Comment by michaelrpeskin

Comment by michaelrpeskin 3 days ago

I was having almost this exact same discussion with a neighbor who's about my age and has kids about my kids' ages. I had recently sold my old truck, and now I only have one (very old and fragile) car left with a manual transmission. I need to keep it running a few more years for my kids to learn how to drive it since it's really hard to get a new car with a stick now...or do I?

Is learning to drive stick as out dated as learning how to do spark advance on a Model T? Do I just give in and accept that all of my future cars, and all the cars for my kids are just going to be automatic? When I was learning to drive, I had to understand how to prime the carburetor to start my dad's Jeep. But I only ever owned fuel injected cars, so that's a "skill" I never needed in real life.

It's the same angst I see in AI. Is typing code in the future going to be like owning a carbureted engine or manual transmission is now? Maybe? Likely? Do we want to hold on to the old way of doing things just because that's what we learned on and like?

Or is it just a new (and more abstracted) way of telling a computer what to do? I don't know.

Right now, I'm using AI like when I got my first automatic transmission. It does make things easier, but I still don't trust it and like to be in control because I'm better. But now automatics are better than even the best professional driver, so do I just accept it?

Technology progresses, at what point to we "accept it" and learn the new way? How much of holding on to the old way is just our "identity".

I don't have answers, but I have been thinking about this a lot lately (both in cars for my kids, and computers for my job).

analog31 3 days ago

The reasons I can think of for learning to drive stick shift are subtle. Renting a stick shift car in Europe is cheaper. You might have to drive a friend's car. My kids both learned to drive our last stick shift car, which is now close to being junked. Since our next car will probably be electric, it's safe bet that it won't be stick.

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direwolf20 3 days ago

The reasons for learning to drive a manual transmission aren't really about the transmission, they're about the learning and the effects on the learner. The more you get hands on with the car and in touch with the car the more deeply you understand it. Once you have the deepish understanding, you can automate it for convenience after that. It's the same reason we should always teach long division before we give students calculators, not after.

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- michaelrpeskin 3 days ago
  
  I agree with all of those statements - I always told my wife that I'd get our kids a underpowered manual so that they're always busy rowing gears and can't text and drive.
  But in the bigger picture, where does it stop?
  You had to do manual spark advance while driving in the 30's
  You had to set the weights in the distributor to adjust spark advance in the 70's
  Now the computer has a programed set of tables for spark advance
  I bet you never think of spark advance while you're driving now, does that take away from deeply understanding the car?
  I used to think about the accelerator pump in a the carburetor when I drove one, now I just know that the extra fuel richening comes from another lookup table in the ECU when I press the gas pedal down, am I less connected to the car now?
  My old Jeep would lean cut when I took my foot off the gas and the throttle would shut quickly. My early fuel injected car from the 80's had a damper to slow the throttle closing to prevent extreme leaning out when you take your foot off the gas. Now that's all tables in the ECU.
  I don't disagree with you that a manual transmission lets you really understand the car, but that's really just the latest thing were losing, we don't even remember all of the other "deep connections" to a car that were there 50-100 years ago. What makes this one different? Is it just the one that's salient now?
  To bring it back on topic. I used to hand-tune assembly for high performance stuff, now the compilers do better than me and I haven't looked at assembly in probably 10 years. Is moving to AI generated code any different? I still think about how I write my C so that the compiler gets the best hints to make good assembly, but I don't touch the assembly. In a few years will be be clever with how we prompt so that the AI generates the best code? Is that a fundamentally different thing, or does it just feel weird to us because of where we are now. How did the generation of programmers before me feel about giving up assembly and handing it over to the compilers?
  
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  direwolf20 3 days ago
  
  EVs don't have variable gearboxes at all, so when EVs become popular, it doesn't make sense to learn stick. It would be a fake abstraction, like the project featured on HN, where kids had floppy disk shells with NFC tags in them that tell the TV which video file to load from a hard disk.
  
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  svilen_dobrev 3 days ago
  
  i have been programming for 40years.. but still have not dipped in this brave new world of shakespeare-taught coding-LLMs.
  IMO there's one basic difference with this new "generative" stuff.. it's not deterministic. Or not yet. All previous generations "AI" were deterministic.. but died.
  Generating is not a problem. i have made medium-ish projects - say 200+kloc python/js - having 50%-70% of code generated (by other code - so you maintain that meta-code, and the "language" recipes-code it interprets) - but it has been all deterministic. If shit happens - or some change is needed, anywhere on the requirements-down-to-deployment chain - someone can eventually figure out where and what. It is reasoned. And most importantly, once done, it stays done. And if i regenerate it 1000 times, it will be same.
  Did this made me redundant? Not at all. Producing software is much easier this way, the recipes are much shorter, there's less space for errors etc etc. But still - Higher abstractions are even harder to grasp than boilerplate. Which has quite a cost.. you cannot throw any newbie on it and expect results.
  So, fine-tuning assembly - or manual transmission - might be gonna-be-obsolete skill, as it is not required.. except in rare conditions. But it is helpful to learn stuff. To flex your mind/body about alternatives, possibilities, shortcuts, wear-and-tear, fatigue, aha-moments and what not. And then move these as concepts, onto another domains, which are not as commoditized yet.
  Another thing is.. Exupery in Land-of-people talks about technology (airplanes in his case), and how without technology, mankind workarounds/ avoids places/things that are not "friendly", like twisting roads around hellscapes. While technology cuts all straight through those - flies above all that, perfect for when it works - and turns into nightmare when it breaks right in the middle of such unfriendly "area".
  dunno. maybe i am getting old..
  
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  lufenialif2 3 days ago
  
  To add: learning how stuff works gives you opportunity to do that stuff, sometimes for cash, when nobody else is
  
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- analog31 3 days ago
  
  Probably a vanishingly small number of people who drive stick, actually understand how and why it works. My kids do, of course, because I explained it to them. Most drivers just go through the motions.
  A growing number of cars have CVTs.
  
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