We're Not Innovating, We’re Just Forgetting Slower
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This article is so weirdly written
One of his points is that a vhs player is easily fixable while a wifi router isn't. These things aren't even remotely the same. They don't serve the same function, they don't have the same complexity. Comparing their repairability makes no sense because they serve different functions. Just because I know how to repair a keyboard doesn't mean I know how to fix a tv.
Most of his complaints are on the capitalization of modern technology, which is not a problem of innovation and knowledge, it's an economics and political problem.
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I like a lot of your responses. I agree about nostalgia being a main driver of his article. However, i think the bits about how a doctor needs to know how a medical tool functions etc, is a little misplaced. I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user. I ALSO think the author would prefer more broad technical literacy, but his core arguement seemed to be that those making things dont understand the tech they're built upon and that unintended consequences can occur when that happens. Worse, if the current technology has been abstracted enough times, eventually no one will know enough to fix it.
I think the author was referring to the makers of the device not understanding what theyre making, not so much the end user.
Just to make sure I'm following your thread of thought, are you referring to this part of the author's opinion piece or something else in his text?
"This wouldn’t matter if it were just marketing hyperbole, but the misunderstanding has real consequences. Companies are making billion-dollar bets on technologies they don’t understand, while actual researchers struggle to separate legitimate progress from venture capital fever dreams. We’re drowning in noise generated by people who mistake familiarity with terminology for comprehension of the underlying principles."
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I think the "black box" nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn't turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
This is a symptom of industry switching to cheap "disposable" electronics, rather than more expensive, robust, and repairable ones.
From the treadmill company's point of view, it's cheaper to just lose one unit and pay shipping one way rather than pay to have the unit returned, spend valuable technician time diagnosing and fixing an issue and then pay to ship the repaired unit back.
About 50 years ago, you could find appliance repair shops that would fix your broken toaster or TV, and parts for stuff like that were easily available. Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
Now, with the advanced automation in building these, combined with the increased difficulty of repair(fine-work soldering, firmware debuging and the like) it makes way more sense to just replace the whole thing.
The other valid component to your argument is the cost of labor now. It is more expensive to maintain a staff of people to perform repairs and manage the logistics of transporting units to service than it is to simply lose 100% of the wholesale value of the handful of items that fail within the warranty period. Labor, especially skilled labor, is really really expensive in the western world.
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VHS player
VCR.
It stands for Video Cassette Recorder. There is no such thing as a "player". They all have recording capability.
I've programmed the intel 8051. I made a firmware update to get it working on 4G/LTE modems. I must say the debug tools weren't the greatest. There was a lot of logging invovled.
A lot of modern tech is garbage. You just need to practice the purchasing habits of Richard Stallman. There are literally hundreds of routers on the market that you can install your own custom OS on. This is the case with many phones, and almost every PC.
"VCR" vs "VHS Player":
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VHS player
VCR.
It stands for Video Cassette Recorder. There is no such thing as a "player". They all have recording capability.
I've programmed the intel 8051. I made a firmware update to get it working on 4G/LTE modems. I must say the debug tools weren't the greatest. There was a lot of logging invovled.
A lot of modern tech is garbage. You just need to practice the purchasing habits of Richard Stallman. There are literally hundreds of routers on the market that you can install your own custom OS on. This is the case with many phones, and almost every PC.
"VCR" vs "VHS Player":
My memory was that there were exclusive players for TV stations. But all the consumer ones could record.
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VHS player
VCR.
It stands for Video Cassette Recorder. There is no such thing as a "player". They all have recording capability.
I've programmed the intel 8051. I made a firmware update to get it working on 4G/LTE modems. I must say the debug tools weren't the greatest. There was a lot of logging invovled.
A lot of modern tech is garbage. You just need to practice the purchasing habits of Richard Stallman. There are literally hundreds of routers on the market that you can install your own custom OS on. This is the case with many phones, and almost every PC.
"VCR" vs "VHS Player":
What is this, Perl? It's not write-only. VCR may stand for video cassette recorder but it's also a VCP.
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This really made me want to find a BASIC emulator and a collection of old programs and introduce them to my kids. Infeelnlike LUA is the modern BASIC. I just picked up Replicube and plan to use it to introduce my daughter to LUA.
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VHS player
VCR.
It stands for Video Cassette Recorder. There is no such thing as a "player". They all have recording capability.
I've programmed the intel 8051. I made a firmware update to get it working on 4G/LTE modems. I must say the debug tools weren't the greatest. There was a lot of logging invovled.
A lot of modern tech is garbage. You just need to practice the purchasing habits of Richard Stallman. There are literally hundreds of routers on the market that you can install your own custom OS on. This is the case with many phones, and almost every PC.
"VCR" vs "VHS Player":
Insane hill to die on but you do you.
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Meanwhile, my Wi-Fi router requires a PhD in reverse engineering just to figure out why it won’t connect to the internet.
I do think people in general could benefit from maybe $100 in tools and a healthy dose of Youtube when it comes to this point. My PC of 10 years wouldn't boot one morning because my SSD died. There wasn't anything too important on it that I hadn't backed up, but it was still a bummer. I took it apart, and started poking around. Found a short across a capacitor, so I started cycling capacitors. Sure enough, one was bad. Replaced it. Boots just fine. (Moved everything to a new SSD just in case).
All I needed for this job was a multimeter and a soldering iron (though hot air gun made it slightly easier).
I think the "black box" nature of electronics is mostly illusory due to how we treat our devices. A friend bought a walking treadmill that wouldn't turn on out of the box. She contacted the company, they told her to trash it and just shipped her a new one.
She gave it to me, I took it apart. One of the headers that connects the power switch to the mainboard was just unplugged. It took literally 10 minutes to "fix" including disassembly and assembly, and all I needed was a screwdriver.
Yet there's zero expectation of user maintenance. If it doesn't work, trash it.
Scroll through maker TikTok
This guy might be looking in the wrong places.
Except with Internet shit, it's usually some dumbass at your ISP who is only trained to answer the phone and parrot from 3 different prompts. Actually getting someone who can flip the switch/register your device in the proper region to make shit actually work on their end.
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While I 100% agree with the fact that even modern things can be fixed with some knowhow and troubleshooting (and spare capacitors or the like), there’s a few things at play:
`- people generally don’t have this skill set
- electronics tend to be made cheaper, this means they may fail faster but also means they can be replaced cheaper
- it costs real money for tech support that can fix said issues, often many times more money than the thing costs to replace
`
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff. Even in the retro sphere, the math starts to side towards fix because of the rarity, but it’s not always clear.
As a retro enthusiast, I’ve fixed my share of electronics that only needed an hour and a $2 capacitor. But there was also $7 shipping for the cap, and 30-60min of labor, and my knowhow in troubleshooting and experience. If the company had to send someone out, they’d likely spend well over $200 for time, gas, labor, parts, etc. not including a vehicle for the tech and the facility nearby and all that good stuff.
This is exactly it. I used to work for a manufacturer that made devices they would often need to repair. They would bill non-warranty labor at $100/hour, plus the cost of parts. Their products were primarily used by professionals, so that was fine when it was being done to repair something that cost between $700-$4,000 new, especially for people who were making money using the product. When they launched a product at a $500 MSRP, though, it started to get harder, and even more so when competition forced them to lower the price to $400. When I left they were about to launch a product targeted at amateurs, originally aiming for a $200 price. It was actually being built by a Chinese competitor, with our software guys contributing to the system and putting our logo on it. Spending $100 labor to repair a $200 device was going to be a tough sell, and when I left the plan for warranty “repairs” was to just give the customer a replacement unit and scrap the defective one. And I’m sure the repair labor rate was going up; they had a hard time hiring qualified technicians at the rate they wanted to pay, and most of the department had quit/moved to new roles when I left, so they were surely having to increase pay and the rate they billed.
When something’s being built on an assembly line mostly by machine and/or low-cost Asian labor, it’s harder for a company to justify paying a skilled technician’s labor in a western country when that makes the cost of repair close to the cost of a new unit.
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This article is so weirdly written
One of his points is that a vhs player is easily fixable while a wifi router isn't. These things aren't even remotely the same. They don't serve the same function, they don't have the same complexity. Comparing their repairability makes no sense because they serve different functions. Just because I know how to repair a keyboard doesn't mean I know how to fix a tv.
Most of his complaints are on the capitalization of modern technology, which is not a problem of innovation and knowledge, it's an economics and political problem.
Fire good. Angry gods strike ground. Man take fire. Place food on top. Simple.
E-e-elic-tri-s-i-ty bad. Complicated. Not know who volt is. Sparks scary. Place food on top not know how. -
VHS player
VCR.
It stands for Video Cassette Recorder. There is no such thing as a "player". They all have recording capability.
I've programmed the intel 8051. I made a firmware update to get it working on 4G/LTE modems. I must say the debug tools weren't the greatest. There was a lot of logging invovled.
A lot of modern tech is garbage. You just need to practice the purchasing habits of Richard Stallman. There are literally hundreds of routers on the market that you can install your own custom OS on. This is the case with many phones, and almost every PC.
"VCR" vs "VHS Player":
Conjuring up a frequency graph from 2004-present doesn't help your argument, as the VCR format wars were pretty much over a good 15 years beforehand.
"VCR" could have meant either VHS or Betamax to a consumer in the early '80s.
At least VHS specifies a particular standard, and "player" in that context has a loose connection with record player, or tape player , being the thing you play your purchased records / tapes / videos on.
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A year or two ago I read about some guy who is still managing the trailer park he inherited from his dad with a TRS-80 (I think), using an app he wrote way back when. If it works it works!
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You don't have to fix everything, but just doing stuff like replacing connectors and capacitors could probably save 10% of the shit that we throw away, and it's not that hard to try.
I do agree with that completely and I'd like to add to it with an additional point.
When things break it sucks, but this does present you with an opportunity. If it's already not working, there's no harm in taking it apart and taking a look around. Maybe you'll see something obviously at fault, maybe you won't. But there's literally no harm in trying to fix it, especially if otherwise you were planning to toss it out.
And I really can't tell you the number of times I've seen a device stop working, and apon closer inspection the entire problem was something very simple, like an old wire broke at the solder point, and with it disconnected, the power switch doesn't work. When I was a kid and didn't know how to solder, I would fix issues like that with some aluminum foil, and often it worked. Just start with a screwdriver, open things up, take a look around. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet to just give it a shot.
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USB-C. We are clearly progressing. I never want to go back to the world where every phone had a proprietary power brick and connector.
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Except with Internet shit, it's usually some dumbass at your ISP who is only trained to answer the phone and parrot from 3 different prompts. Actually getting someone who can flip the switch/register your device in the proper region to make shit actually work on their end.
Ah yes, the shibboleet
