[stonewhite]

I find it interesting to ponder about crafting something that can withstand 7 centuries, given what we currently craft (as a software engineer) not even lasting 10 years.

Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years. I do see the false equivalence here, yet it is nonetheless thought provoking, alongside 100+ year old tea shops in Japan.

[jl6]

One thought that we should not neglect to provoke is that we manufacture things “badly” by choice, in order to reduce cost, in order to make products accessible to more people. Sometimes that sucks and costs more in the long run, but sometimes it’s a rational choice not to overbuild something.

We absolutely could still make a fancy gauntlet that stood a good chance of lasting 700 years, but it would cost enough that only today’s wealthy knights would want to buy it.

[vkou]

And sometimes we manufacture things badly by design, in order to create planned obsolescence, and more revenue in the long term.

[macspoofing]

>in order to create planned obsolescence, a

Planned Obsolescence is an urban myth - there may be some examples, and if there are that's a tiny slice of the market. The reality is what OP said, price and quality are tradeoffs. Manufacturing things that can last 100+ years of wear and tear means those things would be costly, with very limited use cases.

[wewtyflakes]

Isn't this article interesting because it is an outlier (an old preserved gauntlet)? If we want to compare outliers like this to what we build today, it seems impossible to do, since we would need to wait another 700 years to see if any of the things we currently craft last that long.

[stonewhite]

I do agree with you on principles, but given those gauntlets being a pinnacle of human achievement for that time, our current pinnacles doesn't seem to last that long and the means are lost as well. Probably for the better, but quite can't tell also.

Maybe it is a creeping anxiety about losing knowledge as we stride forward and forgetting the means of recreating the things we end up with. Kind of like the Dark age of technology in WH40K.

[its_ethan]

Satellites will be up in space, able to be found by "space archeologists" for literally tens of thousands of years. Sure we maybe won't be able to communicate with them anymore, but that's basically the same as how this gauntlet was dug up out of the ground - the knights who might've used it likely weren't able to "communicate" (find) the gauntlet because it was buried underground.

[wewtyflakes]

How many gauntlets were not preserved? You are comparing a failure of NASA to the what you are calling the pinnacle of human achievement of the 14th century. Would it then not be fair to compare it to the pinnacle of human achieve of this century, rather than its failures? Also, what have we lost by not being able to recreate multi-century lasting gauntlets? Why is something lasting hundreds of years longer than necessary a quality worth preserving, rather than, something fit for purpose?

[anon25783]

You know what's funny? Those tungsten cubes that were a fad recently will be among the most enduring relics of our time, because tungsten is extremely hard and corrosion-resistant. I imagine some archaeologist digging one of those up in a thousand years' time, thinking, "What the hell did they make this thing for?"

[dekhn]

Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron At least 129 extant, made from bronze, some in excellent condition. Unclear what their specific purpose is.

[stonewhite]

In the same vein, I find it funny to think about the future archaeologists pondering the relation of the Eiffel towers around the world the same way we do about pyramids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_replicas_and_deri...

[bookofjoe]

See also: "2001: A Space Odyssey"

[stonewhite]

NASA part was for an exaggerated example, and it was not a failing of them also. It was the nature of the business, decommissioning the C&C of their old satellites, presuming it to be dead after its planned obsolescence. Enthusiasts were there to re-establish contact luckily, but that is beside the point.

But for more mundane stuff, even phasing out media storage technology periodically causes a giant loss of knowledge and means even with the help of archiving groups.

I also stated that I'm ambivalent about the worth of such knowledge preservation, whether it is a form of stamp collecting or something more foundational. All I have to compare is the fact that we have an estimated %1 of Ancient Roman literature surviving and I'd prefer to have at least a bit more of it.

I do admit I didn't have a point to make really, or to assign worth to an ancient gauntlet. Rather it was a reflection on losing stuff while finding stuff and the permanence of marks we leave on this world.

[aksss]

The pinnacle of human achievement in our time is harnessing fossil fuels to replace biomass and whale oil as primary energy sources, enabling massive fertilizer synthesis (cheaper and more plentiful food), cheap concrete and steel production, and plastics. I'm pretty sure those plastics, and maybe even a PowerGlove, will still be around in landfills to be dug up in centuries to come.

I hate that I have to put the disclaimer here that there are obviously costs to the planet and us for this achievement, but it is undoubtedly what characterizes the age we live in (late-19th century forward) in a way that is arguably (if not self-evidently) heretofore unseen in all of human history.

[dekhn]

There is a science of accelerated aging for testing products, which speeds up the process a bit at the expense of accuracy.

[bookofjoe]

See you in 2724

[Scubabear68]

Part of the reason for the long lasting aspect is the over engineering of the products back then. See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.

Today we have much tighter engineering tolerances for cost reasons.

[sumtechguy]

This may be survivorship bias. If you look back say to 1970. Pick any car of that era would you drive it today? Not much. It is not nearly as good or even that well built. But some of the cars of that era are very well preserved and taken care of and maybe even in better shape than when they left the factory floor.

Sometimes things are built well or kept around for whatever reason. But most of the time people slap it together and call it good enough. Then when they are done with that item it is discarded.

You can say 'look at all the stuff from the roman era that survived'. You can also say what about all the stuff that didnt? Probably most of it. But you do not see it because it is no longer there.

[vkou]

> See also Roman aqueducts. Slave labor or nearly free peons also probably contributed to this.

Surviving Roman infrastructure didn't just sit around for two thousand years, it has actively been maintained in that time.

You'll find that you can keep a lot of grandfather's axes around for as long as you want, as long as you keep them clean, and replace the handle and the blade regularly.

[pelagicAustral]

Well I for one, bet my ass that, if we are still using mainframes in 700 years, those will still be running legacy COBOL, they will still publish the mandatory, by-annual "COBOL developer shortage" article iteration on HN.

[hermitcrab]

It is something I have also thought about. Most of the work I have done probably won't even outlast my retirement, let alone last 7 centuries.

https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/24/ephemeral/

[berkes]

We have been "making" nuclear waste that will "last" for eons, though.

Hopefully the constructions (both technical and social) where we store it, in the hope of a future generation that can rid of it, will last centuries too.

I'm convinced everything surrounding nuclear waste is where humans are putting the most effort in thinking and planning for ages. Or, I hope it is.

That said, someone once told me that e.g. castles "back then" where built for centuries, not decades. People thought much more in family-lines, generations and long lasting tribes, than individual, or families' lives.

And there too, nuclear waste is where current society had to think of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, rather than 'before I die'.

[lazystar]

How many generations of humans improved the glove crafting process, prior to the generation that created this glove? Thousands?

How many generations of humans have been writing software? Three?

We're at the early stage of software engineering; brittle code is not surprising.

[bookofjoe]

With the oncoming tsunami of AI we may be in the twilight of human software engineering.

[hutzlibu]

Posssible, but unlikely. It is rather likely, that AI will become a increasing useful tool for human engineering. But replacing would require something fundamentally better.

[bookofjoe]

What if AI creates/invents what comes after software? Just as software didn't exist until machines came along that could interact with it.

[micromacrofoot]

this is kind of survivorship bias, it's a uniquely preserved specimen... the only known of its kind

[deadbabe]

Software is like plants in a garden. Maybe the garden lasts, but the plants are born, live and die, and have to be tended to regularly to survive. It won’t be the same garden eventually.

[bookofjoe]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

[josefresco]

> Even NASA was unable to establish contact with the IMAGE satellite after 18 years.

There's also Voyager, 46/7(?) years and counting.