Comment by sph

Comment by sph 2 days ago

How old are you? At 39 (20 years of professional experience) I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens, which have been replaced by nonsense like Kubernetes and aligning content with CSS Grid.

And I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; to be fair, it gets to a point that most new ideas are just rehashing of older ones. When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.

doix 2 days ago

> I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens

I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me.

I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.

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mickeyp 2 days ago

SoftICE gang represent :-)
That's a skill onto itself, and I mean the general stuff does not fade or at least come back quickly. But there's a lot of the tail end that's just difficult to recall because it's obscure.
How exactly did I hook Delphi apps' TForm handling system instead of breakpointing GetWindowTextA and friends? I mean... I just cannot remember. It wasn't super easy either.

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Agentlien 2 days ago

I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL.
These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.

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nkrisc 2 days ago

You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. You forget skills you don’t use. Barring some pathology, if you’re doing something every day you won’t forget it.

If you’ve forgotten your Win32 reverse engineering skills I’m guessing you haven’t done much of that in a long time.

That said, it’s hard to truly forget something once you’ve learned it. If you had to start doing it again today, you’d learn it much faster this time than the first.

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Wowfunhappy 2 days ago

> You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain.
For what it’s worth—it’s not entirely clear that this is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
The human brain seemingly has the capability to remember (virtually?) infinite amounts of information. It’s just that most of us… don’t.

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- pixl97 2 days ago
  
  You can't store an infinite amount of entropy in a finite amount of space outside of a singularity, well or at least attempting to do that will cause a singularity.
  Compression/algorithms don't save you here either. The algorithm for pi is very short, pulling up any particular randomm digit of pi still requires the expenditure of some particular amount of entropy.
  
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  AstroBen 2 days ago
  
  It's entirely possible for this to be literally false, but practically true
  The important question is can you learn enough in a standard human lifetime to "fill up your knowledge bank"?
  
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- tovej 2 days ago
  
  1) That's not infinite, just vast
  2) Hyperthymesia is about remembering specific events in your past, not about retaining conceptual knowledge.
  
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  thesz 2 days ago
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w
  APL inventor says that he was developing not a programming language, but notation to express as much problems as one can. He found that expressing more and more problems with the notation first made notation grow, then notation size started to shrink.
  To develop conceptual knowledge (when one's "notation" starts to shrink) one has to have some good memory (re-expressing more and more problems).
  
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- nkrisc 2 days ago
  
  > It’s just that most of us… don’t.
  Ok, so my statement is essentially correct.
  Most of us can not keep infinite information in our brain.
  
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  Flatterer3544 2 days ago
  
  It's not that you forget, it's more that it gets archived.
  If you moved back to a country you hadn't lived or spoken its language in for 10 years, you would find yourself that you don't have to relearn it, and it would come back quickly.
  Also information is supposedly almost infinite, as with increased efficiency as you learn, it makes volume limits redundant.
  
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  Wowfunhappy 2 days ago
  
  I do take your point. But the point I’m trying to emphasize is that the brain isn’t like a hard drive that fills up. It’s a muscle that can potentially hold more.
  I’m not sure if this is in the Wikipedia article, but when I last read about this, years ago, there seemed to be a link between Hyperthymesia and OCD. Brain scans suggested the key was in how these individuals organize the information in their brain, so that it’s easy for them retrieve.
  Before the printing press was common, it was common for scholars to memorize entire books. I absolutely cannot do this. When technology made memorization less necessary, our memories shrank. Actually shrank, not merely changing what facts to focus on.
  And to be clear, I would never advocate going back to the middle ages! But we did lose something.
  
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  ploum 2 days ago
  
  It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject.
  It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times.
  Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)
  
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thesz 2 days ago

  > When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.

Learn yourself relational algebra. It invariantly will lead you to optimization problems and these will also invariantly lead you to equality saturation that is most effectively implemented with... generalized join from relational algebra!

Also, relational algebra implements content-addressable storage (CAS), which is essential for data flow computing paradigm. Thus, you will have a window into CPU design.

At 54 (36 years of professional experience) I find these rondos fascinating.

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steve_adams_86 2 days ago

> I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade;

I felt like that for a while, but I seem to be finding new challenges again. Lately I've been deep-diving on data pipelines and embedded systems. Sometimes I find problems that are easy enough to solve by brute force, but elegant solutions are not obvious at all. It's a lot of fun.

It could be that you're way ahead of me and I'll wind up feeling like that again.

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