentive structure, and I also think you're being very prescriptive of your own research style. I knew several academics in my PhD that thrived off being able to publish papers in better conferences, faster, etc than their peers. Also there's a pretty strong niche of puzzle game solvers (think the MIT Puzzle Hunts) that love thinking through problems in gamified ways.
Educational games are just games that also teach fun things along the way. I grew up playing the Carmen Sandiego games and it sparked a lifelong interest in history. When I got to college I took a bunch of history classes and even did a bit of undergrad research in it (well "history" is an incredibly broad topic and not something you research, but rather focusing on a topic that I was interested in) on the side. Think interactive fiction games exploring historical settings or works of literature. Games with some light math-based puzzling.
I don't think high level academic work can ever be taught through a game, but students feel the freedom to explore high level concepts when they are comfortable and confident with low level concepts, something that games can bring across better than the underpaid, overworked teacher in a lot of schools.
This comment reminds me of Status as a Service by Eugene Wei.
"Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a nested series of status contests."
Some status games are better than others. ie when the game requires some common good to be performed, or the mastery of a useful skill. Some status games reward things that only drag us down
As an aside, when people point out virtue signalling (I'm taking it as an analogue of status games) without adding some analysis my first assumption is that they are virtue-signalling to put others down or make others seem shallow (or themselves deep). The cornerstone of western morality is Jesus and he was quite the "virtue signaller". Point being that the observation on it's own is uninteresting without saying something about the context or consequences of a behaviour. There aren't many things that are /purely/ virtue signals (or status games) and those that are, are quite obvious.
Jesus spoke about humility and dying for your beliefs, which he did. Martyrs don't need to signal their virtue (or social status), they do the virtous thing.
Status is a public display of desireability. It doesn't have much to do with virtue, but everyone wants it anyway.
Don't blend those two concepts, they are separate. People who make a public display and performance out of their virtues, 'virtue signallers' miss the point. You do it in humility before God.
People who don't show off their status, get little benefit out of it.
Think of it instead as designing tools that make learning fun, and enables that gratifying feeling you described. Lego, for example, has probably created generations of people with incredibly high levels of visual-spatial intuition who've all been inspired to go on to become designers and engineers of all kinds.
It doesn't have to occur within the walls of a school for something to be considered education.
Yep. Perfect example of this being the Lego Mindstorms platform. We had a "robotics club" at my private school which used the Mindstorms visual programming tools; there were 10 year olds learning about loops and variables in a way that was legitimately _fun_.
While I don't wholly disagree, there's a lot of edtech out there premised on the notion that all subjects, even sometimes challenging ones, should be like playing a game for all people or you're doing it wrong. I submit that you're always going to have some percentage of students who pretty much hate math however you teach it and some percentage who don't want to read books even with relatively "fun" and easy options.
Can I find plenty of problems at all levels of education? Sure. Are there more engaging things we can do even in an environment that's largely not personalized? Of course. But everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal unless you just let kids do whatever they want.
Everyone should have fun all the time is not really a realistic goal, period. I don't think playing games is universally fun either. Games can be quite boring.
Games do often promote the concept of winning and losing, however.
Sure, I don't have an objection on that. In fact, anything up until college is actually distilled and idealised version of the ideas about how nature works. That's why people solve math, physics and other problems recreationally.
However I don't want to call it gamification because those are not designed in a game format in order to make you do something that you normally wouldn't want to do. Those are simplification or analogies to bring ideas within the grasp of the student so they can reach it with their current toolset but without mischaracterising it. So when a student calculates the trajectory of a ball in ideal condition, this is still a calculation of a balls trajectory and not something else.
When I'm really in flow at work, it can almost feel like a game. Then I go back to yak shaving and jira.
There are (and could be better) environments that can isolate and focus on that. The combo of interface and specific challenge can really help communicate what's magical about engineering. Ideally that would help motivate people (versus just being a dopamine hit source).
Highly visual environments with rapid feedback seem to hit that button for me. The old bridge building game Pontifex was great, as was Besiege. I'd love to see more like that (there probably are, I've not played many games in years)
> The kick that inspires new scientists and engineers comes from the gratification of learning or figuring out something as nothing feels better than figuring out how/why something is happening and how to push it to it's edge cases.
This is also how Kerbal Space Program works, to name one example of an educational game.
There's a job I was considering recently that is space-related, I almost wanted to modify my resume with "I don't have professional experience with orbital mechanics, but I do have xxx hours in Kerbal Space Program on Steam."
PHDs are never going to be learning through games but I think at lower levels of education there's a ton of room to inspire a desire to learn something more deeply through games.
Kerbal Space Program seems like a game which both can both inspire newcomers and could also actually be used by PHDs to bounce around ideas. At the least it seems like some actual astrophysics PHDs rely on it for inspiration.
I agree that games intended to teach academic subjects are very hard to get right. Interestingly, when you take the arrow in the other direction, ordinary video games have sometimes been the arena of some very advanced "doing science", e.g.:
I speak 3 languages, attempted to learn the 4th one (German) on Duolingo and I find it very ineffective.
I recall having trouble learning English back in high school and then having a breakthrough. The breakthrough was, I figured out how to think in English when trying to debug my errors with the teacher who actually have lived in the USA. Once it clicked, I no longer had to memorise things but predict instead. My English is still not perfect but I can have fluent conversations and almost never need to look up words, I can figure out the meaning of idioms etc.
IMHO, the gamification in Duolingo is not geared towards making you figure out the mechanics behind the language. I think edge case exploration is way to go but the gamification usually revolves around memorising.
I agree. One skill is recognizing the meaning from a sentence already formed (what Duolingo puzzles consist of). A very different skill is coming up with the sentence in the target language without hints.
There is the company called Assimil that has small books based on this concept, where first you are filling in the blanks (not choose from preexisting options) and as the book progresses you have to fill in more and more of the sentence.
This heavily depends on a course, and courses are different between pairs of languages.
E.g. learning Spanish from English on Duolingo is very natural, the course is built the way a baby learns a language, by practice and suggestion, with few small bits of grammar info strewn along the way. According to reports from my friends, learning Spanish from Russian on Duolingo is a completely different experience, all based on memorizing large amounts of rules before any practice even begins, and it works really poorly.
I assume that learning languages on Duolingo is all about building a chain of good courses based on languages you already know by the moment you consider another one. (Only partly joking.)
Duolingo is a pretty good tool for practice, but for trying to learn a language from scratch it's probably best to go through some YouTube videos for the pronunciation and some books first and consider it a kind of fancy flash card thing to do on the side.
Recently I got the game "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" for my kids to play on steam since I got young kids and I remember loving that game when I was younger.
The game is amazing, the way it combines fun, learning, and engaging kids without ever feeling like it's a lesson. Seriously my 5 year old now has a basic understanding of set theory because of it.
It feels like educational games peaked in the late 90's and early 2000's and everything since then has been a regression that spends too much time trying to explain things to students rather than letting them discover and explore for themselves.
Short attention span is in large part because of computers, phones, etc. So putting ed games on them doesn't seem to address the core problem.
Our solution has been a no screen time policy. Education is strictly non-digital and a lot of real world, hands on learning and dialogue with real people. And our kid has loved books since infancy.
Does it have to be so strict? I'm not sure, but I do know that our society is inundated with screens designed to addict us and if I give in a little, they just beg for more. We'll introduce screens eventually because it's inevitable, but delaying that as long as possible especially during the formative years has worked well for us so far.
I was watching a Pixar movie and wondered, "what if these resources were spent in creating, say, scientifically accurate animations of biological processes for people who are learning chemistry, anatomy, genetics, etc." We all have seen small animations of processes, but some are inaccurate or simplified due to time and money constraints. I've dreamed about this since I was a kid.
On the topic of 'scientifically accurate animations of biological processes'.
You may know of these videos, but I thought these might be worth sharing for others interested in this topic:
Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012)
https://youtu.be/WFCvkkDSfIU
Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017)
https://youtu.be/X_tYrnv_o6A
I TA'ed at a tech camp a while back, and there was a 12 year old from Mexico city that had astonishingly good English. I asked him how he was so good at it and he just answered "Skyrim".
So yeah, kids soak up a lot of info through games.
I basically learnt most of my written English from games as a teenager. They didn't directly help as much with speaking, but hanging out in game chats or IRC for a ridiculous number of hours actually helped with that to an extent as well. Even though it's still written rather than spoken, it's still a more spontaneous form of communication.
I took English as a foreign language in school since I was 8 or 9, so I learnt some of the basics there. But if I was faced with a spontaneous conversation, no matter how simple, I easily got tongue-tied. (I was also shy and socially awkward in general, which didn't help.)
Spending those hours in chats is when I started getting more comfortable with spontaneous communication.
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of gamification in general, which might be a generational thing, but learning as a side product of something you're interested in can be a huge boost. It doesn't have to be games, though. Lots of people probably learnt a lot of English from music or books they were engrossed with.
I've been exploring Encarta 96 on a Windows 95 VM I've been curating for active nostalgia and I gotta say it's pretty awesome. I feel like we are missing out on some magic from those days. Even the intro screen still gives me goosebumps
Simply changing a game's locale to the target language you are trying to acquire is such an amazing immersion experience with the language -- and this wasn't even intended as an educational tool!
If playing Skyrim, you hear the target language constantly, utterances are subtitled so written and heard language can reinforce each other, and practically everything you look at is labeled in the target language. Best of all, you needn't feel so bad for spending all that time playing games!
Guild Wars had the feature of allowing to set a secondary language. This would translate all game text from the main language into the secondary one in real time as long as you hold the given key down. This meant that at any point, you didn't need to fetch a dictionary or translate a word, wasting time and immersion. I'm so sad I haven't found any other game with this feature.
I'm trying to play games with another language, and while sometimes it's ok, other times you really need to know the language to understand how understand mechanics that are introduced into the game. City Skylines was a super tough game to play in a learning language, but it would have been a nice learning exercise if I had the above feature.
I'm pretty sure even a casual observer could tell I'm not a native speaker given a sufficiently large sample of my writings. GP is right, the correct thing to do is to just embrace that I'll never be as fluent, as natural in English as I am in Italian.
Learning English at a relatively young age allowed me to talk to people literally across the ocean. This very conversation we're having right now would have been impossible otherwise.
I'm not upset in the slightest. I count my blessings.
Internet English has different "regional variety" than real life, for example I have litterally never heard "grok" in real life but I read it here fairly often.
"Grok" is not seen very much on the Internet outside of hacker/sci-fi fan circles. And it feels like using it in SF circles is very much marking you as An Old - it comes from Heinlein's "Stranger In A Strange Land", which is not a book that has aged well.
The difference isn't all that subtle. Uk and usa english have regional differences in their english that goes beyond putting the 'u' in colour.
Emphasis on streams of thinking and constructing sentences in ways that make sense to locals, is different to the formal-ish and almost toneless communication we do online.
Internet communication flattens out cultural shortcuts and cultural deepening you can do with fellow speakers in the same nation and locale.
Everything has to be expanded out so that you can 'see all the moving parts', whereas local english can be a lot more intuitive and cultural.
I'm trying something similar with Japanese via Ghost of Tsushima (finally started playing it this month). I've lived in Japan 10+ years, only speak conversational Japanese....so far I don't think I've absorbed any linguistic improvements from using the game. I might just need more time with this style of immersion.
I was never stressed out in terms of English language (I'm from Poland) because I've rarely (never) switched game languages to any other language than English.
When I was ~10 years old I've played through whole Final Fantasy 8 which I was obsessed at the time thanks to my older brother with a PAPER dictionary on the desk (I was translating stuff that I didn't understand) and I think that was the most effective way and time when I've learned most of the English language in my life.
Now I'm trying to encourage slowly my kids and I switch game languages they play from time to time.
That's a neat story! I've read that there is a developmental change that happens in the brain around age 11 that has the effect of "switching off" a child's ability to simply absorb a new language. To the extent that this is true, it is so great that -- from your experience -- videos games could provide enough of an immersive experience for you to rapidly and enduringly acquire a new language. Hope your kids take to it as well!
I work on a gamification product. We have schools as customers, they made a game that engaged the students and in an a/b testing showed much better results over time.
They pay 0.1% of what other, non-education customers pay.
Because that's all they could spare and allow.
Needless to say, the servers alone cost more than what they pay. Not to talk about the massive amount of support they consume.
So if you wonder why it's not widespread - that's why.
Ding ding ding… we have a winner. Scrolled all the way down waiting for someone else to mention the hard truth that they have even less money for educational software that they have for teacher’s supplies, which is so bad you’ll find teachers having to pay for supplies for their class. It’s nice to suggest the idea, but it’s not currently a sustainable business for deeper educational material due to support costs and the low ability of the customer to pay in the first place.
I would like to see a fun game to help me with differential equations. People still want to learn more advanced topics and I feel that not enough edtech exists for learning beyond the formative years, and even less for beyond high school. As an example, Khan Academy has received much praise, but I was less impressed to be honest.
I pitched such a thing to a department of education grant program and got rejected. I called it the Meta Educational Environment for Simulation and Gaming (MEESG) (long before FB thought about turning into Meta). The pitch was to create a core open source platform for which subject matter experts could create their own specialized training packages, tied in with a web interface for teachers/students to track progress, gamifying the educational process, which was the key to engaging the students (feedback on progress).
Oh well, I still like the idea though. One of the biggest benefits was that certain trainings are either very expensive just due to materials, etc, or are very dangerous (high-voltage electrician stuff for example), and doing it virtually would have a much lower risk and cost less.
That's basically what I am doing with Quill.org (I'm the founder / executive director). Quill is a platform for learning tools and games - we support six web applications that plug into a common, open source platform where teachers can assign activities to students and monitor results. At the moment, our applications are all focused on literacy, and they are more "tool-like" than "game-like". However, we use AI to assess writing, and the AI creates a game-like experience of writing different responses and getting different pieces of feedback (somewhat like a MUD RPG). We're creating the applications in-house now, and the API is not public, but the hope is to open it up in the future to allow others to launch tools and game on our platform. Quill is now serving more than six million students across the United States, about 12% of all K-12 students.
Games are limited in the sense that they teach frozen symbols and mechanics. Great for learning a large number of mechanics, engineering concepts and 'settled science'.
Getting your hands on broad concepts, blank paper and a relationship with a master/teacher/prof will always be necessary to teach higher concepts.
I will also note that youtube, khan acamedy, and comment sections have done a lot of education, intentionally or otherwise and do a decent job at conveying the master's perspective on the topic being discussed. Video is education that can be done at a low cost vocally and visually, rather than developing it into a game, one of the most expensive and difficult art forms.
Agree, education via a game makes lots of sense. Math is one of those that is perfectly suited since repetition helps to learn it.
There have been companies that specilized in educational games in the past yet they are no more. In the late nighties there were a few that were giants. If I remember well Software Toolsworks was one of them. It got acquired but now it's gone.
I suspect the reason we don't see more of them is that education in the US is mostly free so it make's little sense for parents to spend money on something they already have. And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.
> And teachers don't want to introduce something that threatens their lively hood and way of working. It's just a guess on my part.
This is wholy untrue, my mother has several decades in elementary education and they would love something like that. The problem is that teachers and schools often don't have the autonomy to acquire these things, a teacher can't buy 20 copies of a game for students as even at 10 bucks that's 200 dollars. So at the budget level required to make games available you then have to go up to the district level. (Stop me if this next part sounds familiar) the District administration is pretty far removed from the students that will be using the product and the teachers using it to teach. Because of this technology companies are incentivized to build their product to the wishes of the district administrators rather than for the students and teachers using the product. This process is helped by the trips, gifts, and "favors" the sales people can use while pitching to the district level decision makers.
So the district goes with the product that checks off the most items on a big checklist, as well as if they are a bad administrator, gives them more control over the students and classrooms. Meanwhile the product that was actually purchased doesn't actually help the students, or facilitate learning because it turns out it is way easier to put together a "study" that shows "leading educators" (who were former district administrators) assure that it will increase X metric by Y%.
That's why you'd probably want to target the homeschool market if you had a startup making educational games. Homeschooling seems to be increasingly popular since the pandemic so that's a growing market and one that is probably not as dominated by very religious families as it used to be.
You're thinking on the right path, but I'd suggest going wider than videogames.
I built a math program in Newark that worked stunningly well because it took the level assessment/lessons/testing from Khan and gamified it.
Not gamification in the electronic badge/"you did it!!!"/points sense, but contests between kids, with teams rooting each other on and parents helping run the show.
Education needs genuine praise and involvement to inspire children to put in the necessary effort. But videogaming the experience is a solution in search of a problem. We need less isolation and more coaching.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think the questions of "who pays", "who profits", and "who controls the material" matters a lot. So does learning theory (I don't think games will be the only way to learn). It is definitely a field we should pay close attention to if we care about learning.
For anybody interested in the space, I strongly recommend "What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" (James Paul Gee)
Agree in principle, though taking the human (i.e. teacher) out of the loop is a very dangerous proposition (consider the current wave of book-banning in Texas).
At one level, even the idea of studying computer games as literary texts is quite tricky, as they tend to be expensive, require expensive hardware, require teachers to have played them (would you expect a teacher to teach a book/film without having read/watched it?), and everyone's experience of it diverges.
At the other end, the idea of a massive game (like the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from "The Diamond Age" where you learn everything as you explore the game world sounds very appealing, but is a massive undertaking even for a game company (you're talking about codify most of the curriculum), so would need massive state funding. Parents tend to want things done at school as they had to do them at school (even if those were crap), so you'd struggle to find schools actually willing to take this on board (and that's before the resistance you'd get from teachers).
Lots of sibling comments have talked about games to learn logic, maths, etc.
To me, the less explored area is games (or computer assistance) that explicitly teach how to know and master your own emotions and how to get on with other people.
Edit: also games to teach basic household finance, critical thinking, and practical probability. (Academic probability teaching totally slides by unacademic people.)
As an alternative, wouldn't it be better to invest into games that teach you something or sharpen your thinking? Playing fun games that elicited curiosity and boosted logical thinking had a lot to do with how I ended up doing what I do for a living (software engineering).
I'm not seeing a more fundamental issue in this thread; What are we trying to teach, and why? It's easy to subject people to studying math, history, etc. What if we wanted to teach appropriate social interaction? Moral analysis (NOT morals)? Critical thinking? Developing self knowledge?
The problem is that we need interactions with live humans to explore these subjects. Gaming in the metaverse won't do the job.
The reality of "technology in the classroom" for me was just a bunch of classmates goofing around and getting distracted with computers, whilst they could be reading a book combined with interacting with each other.
I work for an EdTech company called Prodigy Game ( https://www.prodigygame.com ) - we have Math and English adventure games that help students in grades 1 - 8 learn at school or at home. While I don't think this is a good substitute for teachers / is going to disrupt the entire education space, I think it is an excellent supplement to what is currently in place, and can really help kids want to learn outside of schools. I'd be happy to see more products grow in this space for sure!
We've been writing a data science course [1] which feels like a game. Although it's more like Monkey Island meets MS Encarta, or a choose-your-own-adventure. It's a written story, where you frequently make choices through multiple-choice buttons.
Shameless plug. I'm building this, a fun but curricular platform for games focused on mathematics grades 8 onwards. Please check https://pledu.co/trigo-shooter (no login needed). The game levels are designed to gradually expose you to one concept at a time. Currently live with 3 games on Trigonometry, Vectors, co-ordinate geometry. I am all ears for feedback!
The controls are quite inconvenient. A common type of controls for top-down games is WASD movement relative to camera + mouse to rotate and shoot. If you spam shooting button, it starts showing the same "not enough power" warning many times. For shooting it would be better to simultaneously play the animation and spawn the bullet, not waiting for the animation. The tutorial windows can be replaced with text on screen to not block movement (controls, level objective; power warning replaced with animation maybe)
So not crazy, people have been having for centuries (i.e. the game part predates "computer game" part).
I don't want to say there can't be a real breakthrough that makes this a much bigger educational impact, but it's probably important to remember that as an area lot of smart people have tried this pretty hard (including your characterization of open-world + encarta) , and results are not that impressive, so far.
I credit a huge portion of my current career and general math and reading skills to having a couple CDs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart games early in my childhood. It's a pity I can't think of very many things that I would be comfortable pointing my own kids to and hope for the same effect.
Off-topic but a little tangential: There's a designer named Zander Whitehurst[0] on TikTok/Youtube Shorts teaching Figma in 30 to 60 second videos and I'm in love with the format. I do wonder whether it's effective, but I've learned quite a bit of Figma from him.
You might find https://www.synthesis.com/ interesting. They develop games in-house that teach kids problem-solving, collaboration skills, dealing with unknowns/dynamic conditions, etc. etc.
Attention span is not a well-defined term, and according to most researcher there is not even any reason to believe there is only a singular value — the “kid who can’t sit on his ass” can play a video game/learn something from youtube for hours just fine, it all depends on the activity at hand.
I don't think everything could be a game, but we could definitely teach with newer technologies. Think of how Scratch programming can be used to teach problem solving or even math concepts.
I think accessibility will depend on what we can run in the browser. And what we can run in the browser will depend a lot on where JavaScript goes.
Strongly disagree. Teaching and learning have been solved problems for a long time, for those that want them solved.
"attention span is short" -- b/c we have stopped rewarding its development. The answer is insisting people develop longer attention windows, not trying to stuff real learning into atrophied attention windows.
I would add to that educational animations. For example, in biology/medicine good animation are trully helpful to understand better and form more memorable associations. Animations cannot replace textbooks but can complement them and make learning much more easy.
Interactive visualizations/simulations go a really far way towards helping students learn complex topics. Gamification is tough because you need a human to effectively react to a student's particular shortcomings and help them reframe problems.
Short attention spans can be absorbed into poetry/philosophy and expanded by chasing the meaning of the tiny sentences.
With skill you can put a lot of information into a shorter song. Chain those short sentences together and you can educate and entertain across a rythym.
More like attention spans for boring stuff were always short for humans. Making it more entertaining means people don’t have such a hard time remaining focused.
Agree except for being "boring". I don't see educational games in anyway as boring. If you (reader, not iammjm) see it as boring, you are not the right person to build it.
Sounds like ad-tech masquerading as ed-tech. There are a lot of ed-tech companies around. I don't know how many take this strategy, but I'm sure there is a few.
My thoughts exactly. Knowledge transfer in manufacturing / industrial environments is something that I'm working on.
- Language models / NLP applications for processing large amount of technical text data (SOP, documentation, technical data, machine text logs, voice to text, video data processing for speeding up corrective action, training, onboarding and highlighting areas of improvement / bottlenecks), digitising documents and extracting failure reasons / equipment names / spare parts / processes involved and making associations between them for pareto analysis, better search or process improvement recommendations
- Recommending the next steps to fix something / remote intervention / do something etc. Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.
- Enabling operators to become data scientists by enabling to train AI models via their day to day activities / analysis. Building better UX in general and providing simple tools that even a toddler could use.
I'm a partner in a factory and I believe this is an incredibly important area, and the requirements are fairly different than normal "just put it on Confluence" workplaces, in a way that most tech people don't understand and usually completely miss the mark when they're doing product dev.
- Your team is out on the floor. Their hands have grease on them. Using tablets sounds great until you're trying to use it with a glove on it, or your hands are dirty, and it's hard to get grease off tablets. But they need the info out on the floor. Also, it can be noisy on the floor.
- The team tends to be very visual. They don't like tapping on computers a lot. Literacy ranges from pretty good to kinda OK. Sometimes they refuse to get (or wear) reading glasses for whatever personal reason.
- They're working on proprietary hardware, but technicians with the right knowledge are not nearby to come in and look at it. You really need to be able to see the issues visually. Sometimes even hear them. AR might be interesting here. (I spend $10k to fly a tech out for a few days to look at a machine. The bigger issue is that I lose $10k a day from one machine being down, and a tech might not be available to fly out for a week.)
- Predictive maintenance. The fancy sensors and whatnot mostly don't work. Tech people try it in a clean, quiet office and it works, and they can raise money on it from clueless VCs, so money keeps getting set on fire with smart AI machine learning magic motor sensor companies.
- Preventative maintenance. How to schedule, how to verify it was done, how to check whether it revealed an issue that needs a follow-up. Getting people to do it, and verify it was done, can be a challenge, but there are huge returns to preventative maintenance (for example: checking gearbox oil levels, verifying lubrication line function, checking valve temperatures.)
- Diagnosing machine problems. Using prior problem documentation helps team members see most likely issues. But many of these people don't really want to sort through a database of prior similar issues because they "know" what the problem is. How do you provide this information to them in a way that feels more approachable to them?
I could go on forever. Manufacturing is an interesting environment because downtime is usually hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars of hard cost per hour, depending on the operation, and they will spend quite a bit of money to stop it from going down, but culturally there's a vast gulf between the white collar SF tech bros and what actually happens in manufacturing plants, so innovation tends to be more limited.
Predictive/preventive maintenance is actually a big thrust behind my current company, Dials.
HOAs, which we serve, are run by busy volunteers, yet expected to perform almost insane financial gymnastics, planning 30 years of major component replacement, e.g. common area roofs, piping, asphalt resurfacing. This involves (a) estimating each component's lifetime (total and remaining), (b) getting a cost estimate, and (c) coming up with a plan to spread paying for it out over however many years before it's needed, breaking that up between the units in the HOA, and collecting the funds, month after month.
People blame cultural issues ("people won't pay for maintenance") or "laziness" but the truth is, it's just too damn hard to do predictive/preventative without a very accurate inventory of what you have. You need to get all of this into a cloud environment, and then somehow expose it so that either internal staff or external vendors (more common) can see exactly what you have, bid on fixing it, and track status and work in a fine-grained way.
Our ultimate goal is doing the entire inventory automatically using computer vision (partner and I used to work in self-driving) and having enough data around that we can price and estimate everything accurately.
Nobody wants to pay for this as a standalone product so we just decided to build a payment collection product (for monthly dues), start with that, and build it up. It's going pretty well and we'd love to get more people on it. Email's in my profile in case you want to chat
Tracking stuff is hard. I wonder why QR codes won't work in this case, or something similar, or super basic otherwise / stickers or codes at first. Might be more annoying to generate and maintain them initially. CV could work really well to keep track of inspection steps as well, or to recommend what you should do next, and how to do it
We considered this, but it's another step. What I'm talking about is going to be hard and take a while, but feels like the "endgame" for how this is going to be done--automated, done with phones, no extra work.
It sounds really interesting to work in a manufacturing plant for a year or two in order to empathize with the industry and learn how to blend in software in a way that actually solves problems like you describe. Or, generally, to penetrate areas where technology solutions don't apply obviously. I wonder how you'd set that kind of arrangement up. If you could design a company around displacing a few cofounders for a few years where the product research is hands on, on the ground, doing the job, I bet there are many people who would be interested in this type of setup. I agree the software industry does way too much "solve for ourselves first" type of product development and it's really discouraging.
I think a key point that people fail to remember or marketing just oversells, is that there is no silver bullet for all the problems, especially for an industry that has so much history, precedent and inertia. People want to try and solve (and from the other side, want perfect full solutions) all problems at once, whilst in reality small improvements in key areas are probably the 80/20 that is needed to bring business value. I think continuous feedback and good "translators" would be key for any product in those industries. Manufacturing people are busy and will tell you what the surface level pain point is, but they don't have the time or maybe don't have the idea fully thought out on what the underlying problem/goal is.
After typing up all that, I realise that most of this is applicable to every industry.
Spot on, many of these challenges are common across the board - from my father's plant to Pfizer and others I got the chance to work with. There is however a massive talent gap when it comes to high quality software / ML people in these industries as well. It's tough to get experts to generate quality data and 'recipes' for others to follow when their KPIs are not aligned. Maintenance and reliability don't seem to be sexy enough areas for management to invest in, especially if the value proposition is anecdotal at best. Would be great to chat about your approach for solving some of the above
I would not just knowledge transfer, but knowledge organization. We have so many different ways to represent knowledge, but it is very hard to access it or know where to look.
I think better training and investigation into best practices of organizing knowledge would benefit all industries.
Former librarian here, now at a tech co. This is exactly the domain of information science, and its a salutary tale in two industries talking past one another. Librarians have deep training in the science, philosophy and psychology of information storage and retrieval. Most of the time you think of things like Dewey numbers on library books buts its much more than that. At the dawn of the second internet age (circa 1991, think gopher, WAIS, Archie and a nascent thing called the web) there was a boatload of discussion around what this Internet thing would mean for information.
Then, the tech bros arrived and after a few abortive attempts to catalog things for themselves (webrings, portals, yahoo) the industry collectively shrugged and decided to ignore the problem, assuming that a search engine would always be able to pluck your favorite needle out of the haystack.
Except that, today, it cant. Intranets are essentially corporate graveyards of content. The public web is a webring of 7 or 8 megasites that vacuum up all searches and make it all but impossible to break out of their domain. That article you read in 2005 about XYZ? Forget it, you're never finding that with Google.
Do you have any pointers to things worth reading? I've always sworn if I started a tech company one of the first 10 employees would be a librarian because it needs to be someone's job to organize the information, and you're right the automatic systems for doing it are horrible.
Search isn't enough because search doesn't help you if the philosophy behind how the information is organized doesn't make sense -- if what you need is spread around between 100 slack messages, emails, and unconnected unmaintained wiki pages. You need someone (or ideally a team) whose job it is to one one hand organize that information themselves, and on the other hand create a framework so it's easy for the non-librarians to put things in the right place.
But right now the majority of tech companies are like libraries without librarians, the patrons are just wandering around sticking the books on random shelves and wondering why nobody can ever find anything.
I'm curious what your thoughts about Cory Doctorow's Metacrap [1] essay which I think summarized a lot of the problems with the semantic, informational organization approaches of the early-mid web. Are you also familiar with research in informational sciences these days?
Yes, please tell us your recommendations for informational retrieval / taxonomy systems - what are the current best practices for the different mediums?
Have you considered going into SEO? Combining SEO expertise w information science sounds like market dynamite. There is probably a 5k/month blog in simply applying information science concepts to SEO in practice, to say nothing of the consulting gigs, etc.
I'd agree with knowledge organization. It's either you have to root through academic texts or try and navigate the spammy internet with no really happy medium. It's almost like there's a complete lack of quality middle ground information. It's either total SEO garbage or very low quality entry level information or incredibly specific/dense academic content and the middle ground is missing.
Definitely, transfer can only happen when knowledge is organised and understandable by a variety of stakeholders, with different backgrounds (education, languages spoken, years of expertise)
Lowering the expertise threshold required for technicians, electricians, mechanics or reliability engineers to be effective.
This is a really interesting application I hadn't considered before. Having lots of blue-collar family, helping new members of the trades upskill fast would take a considerable load off that workforce.
These things are all on the radar of "innovation" types. I don't mean to say they're not interesting, but in the area of applied ML all this stuff is basically as mainstream as it comes (despite being unsupported by any actual research advances).
I'm starting a new job doing exactly these things in order to reduce the carbon intensiveness of heavy industry, specifically cement production. I'm hyped because I think the technical challenges aren't too daunting, and the prize is huge.
I've started looking into CO2e reduction techniques as well. Would be great to discuss. Working with a client in the food space who is doing this just to learn more
Quality, reproducibility, and precision necessarily require removing the human.
If it's something "artisanal", that not necessarily true, but even then, intentional "mistakes" can be added [1]. Having humans for the sake of having humans isn't a charity that non-luxury businesses can support (à la Snow Crash). It'll have to be something that governments subsidize or enforce tyrannically.
Fewer and fewer people are interested in manufacturing jobs, especially the less glamorous ones. Large manufacturers are having a hard time using analytics and more advanced systems because of qualified labour shortages. I've spoken to manufacturers whose technicians can't even write or follow instructions correctly. Sometimes, sending 10 technicians to inspect an asset would results in 10 different opinions about possible issues / failures. All of these could lead to lower quality product and increased unscheduled downtimes, lower revenues etc etc. But, it is definitely important to still allow people to use their brains and come up with better options
I volunteer for rural development organizations providing the kinds of services that suburbs would call dept of water or forestry. This point is very important to reliably onboard volunteers.
If we need excavation, our worst-case scenario is that that we need excavation by someone who also knows
Many companies store huge amounts of documents, but every team does it in its own way. One template can quickly result in thousands of variations. If robust documentation principles are not used from the very beginning (checklists / reduction in free text, visual indications, etc), it will be a nightmare to make sense of that data afterwards. Also, there is no value in generating large amounts of text data unless you can easily scan it and retrieve the information of interest
What I wrote wasn't simply a poorly specified product requirement document ;) Instead it was a general idea.
Better and more granular documentation in a form that can be interpreted by humans and also machine readable would be a desirable outcome for any system. Especially true for systems in which the builders and operators are being replaced or EOLed
I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek because "digital transformation" has become an overused marketing term. But I think the core of it is valid -- a company has an inefficient process due to lack of technical expertise or whatever and you help them fix it.
There's multiple parts to this field of work: networking to find leads, doing discovery to understand a potential client's problem, formulating a technical solution, creating/negotiating contracts, and implementing the solution. My experience in this area was at a company that was large enough so that these pieces were split into different roles within our organization, and I was mostly on the tech/solution implementation side.
Sometimes they have in-house teams that are slowly switching things over. Are there any good blogs/articles/books on starting or running such a consultancy?
Interesting, that is my experience at Pfizer as well, where I lead projects end-to-end, from problem discovery to solution deployment and I pretty much did everything, from talking to coding
I used to work in manufacturing as a process engineer (now a dev) and this is fascinating to learn about. Do you have any articles on your work or any use cases where I can learn more?
Less a specific technology and more a mindset. Repairing things around the house. Today, it's almost always rational to throw out the broken thing and buy a new one. There are a bunch of reasons why that's true: cost of one's own labor, lack of discrete replacement parts, lack of repair documentation, improvements in technology since original purchase, risk of further breakage, risk of injury to self, etc.
But the real cost is that people generally don't know how things work anymore. They're just black boxes, even simple things like a coffee maker or a clothes dryer. Which further reduces the demand for repairability, which seems like a downward spiral toward everything being disposable.
I feel like there's a city vs suburbs correlation here too.
If you live in a city, (nevermind the fact that you're probably renting and paying way to much in rent consider fixing anything yourself) you probably don't have the space and the tools to enjoy taking apart and fixing things.
In the suburbs, you probably have a garage and a side yard where you have the space to entertain these kinds of hobbies.
Just recollecting: the last thing I fixed was a bolt that broke off inside a nut that was welded to a pipe. Luckily I have a workshop table, a vice, and a drill with various attachments. All of this takes space.
> If you live in a city, (nevermind the fact that you're probably renting and paying way to much in rent consider fixing anything yourself) you probably don't have the space and the tools to enjoy taking apart and fixing things.
The way housing is now, overpaying for rent is just “paying rent.” There is no special circumstance as a renter where repairs come faster or with less pliant and nuanced communication to the landlord.
The places are actually worse, because competition for below market single family homes, (which are basically always in need of repair,) is extremely fierce.
My experience is landlords don’t fix up anything and you have to pick and choose the most important stuff for them to fix.
Technically are they on the hook to fix everything? Maybe? But only people who don’t rent or haven’t rented in too long to remember think this is actually what happens.
And anyway there is some implicit understanding that since they are not absolutely gouging you like every other landlord, you owe it to them to not ask for too much.
So implicitly, you either have to learn to fix things or have a home that is sorta kinda broken / jenk six ways from Sunday.
Either learn how to fix stuff or live the life of death by a thousand paper cuts.
Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something you've repaired. I'm not very handy, but every time I open the door that doesn't squeak anymore it cheers me up a little.
>Also it is just a nice feeling, every time you use something you've repaired.
I feel it's my personality, but as soon as I fix anything I am overcome with anxiety every time I'm near it for fear the issue will return or that my repair was faulty and inevitably prone to cause further damage.
I don't know why I get this way. In spite of all my worries I've yet to truly fuck up an appliance I've repaired (furnace, microwave, dish washer, workout equipment, countless car repairs, electrical, plumbing, carpentry...the works).
As far as I've ever bothered to explore the feeling, I think I have an inherent trust that products are manufactured with care and attention while my repairs are often ad-hoc suitable replacements with salvaged parts, or even just duct tape and glue. Experience should tell me that things are often built to minimal passing standards so this idea that a manufacturing line that spits out dozens(?)/hundreds(?) of these products in a day are any better than my attempts. Lack of documentation is often a big one. If my repair seems to make more sense why wasn't it done like this before? Am I missing something that should be considered? What caused it to break that I haven't addressed? etc.
I'm totally guessing here, but apart from just being able to trust professional design and manufacturing more, could there be some kind of a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect there?
If it were socially normal and expected to try and repair things, and you did happen to blunder, that would be a normal blunder that everybody makes. But if you go against the grain and try to fix things yourself when it's becoming less and less expected to do that, that could make a mistake feel worse.
Of course one might quite naturally just feel more responsible for a possible mistake when doing things oneself hands-on rather than when delegating things to someone else in any case. Not saying you should, but it'd be quite natural to.
If it broke and I replaced it with a broken appliance then the manufacturer/distributor is to blame. If it broke, and I broke it worse (made it unrepairable) then it's my fault. Sure, I was trying to be frugal and save money doing it myself, but having to admit fault to a professional could be embarrassing.
Easier to displace blame instead of facing truths I guess? Despite repairing this much stuff, I still consider myself a pretty bad mechanic, maybe I'm just too hard on myself.
I’m frightened to repair things because I own a house, and I’m afraid of wreaking havoc, dirtying a wall, having to repaid a whole room… I hope it will pass as I learn to do things here.
I think it is not totally unreasonable. Like I said, I'm not super handy, so when I do amateur fixes I stick to things incapable of catching fire mostly.
FYI if your doors make other noises when they open it could be the paint on the inside edge sticking against the frame. In that case, apply paraffin wax to prevent a seal.
I feel like this is largely a product of USA's society and maybe Europe; but here in Argentina I think it's absolutely the norm to try and fix things multiple times before giving up and buying something new; and many things are now not that expensive anymore, it's just in the culture.
Just to be clear you don't always fix them yourself; it's more common to pay someone who knows what they're doing.
In my experience it just comes down to time and competing priorities.
Would I love to deep dive into my fuse box and learn how to rewire it? Very much so. But the limited free time I have needs to go into side projects and life goals.
I say this having just come out the other side of a long period of learning how stuff in my house works. While it has certainly been satisfying, I'm looking forward to just paying people to do things in future so I can focus more on what compels me.
This. Do the most valuable thing you can. If repairing provides significantly less value than your other work, do not repair. It is great that we can afford so much stuff now. Thanks to it we can spend more time on helping the environment.
This is the big one for me. This will be very alien to a big portion of HN users, but I am NOT a hardware hacker. Browse the DIY subreddits and for every single impressive thing someone has done, you can read the comments about how they have somehow stumbled into building a death trap for themselves and their family.
I guess professionals are probably no better, but what else can you do.
I would say learning about any form of computing not related to Unix. Many of us old-timers grew up using systems (both home and corporate) that weren't variations of Unix, and I feel like CS education is turning into a Unix mono-culture these days. User interfaces from things like VAX, Apple ][, IBM Mainframes, etc. The file system on macOS 8/9 which didn't use paths and has always allowed spaces in names because it isn't interacted with via command line, for example. The VAX file system that automatically versioned documents without the user needing to worry about it. (I think the Apple Lisa did something like this, too.)
Don't get me wrong - there's a lot of bad ideas in those systems, too. (Like why do I have to use "RUN" vs. "BRUN" on the Apple ][ depending on what type of program it is?) But finding and promoting the better ideas and teaching young people about them is, I think , important and risks being lost otherwise.
Learning about failures from older systems is always interesting, too. Why couldn't Atari and Amiga compete against Apple and Microsoft, for example? I think things like that are important to understand going forward, too.
There is stunningly little literature on any R&D in conventional freight rail transport, something I discovered when looking for any published research some months back.
High-speed rail, yes. Regular old freight, no.
Contrast this with autonomous and electrified trucking as alternatives, with which rail could offer considerable synergies.
I'd suspect that break-bulk, trainset assembly and disassembly, and routing might all offer opportunities.
But ... nada.
I suspect other modalities within the transport sector might be similar, notably ocean shipping.
An old college friend went to work for CSX (I think), and we caught up after he'd worked there for a few years. He said that most of his job consisted of digging into old COBOL code to explain why a train was routed a certain way (e.g. Reno -> Phoenix -> LA -> SF instead of Reno -> SF), and that he rarely ever changed the code. They just made summary documents saying "there was rail congestion on the normal route".
I've always hoped that he was just yanking my chain and that they did...well, anything really.
Self driving train seems like a no brainer. I suspect that even with the tech 10 years ago it could have been solved. Where are they and why isn't someone working on it?
I suspect when something is this obvious, yet we don't see a product, it has to do with someone in the industry fighting change and making sure it does not happen.
Rail already has a tremendous labour advantage over trucking. The principle limitations seem to be net transit speed (freight moves on average at or below 30 mph net, and peaks at 79 mph in the US) and the sheer delay and confusion in arranging shipments.
Freight's worked well for high-volume bulk commodities (coal, grain, tanker cars). Intermodal ("piggyback" or containerised cargo) works quite well, but still sees delays compared to trucking, and generally is not viable for distances under 500 mi / 1000 km (within the US). Sub-car shipping (equivalent of less-than-truckload or LTL for trucking) is a nightmare for shippers.
Rail doesn't seem to be integrated into much consumer logistics. Yes, the net flows are slower, but it's far less energy intensive than truck-based shipping (or air cargo), and should be far more economic. The logistics and scheduling though seem to be a real concern.
Trackage consolidation's been an issue, there's been a net decline of trackage for most of the 20th century AFAIU. That especially includes suburban and urban centre transport.
Railyards are still large-area operations which are expensive in terms of locked-in real estate within urban regions. There are major crossing points and exchanges (including both ports and mid-line switching operations) which have been major choke-points.
The basic technology works. It's tremendously efficient. It actually is a largely un-sung success story in the US. And yet it seems it could be so much better.
Probably little savings in just outsourcing that one (small team of) humans to AIs, and you lose your custodian for negotiating out-of-the-box situations. Seems easy enough though.
Isn't that because rail freight is pretty much a solved problem with little left to research? Each one of those you mentioned have been discussed, optimised and reorganised hundreds if not thousands of times across hundreds of countries during the last more than a century of rail history. The answers are there, just not everyone bothers to look and apply them. Autonomous electric trains exist. Scheduling optimisations to the second are well developed.
However there's R&D into cheap electrifying with battery railcars - which is IMHO a dumb idea outside of niche railroads, electrification pays for itself in the medium to long term, a battery bandaid doesn't get you far.
Ans there's also a kind of innovation from India - dedicated rail freight corridors.
There's a argument to be made for this. As of about 30 years ago, I had the opportunity to observe a freight yard at which the tech was 1920s -- 1930s vintage (electromechanical relays controlling switches). I suspect there are many such instances still in operation. To an extent, what works, works, but there are also limitations and sheer maintenance.
But at a bigger-picture view, as I read what's being discussed for trucking, I keep thinking that far greater energy efficiencies are attainable by a switch to rail, though a huge problem remains in the flexibility and time elements. There have been expedited / express long-distance rail initiatives, though those have been on the range of ~14 days for coast-to-coast transit in the US.
There is a very small number of Class 1 railroads in the US: Amtrak, BNSF, Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific. One of those is passenger-only, and two are Canadian-owned. That leaves five US-owned freight carriers. As with the broadband industry, these tend to operate independent territories and routes.
Trucking is also highly subsidized via highway money, with gas/usage taxes covering less than half of roads..= Take that away or make trucks pay for wear and tear and maybe we would see more investment in rail. Long haul trucking almost shouldn't exist given how much cheaper and more efficient rail is.
I recently ran across a mention that this was a deliberate decision made in the 1950s to help further break the power of railroad monopolies.
The decision had merits at the time. Side-effects may be overwhelming those now, though I'll note that with only five US majors, centralisation within rail remains a concern.
A better way to do that would have been something akin to the "Rail Packages" of the EU, most notably the open access part. Infrastructure should be separate from operations, and access should be given to anyone at equal priority and fees. Monopolies are effectively broken, and that works for rail as well any other type of infrastructure monopoly - ISPs, power, etc.
I saw a talk by an engineer from Parallel Systems [0] and they seem to be doing some very cool stuff for the future of rail. Autonomous Electric rail cars and some other interesting things
Very strange product. The benefit of traditional rail freight is scale and cost over long distance. The benefit of truck freight is last mile delivery (no need for warehouse storage, can make multiple stops, etc). Their product seems worse than either except that it’s electric. Fortunately, electric trucks are well within reach.
Cool that they are building the tech though, maybe it will get bought out by an actual logistics/freight company that can find a use for it.
I know that BNSF did wonders with modernizing how they dispatch trains (the old way is build a train until it's as long as it can be and then send it off, which meant you never could really predict when something would arrive) and they also are doing monitoring, etc:
I think there's a number of little regional rail companies popping up now that the bigs have gotten to big to care about those customers; I bet they're reinventing where they have to and would possibly even be willing to fund some knowledge collection and sharing efforts.
I think this has much to do with certain parties controlling most of the dataflow for NA rail freight moves. Definitely a problem on the ocean and in the port terminals as well. We should chat!
After reading the comments here, I think a key issue isn't so much humanity losing knowledge, as it is "locals" for some definition losing it. Manufacturing is alive and well in many places, somebody knows how to build or fix your lawnmower, it's just that the middle class has lost that knowledge, etc. I believe there continues to be more "repatriation" of knowledge - look at semiconductor manufacturing, but it's less a question of it ever being lost.
I'd also say that "preparedness" is generally something nobody is working on. Despite all the shit that happened with Covid, I don't feel like we're even slightly better prepared for an actual lethal pandemic, like with double digit death rates for example. It's not clear we've changed anything other than some political jockeying.
Another example is earthquake/ tsunami preparedness. Everyone knows the west coast is going to be destroyed, we just ignore it because its "boring" and nobody wants to think about it
Everything agriculture, most farmers had their children go off to school and then the cities. Now it’s only really people in their 50s in the fields.
As someone who has a farm and regularly asks for knowledge transfers from the older farmers around me.. it’ll be difficult when they move on.
It’s things you wouldn’t expect either, like how to install a new piston & hydraulics line on a tractor. Or how to repair an old diesel motor. Some people on HN might know that, I know some of that now. However, generally they are all older and their kids moved on. In terms of a generational knowledge gap I can think of no greater one.
AgTech is big enough to have it's own tag on TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/tag/agtech/ It might not be interesting on the coasts, but there are a bunch of agriculture startups in midwestern places like Urbana-Champaign.
There's a difference between AgTech and actual agriculture. Farms don't need drones, apps or tractors with DRM. They need people with knowledge of biological systems and logistics.
Specifically small agriculture too. Most investment is in huge farms, very little investment in making small agriculture (think less than 10 acres) more affordable and accessible. Most of this is policy problems in the US, but globally its also a problem.
There is growing regenerative agriculture movement that focuses on small farms. Especially works of Richard Perkins - his slogan is even "Making small farms work". He (used to) make living from 10ha's of land in northern Europe. Key was to have multiple small enterprises in the same farm that support each other, and which don't require big investments. Also selling goods straight to customers is important so there's no middlemen eating your profits.
It's crazy really and I think one of the biggest problems our society has. Young innovative people don't have access to land as entering into the farming business requires big investment and thus capitals most people don't have access to. And it's not very attractive to take a huge loan and enter into a business that is already hard and where margins are low. Same time the suicide rates of farmers are 60% higher than non-farmers and the trend is upwards [1].
how much is the average farmer net income? in italy, as a son of farmers i see the biggest problem being the average size of holdings, too small to live on with the peace of mind, and the really absymal ROE of the sector, below 2%, making it impossible to expanding with debt in the industry. like, i would need 1.8 M euros of capital in farming (cereals + meat calfs) to give a family a BARELY MIDDLE class lifestyle.
Average net profit is very low ($10K) but it's because majority of farmers are old small family, They also receive pension, may work on another part time job, eat their own veges, and do barter exchange. Average net profit for full-timer (under 65yo) is also lower ($30K) but to be fair local jobs salary is also tend to low,
Here, problem is that there are few newcomer to be a farmer. It's unpopular to live rural area. People in rural area are generally considered to treat newcomers unkindly. Local people grown by farmer also don't want to choose farming as a first career (but may choose after retiring, or help father's farming). Farming lands have been tend to be divided for small lands (partially thanks to WW2 lose), and generally Japan lands aren't so flat, so productivity isn't great thus income isn't great.
Improving the core of the power grid to prepare for the near-doubling of power demand that will occur when everyone drives EVs, and also making the grid more maintainable, more robust, and easier to fix if damaged by anything from mundane causes to EMPs.
Some thoughts:
* Equipment to allow existing runs to be upgraded to higher voltages or even HVDC while being compatible on the other side with existing equipment and grid voltages. That way existing rights of way can carry far more power over existing wires.
* Smaller more modular cheaper substation equipment that can be slotted in and rapidly replaced, eventually to replace the mega-transformers and stuff that are very hard to physically ship places. Today there are substations with equipment so unwieldy that it would be physically challenging to ship replacement equipment.
* Lower cost methods of stringing new high power transmission lines to bring distant renewable energy to cities.
* Make undersea power lines as cheap (or nearly so) as undersea fiber allowing "global supergrid" systems to share renewable energy.
* Protection equipment or techniques to reduce damage from solar storms or EMP.
The power grid is becoming more and more central and essential to human life, and we are about to drop tons more demand on it via electrification of transport and HVAC (heat pumps). Yet it seems like there's not much innovation there. Right now if everyone comes home and plugs in their car it crashes the grid in many places, and this won't do.
Batteries are hot, but they're still too expensive to back up whole cities or regions. The need for batteries can be greatly reduced if the grid can be made bigger, wider, and at least an order of magnitude more reliable.
Related question: this issue of power bill costs skyrocketing in europe and elsewhere, to where there is real risk of mass non-payment. Do we know what percentage of households being shut off would cause grid instability because of having to dump load from nuclear and other plants that can't easily be shut down?
Traditional draftsmanship (not really tech is it?), as in with a pen/pencil on a draftsman table, has completely disappeared.
My father is a (relatively) recently retired Architect, he ran a small but specialist firm of about 20 people. By the time he retired about 5 years ago there was no one in the office that had ever been trained in traditional draftsmanship, only himself. It’s a lost art.
There are now almost two generations of working architects, those that learnt 2D CAD in the 90s and early 00s who still think in 3d and translate it themselves to 2d in cad (a little like traditional draftsmanship). And those since who have only ever worked in 3d and used the tooling to “project” 2d elevations and sections.
I trained at university in the early 2000s in Industrial Design, we did some traditional drafting lesions (maybe three or four weeks). But then jumped straight to 3d CAD and never looked back. I suspect they don’t even do those lessons now, and in fact most kids have probably done some 3D cad at school, maybe only 10% had when I started.
I think this craft is well-documented in books, even if it's disappearing from common practice, no [1]?
In general, I've found books are an underrated source of technical information like this. The library of congress is probably doing a pretty good job of preserving the knowledge needed to bootstrap civilization.
For example, I have a few books on country wood-crafting that have enabled me to become pretty self-sufficient on a rural property. Even though there's no woodworking knowledge in my circle of friends or family.
YMMV depending on the craft, but the scope of knowledge documented in dead-tree mediums is both vast and deep.
My complaint about cad is the exact opposite. That those traditional techniques have too much influence on how people use cad and how cad software was designed. People use low level abstractions that leave far too much to interpretation.
I agree. The purpose of plans is to transfer information about design intent for specific construction outcomes. Years ago, this was done by paper because there was not another efficient option. For the last few decades, this hasn’t been necessary, but we still produce paper products. Now roadway and earthwork folks tend to lean on digital models, but that’s after bidding and only for a handful of items. There’s “BIM” but nobody can actually tell you in concrete terms what that is.
I don’t know what we should be doing to deliver construction projects efficiently, but I’m pretty sure it’s not this.
To add to the agreement chain: completely concur that models > printed projections of these. Dropping to a paper based form will always result in information loss. The challenge is paper / pdf's are ubiquitous. Tools in the CAD space are built around vendor lock-in with non-trivial license costs. As a result there still needs to be a way to distribute that detail to all the people involved in delivery.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on that.
I could see that being the case with 2d focussed cad tools such as AutoCad, however “3d first” tools like Revit for architecture or SolidWorks for product design are so far removed form traditional drafting I don’t realy see any alignment.
I work in an infrastructure field with lots of engineering disciplines doing separate design. Designs are typically exchanged in AutoCAD even when a 3d tool are used to make them. Or AutoCAD is used to do design work in 3D. BIM exists but is just another data silo. A lot of the large engineering companies will try and push their own BIM solution which adds one more silo that no one else uses.
Everyone wants their own system and solution to be the single source of truth and that is a huge part of the problem. On a project of thousands of people there is never going to be a single source of truth. It's like expecting a globally distributed system to be in sync. Ultimately you have to chose between locking and eventual consistency and there is no other option. Having a single BIM system helps but is not a silver bullet. Because people will still get out of sync as other teams and tools are brought into play.
A beautifully draughty schematic or plan is something to behold - with carefully considered weight of line, and perfectly executed detailing. This can absolutely achieved with 2D CAD draughting, and is indeed quicker than hand draughting, but with that productivity gain, thinking time is reduced. The knock on effect is timescales for project completion are lost, then everything becomes a kt of parts and looks the same. This has been worsened, IMHO especially in architecture, by BIM tools like Revit and ArchiCAD. There are an awful lot of "Revity" buildings going up...
Yes, architecture and design is an art form, the medium in which you work influences the design process and the output you create. I’m not saying all architects and designers should return to the drafting table, but it is a shame that the knowledge of how to work like that is disappearing from the workplace.
Also, not everything always needs to be “efficient”, what’s wrong with working slowly if you can then create an even better result.
How does the slower process lead to a superior result, exactly? Are there designs that modern CAD systems can't achieve that the older process could? If so, perhaps it would be more practical to focus on closing that gap by improving our modern tooling.
Modern CAD systems tend to produce reproducible, very similar systems. Drafting produces individualized solutions. "Superior" depends on what you want.
(For housing, I want individualized so badly. If I see one more SillyValley SWE storehouse - excuse me, "luxury housing" - I'm going to vomit. They're all exactly the same. I'm fairly certain the firms involved have traded macros or something)
I'm not sure you can close that gap. I've done both drafting and CAD design (amateur level), and... you approach the space differently. Drafting almost forces you to have a plan, while CAD very much is "as you go".
Housing is super expensive in SFBA because it's all individual. In SF any housing project needs to make it through design meetings where all your neighbors make arbitrary aesthetic complaints about how it looks and how it casts shadows on things.
To get housing back to the rates it was built (and the price you could buy it at) in the 60s it needs to be a hundred times faster and more factory manufactured, not less.
Luckily, if you wait a hundred years people will like anything. That's the only reason people like mass-produced Eichlers, SF Victorians, and NYC brownstones.
I mean, I know the Bay Area fails to understand that, but you scale up housing by building more multi-level housing, not faster building of single homes.
And what multi-level housing there is being built is absolutely devoid of any creativity already, it can't really get more factory-like.
You’re able to perform much more robust and detailed calculations using computers compared to hand. You’re able to iterate more rapidly. The only thing I can think of is that the designer or engineer has more time to ruminate on their design. Or there is no artistry in a computer generated print.
It’s probably the bias in my training (mechanical engineering tech and not architecture or industrial design) and what I’m trying to accomplish through drafting, but I don’t get this romanticism for hand drafting.
My program, in the mid-2010s, had 13 weeks of hand drafting. The program still does that in the 2020s. My program emphasized sketching and drafting as a core component of the engineering design process. So hand drafting is still taught, and there may be sampling bias at play in the other comments. Or my hand drafting isn’t “real hand drafting.”
Sketching allows you to iterate through different designs early on. You then move into the detailed design which results in the manufacturing specs. For example, hole sizing and location, material thickness. We absolutely did all of these calculations by hand in our courses, so you need to be able to draw something out. You’d simplify and not worry about completely accurate proportions, though.
I guess before the rise of CAD systems, you’d hand over a bunch of rough design papers with the final dimensions for a drafter to prepare the final print.
However, with computers we now do the detailed design through computer aided engineering (CAE) software. This requires a 3D model of what you’re building. You run the simulation and find out that the thickness of the material isn’t suitable, so you change the thickness in the model and re-run the simulation.
This CAE process gives the engineer the 2D print for “free.” All the information needed to create the 2D print are embedded in the 3D model. You just pick which projections you want in 2D and you specify the dimensions and tolerance. Now that’s done and there is no need to draft it by hand.
My father has a background that's eerily similar to yours, right down to running a firm the same size, and he feels the same way you and yours does (so do I).
It truly is a lost art and there's a lot more hidden knowledge and reward that comes with knowing traditional drafting than it may appear on the surface. Patience, precision, a sense of intuitive aesthetics, and how to arrange a composition on paper to tell a story effectively ... thank you for sharing this comment, I'll have to tell him somebody else agrees. :)
A family relative of mine is a qualified draftsman and unfortunately had to pick up stacking shelves at the grocery store because he wasn't able to get enough work ad a draftsman to support his family.
I suspect an architect + engineer is all that's really needed these days, or perhaps even an architect that knows enough engineering, or an engineer that knows enough architecture.
Try Shapr3D on macOS and iOS and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised -- maybe even shocked -- at how amazing CAD software can be. Should be. The UX quality is exceptional and inspiring.
P.S. I have no connection to the product or company (based in Budapest I think).
Secretaries. The corporation of the mid-20th Century was run by an army of secretaries. They allowed for an important kind of flexibility. They've been replaced by software, which is more rigid, and which does harm because of its lack of flexibility.
Software engineers tend to over-estimate the productivity gains that come from software, while underestimating how much we lose to the rigidness of software (which is often the reflection of the underlying data schema). It costs money to change software. By contrast, older systems of organization depended on armies of secretaries, who knew when to bend the rules. The flexibility of having a human enforce rules, but also be able to bend them as needed, allowed an important kind of productivity benefit. We've lost that benefit as we have mostly purged secretaries out of corporations and replaced them with software.
On the theme of "software sucks," if you don't mind a comical, personal story, I shared this event from last month, when my mom was in the hospital (my conclusion is that the rigidity of software systems in hospitals is making hospitals worse):
Chief of Staff, Founder's Office seem to be just a new name for secretaries at tech companies. Not sure how this gets solved for businesses that are losing out to automation (such as the hospitals example).
I think your story is off topic, but really touching nonetheless (plenty of people are working on hospital software, even if it's largely pretty bad)
Glad that the worst that happened to your mom is that a nurse was confused about her food, rather than amputating the wrong leg or something (I wonder if faulty software has ever been the cause of this)
I wonder if the situation with hospital software will ever improve
Not a software change but one reason you get asked a dozen times "Are you having your the nails on your left big toe clipped" (joke procedure in a hospital of course) is to help avoid exactly these errors.
Is the patient who you think it is.
Does the patient agree with what your procedure says to do.
Often the area to be worked on (like the left big toe in my joke) is marked and the patient agreed with that marking.
There are a number of other such safeguards, similar to pre-flight checklists in aviation.
Institution these processes have greatly reduced treatment errors.
That both are older is either a sign that we are yet to recognize present harm or that things have improved. Check back in 20 years for clarity on that issue I guess.
Online safety education for the younger generations. There's of course outliers, but as a rule I've seen some scary amounts of zoomers who have zero idea of why giving out a photo of their government ID card (unredacted) to total strangers for age verification is a very bad idea.
It's a far cry from the old "don't give out your A/S/L/(and name)" that I got.
I ranted on reddit about this topic a while ago but the gist of it is that the stakes of online harm are just so much higher now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I feel like I learned about safety online in the hard way: failing, but I went through the stages of everything back when the cost of mistakes was needing to wipe a drive and start over, the upcoming youth today won't have that luxury.
The other complicating problem is just how few people are actually good at it. Who is suitable to be the teachers in this space? I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, I've just been burned enough times to be skeptical by default and trust virtually nothing anymore. I guess that's a good start, but how does that get passed onto the next generation in a productive way?
On the other side of the spectrum, I often joke with my dad that I want to setup a "TechNanny" service for him. Someone who can come home and help with random computer/mobile issues. There are of course challenges in reliability, safety and staffing.
Almost everyone who wants to fundamentally reinvent programming seems to come up with visual dataflow programming, which is strange to me because aren't those just function calls?
Function calls (called messages) can go in a queue in the actor model.
I do think dataflow programming might be interesting for low-level if it compiled to hardware as well as C. There's an old project for that here but the actual webpage and docs are gone:
Extracting deeply useful information from tens/hundreds/thousands of thousands of scanned PDFs in a way that dumps its information, regardless of structure (eg, tables, text), into a relational database that's (mostly) trivially queryable and repeatable. Preferably open source. This is such a hard problem right now.
Using Textract from Amazon to do the OCR. I dump the raw json in a SQLite database.
Information extraction is trickier. I extract useful things like lines and pages, locations of lines, set up various columns and now can search the SQLite db either with python code or SQL queries.
There's of course cost for running textract OCR on AWS. There are open source solutions like Tesseract
Oh yes, I'm very familiar with these. All these do though is extract information, but don't immediately make them useful. So there's a massive gulf of a middle-step that's not yet done. Textract gets close...ish to that, but it's prohibitively expensive.
Even with Amazon Textract, the middle step to curate extracted information into some form of meaning is still missing. Didn't realize this is still an unsolved problem.
Lots of missing context from these sheets that has to be interpreted (ie, how do you taxonomize each field of information?). Then asking questions on top of these documents is a step on top: "is the allegation about sexual violence?", "What is the name and rank of the person being accused?", "Is anything anomalous in the review process?", "Has this person's rank changed in the past 5 years?" etc etc.
Now expand this problem to hundreds of thousands of different types of document.
When you say "regardless of structure" -- if it's a relational database, that inherently implies a set structure. Or did you mean the information is consistent enough to be represented in one relational structure, but is presented in the PDFs in different formats?
Honestly, I don't know what it would look like, but being able to query would be deeply important. But what I can say is that a lot of the PDFs I work with are auto-generated as PDF forms using queries, after the information was likely inserted into a relational database during some esoteric transcription step.
Meaning, the information that formed the PDFs very likely come from a relational database and an inversion back to its original relational form is probably the convenient form. Whether that means it turns to 40 tables, that's fine, so long as it's relational and a query can be written.
If querying is the main goal, ingesting the pdf directly into something like elasticsearch or splunk would be much simpler. This of course doesn't meet the checkbox of being open source though.
This right there is the difficult part - what do you mean exactly? I cannot come up with anything better than search, as in like Google search. And they did it for books already, it's seriously good.
A big problem that happens with FOIA requests is that you're often sent data in the form of a spreadsheet that was converted to a PDF. And then scanned. For thousands of pages. Solve that generally so that you can insert all of that data into a postgres database, with sensible indexes.
I have around 2 million pages from FOIA requests that need information systematically extracted and I'm not alone in this problem. The costs for the systematization of many pages will be prohibitive.
The public good of having a resource like this available to the public for free is beyond unimaginable as far as I'm concerned.
Mostly tesseract, or uploading it through documentcloud and running manual searches. I do a combination of data analysis and spend many hours reading through documents. Sometimes I use unix tools like grep/awk/etc, sometimes I use SQL. If the PDF isn't scanned, I use tabula for csv extraction, but if it's scanned it becomes a silly ordeal.
Mind you, I'm not exactly looking for advice here. It's a supremely difficult problem and gut-ideas more often than not don't pan out.
How to design thermally efficient buildings - especially everything that's going on with climate crisis. The thermal comfort solution to everything in the last 70 years has been to put an HVAC on it, whereas if the buildings were designed properly, the need to actively maintain internal temperature is minimized.
After talking to architects, I'm dismayed that basic heat transfer is not a part of their curriculum.
HVACs are very rare outside of industrial and some office buildings across most of Europe. Buildings with innovative designs(like opening up during the night to cool itself and using that cool air to refresh during the day) exist. Thermal efficiency is taken very seriously and is a serious part of building codes.
There's no secret how to build efficient buildings. There's standards like passive solar, zero energy building design and passive house that have been in practice for decades. These just aren't as widely known in the US as they are in Europe.
Supply chain/logistics. I've been simultaneously surprised and unsurprised by the relatively minuscule number of people interested in driving technology and change for this space forward compared to other spaces.
I'm actively working in this space right now. Working with a Fortune 100 to replatform their entire supply chain software. Currently handles all $15B of their US revenue.
Maybe for driving technology specifically the space is small. But for supply chain management there are a number of players: SAP, Oracle, and Kinaxis to name three. There are more than a dozen though.
There are plenty SCM solutions and TMS products, agreed, however that isn't the change I'm describing. OTM, SAP S4/HANA, etc are heavily used and have been around for ages, yes -- even better systems exist. Problem is: the quality of data going into those systems has not improved much, the flow of that data is pretty poor, and the barriers to entry for basic visibility are high unless you're moving a lot of boxes.
Despite best efforts, even among the largest lines (Maersk + others via DCSA), EDI still reigns supreme in this space. Nothing inherently wrong with EDI itself but there are plenty problems with access. Port & terminal level visibility are in an even worse place.
The work they do behind the scenes is very impressive. An "AWS, but for supply chain" would be huge in my (biased) opinion, though I'm curious whether they would be motivated enough to share their progress with the rest of the world since it's been quite a competitive advantage.
In a sense they already do with “fulfillment by Amazon”. The only thing missing compared to UPS or FedEx is the retail locations and last mile pick up.
Bit of an entire category: Older scientific equipment.
Typically, you have one graybeard down in the basement that knows how those old centrifuges/distilizers/ionificators/etc work. Things that an entire building is really dependent on. Not only that, but they typically know the limits and how to get good science out of them.
It's more of a $$$ issue though. Loads of these old machines are dying off with the people that know them. This then opens up the market for the new people to come in and reinvent the wheel, sometimes literally so. It costs more, sure, but it keeps things moving along too.
If you get the chance, talk to these old graybeards and hear their stories. Most of it is mumbo jumbo, but man, they are great stories.
Seriously. Did a physics bachelor's and taking a network science course in my master's right now. Also currently looking for a job, and it feels impossible to get people to take me, a generalist who can move up and down the problem stack with ease, seriously. I truly believe what Heinlein said; that specialization is for insects.
This is a puzzle to me, even late in my career. I think one thing is that as a company grows and matures, it gets more organized, and more formal about hiring. This makes it harder to hire misfits such as myself. HR has a hard time passing a misfit's resume along to a hiring manager. But also harder to get rid of us. ;-)
If bigger, more successful companies hire with an eye towards specialization, then the flip side is that there's a reward for workers who specialize. Also, many people like what they're doing, want to get good at it, and do more of it.
This is why, much as I love physics and don't regret studying it, I also won't tell anybody that it's a surefire career path.
That is by design. A person with complete knowlege is a liability. Workers should be replacable with minimal disruption. It's also less intellectual property to take with you when you leave.
You don't want many people with top-to-bottom knowledge because those people command higher salaries, and because most jobs don't require top-to-bottom knowledge, meaning those higher salaries wouldn't translate into commensurate value being returned to the company.
Also people with top-to-bottom knowledge will tend to want to be promoted, and most won't (because employment is a pyramid, and also see the Gervais Principle) so you'll be left with a pool of frustrated, overpaid employees.
I think a decent rule of thumb might be to have three people with really deep holistic expertise. If there's so much context that it's hard for people to have and maintain that depth, then the organization is successful enough that it can afford to pay a premium for a few of them. And when one of them moves up or out, you have two more to pass on the knowledge to a new third. Maybe two or four or five would be fine too, but three seems to me like it might be about the optimum. But it's very risky to have either zero or one person who knows a system from top to bottom.
In general, our industry lacks a sense of "mechanical sympathy"[0]. Whether it's understanding what knobs are tunable in an operating system or using streams for reading data to keep a consistent memory profile, we often don't dig deep. Ditto for folks understanding database systems.
I think in very big systems, you see folks dig deep, but it's not encouraged with smaller systems. I think there's a lot of inefficiently run services - not from a price perspective but from a "what could I really get out of 3 compute nodes and a well designed database schema."
I think about it a lot. A portion of my job has been either optimizing big systems or building very minimally invasive software that has to process a lot of data.
It’s akin to tuning a sports car. You can slap a big engine in a car, but the difference of a few seconds off of a lap is thousands of man-hours in optimization and tuning.
Absolutely! So much of my 'bag of tricks' is having been around the block so many times that I can sniff these things out. It's a bad way for things to be!
Health insurance navigation and transparency (US):
People who go through dealing with health insurance: a lot of this knowledge is difficult to transfer, but is very valuable, and usually transferred through word-of-mouth. People who suddenly have a need for a treatment or surgery, don't always know what their options are and how to deal with insurance claims in the best manner, or to maximize coverage and deal with extra circumstances.
Efficient extraction of metals (and materials that can be broken down to useful precursors) from landfills and 'e-waste'. My PhD supervisor worked for years before he retired, on, among other things, magnetic separation using inhomogeneous magnetic fields. It would be a great pity if such work were forgotten.
Disclaimer (does it really need one?): On the first link above: I shared responsibility for the menial editing, checking and manual indexing of the entire book volume.
Not sure. I know that the conglomerate Outokumpu once had a pilot plant with high-Tc superconducting magnets deployed in the Amazon region somewhere ('Ice in the jungle'? Hah, hold my beer, try liquid-helium cooled superconducting magnets in the jungle).
I know because a colleague joined the company, and one of his first assignments was to diagnose unexpectedly large helium losses. A quick FFT later of the recorded Dewar flask levels revealed a 24-hour periodicity, and further analysis found that for a couple of hours every day, the full heat of the tropical sun was finding its way to the tin roof of the mine shed housing the superconducting magnet systems.
I haven't heard anything more about the technology or its economics/scaling since then. But I also certainly haven't heard anything more about its use with landfill-derived feedstocks, which seems like a reasonable move.
I'm pretty sure there's a timezone database that's maintained by two guys and literally everything depends on it to get timezones right.
When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word worked. I'm sure they've fixed it by now but back then if you wanted to touch the tables code in Word you had to talk to the tables guy to make sure you wouldn't break everything.
If I remember correctly there's a lot of low level networking code that's basically in this state. I think ntp is maintained by a single person. Curl was written by a single person, not sure who maintains it.
Tons of stuff in the geospatial world is owned and maintained by surprisingly few people like proj and gdal. I'm almost certain I saw something about all GPS code in the world relying on a package maintained by a single person.
, When I was at Microsoft ~10 years ago there was a single guy who truly understood how tables in Word worked. I'm sure they've fixed it by now but back then if you wanted to touch the tables code in Word you had to talk to the tables guy to make sure you wouldn't break everything.*
Every business I've worked in over the past twenty years have two things in common - one person who knows a key piece of thetechnology, and there's a woeful lack of documentation around processes and understanding. There's often reasonably good code docs, but that only ever tells you what the code is trying to do; it doesn't tell you why the code exists in the first place, or what the code should do. If you ever need to check the code is correct there's rarely any resources apart from that one person. In the worst cases that person left a few years before.
I've become quite good at technical writing because I always end up establishing a project to fix the docs.
> it doesn't tell you why the code exists in the first place, or what the code should do
This is one of the worst things in most codebases I see. Today I was told to use function X to solve my problem. Checked: 0 docs on what it does and why/how; although used extensively in the codebase. Read existing code and try to infer it, every damned time.
There are some bugs in browsers that are decades old and they do not get fixed, precisely because of this IMO - no one knows part X of codebase anymore, learning it would take weeks, as it's probably written in idiomatic C++ from 2003 :) and there are other priorities (mostly shipping new stuff).
I wonder if this is actually a more efficient way to run things than every company implementing timezones/tables/curl themselves for each of their needs. current situation isnt ideal but not horrible.
It often is the better way, because you have ONE implementation that everyone uses (even if it might be wrong at some point) vs multiple implementations that are all subtly different and never align.
Computer science. We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation. Now we just talk in terms of how fast it runs on the newest Nvidia cards. Also, most discussions here are about how you can glue existing stuff together and turn it into a profit. I hardly see any real CS anymore these days on online forums, let alone progress. Closest thing I remember is an article that discussed whether CSS stylesheets are Turing complete.
> We used to talk about algorithms in terms of big-O notation.
This is something CS majors often have to un-learn as they enter the world of practical programming. Big-O is just not incredibly useful in reasoning about algorithms as n is always bounded.
Yes, and realistically, you're just as likely to benefit from investigating lock and I/O contention. I wish my work was mostly optimizing single threaded CPU bottlenecks. Would make things a lot easier.
If you're dealing with disk access, sequential access is often so much faster than random I/O even in SSDs (especially in writes) that Big-O can be very misleading to look at.
As far as I know, computer science is still taught in CS degrees though. I think the signal to noise online is much lower because programming is much more accessible to those without a theoretical background, but I'd guess that in terms of raw numbers there are more people graduating with CS degrees who have learned the theory than ever before.
Not tech but I think millenials, gen Z, and younger have lost the know-how to make a dollar independently of mega corps. I never see kids going door to door mowing lawns anymore, for example.
I wonder if that's partly due to people (both young people and the older people that would hire them) being uncertain if they can get away with it these days? There were a bunch of scandals about ten years or so ago about politicians running for office who had housekeepers and didn't pay social security. And kids sometimes get in trouble for running a lemonade stand without a food handler's card or business license or whatever.
There might also be a disconnect between what people think they should pay and what the cost of living is. In other words: maybe people don't do that sort of thing because they'd still be losing money even if they did it full time.
Paper routes were pretty exploitative. The children, often around 12 years old, were/are treated as independent contractors who buy the papers and have to collect the money themselves. Deadbeats could avoid paying for some time, usually until a parent chewed them out. When you went on vacation you were responsible for finding your replacement and paying them.
Throw stranger danger into the mix and it's obvious why kids aren't doing paper routes anymore.
I'm pretty sure that's also because the number of households that get newspaper delivery now is so low, and so the density so low, that it's necessary to have a car to do it.
Did you give up mowing lawns forever based on that one experience?
My stepson related a similar story once. He left out the part about he didn't return to mow until the next day. And the person who mowed was long gone when he arrived.
Not implying you didn't make doing the job a priority. That, however, has been a common them for my stepson.
I disagree with this, I'm (unfortunately) swamped with short videos on how to 'make side hustles' doing just these sorts of things due to the cost of living crisis.
You need a peaceful society for that. Also the State will fine you for not having a license to mow lawns. Something like that. Western world is a post-liberty world.
Non-tech DIY in general is becoming lost. There is so much knowledge available on YouTube but so many of my younger friends just pay people $hundreds to do very simple, quick things. I’m not talking about transmission replacement, but ridiculously simple things like fixing a leaking toilet and changing motor oil.
Re. Changing motor oil example: I gave up doing this when my cars started having non-standard nuts on the oil sump. I had to pay the garage to fit a _headlight_ recently because the bulb was practically inaccessible without either specialist tools or 3 elbows :(
Why? Especially if you have an SUV or higher car you can easily crawl under. Just unscrew the original plug, screw in a Fumoto valve, and an entire oil change is done in under 20 min, and then you just drop off the old oil at Autozone or whatever. While the oil is draining, you can change the air filters too.
Buy the Kirkland brand oil at Costco, and you do not have to trust whoever the mechanic shop hires to bust your car up or use low quality oil.
- Equipment: wrenches, oil collection pan, oil container for transport to disposal, funnel?
- Knowledge: Quality of oils, filters, Oil weights (5W20? 10W30?)
- Willingness: To get dirty, to stain the driveway
- Time: 30min if all goes well, then time to take waste oil to disposal
- Trust: In self
- Funds: $20 for oil and filter, assuming disposal is free
Option 2 requirements:
- Time: 15min, plus a few minutes to drive to the shop
- Trust: In "professionals", misplaced or not
- Funds: $29.95
I change my own oil also, but I have no rational explanation for this choice.
I have the equipment, knowledge, and willingness to take the minor risk of mistake and deal with the consequences. $10 is not a fair wage for those prerequisites!
Of course I use better oil and filters than the shop would. Does this matter? Am I kidding myself? And someday I'll take my plastic milk jugs full of waste oil to a disposal place.
> I change my own oil also, but I have no rational explanation for this choice.
Of course you do. All the items you listed are a small, one time cost. Watch a YouTube video, buy the wrench, pan, and funnel ($50?). The “knowledge” of which oil to use takes 20 seconds to look up in the manual in the glove box of the car. And the disposal is pretty easy, you take the empty oil bottles, fill them back up with old oil, and dump it at Autozone.
And for this initial, let’s say 1 hour of work for procurement, you get to guarantee that the oil change on your car (which represents a significant portion of the average American’s wealth) is done properly, with zero risk of it going wrong.
Now, there is nothing objectively wrong with NOT wanting to do this and just preferring to pay someone else. But for a household with 2 ICE cars that they own for 10+ years, this is very little work for a lot of gain, and watching 1 less Netflix show is probably not going to hurt. The tools for for all of this also take a small space to store.
Which is why I do not consider it a “no brainer” to outsource oil changes.
> Of course I use better oil and filters than the shop would. Does this matter?
Why would it not if you intend on driving the car for 200k miles? My main concern is some minimum wage mechanic not doing the oil change properly. I know they are not getting paid enough to care, and if I have to stop and check to see if it was done properly, I might as well do it myself.
I've probably paid for 5 oil changes in my life. Many dozens done myself.
In those 5 (always while traveling cross country, and purposely done at a Sears or Firestone for national guarantees), I've had the following negative experiences:
- 1 overtightened and stripped plug bolt, requiring three extra days in a hotel while the replacement pan (which they charged me for) was shipped
- 1 case of badly greased up door, floor mats, and steering wheel
- 2 improperly seated crush washers (or inadequately tightened) plug bolts, causing leaks in parking lots
In the latter two cases, I was hundreds of miles away before noticing, but the nearest franchise honored the guarantee.
This can be simplified depending on your car. GM, for example, requires Dexos oil from any manufacturer. Pair that with an OEM filter and you have a 10,000 mile oil change.
The hard part is having the crush washer on hand and remembering to put it on. In my experience, shops have forgotten it too, used the old one, or have over torqued the plug screw. I think this is why many shops aspirate the oil instead.
I mean we're in our 30's, even those millenials who do want to do yardwork as a career have hopefully moved beyond the "knocking on doors to mow lawns" stage.
I think there is some truth to the generational knowledge transfer because the tech industry is still young. That said, we should not expect the generation gap to play an outsized role in tech compared to manufacturing, engineering, etc.
Where the technology is mission critical, healthcare companies have worked for decades to train new developers on 1980’s tech.
In the same way that all cultural understanding can become extinct, we probably are losing some bits of wisdom as older generations age out. The problem is it’s not obvious what bits of wisdom are being lost, even to the aged.
Finally, given Moore’s law, many of the constraints which drove early decisions no longer apply. As long as we are on a hyper-growth curve in technology cost and adoption rates, we will suffer from a lack of wisdom, and need lots of extra energy to be spent on bad ideas in order to make progress.
Eventually, when growth rates slow down, we will have a more developed sense of what technological wisdom looks like in the long term. The good news is, that will happen on its own. The bad news is It’s a long way off.
The 'advanced' nuclear industry has dozens of big players and is raising money like crazy. Everyone wants to mess around with exotic fuel and coolants. But no one cares about the real workhorse reactors anymore like ABWRs, APR-1400, etc. We should be more focused on those imho.
Came here to say that. From what I understand, a lot of nuclear welders retired and because very few projects happened in the past couple of decades, their expertise was not transfered. It is a shame.
Rare plants, and cultivating (not a pun) biological diversity.
For example, there are hundreds of varieties of tomato. There are wild tomatoes from the Andes Mountains to the Everglades. There are thousands of varieties of brassica (a huge genus of plants that includes bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, cabbage, rutabaga, and turnip, etc.)
I was just hearing from the proprietor of a seed company that many of the old guard are retiring and some are having trouble finding people to carry the torch.
Mentioned before by an ex-librarian in this thread as information loss, I'd go further and say we're loosing control of our language in the digital sphere. That's why I'm holding on to markup technologies (SGML/XML) as our best bet for evolving the web and other communication standards - because the alternative are memes, TikTok, and other, worse corporate attention grabs.
There's lots of movement in that space in rust[0][1]. Also in that space are raphlinus' posts about GUI toolkits[2][3]. There was a post about a zig toolkit a while ago too[4]. Another post about a new c GUI toolkit[5]. There might be more cf. [6]
I think a big part of the problem is we seem to have decided, as an industry, that Electron solved application development and in particularly GUIs, and left everything else to rot.
And a lot of the alternatives seem more focused on leveraging specific languages than making the development process easier, which is really the problem that Electron (specifically the HTML/CSS/JS) model solves. Like, I would kill to be able to write a C GUI application with a layout as easy as HTML and style it with CSS, but just not have a web browser or anything be involved.
> Like, I would kill to be able to write a C GUI application with a layout as easy as HTML and style it with CSS, but just not have a web browser or anything be involved.
You can link to different libraries that are part of WebKit, or Firefox?
Something I've noticed in this space is that there exist "standards" which are intended to make systems compatible and useful and modern, but all of these standards are extremely poorly written and cling to outdated paradigms and weird non-standard protocols that aren't used anywhere except small subsets of the manufacturing world. Often you'll have to implement interfaces yourself because there's only one reference C library available that hasn't had any maintenance for years and won't even compile.
At risk of someone posting the xkcd on standards, I would love to see an full industry wide consortium to establish _modern and well designed_ standards, led by people with experience making modern networked services and systems. Specifically around industrial machine controls and data/telemetry collection. A few standards exist that are roughly xml-rpc-ish, but they don't even follow that much as a standard. OPC-UA is the latest "standard" to be making the rounds and is (IMO) doomed to fail due to its layers of complexity and unclear specifications.
Sort of related but I, a 28 year old tech guy, am going back to school part-time to get a BEng so I can get into more aerospace-heavy roles. It'll take 6 years but I'm currently happy with my work so am not in a rush. Currently I work in networking/search for a defense startup so it's tangentially related.
>Sort of related but I, a 28 year old tech guy, am going back to school part-time to get a BEng so I can get into more aerospace-heavy roles.
Best of luck to you friend. Absolutely worth it if you can hack it. I tried at 26 after a few years in the industry, and failed miserably. Protip: pay for a good math tutor.
I've just noticed FlexCNC machines for the first time. It's a bridge CNC with a long bed, they start at $209,000, so I'm not getting one... but the idea of a CNC bed sufficiently long that you don't need pallet swapping, you just load jobs wherever the bridge isn't, seems like it could be quite productive.
They use a helical rack instead of a ball screw, which makes sense in 50 foot long machines. It's welded construction, so no huge castings, quite interesting.
We're going to need a lot of machining here in the US as the world deglobalizes.
Possibly industrial automation and control systems
I heard once from a recruiter that a lot of the air traffic communications in the defense industry are losing old timers and there's not enough young blood to replace them. That could've just been him trying to sell me the job though
All things related to mainframe, cics, cobol etc.
It seems like it has been tried to replace it for decades.
But it also seems like that replacement is not getting anywhere.
I directly worked on the planning of a replacement deposits system for a major financial institution. The existing system was written in COBOL and the vendor did not want to continue any business, including maintenance support, on this old software. We were already able to extend the software ourselves without their help to add integrations or features.
Consultants came in and offered the following suggestions:
1) Write new software to replace. Estimate $3-400 million dollars.
2) Use a product that would transpile the COBOL to Java.
We chose option 3: offer a lump sump to license the software in perpetuity and maintain ourselves. Built a layer around it to better enable the systems of engagement use cases.
The problem with #1 and #2 is documenting all the use cases and validating them after changes are made. Can you even imagine the resulting Java code for #2? There are many edge case behaviors that were either purposeful or accidental, but now relied upon by downstream software.
To summarize, there's a huge price tag to replace these systems, it's an extremely high risk exercise, and the benefits to the business are at best incremental. It's easy to see why the financial sector won't bother until either regulators force them or they acquire another institution with a better system.
This is the most real answer so far. Knowledge is being lost in the field, very few want to learn the field, and it is needed in just about every company. Companies that existed in the 80s and have managed to migrate off of the mainframe are the very very small minority.
Pay is part of this, but I'd posit that most programmers would need to be paid a hefty premium over standard rates to be will to work on what they consider legacy or dying technology.
I found this to be an area that really doesn’t want motivated people, just entry level blank slate newcomers.
I tried to get into this field for four years and gave up. I’ve got 10+ years as a UNIX guy mind you. I participated in IBM master the mainframe every year to get real hands-on experience and practice. I did IBMs courses on Coursera for more practice. I read the red books to learn even more! I also took classes at an community college on IBM midranges too as a potential alternative to mainframes; I interned at a factory and worked with RPG-IV and AS/400 way back. Yet I didn’t get a single reply to a resume I sent out, not even a follow up email.
If you really look into this, IBM and their network of partner companies that do mainframes are really only looking for entry level folks out of college or 2 year schools. My guess is that companies have slashed their mainframe budgets so much they can’t afford non-entry level folks, and assumed experienced techs won’t take the pay cuts. It won’t be until the mass retirements that organizations will really panic I suppose…
It was at least fun learning the tech though, would love to had the opportunity to learn even more. Or even just have access to a system z to continue learning on…
Going back to basics. The fun there is in understanding the low-levels and being able to tinker is one of the most satisfying thing. Unfortunately we have added so much abstract layers over things using technology that no one knows anymore what exactly is happening under those abstract layers.
I remember my Dad use to do DIY of almost everything in the house, Radio repair, Grinder-Mixer repair, TV repair, Plumbing, Carpentry, Stove repair, Fan repair, Building his own tools for work, Electricals of the house, Sewing machine repair, Scooter repair(hell, he once even built a small moped for his boss's daughter!). And he had limited resources i.e. lack of tools. His education? A basic Diploma in electronics, in native language(not English) in a remote village and completed just few years after the country became independent from British rule?
But he was not unique. Most of my neighbours use to do DIY of most things. We are losing that art.
This may not be the type of answer you're looking for but near me insurance companies (AmFam, Sentry, etc) pay extremely well for the area and pay big money to purchase startups
I and my colleagues have done consulting work for several insurance companies. I'd love to develop some sick claim processing/auditing software or data management solution for insurance, but it's next to impossible to get visibility into the data they're processing and where the improvement opportunities lie without working there or having an in.
I'm guessing the cycle is; work at an insurance company, figure out a solution to their problem, ask your boss if you can work on that solution, be told no, quit and start a startup to do it, sell it to that company, get bought by that company.
This sounds complicated but remember that there is little downside risk for the insurance company that buys you. If you don't make a good product, then you or your investors are out the cash, and they are out $0. This is probably 99% of cases. If you do make a good product, then they can just buy it later when the $ is worth less! (There is also a risk that a competitor buys you, I guess.)
> processing and where the improvement opportunities lie without working there or having an in.
This isn't institutionally crazy.
It's an old, old, story. Lots of people feel like they can come in from the outside to a complex domain, apply some "generic" techniques etc, and make changes with huge positive impact. They usually wrong, usually enough that many people feel safe just ignoring the possibility.
Chance of success is much higher by building capability internally for the techniques with people who already understand the domain well. This however runs into both internal politics and moribund institutions so can be a real challenge.
One of the big startup purchases that happened while I was there was of a company that used machine learning to estimate the value of items in a room, ostensibly to guess how much your furniture and electronics are worth. Insurance companies are already good at actuarial sciences so they don't need you to estimate how likely someone is to file a claim, they need you to do things they're not good at
I've done so much work in this space that I wrote up a patern that I modify as needed. The only data-specific issues you'll encounter are the underwriting rules - each insurer has their own secret sauce that they guard very closely.
Lisp, Smalltalk are the first family of important tech fading to oblivion due to time passing and corporate interest. Most people do not think them in such terms but they represent The Real Desktop tech, the user programmable flexible environment to live in to free the power of computing. Without it, like today, our civilization lost an immense opportunity. We need people that work to push desktop systems, single-applications flexible systems where anything is a function, easy to combine, change and extend as the user wish. Simple and powerful enough end users can use and change.
Domestic food production is another, far simpler, not that exiting, but still important: these days some children do not even know where came from something they eat. Without any catastrophic scenario any society need to know at least superficially anything essential to survive. This include for instance basic knowledge about tools for instance to grind and pack meat to make salami, tools to sterilize and store vacuumed foods etc new tools to modernize and made such process a pleasure to do.
Last but not least generic knowledge, generic tools. We have gazillions of hyper-specialist in any fields and veeeeery few able to see the big picture. We have gazillion of tools for doing a thing and only one. We need generic stuff. Standards not made like https://xkcd.com/927/ but made and updated to be useful and spread. This is the essence of most tech, including the generic desktops cited above, including solar panels with maaaany cells one after another, including bricks, simple thing we can use to made a wall, a house, a bridge, ... it's very hard to made anything in such domain, but it's tremendously useful once done. In the past we have seen some examples here and there, nowadays nobody care.
EDI gateways and conversion. Super important to large companies and the existing companies that can convert and manage the stream of it are incompetent at best. Small companies that interface with large companies use 3rd party gateways for conversion and compliance purposes. Great MRR business if you don't mind boring and no how to build reliable systems.
It seems to me the problem is we are losing all the knowledge of the 'old generation'. This problem is wider than just in the tech industry. What we need is a tech that can capture the knowledge of Elders and individuals before it is lost. And also be able to access it in some way to answer questions and solve problems without having to analyse each person's contribution individually.
I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to).
The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make them like they used to" rings true.
I hired a carpenter a few years ago and we became friends / stay in touch. He had just started his own company in 2018 and the work he did for me he did with a “helper”. By 2020, he ran 5 crews and jumped in where needed to help keep deadlines and whatnot. In 2022, he said he hasn’t picked up a hammer in over a year other than training his crews of which he now has 12. All the growth has been entirely word of mouth, they all drive plain white construction vehicles without his company branding on them and he has never marketed his company at all.
What i mean is that construction as a whole is a completely overlooked market.
Working in that space since almost 5 years after product development in and for several industries for 20+ years.
It’s highly complex but the user group is an overlooked and diverse set of people that have to put up with less than crappy solutions for getting their jobs done - for the chaos that is construction.
So many opportunities and space for innovation that is not another food delivery service for meteopolitan areas but meaningful tools for people in dire need.
Latham identified industry inefficiencies, condemning existing industry practices as 'adversarial', 'ineffective', 'fragmented', 'incapable of delivering for its clients' and 'lacking respect for its employees'.
From 1994, almost two decades later and not much has changed.
Work is being done in this area, but it doesn't move as fast as people would think. Milwaukee is doing a lot of electric/battery tool development that replaces/enhances gas tools, and there are new construction methods that take time to be adopted.
Two off-hand that I can think of are "cast and move" bridges and hollowcore.
Construction moves very slowly because of the permitting process and the equipment investments. You also have to deal with the realities - if you build a standard house via the methods everyone around you uses, you'll have no problem finding people to perform maintenance on it. If you build it differently, people may not know how to deal with it, even if the method is technically better.
Many "US builders" are stealing techniques from Europe and vice versa.
I'm currently working in this space and agree - very underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more served because more money is involved, residential is underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time without some real movement.
There’s process and digital tools on the one end and on the other the ugly truth that almost everyone building spaces - be it commercial or residential - will be fed up with the low wages they get for the treciourous work they have to do in most cases since the number of people in “western countries” willing to work in construction is rapidly falling.
Lessons learned modeling complex systems, outside the domains of computing and the data sciences, into code.
Over a decade was spent by enterprises designing software using Structured Analysis (data-flow modeling) - lessons lost. Functional decomposition as a design methodology lessons learned - forgotten. Data modeling lessons learned - we are all the way back to people proposing stored procedures for logic. Object-oriented modeling - deprecated, unfashionable and obscured by “its about messaging” or “code organization” in a world that supposedly should be entirely functional.
A lot of manufacturing operations are having trouble getting the skilled workers they need, like precision machinists, because the older generation is retiring and there aren't enough people learning those occupations.
When you read discussions of "going into the trades" instead of going to college, there is almost never a mention of the skilled trades. It all seems to be construction, and I think that's a mistake.
A search engine for court cases (every country has something of this sort) bootstrapping latest semantic search, topic modeling, summarization and other cool use cases once you have vectorized the text in each court case. (LLM)
I think legacy technology experience is important when comparing the efficiency of current technology. The web provides access to legacy technology and it depends on industry requirements and practices when it comes to utilizing the various technology options.
Copper based telephony systems. So much knowledge in peoples heads, not just technical how-to but system and network knowledge. These things were built by people with quirks understood by people and are mission critical still.
They will be replaced by IP and fibre, but not yet.
The question was "boring but important" not "pointless." I tease, but I've worked on a lot of government tech and their only use cases are surveillance and lying. It's why PowerBI is so popular.
Every car built in the last 20 years can detect when a bulb blows. Doesn't seem like it accomplishes much given how many people just straight up ignore warning lights on their dashes.
My startup is working on solutions to crop failure scenarios such as from a nuclear war.
Unfortunately we calculate there are probable outcomes where the only reasonable course of action is for one selected group to actually consume parts of the population in order to survive a nuclear winter.
And so we’re building an automated system to take a newly deceased human being and create as many wholesome and nutritious meals from the remains as possible, in a dignified manner. We’re also trying to figure out how the consumption could play out in an orderly fashion where the old and those with non communicable diseases (but are never the less dependent at a time where the burden is too great for society), can be respectfully consumed first, and then in order of value to a future society, with those scoring least being respectfully consumed first, and so on.
We are envisioning a type of sleeping capsule with a cover that seals the user from the elements and fallout materials, providing clean air, heat and water. These could be deployed quickly. As the starvation continues the capsules would, every other night, fairly, amongst those of an equal social value, reduce the oxygen during sleep for a painless and stress free passing, and then alert others in the prospect to convert the remains into new rations.
It’s out there, but we’re serious. Based on reasonable logic in a bad situation. Important, but nobody seems to care. When 5 billion people have nothing left to eat then they’ll care.
Let's assume your projections are right and cannibalism is unavoidable like you say. You will never sell any of this technology. There is no need for it until there is a nuclear winter, so nobody will buy before it happens. After it happens nobody will buy anything. The only thing that could invest in something like this is government, but no government will commit political suicide by funding machine-assisted cannibalism.
Sounds like the same technology could be used to kill animals in a more ethical way. Perhaps you could market it as an ethical cow killing machine or something? Then you might even be able to continue secretly pursuing the cannibalism tech agenda, making sure the cow-killers can be easily repurposed into man-killers.
Anyways it sounds like you are an aspiring Bond villain, so I wish you good luck fighting spies and superheroes. When you inevitably trap one in one of these capsules don't turn around until they are 100% dead! Thats how they get you!
If you are serious about your business, you should think more about the PR aspect of it. Without any planning or preparation you have an absolutely guaranteed PR disaster on your hands. Your product needs careful messaging and some kind of strategy for what to do about the inevitable “can’t believe this is real” news stories.
a cool thing about late business cycle "speculation" (VC in this case probably) is that really pie in the sky projects get cash, creating sometimes successes
