What are some examples of IRL lostech?
Some technological capability humanity has really lost. Not looking for stuff like greek fire or the pyramids where we're not 100% sure how they did it but it doesn't matter because we have napalm and killdozer.
All I can think of is those toasters that don't operate off timers and always make the perfect toast. It has been multiple generations since they were last produced.
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You can still get them they're just 20x the price of the cheap shitty toasters.
Real example might be the LM3909. Single purpose computer chip who's sole function was to blink indicator lights, did it more efficiently at lower voltages than any chip we have currently, hasn't been manufactured since the '80s due to patent BS and may possibly be a lost design.
(Me)
Small correction, apparently they stopped making them in '95, I misremembered.
Where can I buy a nice, high quality American-made toaster, anon?
eBay or this dude if you want a restoration
https://www.timstoasters.com/
Same company made a nice waffle iron with a done-ness timing system around the same time too. They're neat little gadgets.
There's also this guy for a variety of other designs from the 20's to the 50's.
https://www.toastercentral.com/toaster30s.htm
If you adjust for inflation these old Kitchen appliances are often several hundred dollars in today's money. It's probably why they were advertised as wedding gifts instead of just a general appliance you could get whenever and sometimes came with serving trays in a deluxe edition.
I once dated this farm girl who's bathroom was stuck in 1950s decor. The razor slot, the four knob water faucet, pink 4x4 tiles, the sink the tub.
I loved it, though I will always bawd for Art Deco.
>Where can I buy a nice, high quality American-made
So I've worked in product development, and seen many rants by Engineers in product development that the "planned obsolescence" is a myth and it's actually a direct consequence of people wanting more features for cheaper. Given a budget you've got a balance between longevity and being able to play angry birds on your fridge as it automatically updates your shopping list for you and renews your Amazon subscription then automatically orders six dozen eggs every day due to a software bug. Nobody actually wanted those features, but they're actually part of a sales strategy which increases sales and profits therefore it gets shoehorned whether or not it's merely generating psychological sales and not logical sales.
What you ACTUALLY want to buy are commercial appliances, the ones that cost more than a cheap dirtbike. What you'll find is adjusted for inflation, that's what quality appliances have always cost.
>What are some examples of IRL lostech?
Environmental regulations have impacted a lot of industries. Heat pumps are a good example, the survivorship bias you see is partly because they can't use certain working fluid/gas, because the more durable working parts aren't energy efficient, and because you want it cheaper than ever. This saves a lot of electricity and environmental hazard in the long run, but also puts more than half a dozen refrigerators in the landfill for every BIFL you inherited from your grandparents. Normal sized trucks are another example. Regulations were supposed to result in more efficient trucks, but instead manufacturers meta-gamed the details and kept expanding the wheel base, at the same time marketing realized the psychology of selling bigger look-at-my-dick-size makes more profit. Now you literally can't buy a normal sized truck in the States, nobody makes them because it's not min-maxing profits given well intended regulations.
>Now you literally can't buy a normal sized truck in the States, nobody makes them because it's not min-maxing profits given well intended regulations.
Shouldn't the Japanese still sell trucks that don't need a forklift to load?
>Shouldn't the Japanese still sell trucks that don't need a forklift to load?
Yes. They do.They're called Kei Trucks. They're lovely vehicles. They are difficult to get inside of the United States.
That ceramic with insane heat dissipation that some guy made 2 samples of, couldn't sell because he was too erratic with his asking price, and likely destroyed the documentation for before he died.
Kei trucks are actually one of the easier vehicles to import in the US but they don't meet safety/performance regulations to be driven on highways. They aren't too uncommon in cities
I saw the recording of the old BBC demonstration of that.
Some people also suspect he mixed PVA Glue or another already licensed product in for binding which he was worried about.
My boss had that problem, he had to hold onto a rustbucket van because all the new ones are too tall and anything the right height would have far less space inside. It's bizarre.
A quick search shows the Tacoma is in small dick mode now. Depressing.
English motherfricker, do you speak it?
>My boss had that problem, he had to hold onto a rustbucket van because all the new ones are too tall and anything the right height would have far less space inside. It's bizarre.
I think this is the same issue with housing and apartments, all the new construction is focused on "bloated profit margins" and not "what's actually necessary". On the ladder of problems stacked together, pure rent seeking bullshit is at the top with crap like automated software automated price collusion on a significant portion of the market while private investment firms intentionally create shortages to inflate the value of their assets at everybody else's expense, but the next rung down is the inexorable corporate psychology of bottom line profits even if you force them to actually contribute anything to the market.
>Ganker simply thrives on a certain level of activity, one that discussion is quick and common enough to be considered alive but not between so many users as to be completely impersonal and ephemeral.
I really miss (4+4)chan for this. Boards had more than double the threads, post limits, image limits, etc, which allowed for a nice of mix of fast and slow topics on the same board. (4+4)chan itself and a lot of the communities were shit, but the software and misc conveniences it added were a huge improvement on classic Ganker.
Come to think of it, (4+4)chan is dead and it's name is STILL blocked from posting.
I liked that sound webms were enabled by default and it's fricking nuts to me that it's 2014+10 and we STILL don't have sound webms on all boards.
The usual excuse I see is that anons would just post screamer videos if sound webms were enabled.
And yet somehow screamers were never much of an issue on the other site.
>and it's name is STILL blocked from posting
>asked to clarify if you meant 8 chan
>"our system thinks your post is spam"
Huh. I learned something new.
Cont.
This is a great example. Most Lostech in fiction is something like "The only factory blew up with every senior engineer before they could train their replacements" but somehow we never redevelop the thing despite being 99% of the way there with underlying tech. The more believable fiction is "it got banned".
What actually happens 99% of the time is something legalese wraps something in knots.
>Also, Trinary computers
This one is held back by the sheer amount of fundamentals you'd need to redevelop. Binary computers sit on a throne of 50 years of entrenched dependencies, and this is weighed against the minor gains and losses on specific things that binary computers will outpace anyway in the time it takes to reinvent fundamentals for competitive Trinary computing. It's like starting a race when the other guy is already across the finish line.
>Shouldn't the Japanese still sell trucks that don't need a forklift to load?
They do, as do a lot of countries around the world. There's a ton of regulations keeping you from just importing them. That would undermine the American companies wanting to sell trucks to Americans (despite the fact they clearly don't give a frick about America). Asia can make a 10,000$ electric car just as functional as your 2003 Sedan, you just can't import it.
But if people actually cared about market competition, Dealerships would be gone with all the owners and salespeople pending public hanging, and public transit and railways wouldn't have been publicly murdered.
>But if people actually cared about market competition, Dealerships would be gone with all the owners
This is the weirdest shit if you think about it. Way I've heard it is car manufacturers would love to sell cars directly to consumers but dealerships waive around some ancient law to force manufacturers to sell to them, so they can take their cut before selling to the customers. You'd think in American all business, all the time politics this would be an easy thing for the manufacturers to solve: Just bribe eh I mean "lobby" for the removal of that law. But they can't!?
Eh, dunno about "they would love to". I think they would like to in theory, because having full control of distribution is what every corporation would prefer, as long as it's not too much of a hurdle to do it. Seeing how every mass media entertainment company launched their own streaming platform, and every major video game publisher has launched their own storefront.
But setting up digital infrastructure is much easier than setting up physical infrastructure, and there's way less legislation and regulation concerning digital stuff than there is physical stuff. And the auto dealership industry is like 5 times larger than the video game industry.
All that to say, owning your own distribution "would be nice", but not nice enough to justify an entire socio-politico-logistical campaign to overturn the status quo.
As is right now, auto manufacturers still get their profit, lose some control over distribution, but don't have to pay the cost of distribution, and the end consumer eats the price. Manufacturers have the freedom to price things up or down.
With video games, there's an established expected static price for an AAA title: around $60. Nobody's going to pay $300 for a video game, regardless of how cutting edge it is. So, there's no luxury market, and the price is set. And the only way to make more money is to sell more units. Of course they'd want to get rid of the 30% storefront cut.
Meanwhile, dealerships can probably just pass the 30% cut onto the customers, so they don't care much. Especially given how expensive lobbying, marketing, propagandizing and then setting up your own infrastructure could be.
Remember, the small to medium business owners are weaker than the corporations, but they can still put up a fight. It's the proles who are powerless. So if it's the proles who are eating the shit sandwich, the corpos and the medium businesses would rather not fight each other.
With streaming you mention a very good example of vertical integration. Netflix for example produces and distributes its shows.
Historically vertical integration was always popular in the entertainment industry. Studios used to own the whole value chain down to the cinemas showing their movies. That is until the government stepped in and broke all of that up.
I'd venture manufacturers stand to similarly gain more than a little control in the long run. Not least is actual data of what people, living were, want which cars, in which colors, with which extras, how much would they be willing to pay and so on. Building the dealership side is costly yes, but you then get to show your cars in luxurious environments and employ the whole Apple store/Starbucks array of tricks. You can later on build workshops in the back where the customer has to go to get their vehicle repaired also like Apple/John Deere.
Selling a car once is for suckers. You have to continually bilk the customer with Transportation as a service. 😉
>Engineers in product development that the "planned obsolescence" is a myth
>people wanting more features for cheaper
>Nobody actually wanted those features, but they're actually part of a sales strategy
Sure sounds like the obsolescence is planned, just not by the engineers. Which should be no surprise to anyone.
I want less features for less cost. I don't want my car/truck to have motorized seats, or even electric windows.
Just a radio/CD player/MP3 player or something. And heat.
Anywhere that sells kitchen appliances aimed at the catering or hospitality industry.
I wouldn't call it lost technology since the patent information is publicly available, but Sunbeam stopped making that type of toaster because cost cutting (and fraud) measures of their late 90's CEO Albert J. Dunlap. If someone wanted to recreate the toaster and sell it today they could attempt it, though I'm not sure if today's consumers would possible pay more for a toaster that just toasts bread with a novel method.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2667828
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2459170A
Also yes, ultimately the toaster is quite simple and ingenious, especially in comparison to toasters from the same era. 30's through 50's toasters used complex clock mechanism for their timing instead of a simple piece of metal they shuts the toaster off once the surface temperature has reached the desired heat.
Don't indicator lights blink with a shape memory alloy that springs back and forth opening and closing a circuit?
Or do they just run off the cars computer now?
CRT Televisions are sort of like this. Not in the sense that we don't know how they work and couldn't produce them again if we wanted to, but that the factories that have the capacity to do color and high quality ones don't exist anymore and hobbyists can't really replicate them in the garage. There will be a time where no more will be in service and people won't really be able to build them again without a massive amount of for the industrial equipment to get the right precision needed.
Also, Trinary computers. Again, not exactly lost knowledge, but it's an experimental tech from the 60s or so that lost out in the war against binary computing because binary computers were more simple to produce despite being less efficient/capable in some ways.
Outdated technology that we no longer have any reason to produce is not lost technology.
Actually with both there's a point. CRT actually required less data and was fairly scalable.
Trinary systems are have greater processing speeds and gar more efficient with disk space.
It's not outdated technology. It's technology that doesn't optimize for profit in the current manufacturing landscape. That is an entirely different and frankly totally unrelated category. They're sidegrade technology - better at some things, worse than others.
>in the current manufacturing landscape
I remember a company that had pre-orders for replica FG42 rifles. The real deal used a lot of stamped steel manufacturing which had an enormous upfront investment cost and was only a good choice for mass production volumes. So it turned out too expensive to make accurate replicas on their pre-order budget, they had to use a mix of methods with cheaper upfront costs and sort-of replicate real design features. The resulting abominations only kind of resembled an FG42 the way a capgun from the toystore resembles anything.
I was the big sad on seeing what they delivered, not that I'd bought or pre-ordered one.
CRTs are power hungry monsters that were heavier, required not insiginificant amounts of rare metals, emit not insignificant amounts of xrays, and never offered significant fidelity superiority over all but the oldest liquid crystal displays, let alone modern LED displays.
>heavier
That can be good for some situations and bad in others.
>not insignificant amounts of rare metals
That's a problem for both devices.
>emit not insignificant amounts of xrays
True. And a fixable issue.
>fidelity superiority
Enough for nearly all use-cases, and the fuzziness can be used to enhance the visuals with competent design. (You see this in retro games and UIs.)
They were also cheap to make, much easier to repair, less fragile in the first place, and were more efficient in footprint on furniture or in a room. If we go into technical details, it goes more in the CRTs favor. And all of this is tangential to my real point: that technology gets changed out for a lot more reasons than categorical obsolescence and trying to frame it that way is at best reductive and at worst active deception.
>That can be good for some situations and bad in others.
If you need a device to be heavier you can just anchor it or add ballast.
>That's a problem for both devices.
The rare metal use in LEDs is quite a lot less and LCDs use organic compounds, not rare metals.
>True. And a fixable issue.
It isn't. Xray emission is how a CRT works.
>Enough for nearly all use-cases, and the fuzziness can be used to enhance the visuals with competent design. (You see this in retro games and UIs.)
The fidelity is "enough", but inferior to other technologies which are also better in every other way. Fuzziness can trivially be added to an image.
>They were also cheap to make, much easier to repair, less fragile in the first place, and were more efficient in footprint on furniture or in a room.
This isn't even close to true. They were bulky and expensive, whereas nowadays you can buy a TV that will sit near flush against the wall and has ten times the screen for the same cost, even corrected for inflation. As far as repair goes, while some CRTs could have modules removed and replaced rather than replacing the whole unit, this is a result of the CRTs just having way more components than the technology that replaced it. They were not less fragile, as due to their heavy weight even a short tumble could easily blow out the glass or dislodge the internal components.
>And all of this is tangential to my real point: that technology gets changed out for a lot more reasons than categorical obsolescence
Occasionally, but usually not. And certainly not in the case of CRTs. They sucked ass, and everyone who ever had one is glad they're gone.
shouldn't that be mostly fixed by 3d printers? considering how they are advancing, still making a hollow piece of glass and creating a high level of void inside should be a bit difficult since that is more of a mechanical process instead of something a micro scale. About trinary computation that maybe would get revisited if the current microprocessor technology reaches a hard limit and quatum doesn't offer anything better or more compatible that it
3d printers aren't going to be making CRT tvs for a long time. CRT tvs are also pretty terrible to use they're extremely heavy and bulky. I have a 13" one that that's more than enough for playing PS2 games.
>Trinary computers
I remember seeing those in a Mage: The Ascension book, didn't know they were a real thing.
They had them in Schlock Mercenary, instead of Bits they had breasts.
The concept is pretty simple. You know how a computer bit is a 0 or 1? Well a Trinary computer just uses 0, 1, or 2, or in a different way of thinking about it, -1, 0, 1. It allows you to do some operations with far less calculations than a binary machine could do them in, but the machinery is more complex to manufacture and the system harder for people to wrap their head around than simple binary.
I think it's a neat concept, but it's a lot like saying the metric system is superior to the imperial one--it has advantages, but those advantages don't outweigh the inertia of getting the US to switch because really both systems provide the same empirical functionality.
Doesn't binary come from transistors having either a positive or negative charge? Where does the third thing come from?
It comes from either having a charge or not having a charge. Trinary comes from not having a charge, having a small charge, or having a large charge.
You can also use positive charge, no charge, and negative charge in balanced trinary systems, though that creates a bunch of implementation weirdness.
Yeah, all that weirdness is part of the problem with implementing it. It's really easy to have on/off, it's harder to have off and varying degress of on.
fogbank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
3D holographic stickers.
Not rainbow glitter stuff. Not authenticity stickers, not the stickers with ridged plastic that kids pretended they used to be scratching vinyl records, but lasers-to-make-a-3D-image-on-film holographic sticker. They used to be a dime a dozen, but now you're hard pressed to find overstock from the 80s much less anything newly made.
Which is surprising as the price of lasers have gone way down, and computers could easily take the place of physical photography to render 3D images onto the film. Instead, besides the back of a credit card I hardly ever see them anymore.
Man I was wondering why I never see that stuff anymore. Does that apply to those cool eyeball sunglasses?
I think you can still come across those glasses in novelty stores, but the generic dinosaurs, space ships, skulls, and Star Trek tie-ins used to be in everything from checkout counters at the supermarket to inside sugared cereal boxes. Now all I can find are "Authentic product" labels for god knows what from India and China.
>those toasters that don't operate off timers and always make the perfect toast
literally just a shitty minaturized spectrophotometer staring at the bread
being out of fashion isn't lost tech
actual good lostech: the rocket-assisted orbital cannon that burger designed for Saddam to shoot his nooks at israel
noone knows if it would've worked, noone produced anything like that ever since
The proliferation of security holograms is pretty much why. While making a one-off hologram is easy, it's a real b***h to mass produce them and the companies with the equipment to do it just make security shit for the financial sector now.
I always thought true holographs looked dark and murky. Like seeing something in a pond. Impressive tech but just not nice to look at
Weirdly enough there was a little hole in the wall shop in my hometown that sold 3D stickers and novelties. I have no idea what they imagined would be the demand for it was, but it was an honest to god brick and mortar store JUST for holograms. I remember it was dark and all the hologram toys were on black velvet counters and the weird dude dressed in black who worked there would quietly go around spinning these disc things that generated 3D image illusions. This would have been in the late 80s or early 90s, because I was old enough to be walking around downtown by myself.
Damascus steel
Antikythera mechanism
Most of the 7 wonders of the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lost_inventions
>Most of the 7 wonders of the world
Do people really not understand how a big pile of rocks was constructed? Like, the specifics of labour rotations and what tackle they used, sure, exactly how many goat bladders it took to float the quarried stone down a river, whatever, but is there an actual human being with an education who can't comprehend how a million chinks managed to stack some rocks together to form a wall over the span of like a thousand years?
One of those boulders weigh as much as your mom, in other words nearly impossible to move without some dark magic or futuristic science.
There's a dude who figured out how to do it with one person in his back yard.
>Not looking for stuff like greek fire or the pyramids where we're not 100% sure how they did it but it doesn't matter because we have napalm and killdozer.
Yet your example is a toaster we 100% know how it's made, we just don't make them because it'd cost a touch more than the what we normally do nowadays?
>Damascus steel
That one sits in between Greek fire and the toaster. We know very well what that is and how to make it. A number of modern day craftsmen do (and no, I'm not just talking about pattern welding, but the jawhar/bulat/pulad/wootz stuff here), simply searching for wootz on youtube should give you a few (first Is tumbled on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTKtth2oVlw ). But obviously the expert craftsmen of the 18th century could show the craftsmen of today a number of tips and tricks regarding the whole affair.
See:
https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/9809/verhoeven-9809.html
https://www.academia.edu/397355/Crucible_Damascus_Steel_A_Fascination_for_Almost_2_000_Years
https://www.mediafire.com/file/zoyjlnmyjtw/Wootz_articles.zip/file
Rivkin, "A study of the Eastern Blade"
And for some more historical accounts: Khorasani, "Arms and Armor from Iran"
>Antikythera mechanism
Since the others in your post were deboonked I'll post about this one.
Its not even particularly interesting gear work. Thats all it is. Its a little planetarium running on hand tooled gears. Little more than a fancy clock, without the springs, you have to turn it yourself.
At least 2 people I'm aware of have built it using period accurate tools.
Its certainly very impressive for the time, but its not anything we don't know the greeks were capable of. They had novelty steam power and a bunch of other neat inventions.
Did they ever rediscover the formula for Greek fire?
There are several plausible candidates (recipes that could have been made at the time to similar effect) but no definitive proof of what actually was used. Which makes sense given how tight the secret was kept even at the time.
>Damascus steel
not even slightly lost. we know the sources for the ores, we know how to do it. In fact I know a few who do. Its usually called "crucible steel" or "wootz" nowadays. Making it is a pain in the breasts, for a material that is a nightmare to forge as it doesn't flow under the hammer like modern steels, so has little in the way of commercial applications - a modern homogenous steel does the same job in terms of function, at a fraction of the cost. But its in no ways lost.
- yes, I am a historical bladesmith. I know the people doing that stuff.
>Antikythera mechanism
is just clockwork. Exactly like a million high-end wristwatches made every day. The only thing "lost" about it was what the mechanism was trying to compute or model.
Yeah the mystery of Damascus steel is widely misunderstood. It's not that we can't replicate it, it's that we don't know how it was made historically. None of the 10th century forges we've found would've been able to produce temperatures high enough to do it the modern way.
Roman concrete.
Apparently they actually figured this out a few years back, the exact recipe depended on volcanic ash and use of seawater rather than fresh water.
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-modern-mortar-crumbles-roman-concrete-lasts-millennia
Reminds me of viking swords being forged with bones for spiritual reasons, turns out the carbon in them made it into quality steel that wouldn't be seen elsewhere for hundreds of years from then.
>concrete and iron were the foundation of civilization
>both depended on freak impurities the people making them might not have even known about
Really activates the almonds.
>turns out the carbon in them made it into quality steel that wouldn't be seen elsewhere for hundreds of years from then.
That's bullshit I'm afraid, someone misheard/misremembered the bit about some Viking swords being made with imported central Asian crucible steel, then (unconsciously, we'd hope) used the bit about tossing in bones to fill in the blanks and make an appealing story. The internet might not be on dial-up any more but it sure loves a game of telephone. (And as a quick if admittedly very simplified reality check: bone does have a meaningful amount of carbon mixed in with all the calcium phosphate, but remember that all the charcoal the smith has filled the forge with is nearly 100% carbon.
Thing is, you need to completely encase the sword in bone ash inside a clay vessel and then heath that over hours to achieve carbon transfer to the surfarce. It's not as easy as dropping bone chips in the fire or whatever.
A real-life example of "abandoned Soviet experiment" is the NK-33 closed circuit rocket engine. Originally intended for use in the attempt to get a man on the Moon, the prototypes were supposed to be destroyed once that project was cancelled. Fortunately, several NK-33 engines were hidden in a warehouse by their designer, Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kuznetsov. That happened in the 70s. Fast forward to the 90s, when somewhat improved relations between East and West, and presumably some money, helped the old relics emerge from storage, where they proved to be still cutting edge tech despite being two decades old when they were found. The technology behind the NK-33 allows it to be a very efficient engine, and Wikipedia is to be believed, the NK-33 achieves a thrust-to-mass ratio that is among the highest among all currently existing rocket engines, and that is for an engine that is over four decades old.
>this Soviet tech is absolutely revolutionary and superior to all contemporary stuff!
>may we see it?
>n-no, it's lostech
>but Russia stronk!
I'll believe that when I see it.
Funny enough, that was the initial reaction when they were offered it to western aerospace companies after the Cold War. About 60 engines survived in the "Forest of Engines", as described by engineers on a trip to the warehouse. In the mid-1990s, Russia sold 36 engines to Aerojet General for $1.1 million each, shipping them to the company facility in Sacramento CA. During the engine test they lived up to the hype. More of them have been used in western rockets since then.
>well documented historical event
>n-no it didn't happen!
Frick off.
While generally Soviet tech was inferior, there are a limited few areas where the Soviets were competitive. Rocket and jet engines are amongst these.
Soviets had no choice but to make their engines better, as everything else they built was so much heavier since they never developed decent miniaturization techniques.
>cutting edge tech despite being two decades old
That is what happens when tech moves to make LEO cheaper, instead of moon landing.
Then again, the Soviets are famed for how much shit they stuffed into warehouses, because everything is just military secrets. Or the army might just make a few copies each few years, and hoard the tech.
In the US system there would at the least be a paper trail, a patent, and some uni students who would do underfunded work on the design a decade later to see if tech advancements was big enough. Or the patenter would do private industry work and see if the patent is still feasible a decade or two later.
>nearly impossible to move
Meh
The biggest factor is that manpower is now heinously expensive, but machines and material is extremely cheap.
Today's society can't do something like moving the Grom-kamen from somewhere in Finland to Petersburg: Because to do so would require it to be chopped into movable pieces in order to use the road network.
Trying to do the same with other ancient slabs you run into the same issue: You can't just build a custom barge and set sail because it needs to fit on a ship you can book a loan off. You can't uncover it by 10.000 hands because you need to use excavators and construction equipment.
We are facing a similar issue with concrete.
In order to make buildings cheaper and faster to build, concrete is reinforced. The reinforcement has lifespans of 30-150ish years depending on maintenance. While as far as we know, concrete itself do not have a upper lifespan as we know it.
What used to be The Soviet Union is still filled with massive old world wonders, which are decaying because somebody thought metal tubing and rebar is a viable long term construction method. Its not that long since the Berlin wall fell, and quite a bit do not exist any longer.
A lot of technology is lost because not every single thing is recorded in blueprints or patents. If you look up the patent for a thing, especially an older stuff, you will typically find this whole nice series of drawings, exploded views, sort of cutaway mechanical drawings, showing exactly how everything works. And a lot of people seem to have the impression that this tells you how to build the thing. In reality, the information you get from patent drawings is simply it's, like, how does the thing work? Which is not the same as how do you make the thing? So if you have a physical example of an item, you will have as much information, in fact, you'll have quite a bit more information about it, than you would just looking at the patent drawings. In addition, just because you send one set of design drawings in with a patent and you receive a patent, that doesn't mean that the product you build under that patent has to look exactly the same. There are a lot of instances where the patent for a thing doesn't look a whole lot like the final product. The only thing that's legally relevant is that the specific features that you are patenting are reproduced the same way in the device that you end up selling. And if they're not, then you don't have a patent on whatever it is that you're actually selling.
So a good example of this would be John Browning. A lot of the patents that he took out, that he was awarded, he would sell to Winchester. And Winchester would do a substantial amount of tweaking and redesign to the guns that he created, to turn them into marketable products. So they would make use of whatever his patented feature was, but looking at Browning's patent doesn't. If you look at the patent behind an 1895 Winchester lever-action, it doesn't quite look the same as an actual Winchester 1895 lever action, for that reason. Now, what you would actually need if you want to just put a gun into production, like I want to build a copy of that, of the 1905 Bjorgum. What you need is what today is called a Technical Data Package for the gun. Colloquially called "blueprints". Those include a couple of pieces of information that are nowhere on patent drawings. So, one thing is just measurements. Patent drawings don't have measurements. They don't need them, like the scale of the thing really doesn't matter. But it's not just like a length, like the slide is four inches long. It's much more than just that. You also need to know like, OK, it's four inches plus or minus what? EVERY part has to fit together and work correctly, which means every part has a range of dimensions that it can be. Manufacturing is not an exact science, and any manufacturing process will create a range of sizes, no matter how good you make it. The more money, and the more time, and the more care you spend, the tighter you can make that range of variation, but you'll never get rid of it completely. So what is important for building any mechanical, is identifying what's the range of sizes that we can have on this part, that will ensure that it will in fact work correctly with every other part. If you don't have that, you go back to the pre-industrial revolution days of hand fitting every gun until it works right.
There's also other information on a set of blueprints, or technical data package, that you need. Namely information on material specification. So not just is this steel or aluminum or neodymium, but also what alloy? There are an almost infinite number of different steel alloys. Do you want 4140, do you want 8620? What is the heat treating specification? Is it surface hardened, is it through hardened? All of these things are essential, and often, I think, are unappreciated by people who haven't worked in the manufacturing trades, or manufacturing industry. So you can take a look at your Bjorgum pistol, and even if you have one in hand and you can measure every part, that's one example of the gun, and it'll give you one set of dimensions. It doesn't give you your tolerance ranges, and unless you start doing a lot of material analysis, it also doesn't tell you what alloys you have, how they're heat-treated. And all that type of information. So in order to properly reverse engineer a firearm, you need to have a lot more information. You would need to go through and do a statistical study of the dimensions of, say, 50 different sets of parts, to try and approximate what were the tolerances. That won't be perfect, but it'll probably get you good enough information to work on.
Now people will ask, why don't I just get the technical data package from the original manufacturer? Well, often that doesn't exist any more. While those things are not covered by patent or copyright law, they are private property. And it doesn't really serve a company's interest to make that sort of thing available to other people. You know, if I'm Bjorgum, why would I want to publish all of my blueprints, which would then allow other people to make the gun and compete with me? I keep that to myself. When companies dissolve, when they go bankrupt, even very successful designs, often that technical data package is just lost, if there isn't someone there specifically interested in keeping track of it. For most people, when the company goes bankrupt or dissolves the opportunity to be building the thing has gone away. And there's no point in having this data, and it goes out in a pile with all of the other paperwork associated with the company. So, there are some stuff where technical data packages have survived, and have kind of gotten into the public sphere. But not as many as you might expect. And certainly not typically ones that are unusual, weird stuff.
You can also scale this with industrial equipment. Most factories are using tailored machines that take years to tweak and are almost always bespoke.
That's why the chinese bought so much of the equipment in America, and a plethora of chinese manufacturing equipment produced can be measured with imperial measurements - literally just copied.
>slavishly follows existing specs even when it's counterproductive
>sees human life as cheap
>really likes the color red
>manufactures everything for another society that they are on frosty terms with
Was China the real Admech the entire time?
>we have an institutional knowledge problem
>ok, let's do the obvious solution to it
>no, why would a sane company do that?
???
It costs money and doesn't generate profit, which is where the discussion ends.
Also generally business relations that require specific institutional knowledge within companies last maybe two decades, so they don't have an issue with institutional knowledge loss because their money making generally ends long before the relevant people die or leave. The brass don't care if production machinery are only kept running by daily interpretative dances through the sensors because the folks who built them are long gone from the company either.
This is absolutely not how the private sector does anything remotely important or profitable. No company that I've ever worked for has operated in this fashion, and I've worked for some shitty companies.
Why are you posting on Ganker on a Saturday night?
That's just normal /tg/ posting. Or at least it used to be.
I'm just surprised cos it's the type of thing I'll hear my friends in the industry talk about, but I've never seen it talked about here despite being useful as a way to either include or handwaive away certain things in worldbuilding
/tg/ was traditionally a board for hobbyists and thus it attracted a more invested, more articulate sort of autist, at least compared to the chaotic autists you could find elsewhere. So it wouldn't be weird for someone to have domain specific knowledge and have enough autism to go on for a couple posts about it. Not to romanticize the past too much, though, since there were still dumb memesters and lewdposting aplenty.
Still, the past 10 years haven't been kind to this hobby, the hobbyists, or this place.
Very true, and you can blame smartphones for that. The average IQ if an internet user has dropped by like 40 point since 2007.
>t. eternal boomer
I blame removal of the quests, it murdered the inflow of people into the board leaving nothing but stagnation
We've got a live one here! Stay where you are, the death squads will be there soon.
Nah frick that. Quest threads contributed nothing to /tg/. I remember times I would get on and the entire first page of /tg/ would be nothing but storyshitters spamming their moronic creative writing exercises.
Do you really think the board is better now that everyone interested in roleplay is gone? All we have left is number spergs and they're the worst element of the hobby.
Quest threads didn't have anything to do with roleplaying either.
>Everyone interested in roleplay
>Questgays
>quests were extremely popular among the userbase of /tg/
Interesting.
Nah more like they were a circlejerk. Bleach Quest #174 would be bumped every three minutes but only have like 5 posters
Now that precise wording is dubious. Part of the problem with quests was that quests from everywhere were getting punted off to /tg/. So then how much of the popularity was coming from the "native" /tg/ userbase and how much was coming from people following the quests to /tg/ from elsewhere? Difficult to say. And as the other anon pointed out, proliferation wasn't necessarily a good indication of popularity, since a given quest could sit on the board for days and days because of a few dedicated people bumping it.
I'm not gonna pretend I didn't have a LOT of fun with quests and things haven't gotten worse since the age of quests, but I don't think we can judge the correlation/causation on that. Did removing quests cause the damage? Did letting quests overgrow cause the damage? Or was that all just parallel to the real source of damage (i.e. phoneposting, tourists, whatever)? It's a matter of opinion after a certain point.
Personally, I'm of the boring opinion that Ganker simply thrives on a certain level of activity, one that discussion is quick and common enough to be considered alive but not between so many users as to be completely impersonal and ephemeral.
The slowest boards have the problem that while they have quality content, even a higher quality:quantity ratio than other boards, they're too slow to create real engagement among users. You could check something like /ic/ once every week and still be in the same threads and topics, so it's slow enough that you can't really spend more than a passing glance at it.
But the on the other side, you have Ganker which is so fast any and all legitimate discussion gets pushed off the board too quickly because it's too niche of topic to stay up without a bump every five minutes. It's not an environment conducive to writing anything detailed because by the time you do, the thread might not even be alive or the topic of discussion might've shifted to something else.
We want to believe that Ganker, in its anonymous nature is open to anyone and everyone, and that's true to some extent until you get so many people that it poisons the well. Once discussion breaks down, people find it harder to put in the effort to post useful things and you're left with a chaotic mess of one line nonsense.
>It's a matter of opinion after a certain point.
NTA, but I don't think so. I've never been quests guy myself though I distinctly remember how buttblasted people got about quests being a regular thing. Eventually people were calling for quests getting their own board.
Compare and contrast this to phoneposters and tourists you mentioned. While /tg/ might not like questgays they are anons just like us. Eternal summergays are normies through and through.
>i want /misc/ to leave
>phone posting should be a bannable offense
>>i want /misc/ to leave
Yep, that's an eternal summergay opinion right there. It could only be said by someone too young to know why /misc/ exists.
It wasn't even creative shit. It was mostly just [Seasonal Anime] Quest or [Seasonal Anime + Pokemon] Quest.
>Some new cute girls doing military things anime comes out
>Like 5 different quest threads from the usual suspects pop up trying to "fix" it
Always bizarre to watch happen.
Banning quests killed tg.
Anyone who disagrees is a contrarian or wasn't here.
Nah, the old mod around 2010 or so was what did it in. /tg/ was largely self sufficient and didn't need much moderation at all, somewhere along the line a mod was set to it that killed anything that wasn't absolutely on topic. The result was the userbase could no long self-moderate, turning shitty bait threads into productive discussion. Quests dying was merely a symptom of that.
/tg/ was basically the "science fiction, fantasy, history general" board for a long time. I always had the feeling that a good deal of people here didn't even play games, but just came to /tg/ to talk about Star Wars or whatever.
Why are you complaining? That's some really interesting piece of random information which I enjoyed reading. That's the good type of autism, where a sperg will use any opening in a conversation to introduce the topic he obsess over and start talking nonstop while delving in depths of that sphere of knowledge that you never ever thought could be interesting
We can't make Saturn V's rockets, the F-1, anymore. The mighty Rocketdyne F-1 the huge engines which took men to the moon with the Apollo program but they haven't been built since the 1960s. The F-1 engines were not only extremely powerful but they were also simple which meant they were cheap enough to be disposable. So why don't we just remake them? Now there is a common myth which says NASA lost or threw away the blueprints, which of course is complete rubbish: Every design document ever created for the Apollo program is still available, but if it was just a case of wheeling out old designs, they would have done that years ago.
The problem is not the design but it's for way in which the world has moved on since the engineers first created those F-1 engines back in the 1960s. When a group of present-day rocket engineers looked at how they could recreate the iconic F-1 engines they soon realized just how differently things were done some 50 years ago: there was no computer-aided design, just slide rules and trial and error testing. Components were designed, built and then tested and then often modified before being used. Complex engines sub assemblies were welded together from sometimes hundreds of smaller parts with skilled welders taking sometimes a day to complete one. Although they had the original blueprints what they found that was missing was the notes made by the engineers as they effectively handcrafted every engine, each one slightly different with its own quirks and foibles. The original builders of the F-1 engines were highly skilled engineers, welders and fitters. They did almost everything by hand because often that was the only way to do it back then and in the rush to meet deadlines they kept many of the tricks that they used to get things to work and go together in their heads or scribbled down on scraps of paper long since lost.
So it was like those artisan crafts that have only a handful of people still able to do and no apprentice to carry it on for another generation
Pretty much. There was institutional memory loss and people have simply had to make do with other things.
That's fascinating if true. Thanks
practical effects in cinema, for instance who framed roger rabbit has, besides the cartoon characters, a bunch of objects physically moving on the set without them being cgi
now everything is cgi and moviemakers don't know how to do or replicate such practical effects anymore
People know how to do it. No one bothers to do it, because while Who Framed Roger Rabbit still looks amazing today, the effort that went into making it was absurd. The planning and set design and prop design could be redone, but no one wants to do it because it's genuinely hard expensive. Go look up documentaries/videos about how that film was made, and you'll see why no one has done anything quite like it since. You can create 90%+ of the effect for like 1% of the effort with CGI you could run on a modern desktop PC, and getting good people doing CGI, and you can still get nearly the same result with a fraction of the effort.
It's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire/money for non-cgi special effects.
>it's genuinely hard expensive.
CG isn't nearly as cheap as you think it is, budgets have gotten worse *after* the cgi-slopfest.
>this is a uniquely American problem
Other than Europe (inheriting roads from fricking Rome is cheating) and Japan (they just build stuff right), who has better infrastructure? Infrastructure kills a motorist in the 3rd world and it doesn't even make headlines.
To be fair, I would expect deaths in 3rd/2nd world developing countries. They are working toward better but aren't there yet.
Not in Boston. Americans expect competency and professionalism. It's demanded, But no matter how much you try to idiot proof a blue print the universe builds a better idiot.
>lost tech.
Road building. I don't know about you anon, but my roads get potholes and raggedy.
That's not really lost tech, it's just that asphalt pavement is by far the cheapest method to build roads, but it's also inherently prone to wear from weather and traffic, so it ends up getting cracks and potholes and needs to be regularly refaced. We could build roads that can better handle wear, it requires far more work and takes much longer to build, so just periodically resurfacing the asphalt is more convenient. The problems only really start when that maintenance is postponed to cut costs.
It's more than maintaining current infrastructure. The best crews can't fix problems from flaws when a project was first built.
For example, The Big Dig in Boston Massachusetts. This was a big project that went over time and over budget far past the expectations of "this has never been done before". There was grift, theft, skim, scam, incompetence and sheer ass-hattery. Tunnels leaked. Every day was a new problem. Every day was a new traffic flow.
Boston had to pay out Wrongful Death lawsuit. all because an incorrect epoxy bolt factor was used causing concrete preformed panels to fall killing a motorist.
The Big Dig was finished in ~2007, But What else went wrong though that nobody knows about? At best an engineer didn't think through a plan or at worst "it's not my problem" and said frick it.
I want to say this is a uniquely American problem, And specifically a Major-Metropolitan problem. There's something about big cities that they just can't get out of their own way.
I'm rambling
>There's something about big cities that they just can't get out of their own way.
Yeah, their projects are big enough to make headlines and their infrastructure actually sees enough use to make the flaws painfully obvious. Small town grift just gets buried in tumbleweeds and forgotten.
Humans literally don't have the neurological capacity to give a shit about more than a couple hundred people at the same time. When they meet and care about a new person after this maximum, it's only after - this is tested biologically, not with the sociological replication crisis - physically dehumanizing someone else. Or by chunking people together into a meta-person that they care about (which is why tribalism has become so bad in a massive interconnected world; you don't care about X person necessarily, you care about The Good Gamer or whatever and once they can't fit into that category anymore they become unpersoned.)
The way this manifests in major cities with millions and millions of people is that every group cannot treat all the people they're responsible for as people the same way they treat their sister as a person or their star employee as a person or their corner store grocer as a person (if any of those three are so lucky). They're just person-shaped resources, and sometimes, person-shaped obstacles. And a human being instinctively reserves care and favor for the in-group. Cities are made of thousands and thousands of competing in-groups who are trying to bleed each other dry.
Every community larger than about 300 people is built to fail. None of this is sustainable because the animals trying to hold it up don't have the necessary hardware.
>Every community larger than about 300 people is built to fail. None of this is sustainable because the animals trying to hold it up don't have the necessary hardware.
Isn't that the entire purpose of bureaucracy? To build a machine out of men (and more recently, computers), reduce the complexities of the world into something legible for the machine, and set it to work.
Which has its' own problems.
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt describes man as 90% chimp, 10% bee. Religion and politics are what activate the 10% bee part and organizations/institutions are the beehive. We used to have small and intimate hives but have swapped them out for increasingly giant hives that harbour national and corporate superorganisms. The necessary small-scale ecosystems of local hives have become all but abandoned in the 2020s.
>I want to say this is a uniquely American problem, And specifically a Major-Metropolitan problem. There's something about big cities that they just can't get out of their own way.
It's not.
>t. Australia
I still believe that the car-ification if America is the result of a conspiracy between Big Oil and Big Car and all their stockholders. If you want more efficient roads for goods to go from farm to shop, if you wanna remove highway congestion, then build a damn train to get people out of personal cars and thus out of the busy road, so that trucks can truck safely.
>but its le too big
Russia has trains to basically everywhere and it's about twice as wide as the US, with way worse conditions too (iced rails are the devil). There is no excuse to not make a train other than "the people (read: Big Car and Big Fuel shareholders) voted to do it this way". On the other hand, if traffic planners solved traffic, they'd be out of a job, and looking like you're gonna solve traffic while not actually doing that is pretty good job security.
New York brought in a famed rail engineer to fix their systems and make sure everything ran on time and efficiently.
He publicly expressed that he has not been allowed to actually do anything because of the bureaucracy fricking him and the government not actually wanting fixed railways when they can just pocket the money for the projects.
Then they threw everything at him to sully his name and say he's not actually doing anything of value, is part of the corruption himself, and has no idea what he's talking about.
He then moved on to fix rail ways in other countries and never came back to work on US systems.
Then again it was almost a century ago when New York City also had plans to make it so in-city you can only use electric vehicles with plans for building battery changing stations, since the idea would be that only transport trucks could use diesel and everyone else either would use public transport or the rented electric cars for their needs, and out of towners would be recommended to come in by train or leave their car in a lot near the edges of the city.
That one I believe got trashed due to a combination of "tech wasn't here yet" and big industries telling NYC to go frick itself.
That said, frick people who say we need to get rid of cars. Having lived in cities, both "walkable" and regular, I can tell you I hate those shit holes, and am quite fine with rural living (suburban if I must), where sure I can walk 1.5 miles to the bakery, or 1.5 miles in another direction to the butcher, and sometimes do, but on some days I prefer just hopping in the car and spending the day hitting the various places I need to go all at once on my own schedule.
Also as
said. The only reason people are noticing "now" the lack of transport is because a bunch of young upper middle class people haven't been educated on why their parents moved to that neighborhood in the first place.
So you enjoy fellating the oil and car israelite? Walkable cities are incredible as is better urban planning. The only problem is people that aren't white or asian.
NTA you're correct and I'm not even racist.
In Germany every city has a few blocks or even a district that's basically a Turkish ghetto. Low-rent, dirty, crime-ridden neighborhoods full of people constantly engaged in shouting matches.
There are streets were more Asians live but they are normal people working normal jobs living in normal neighborhoods.
On the contrary, we know exactly how the Romans made their roads, it just isn't economical to do anymore.
I swear to god there's a massive one right on Main street where I live and I am tempted to just go out in the middle of the night with a bucket of cement and fill it in myself
>and kept expanding the wheel base
Is that what it was? I knew there was some dumb regulation that led to the ballooning size of vehicles. I thought it was something like trucks above a certain size are exempt from some emissions requirement.
>I thought it was something like trucks above a certain size are exempt from some emissions requirement.
That's essentially it. Bigger trucks are more exempt, so it's more profitable to build bigger shittier trucks that qualify for the looser regulations than smaller quality trucks that qualify for the tighter regulations. The regulations intended to make them build better trucks had the opposite effect, while also increasing profit margins as they ballooned the "luxury" aspects as well.
>I want less features for less cost.
Nope. Profit margins. Nobody cares about you, your market segment doesn't have enough "unrealized profits". You know how a lot of video games are propped up by "whales"? That's cars now. There's enough dipshits willing to pay 80,000$ for a truck that they've quit marketing to normal people entirely, that one sale outshines the profits on dozens of 1999 Corollas. It's also apartments and housing. Ever notice how the "American Dream" suburban post-war bullshit started with tiny little homes on tiny little lots? And now it's all 800,000$+ McMansions? Same bullshit. Lots of people want a basic product, but they just can't have enough blood squeezed out hard enough for the blessed invisible hand of the free market to give a shit about them.
You'd think the free market would have competition come in and fill the unrealized market segment of reasonable goods at reasonable cost, but again no. All resources, space, expertise, and supply chains are finite, and it's all getting bent towards Gacha Whales.
>Bigger trucks are more exempt, so it's more profitable to build bigger shittier trucks that qualify for the looser regulations than smaller quality trucks that qualify for the tighter regulations.
IIRC, it's that the emissions allowed is directly proportionate to wheel base, so bigger truck is allowed to be worse because it's expected to need more power for its job.
As opposed to doing this shit sensibly and passing it by the demands of the already-existing classes of vehicle so you don't have one kind bloated into the territory of another just to dodge regulations.
>You'd think the free market would have competition come in and fill the unrealized market segment of reasonable goods at reasonable cost, but again no. All resources, space, expertise, and supply chains are finite, and it's all getting bent towards Gacha Whales.
Correction, the regulations bloated the barrier to entry such that starting new companies to compete doesn't really work anymore, and this results in the government feeling the need to bail out the increasingly inefficient megacorps to keep the sector alive.
The Perennial Gale has been stalled for generations, and at this point it's going to be complete hell on earth for quite a while when it inevitably arrives to clean house.
If we count societal organization as technology, then all previous societal orders are lost technology.
We have already lost or are losing the knowledge of how to build some things, because computers are now doing it.
What will happen as AI starts doing more thinking and designing for us?
So far it can't do any thinking at all, so I'm not concerned.
We become cabbages. Neat little cabbages lined up.
I work with Mainframes. We're getting precipitously close to people not knowing how to work the goddamn mainframes. My company employs a ton of old-timers who get payed huge bucks to stay on, because there's a huge competence gap where the zoomers simply can't fix certain problems that come up. The old guard have an intuitive understanding of this tech, and newer-tenure employees, even to the tune of 5, maybe 10 fricking years in, are relatively floundering. They can run programs, write code, etc but they're not true gritty system administrators. It's a field with great job security, at least, but mainframers feel like a dying breed. Your average graduate coming out of college is going to know industry-standard programming languages and industry-standard operating systems. If they get into mainframes, you essentially need to retrain them to proprietary everything, and it's a pain in the ass to work with mainframes at all for countless different reasons. So we've got plenty of decent USERS, plenty of decent journeymen/grunts. But we don't have elites, and may never have a workforce that has the same intuitive, encyclopedic expertise as the oldies.
My mother claims that every industry is like this. Both my folks are university profs and they really think kids are moronic now. She's got this Atlas Shrugged style fear, where she genuinely believes that the world will suffer a huge competence crisis in the coming decades. Like the people building airplanes will know how to apply the formulas, plug shit into autocad, and build the airplane. But they won't know the actual theories of kinematics, and the crutch of advanced tech will slowly manifest with little inefficiencies that will be invisible at first. And then someday, "Frick, we don't understand what's going on here." They realize that the last employee who understood some random aerodynamic formula retired last year.
I hope she's wrong, but in my industry, she's 100% right. We had to pull one guy out of retirement.
University professor here, there is definitely a drop among younger people coming in from my anecdotal experience. It isn't just your parents who think that.
I'm looking for a postdoc. Can I apply?
I doubt we are in the same field anon, and I'm not on the selection panels for those.
wait you cannt hire your own post docs?
are in humanistic discipline?
Anyway I'm physics with phd in nanofabrication and metasurfaces.
There's always more applications than available spaces, so yes, selection panels are used.
The bright side is that this is mostly a technical debt problem of stacking things on top of a foundation dating to the 1960s for the sake of keeping the data around, rather than a strict inability. Mainframe implementations consisting entirely of those "industry standards" exist, and are in use by several significant companies, but most workplaces cling to their legacy machines with legacy interfaces and legacy programming languages until the absolute last minute because Big Iron is expensive.
Even though in many cases they could probably replace it with a pre-built desktop computer with how much processing and network loads have grown since that legacy hardware was installed.
That's true by-and-large. Like Mainframe users tend to be very sticky, and adopt new hardware much more willingly than they adopt new software. That's to say, we have companies who are using the same software they used in the 80s (seriously!) but are perfectly willing to buy a new machine that runs the same code. So we ensure backwards compatibility, they pay out the nose for backwards compatibility, everyone's happy. As for mainframe implementations in "standard tech", I think they're fantastic, but I believe my point still stands. You can take a mainframe and build up a whole new tech stack with graphical monitoring in Prometheus, have everything run in CI/CD pipelines, you can encapsulate it such that your developers are writing code - real code - in Python and never even need to know that they're on a mainframe. They'll never touch a green screen.
And then one day, you decide to re-IPL the mainframe and it doesn't work. It's busted. Even if you have a whole workforce of modern devs with a modern environment, you'll need at least one dude who can roll up his sleeves and fix the underlying stack. A Rexx exec is busted? Thank god, last time it was a regex statement written pre-y2k. Then there's all this arcane pain-in-the-ass miscellany. Big Endian vs Little Endian encoding. We decided to make all of our numbers backwards decades ago before standards crystallized. And now we're stuck, and we abstract that unpleasant reality away from end users. Writing JCL code for the first time, you find out that lines can only be 80 characters long. Why? Because that's the size of a punch card. Jesus Christ, you're writing punch card code. And someone needs to know all this shit, as much as companies can and do make a "industry" playground for their devs, there's always going to be a need for admins who know the guts of the platform.
>pre-built desktop computer
Eh. For all the pain, mainframes DO have fundamental strengths that keep them around.
>You had me at punch card.
You sent me on a trip down memory lane.
The last time I saw one of these I was in first or second grade. I'm an Air Force brat and my mom was Logistics. She showed me the old computers and an Airman showed me one card, out of stacks of cards, out of boxes of stacks. Unbelievable.
Then he showed me 'Tanks' he uploaded to the Governments PC. I was exposed to an early underculture of people's that while they 9-5 worked the computers of Military/MIC/University/Corps, they used their lunch breaks and after hours to push what gaming could become. What would eventually be done because regular John Q Citizen couldn't afford the equipment or the energy requirements.
Frankly, given how you've described it, I'm glad you're a dying breed. Like good for you for getting that bread, but at the same time it's probably better if companies are forced to rip the bandaid off at some point and just replace the fricking system.
Yep. Shit's gotten so complex that only the people who've been along for the entire journey have any real hope of keeping up. And if the entire pile comes crashing down one day when the old timers retire... you build up from scratch again, get a new crop of "old timers who were there when it all started" out of that process.
Things like this actually terrify me.
It feels like we're appraching another Bronze Age Collapse, just worse.
It's less terrifying when you grasp that there are functional replacements available for all this stuff, companies just refuse to use them because they don't want to justify the expense to their shareholders or the guy who makes that decision is a terminal boomer. Migrating would be a pain in the arse and probably cost a lot of money and/or time, but it's not *impossible* and so anywhere where it genuinely matters eventually reality will bite and it'll happen.
No sane company invest into knowledge transfer. Like how dumb would you have to be to just keep somebody on at premium rates and waste everybody else's wages and working hours just to make sure that knowledge transfer happens, bruv?
Other than that, I've heard a lot of old engineers complain about how kids these days are no longer in the mental space to build the tools to get the job done. Instead, they'll shop around online and throw their hands up if they can't order what they specifically require for this one specific job.
It's not helped by how IBM treats licensing. There's effectively no platform available to teach students JCL or the inner workings of z/OS except for actual production machines.
Another university professor here. It's not just in sciences, it's in humanities as well. The attention spans are dropping badly. The ability to read a book cover to cover is practically extinct. Not only are we reducing the required reading to single chapters, they aren't even touching those 20 pages because some random podcast offers a quick explanation. They feel like they get the gist of it in 10 minutes of listening to that video. Discussions become impossible because this 'gist' is not enough to fill 90 minutes in a room of 20 people who all swear to have read the text.
There are books that you just can't use in my masters classes, namely from those authors who just assumed a certain level of pre-existing knowledge.
So when the author mentions a little bit of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Leibnitz and god forbid throws in a little obscure mention of Platon or Socrates, you can bet that the collection of master's degree students in this room won't be able to figure out anything, because they never touched those books.
All of which were required reading at some point in their careers leading to this seminar.
I don't say that every word that those old guys ever wrote is so important that you have to have read it, of course a working knowledge of their concepts is kind of enough.
But we are starting to get paper proposals for doctorates, where we just have to tell them 'nice idea, but this was already done 150 years ago, and you should know that'.
And that's a terrifying development.
>Philosophy
At least in this case very little of actual value was lost, unlike other examples in the thread, like hypercolor t-shirts.
>Oh no, the kids aren't reading Lacan's 10,000 page dissertation on why 1+1=penis!
We're not philosophy here, it's just that those thoughts are the foundation of being able to discuss further concepts.
Like communicating in memes for your ballpark.
All that university philosophy courses teach is how to teach philosophy in a university. It's a loop that creates nothing of value.
If anything, we should be happy that society has withered to the point that it can no longer sustain its most redundant branches.
Try reading comprehension
>double-digit IQ, the post
Black person, you need philosophy to know when other philosophical grifters are there to frick you.
No, you just need the skimmed version. You don't need to do an entire fricking three year course. Especially since most of the lessons of philosophy can already be obtained by picking up a history book or just plain life experience. University philosophy courses are a self-perpetuating scam and massive waste of time.
Top 5% IQ score here btw, seeing as you needed to bring that into the discussion.
So basically what I am saying as an anthropologist from the praxeology viewpoint: we are losing the practises that let us make the most of the use of books. Which doesn't make books 'lostech' per se, but it's like climbing on the top of your gas-less car as a makeshift ladder. It's still somehow using the artifact, but neither a ladder not is it a car anymore.
Hold on this one might be good actually, that entire field collapsing into a black hole and being forgotten would likely advance the human race, while burning all the pertaining books for bonfire celebrations would result in more practical benefit than their written content could provide.
30 years old here. My professor used to complain that the new generation has a reduced attention span, and if they cannot solve a problem fast, they give up. If an answer is not the first 3 result sin google, it doesn't exist.
IMHO, this is due to average YouTube video length being 10 minutes. This is the standard attention span now days.
About transfer of knowledge: it is going to be harder. You need to find points of contact with the other generation, and our world changes very fast. Teen years for me very, very different from teen years for a zoomer. For example, once I had to explain a master student in physics how to convert 400 seconds into 6 minutes and 40 seconds. It was hard, yet we were like 6–7 years of age difference. I was so surprised, I didn't even understand what was his problem was with this task. In the end he was still unable to convert.
Educators are hypocritical homosexuals, because they whinge about the normies not having enough attention span, and then when confronted with an autist who could happily sit there and read every book in the syllabus in an afternoon but might need a bit of prompting to turn in a paper on time they whinge about that too. The only student educators are happy with is the entirely fictional platonic ideal of a student that lives only in their own head as a justification for feeling smug.
The problem is that most students aren't in university to study an academic discipline; they are there to receive their Certificate In Getting A Good Job (CIGAGJ). You need your CIGAGJ else you will be doomed to a life of manual labour/poverty/whatever.
Therefore, they are going through the expected motions, which the university itself endorses by charging so much and making decisions based on financial considerations. This is not about the furtherance of the academic field, this is young people making a financial investment and expecting a return upon it. For the average student (who isn't going to seek a Masters or PhD) there isn't anything to be gained by working harder than necessary especially when the institution they are attending favours their money over their academic prowess.
The solution is employers paying their staff properly (plus decent stable working conditions and proper training) rather than making a CIGAGJ a minimum bar of entry, and society accepting that not everyone needs to have a university degree.
I had built a hydrogen fuel cell as a hobbyist, it was pretty fun and I could see the use if I thought through all the parts. As it stood, I wasted a lot of electricity on electrolysis to get the hydrogen to use the fuel cell in the first place and the who thing was labor intensive and messy.
I think all of that could be fixed, not really sure about the safety of storing a large amount of hydrogen though as if to fuel a vehicle. The principle is sound enough, however.
>Kant
To be fair that fricker tries his hardest to write exclusively in run-on sentences spanning entire pages.
Wait, so I can make money just by reading books from the 60's, 70's and 80's about sysadmin? Will these old fricks help turn technical know-how into experience or is it gonna be a trial by fire thing?
If you didn't lose the lost art of reading a book lol
I'm an automotive technician that does side work repairing people's horrifically out of date appliances. I'm used to reading old manuals.
I've heard the same thing about aerospace engineering, specifically space applications, where a lot of old knowledge was lost because the Space Race ended and no-one wanted to throw money at space anymore. But that's kind of the thing, here. People (like your mother) love framing this as some inherent fault in whatever current generation has recently entered the workforce. But it's not like they get a say in how the world works. For instance, with space applications it was 100% politicians deciding that didn't need space travel anymore and just neglecting the sector for decades until Musk made it cool again. Same thing with the companies who run the mainframes. The system everything is built on now evolved organically with the old guard, but no-one made any effort to ensure it would be passed on, essentially assuming it just would be. And for now they feel more comfortable pulling old guys out of retirement than educating new workers. Companies want to have their cake and eat it too, and it shows in shit like this. They wanted easy, off-the-shelf workers from universities that they don't have to train in-house, and now lament that's exactly what they got.
Have you guys, I don't know, considered failing poor students? This is what I'm talking about above. If you let the entire system erode you don't get to be surprised that everyone who "passes" is moronic. It's been a while since I was in university, but shit like this didn't fly. And I guarantee you, you're losing the good students who actually thrive when challenged.
Believe me, it's already what you get from the schools.
The first time that I failed 70% of a bachelor's semester, there was an uproar from the parents and the consequence is that I don't get to teach beginners anymore.
I remember learning that universities hate students from Maryland because their families often have enough money to get angry about the fact you didn't autopass their kid and they're from a state where just showing up is worth half of the grade.
I would later learn MD was just a leader in this trend, but Jesus Christ is it horrible.
Well, that's ridiculous, but that's exactly how the system is complicit in creating the situations they later b***h and moan about.
I part of it is the obsession with specialization we've had for the past decades. Having well rounded knowledge means developing a lot skills you won't be using 99% of the time. It also means sinking years and years of focus into something and having the time space and money to find out what works and what doesn't.
From an employer's perspective they want to cut fat, use only what they need to keep costs low and to expand quickly to keep shareholders happy. A specialist straight out of university who's willing to accept entry level pay for a fancy title is more attractive than some opinioned old-timer who expects decent compensation for a lot of skills that don't seem relevant to what this specific job requires.
And for young people a lot of the opportunities to become that kind of old-time expert aren't really viable. You can't compete with the old-heads because you don't have the experience yet. Most employers don't want generalists and specialists get better pay anyway.
You'll be amazed once the extraterrestrials who're prisoners show themselves and offer solutions to exactly these problems.
Old Lightbulbs lasted longer than new ones. this is a recorded case of companies intentionally selling inferior products in order to increase demand for replacements, I don't even think it's that much of a secret it's a loose agreement between lightbulb companies to sell short-live Lightbulbs & crowd out competition wo try & make better bulbs. It's in the best interest of all involved to keep this going without even needing to meet up about it & also lets them indulge in corner cutting on materials & such.
Other examples of this exist for other things. Like construction tools.
But aren't really "lost-tech" so much as corporations nickel & diming people. Good Lightbulb tech exists still.
Also there are some Space Shuttle designs which couldn't really be replicated now as almost all of their parts are OOP, & some of the ancient code which runs the systems is being forgotten & getting illegible, people know what it does but not how it works.
But this is more of the Greek Fire & Napalm stuff OP mentioned.
I guess Roman Concrete was pretty good but we've cracked that mostly.
Romans also made use of this herb that was an honest to god Aphrodisiac, but it couldn't be properly cultivated in a farm or garden & the wild stuff was harvested to extinction by horny Romans (serious). It's lost but not Tech.
...Unless prehistoric aliens were psychic spacefarers who have since horribly regressed, there's not much that's been forgotten which wasn't rendered obsolete by later invention. Maybe some proprietary software used by companies now is liable to become lost but not outclassed in the future. But at the moment it's only really stuff like that one algorithm that one games company used to generate decks of cards for their generated-decks-of-cards game.
Oh shit. Damascus Steel, maybe. I know we can put Damascus-patterns on metal in the modern day but IDK if we can replicate the actual ancient Damascus Steel of old. Maybe we can, as I said IDK
>Old Lightbulbs lasted longer than new ones. this is a recorded case of companies intentionally selling inferior products in order to increase demand for replacements
Actually this is because the temperatures needed for black-body radiation lighting cause the filament to evaporate at a rate directly proportionate to brightness. There was a whole hell of a lot of bullshit with the collaboration setting standards on trading lifespan for brightness, but the impetus was a genuine technical challenge.
yeah. If you take a look ath those "hundred years old bulbs" you will see the probelm. Some can be still found around in historical placs, but they are dim as frick. they are thicker, so they produce more heat and less light, and the evaporated metal makes the glass less transparent. So it is a good thing the companies managed to ocme together and agree on a standard.
I didn't know that.
I suspect that some intentional lifespan reduction is still in effect, but yeah that makes a lot of sense.
>Romans also made use of this herb that was an honest to god Aphrodisiac
I wonder.
Might have just been a placebo effect, and the poor plant was collected to extinction for nothing.
>collected to extinction for nothing
Like rhinos.
I suspect anon is getting slightly mixed up. Probably thinking of Silphium, which was a herbal contraceptive / abortifacient that we either can't 100% identify correctly or is extinct.
It was Plan B, not Viagra.
All signs point to the extinct plant being a strain or very close relative of asofetida, which has niche culinary use (and the Roman plant is said to have tasted better) but does pretty much nothing as medicine
>industry is filled with capitalist conspiracies to sell you worse stuff
>entertainment is only harping on it because they want to implement an even worse alternative
It's all so tiresome.
Yes.
>but IDK if we can replicate the actual ancient Damascus Steel of old
We can.
>Romans also made use of this herb that was an honest to god Aphrodisiac, but it couldn't be properly cultivated in a farm or garden & the wild stuff was harvested to extinction by horny Romans (serious).
You mean silphium? It was an aphrodisiac and a contraceptive, but also it was very commonly used in cooking and perfumes. Supposedly asafoetida (basically resin from several plants of the ferula genus) was a cheaper substitute and there's theories that silphium was just a particularly high grade variety of that. There are extant plants in the ferula genus who have appearances similar to the described appearance of silphium and possess similar properties. In other words, silphium may exist, but we just don't use it as extensively.
Actually, a year or so back they found a plant in turkey that MIGHT be silphium
I remember reading somewhere that those "longer lasting lightbulbs of yore" wasted a lot more of electricity, thus being impractical on a larger scale use
There is this myth about a roman artisan inventing a sort of flexible glass. He presented it to the emperor, who allegedly had him killed, for he feared that the material could become more valuable than silver and gold.
In the German Democratic Republic, they developed a extremely durable glass for drinking glasses and other stuff. They wanted a glass that could last five times longer and created one that was actually fifteen times longer. It was called Superfest or Ceverit. They planned to sell it in the West, but noone wanted to sell drinking glasses that won't break, as that would decrease demand. After the German reunification, the one industrial plant equipped for making them ceased production. Some of them are still being sold, but there probably won't be any production anymore, as glass ware too durable is not a viable business model under capitalism.
Speaking of glass, I seem to remember the green stained glass used in old churches being unreproducible as the dyes were closely guarded for ages. We can make green windows, but the exact shade of green is a mystery.
Could be bullshit. Learned that decades ago.
>Some of them are still being sold, but there probably won't be any production anymore, as glass ware too durable is not a viable business model under capitalism.
Because capitalism created plastic glasses if you want something durable and shatterproof, dummy
https://unbreakabledrinkware.com.au/
Communists have a terminal inability to update their thinking
>What are some examples of IRL lostech?
The entire city of Rome
I've been on a bit of a rome binge recently and it still baffles me they could build structures like that.
>it was less the technology and more that NOBODY WROTE DOWN THE PROCESS
THATS HOW TECHNOLOGY GETS LOST YOU IDIOT THERE IS NO TECHNOLOGY THAT IS LOST BECAUSE WE JUST CANT MAKE IT ANY MORE
EITHER SOMEBODY FORGETS OR WE DECIDE IT'S NOT IMPORTANT
Oh, is this the part where you pretend corporations are suicidally irresponsible because muh monocle and top hat? We're not talking about pushing stealth inflation on consumers, this is companies not knowing how to run their own shit. Maybe they kick the can down the road and it isn't as easy as it could have been, but if the institutional knowledge apocalypse actually happens, heads will roll.
To be fair, you think of a company as an entity of itself that seeks to perpetuate itself as a living organism. It's not, a company is simply a vehicle to be used to get from one place to another by its masters and discarded when it breaks down. Everyone on board just moves to a newer, working vehicle and continues the process there.
You don't build a company to last, you run a company to extract as much wealth from it as you can before moving on to do that elsewhere. If you leave the company a broken husk, that's no longer your problem when you're gone.
>You don't build a company to last, you run a company to extract as much wealth from it as you can before moving on to do that elsewhere. If you leave the company a broken husk, that's no longer your problem when you're gone.
The word of the year for 2023 was "Enshittification".
It even has a bigass Wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
The leveraged buyouts from Vulture Capital comes to mind too. RIP Toys R Us.
>Sure sounds like the obsolescence is planned, just not by the engineers
Yes and No. You still have some going out of business for selling products that never break. My Instant Pot is over 10 years old and outlived the company filing for bankruptcy. But there's also a finite amount of luxury bullshit you can tack on to a pressure cooker, I've literally never pressed half the buttons on the damn thing.
"Planned" is too intentional, and too long term. You're giving MBA's wayyyyy too much credit for long term thinking or even company loyalty. What happens is market research says focus here for bottom line profits, then puts restrictions and demands on Engineering which result in a product that's shit but has a high profit margin multiplied by enough sales to ensure the fact it's shit doesn't matter enough to drop sales. If the company doesn't go bankrupt from saturating the market because it's product is so shit demand is never saturated, that's a happy accident. To give you scope on what you should credit MBA's for, I've had to explain stuff like "No you can't feed people poison", "No you shouldn't put cheap materials in a corrosive environment to save a few dollars when people's lives are at risk", and "No you actually have to comply with government regulations and can't expect professionals to ignore them". There's nothing going on between their ears. They want short term profit so they can jump ship in 5-10 years at higher pay to frick up everything again. It's all upward failure.
Agreed, MBAs function on the level of elementary schoolers at best.
It's more that they have every incentive to give a frick about the short term, long term be damned.
>IIRC the Egyptians didn't have block and tackle but there's definitely no evidence to support the notion they used ropes during the construction of the pyramids. The blocks weigh literal tons.
I thought it was more or less accepted that they made molds and some kind of lost tech cement mixture.
I'm sorry, but we know where their quarries were and there are remains of unfinished blocks in the right format present in those.
You can still squeeze your UFOs in at any point, but we at least know that they used regional rocks.
>muh roman roads
I live 100km from rome. My house sits on the oldest roman road. That road is viable only because it is manatined an rebuild now and then. Once I saw an actual roman road from 2000 years ago. The stone that formed it now where distand half a meter one from the next. Earth moves, shit gets damaged. If it is not mantained it beraks.
Same with soveit tech. There is a legend that soviet tech is unbreakable. This because the only equipment that survived to our days are the sturdy ones. A russian guy on youtube run resistance test on soviet era instruments and modern ones and high quality modern ones outperfroemd it.
A lot of "Soviet tech" was also just shit Americans gave them in WW2 or which they plagiarized from the same, or the French, or the Italians.
this American propagands. In all time tech development was done by stealing ideas from everywhere and everyone.
Some were inspired, some copied, some original.
if USA goes into a civil war now 30 years people will remember the artifacts from the Pax Americana Period.
Hi Ivan.
Пpивeт, Джoн.
On topic of generational knowledge gap in Russia:
10 years ago people complianed of a different issue.
There were old timers, then during the 90s all intelligent people left Russia, only from 2005 onwards young peole started entering position that soem know how. And the older generation had trouble comunciating with the newer creating a great loss of knowledge.
No idea what is is the situaion now.
Nah, a lot of Soviet tech WAS sturdy ("it'll bend but not break" went the saying) for two reasons.
One was that the omnipresent poverty/scarcity was something designers were aware of and most stuff was designed to be repaired ad infinitum instead of replaced, because if it actually broke for real you'd have no idea if or when you could get another one.
Another reason was that Soviet shit was built crudely, thick plates, suboptimal tolerances, that all added to extra safety margin. (I've even heard that part of that was because all major industry was designed specifically for war production, which reflected on the material/tech in the consumer products (that does sound kinda conspiracy theory-ish even for an EEuro kid like me, so I have my doubts as to whether it was done to that extent).
To be fair, the "bend" part was very important, Soviet shit was real hard to destroy completely but also most stuff had minor problems and you HAD to tinker with it. Good for survival-tier, abysmal for peacetime society.
>To be fair, the "bend" part was very important, Soviet shit was real hard to destroy completely but also most stuff had minor problems and you HAD to tinker with it. Good for survival-tier, abysmal for peacetime society.
My dad spoke about this. He was a field welder/engineer for the Israeli military back in the 70s.
Said American equipment rarely broke but when it did it was a nightmare.
Soviet equipment broke and he would go into the nearest village or town, get a coke can, and he had the vehicle fixed by nightfall.
>I've even heard that part of that was because all major industry was designed specifically for war production, which reflected on the material/tech in the consumer products
Not exactly. Major indsutry was build for being able to switch to a war effort very fast. I think for some even 24 hours. For soviet cigarette have a different shape then american ones, and the reason is that cigarette factories could be covnerted to bullet factories in emergnecy.
Got any any concrete names/keywords to search for? I've heard a lot about this, including about the presence of designated military offices/officials in factories specifically to ensure the feasibility of such switch, but it was always just some vague "sure it was there, everybody knew, can't name stuff for personal safety reasons" etc. And I'd love to read up on the specifics of that.
I've found Soviet cigarettes to have a very similar shape to American cigarettes.
it wouldn't exactly be a conspiracy, it's just good governance
>it's just good governance
Buddy we're talking Soviet state, here good governance is not just conspiracy theory-ish matter, but far into outright schizo territory.
i mean good governance for the party rather than the soviet people
I think the channel technology connections has a videos about it but, it isn't that the tech is lost but is probably more related to either programmed obsolescence or just bloated functionalities to do give a an impression of a higher quality product to push sales over a simpler yet more efficient product
To be fair the management companies going around telling companies
>Grind employees into dust
>Delete R&D because there's no money in doing that, just buy smaller companies who did it already
>Pay CEOs more
Started in the 60s and 70s and had enough government ties then to never get in trouble when it caused bad things to happen.
And since it looked like the company was making loads of money (their profits went up from reducing employee wages/benefits AND the CEO can afford to do crazy things! wow!) it worked for investors.
And if we want to get back further, it was long before the 60s and 70s that the US courts upheld the idea that shareholders are more important to a company than the employees and the customers and as such should get preferential treatment in every single way.
So I don't think blaming Ronny for his deregulation mess (which was a mess and fricked up loads of parts of the US on the long term) is accurate when the rot started in the early 1900s.
>blaming Ronny for his deregulation mess when the rot started in the early 1900s
The rot was always there, but the financial and economic part of it has a major inflection point with him when the executive and legislative were supposed to be the big dam holding it back. You can't not be mad at an arsonist for putting gasoline in a firetruck on purpose.
Never saw one, and it's not like I didn't have my audio at reasonable levels anyway.
Not so much "lost" but just failed but still cool is Ground Effect Vehicles. Whole idea was that plains that flew just around 200 meters above the ground could travel faster and with less effort than a high-flyring plane. It worked but was considered too impractical to actually be used.
Look up "Caspian Sea Monster".
I wish GEVs had the same amount of money invested in them as modern aircraft. I'm a big fan of exotic aircraft in general. But ultimately you can do better with a conventional aircraft instead and business wants to turn a profit now instead of pave the way for future development.
>Is that why you can't get banned longer than a month now?!
Standardized ban lengths predate moot leaving.
That's a black chicken.
>200 meters above the ground
That seems like a major safety nightmare in all but the most specialised of uses. One blip in either software, hardware, or environmental factors and you could easily just smash into the ground in a couple seconds. A plane stalling out 2km up has some time to get things going again, 200 metres just feels like a death sentence.
It's okay if it's over the sea. But the problem is that the tolerances I saw were more like 20 meters and there are waves that easily beat that.
The application was long range submarine patrolling and engagement, and GEVs/ekranoplanes' main advantage was the ability to cruise for long distances at reasonably high speeds with minimal fuel consumption. But in the end it still didn't work out. There are modern GEVs out there, but they're tiny things, 8-12 seaters at max. What the designers envisioned was 5000 ton mini aircraft carriers (GEV tech supposedly scales up well) moving at airliner speeds.
They use hybrid airship tech now. Carbon fiber, plastics and solar power. And of course helium as a lift gas.
Helium as a lift gas is why airships will never come back in any significant capacity. Like yeah we can't really store it long terms and it's not like we're NOT going pump natural gas either way, but it's just so much fricking helium.
Honestly we really should use hydrogen but with better safety tech. But the Hindenburg poisoned the use of hydrogen the way Chernobyl and Fukushima poisoned the use of nuclear power.
There was a brief period after WW1 where working Rigid Airships were a sort of Lost Technology. The Germans were forbidden from making more for war, and whenever someone else would try to make one (Shannondoah, R38) or steal one from the Germans (Dixmude) it would explode.
Eventually most of the nations gave up or moved on to less trick airships like Blimps and then the Germans eventually stopped after the whole Hindenberg and WW2 thing.
It's not impossible that we could make more but I imagine the first dozen attempts would end up like they did back then.
We see the Zeppelin NT almost every day 'round these parts. They're around twenty years old at this point.
>thread about lost technology
>ends up arguing about corporatism
>corporatism posts get deleted
I think it makes a decent amount of sense, and some of my posts were among the deleted.
the thread isn't even on topic related to the board though I don't mind that since it seems like off topic threads are usually way better than your average on topic thread since it doesn't attract that many attention prostitutes/trolls and bots don't seem to target them (that goes especially for popular boards), the problem is when some troony decides to start censoring left and right based on their vague and convoluted rules
so a well known troll?, that makes more sense
Many were manicanon from /btg/. Look out for lots of random caps lock. He's insane, here all the time, and annoying.
Wait, Manic was nuked wholesale? Oh glorious day!
>manic
Why the frick does this guy keep showing up
>rekindle the argument and get me a vacation
No thanks.
Janny went on a spree, there's a couple threads I had up that were heavily pruned. Looks like these posts were all related to some other chan's drama so that's the likely explanation there.
Might also be a prolific poster got banned and all his posts got deleted at once. You see that occasionally with bumpgay threads suddenly having in replies.
Just talking about this means I'm probably going to get a vacation myself.
can't just use a phone or system with a non fixed ip?
I wonder if the stuff on a battleship--analog fire computers, turret mechanisms, the guns themselves--can still be replicated at reasonable cost.
Microsoft Windows
>there will be no windows 11
also inb4 "but 11 is just 10 with a fricked up taskbar"
11 is just 10 with a fricked up taskbar.
It's funny how much of this ended up being true. But in the context of lostech that shit happens all the time in software development. Programming is a high turnover job so people end up writing stuff that the next guy ends up fixing and doesn't know how it actually works or why his hack works.
One gains a greater understanding to the why of the Admech if you stay there long enough. How does the machine work? I dunno. All I know is that unless I press the button and do a prayer then release the button every 24 minutes it doesn't work.
>All I know is that unless I press the button and do a prayer then release the button every 24 minutes it doesn't work.
That reminds me of something I read once that I don't know if it's true. Supposedly the reason why medieval doctors would tell people to do a prayer while using some medicines was that it would take them about the length of a few Hail Mary prayers to properly work things into their skin.
Sadly that's not the AdMech anymore, now there really is an actual literal spirit in that machine with a personality that needs to be placated in that way and all their whacky dipshit dogma is actually 100% real-true-correct, because the people who've been writing 40K for the last 10-15 years are soulless husks who only have a meme-level understanding of the IP.
I'm not reading all of that and my knowledge of programming is only the most rudimentary and surface-level. Can someone summarize this?
Spaghetti code that nobody truly understands, legacy software still in use, and old bugs that never get fixed because the bosses have other priorities and will berate you if you "waste" time doing it.
Meanwhile teams (under the same boss) that don't collaborate even yell at each other, have different opinions, and present different solutions. Then the boss compromise by mixing both solutions damn the consequences.
>legacy software still in use
I honestly love that all the old-ass tools are still available. Regedit and msconfig.sys are based. Everything from the windows store©®™ is cringe.
Also if Vista and 8 have proven anything at all then that power users all agree with me.
Lamps that are built to last. Or anything thats built to last. Modern capitalist society needs you to buy the same shit multiple times over so it's products need to have a "best before" date, be they food or furniture or even guns. Wonder why the old Mosins and AK's still work while a lot of more modern guns don't? Planned obsolescence wasn't a thing in the USSR, or even the whole world, at least back then.
god I'm fricking tired of people repeating this shit. Mosins and AKs were largely built like absolute SHIT and the ammo put through them was cheap shitty CORROSIVE ammo that makes the guns fall apart
so no, old soviet firearms are not indestructible god-guns
but you know what is? Ma Deuce.
Let's not remind people that german guns of WW2 were built to last for a scant few years, so that they could all be discharged and the army re-armed for the milennial german reich.
>Wonder why the old Mosins and AK's still work while a lot of more modern guns don't? Planned obsolescence wasn't a thing in the USSR, or even the whole world, at least back then.
Don't be a fricking idiot. You don't fricking build guns with planned obsolescence. The reason why there's lots of old, functional Mosins and AKs is because they manufactured them in obscene numbers, so it's magnitudes easier to find ones that saw little to no service.
>Wonder why the old Mosins and AK's still work while a lot of more modern guns don't?
Because the USSR built 10 billion trillion of the fricking things and stored some of them in cosmoline (or whatever the commie equivalent was). Modern guns also last forever if you mothball them because modern guns are also made of fricking steel. A gun eventually has reduced accuracy and can even fail if it's USED a whole ton, and more modern guns are much MORE resistant to wear and abuse than older ones (western, russian, or otherwise), due to far superior metallurgy.
Also half the shit in the USSR didn't work out of the fricking factory, let alone decades later.
>to make sure that the people they're trying to get away from can't just ride a bus to reach them
Amusing anecdote from living in the suburbs orbiting Chicago, I remember a while back there was a bunch of weird crime in the typically quite nice suburbs. What it turned to be was city people realizing that they could take a bus out to the burbs, steal some shit easily because these were rich people areas where people didn't even lock their doors at night, and then just hop the bus back. I think it slowed down a bit because local cops got more on the ball about it, but it's still somewhat of an issue.
i want UBI. yes, even for you. pacifies the weirdos, but keeps the economy flowing.
We do not live in a high trust society. Very few people would work if they had UBI.
Every experimental deployment of UBI demonstrates otherwise(most people end up working part time, but since that includes people who previously didn't work at all it evens out), which is why they keep running trials to "gather more data" - if they accept the results of the existing trials they'd run out of excuses not to do it.
I seem to recall before covid there was another UBI experiment done across like 4 EU nations, canada, and one US state, and they all found massive improvements in paying people enough to live while only asking them to work for like 3 days a week.
Which as you said, led to saying "we need another trial before we can confirm any of this data."
UBI just makes you the government's b***h (more so).
>t. never seen a gypsy
they already treat unemployment and family support as UBI
t. lived among gypsies
>t. lived among gypsies
Gypsies are a very closed group. You didn't live among gypsies unless (you) are a gypsy. In which frick you for trying to hide that in the least convincing way possible.
Fricking gypsies...
Wootz steel
Damascus steel
Bulat steel
Heavy lift spaceship
Star Trek 2 uniform pleated collars
Hypercolour T-shirts
Sultana grape juice
Vogels bread
Tesla death ray
Roman cement
Vector arcade games
Flash
The formula for Roman cement was recently rediscovered, though. It has an interesting form of limited self-repair. Look earlier in the thread for some of the other stuff.
Ocean thermal power generation. They had a rig working in the 1800's, you can't tell me they couldn't make it work better now.
Steam cars. Jay Leno has one from 1925. If it worked then, why can't we make a better one now ffs?
Concorde and the Space Shuttle. Still no replacements.
>If it worked then, why can't we make a better one now ffs?
Are you aware of the hydrogen car and how green and cost efficient it would be if only someone designed one?
Are you aware it has been designed multiple times?
As it turns giving the average consumer access to something that can easily be turned into an incredibly powerful high explosive is against what most governments see as acceptable.
There was something about researchers who looked for new kinds of antibiotics and found out that some disgusting mixtures from the past were actually good at killing multi-resistant bacteria that we now have troubles with.
I don't know if that is lostech, but it's cool that boiling garlic in bull pee was forgotten for centuries until we needed it back.
honey is a good disinfectant because the sugar osmotically kills any bacteria that comes into contact with it, the egyptians used it. most sterilizing substances that avoid resistance work by fricking the bacteria over on a fundamental level, rather than blocking receptor protein beta-e9101f like other antibiotics
To imagine that if we didn't stop using this the honey allergy would be dead by now.
I'm on the theory that medicine gave made irreparalble damage to the genepool. Now all dfecets in the genome propagate and accumulate.
this will be the death of th ehuman race.
Biologist i spoke to say that the imline so far is nto enough, but as this thread proved, WE NO LONGER BELIEVE IN SCIENCE
Yeah we should totally go back to 40% infant mortality rates because allergies exist. You fricking idiot.
>writes like an absolute troglodyte
>"no it's the other people who are moronic"
Why should we be slave to our genetics?
Even if our genes get worse, as long as our technology allows each average individual to perform as good or better with our genes + technology, it's a net gain.
It's all about genes and memes, and personally I don't care in which proportion they are expressed, as long as the end result is superior.
Maybe our genes would degenerate to the point where we are born as sick mutated freaks, but as long as our technology can compensate to neutralize the maladies and improve elsewhere, I don't care, it's a net gain.
think of instability. If the tech has a dwonfall for a short period all humanity dies.
being so depndable on tech is a shit approach.
Meh. An asteroid could hit us. Or a gamma ray. Or a black hole traveling at 50% of light speed. Or a lump of anti-matter.
Or a solar flare fries our electronics.
There's a million scenarios outside of our control where humanity goes extinct. I don't see how a catastrophic loss of technology is unique or deserving of special attention. Especially since that's THE one factor within our control, unlike everything else that can go wrong.
And I don't care about "humanity" anyway, as long as it's a sapient species capable of recognizing our Lord God, who cares. The Kingdom of Heaven on Eearth will be built by evolved post-apocalyptic cephalopods maybe. Well, so be it.
The Lord God works in mysterious (and totally epic) ways.
>And I don't care about "humanity" anyway, as long as it's a sapient species capable of recognizing our Lord God, who cares
presumably god, since he created us in his image, you numpty.
He created everything in His image.
nowhere does "created humans in his image" imply that everything else wasn't created in his image either. It's not an exclusive statement.
He created us in His image, and so did He everything else.
I mean think about it, if only us were created in His image, whose image was everything else created in? Since He is the creator of everything, there's no other candidate. To claim otherwise is polytheism.
If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.
– Montesquieu
I don't get it please explain
btw god is unknowable so every creature vainly attempts to portray Him in impotent effighy.
Triangles as if he had 3 sides, bugs as if he had antennae, humans as if He were merciful.
Being a tripgay is a sin.
>And I don't care about "humanity" anyway, as long as it's a sapient species capable of recognizing our Lord God
you are a good goy
He has scheduled the Destruction and time's almost up.
Have you read the Book for yourself? The human form is unique.
Revolutionaries were almost always satanists. Call them Freemasons or Feminists, they either explicitely worship Lucifer or make up stories about the First Rebel, respectively.
That's one thing that could be recovered in a couple of generations of spartan selection at birth, soemething that can't can't be fixed (at least not in less than 10k years) is all of the forced mongrelization according to kalergui's ideals
Nintendo 64 controller sticks
The issue isn't some grasping hand of capitalism burning treasure troves of documents because it isn't making them a penny, but rather it is fricking expensive to properly preserve stuff for the long haul. It's easy to say "Oh, make this available to the public!", but who the hell is going to catalogue it all, maintain access to it, and properly curate it?
Will it be you, or is your shrivelled walnut of a brain expecting someone else to do all that effort for little to no reward?
You just got done saying that this stuff is put into piles with the rest of all the documents related to the company, which are presumably processed in some way at some point by some people as part of the process of bankruptcy, and you're going to tell me it would be an intolerable, unbearable burden for someone in that process - even just the guy who puts it on the pile - to think
>hmm this sure looks important, maybe we should scan it/copy it and upload it to the internet archive or something?
and then take the ~1-2 minutes to do so?
Nobody gives a shit if the literal actual document itself is preserved in a museum you dipshit, what matters is that the information it contains isn't lost and preventing that has been possible for basically no cost for decades now.
>>hmm this sure looks important, maybe we should scan it/copy it and upload it to the internet archive or something?
>and then take the ~1-2 minutes to do so?
Writing documentation for a job that takes maybe than five minutes to complete can easily take up a whole work day if you're trying to do a proper job at it. And that's assuming that you're the one trying to pass on your own experience.
>Nobody gives a shit if the literal actual document itself is preserved in a museum you dipshit
We get at least one request for a list of camp inmates every year.
Previous job I had, we got requests for documents out of a collection concerning the national university sports organization about once a month.
So "nobody" really covers too many people to stand up to scrutiny.
Didn’t the ancients have drilling hole techniques that we still haven’t rediscovered?
I always wonder what less advanced technologies have gone over our heads.
Now, you COULD say “Aliens helped them!” but that risks disrespecting the ingenuity of the past.
If I remember the stories correctly, in old cold war era nukes there was a special kind of aerogel they used as a filler around the warhead. It was top secret so none of the guys who made it ever wrote down the recipe.
Well a few decades later when the nuclear inventory was being refurbished and since nobody wrote down how to make the material, and everybody who knew was dead, they had no idea how to make more of the stuff so they had to reverse engineer it. And they actually had a complication in that part because the chemicals and materials they were using were of a greater purity than the ones from the 60's, so they had to re-introduce an impurity during production because whatever it was, it was vital to the production of the gel.
Something similar happened with swiss cheese production, they noticed that the holes were getting smaller and eventually entirely gone. Turns out that the process was just getting so clean that there were no particulates for the bubbles of gas to start collecting on, so they had to start adding minute quantities of cellulose to get the holes back.
I just remembered that story the other day but when I read it nobody knew why the holes were getting smaller. I had assumed it was due to something like bacterial cultures evolving or being wiped out by modern sanitation practices.
Whatever the frick they recorded for event horizon
what
Science isn’t everything it’s a method you apply to something.
You are actually a fricking moron if you can’t see the inverse. The universe is a scientist.
Science is a process. The simplest process.
—“Remember kids, the only difference between science and fricking around is writing it down.” (Mythbusters quote)
When someone asks how the erection works, they will be given a biological explanation on the processes of the penis, such as blood flow, sponginess, etc.
Science is a process used to discover processes. If it exists, there is a process/science to it. If something works at all, even nature, it is science.
—“Science is magic that works.” (Kurt Vonnegut)
No, science is very specific methodologies. Trying to reduce it to "frick around and find out" renders it useless, because now you're just flailing at raw trial and error in ignorance of the details that make it iterate towards accurate conclusions.
>Trying to reduce it to "frick around and find out" renders it useless
No? Science is an incredibly simple concept. You disrespect it by thinking otherwise. The wheel, is science/technology. Rolling. Making a fire, is science. Christ.
Repeatability is science itself, and the various nuances in-between (not everything repeatable reproduces the same result, etc).
This isn’t exactly debatable, and anyone who disagrees is sadly misinformed, and likely under the age of thirty.
This is painful
Pretty sure it's a troll. He's responding to himself.
/tg/ anons are actually brain dead and moronic, and the "trust the science" meme has absolutely rotted their trust in actual science, to the point where they cannot actually distinguish between true education and lies. They just assume it's all bullshit out to "get them".
They are doomed to live an existence without critical think.
NASA admitted to have lost all the designs and technology of the Apollo missions needed to go to the Moon
Bullshit.
every single piece of documentation, every single blueprint, every single launch record is stored in microfiche and digital copies in a facility near Houston. there's something like 65 million pages of documents. (that number is almost certainly wrong, as I cant remember the exact number, but its something fricking huge)
Flat earthers, and conspiracy theorists CLAIM that nasa lost the designs, and the reality is nothing even remotely close.
The filing system is utterly abhorrent to outright nonexistent, so it's still "lost".
again, bullshit.
the entire thing is filed, stored and catalogued by archivists who know exactly how to store and conserve data like that.
just because you're too fricking dumb to know how to access data does not mean its "lost". do you really expect things to just be handed to your on a silver plate?
https://www.nasa.gov/archives/research/#NASAArchivesholdings
you can go to the Goddard center where the archives are stored. if you have a valid research reason, you have access. its not remotely as tinfoil-hatted as your imagination makes it out to be.
And it is not enough. Not everything is in the blueprints. There are tons of notes and scraps of paper that have been lost.
I was more remembering the horror-stories regarding unlabeled boxes with no index that characterize many areas of government record keeping. That had videos of people witnessing that there was no discernable pattern to what information went where.
Maybe you're right about this specific facility, but there's no telling what minutia slipped the scope leading to
or being in the general undifferentiated mass.
What is lost is institutional knowledge and notes for last-minute fine-tuning the stuff.
If I remember correctly we can't replicate the technique used to manufacture the windows on cathedrals with the effect that light seems to come inside of the window instead of shining through
I don’t know anon, some people are really, REALLY slow…
(Not that slow ponderous thinkers can’t be smart)
>Ok, how about the important shit, like how to construct and use a Slide Rule?
We know how to make and use sliderules. It's also not even remotely close to important. They are totally inferior to the most basic of calculators that you can buy for 5 bucks at walmart based on 50 year old technology.
>Until you can't for whatever reason...
You think you're going to be manufacturing sliderules under the kind of total economic collapse that would be required to lose the fricking CALCULATOR?
All it would take is rare earth minerals not being subsidized and extracted with slave labor. You're being histrionic.
No, getting rid of the calculator would require way more than a rise in rare earth prices. You don't even need rare earths to make a basic calculator.
It would be easier and much more beneficial for post-apocalyptic intellectuals to focus on rebuilding computation technology rather than learning how to use an obsolete way to do basic math faster by hand.
What a garbage thread
>they wouldn't HAVE access to Rare Earths
Rare earth elements are not that rare.
They're just extracted in China for enviromental reasons.
First of all, you don't need rare earths to make transistors or logic circuits. Secondly, no, a slide rule is NOT a tool you need as an intermediate step to produce manufacturing equipment. It was a device created to do basic calculations quickly, for specific applications where that was needed at a time where computers were slow to program, IE, mid cold war rocketry programs.
Not the technology per se, but we lost lots of craftsmanship.
>No, that's just technology.
Technology is applied science you moron. They are two sides of the same coin.
This is basic information.
No, the technologies that arise from blind trial and error with no understanding of underlying processes are in fact unscientific.
Science and technology are two sides of the same coin. Science is where we investigate the natural world and learn things about it, while technology is where we use that knowledge and apply it to achieve certain goals. That's really all technology is: the application of our scientific knowledge.
Now go frick yourself.
>while technology is where we use that knowledge and apply it to achieve certain goals.
No, technology is when we build tools. Knowledge has frick-all to do with it, engineering ran almost solely on laughably inaccurate raw proportions with no conception of material stresses for most of history.
Again, insisting that science is everything renders you flailing about uselessly because you're blinding yourself to the details that result in useful iteration to increasing accuracy instead of blind trial-and-error that can easily have you fricking up MORE than you started with.
>Knowledge has frick-all to do with it
Buddy, you've kinda gotta, y'know... KNOW HOW to make those tools. That knowledge is, in a meaningful sense, the technology, while the tools are individual expressions of that technology.
It's kind of like the difference between "A wheel" and "THE wheel". You might say that "A wheel" is a specific machine, but "THE wheel" (as in "somebody invented 'the wheel'") is the knowledge or practice of how to make and use that category of machine.
there's an apocrypha of some artisan coming to a roman emperor with a kind of glass he invented which is flexible, demonstrated by dropping a cup on the floor which bounced rather than shattering. the emperor asks him if he is the only one who knows how to make it, to which the glassmaker replies yes. The roman emperor orders his execution, as the new indestructible glass would devastate the roman glassblowing industry.
As mentioned earlier in the thread, recreated in the 80s, shut down in the 90s because it was made in East Germany and after reunification the west shut that shit down, famously even openly saying that unbreakable glass costs companies too much money on the long run.
which post?
I once toured a facility making components for the military where a central part of the production process involved painting silver onto a component using 70 year old calligraphy pens they don't make anymore.
That plant was the only location where they made those components and the parts were fundamental to half the vehicles in the military. So hopefully they find a replacement for when the last set of pens breaks. Last I heard they had bought up all the sets they could find on Ebay.
The thing about the German super-glass is that we know the rough steps just not the specifics.
Heat glass to 420C, spray a specific Potassium-Chloride solution on it so it binds to the molecules on the surface.
so they invented the gorila glass that covers our smartphones?
The idea is the same, you add ions to the surface of the glass.
Why not just use sapphire?
>sapphire
I have no idea how much industrial sapphire costs. Actually how much does it cost? can I make a d20 out of one for a reasonable price?
Watch glass is like $5. My Kyocera's screen is like $120. So I dunno, something like $10 cm^3.
Just wanted to say, this has been a cool thread, largely civil discussion about an interesting subject. Really feels like an old/tg/ thread.
>largely civil discussion
KYS homosexual
If you can somehow disregard the intentional attempts at misinformation, sure.