[xyzzy123]

Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care.

The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise.

In many many domains I am that person.

If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know? Most of us know very little about the concrete networks and systems that keep us alive.

But this is what civilisation is.

[teekert]

I feel a certain uncomfortableness when I don't know these things. It's annoying, and yet it brings me many things as well. When I drive off in my car, I half visualize the clutch plates coming into contact with each other etc etc etc.

But my kids call any internet connection WiFi. My wife didn't understand why she couldn't print with the WiFi switch off (back when we had switches). And every time I try to tell them "how the internet flows", I take them to the hotspot and tell them what WiFi is, how the UTP cable goes to the modem and the fiber goes into the ground and somewhere it gets information from some other computer. And I tell them why they have less issues with our local Minecraft server then when he gets invited to a worlds on someone's Playstation across town (in Bugrock).

It's tiring in a way, even more so for people around me. And still, it also brings me many nice things.

[QuercusMax]

I just blew my college sophomore's mind when I showed them that it's literally 10x faster to transfer data over Ethernet than over wifi. They literally had no idea that hardwired cables are massively faster and more reliable than wireless.

[Cyphase]

> But my kids call any internet connection WiFi.

I was listening to a tech podcast last week, and a guest host, who's a tech reporter and an intelligent person, at some point talked about "Wi-Fi plans" and "getting Wi-Fi for your house". I cringed so hard inside.

Nothing against them personally, and I don't think it's super meaningful (e.g. "how could a tech reporter say that?!"), but yeah, it was a little sad for me.

Bonus anecdote:

A while back I was considering renting an ADU-type unit, and I remember bunches of listing saying "Wi-Fi available". One place I looked at in person, the landlord said a similar thing, and seemed nonplussed when I asked if I could pay for my own internet service to be set up (which I can understand for more valid reasons).

[johnnyanmac]

> and most importantly don't care

That's the depressing part in modern (western) society. The lack of curiosity is one thing, but it seems to spread to a overall lack of care for anything these days. First it's lack of knowledge, then it's lack of care for fellow beings, then it's lack of care for the broken windows everywhere. Community breaks down in real time with the reaction of a shrug.

>If a person doesn't know (except in the vaguest terms) where their water comes from, where their poo goes when they flush, where their food comes from (the supermarket!), or the energy that heats their home... what do they really know?

What are our schools teaching us? I don't expect perfect domain knowledge, but I learned the bare basic supply chains in middle and high school. Food comes from trucks distributing from a factory that gets ingredients from farms and other types of food procurement. Water comes from pipes connected to the house connected to a grid filtered through government purification systems that is retrieved through ravines and dams (and then the water cycle comes in).

Not knowing that much just feels odd.

[pibaker]

> That's the depressing part in modern (western) society

Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American? This is such a weirdly romantic view about the past that I don't know where to even start.

> Food comes from trucks distributing from a factory that gets ingredients from farms and other types of food procurement.

This is like saying the internet is when two computer send 1s and 0s over copper wire. A technically correct description that lacks so much detail that it is practically useless.

[johnnyanmac]

>Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve?

I think the average medieval farmer understood how to harvest food and draw water, yes. This isn't as esoteric as using SSH in 2026. Knowing where your necessary resources come from should be basic knowledge.

For a more modern context of why: I hope people don't simply rant about "why are groceries expensive" and simply believe that a single politician is the reason and that an upcoming politician will magically lower prices. A medieval farmer would not see their crops having low yields and ponder why there's less food.

>This is like saying the internet is when two computer send 1s and 0s over copper wire.

If they aren't specialized in computers, it'd be a start. Things are abstracted, so I'm expecting less knowledge of bits and assembly and more about landlines and isps.

In short, if you use and pay for something everyday, you should understand who to hold accountable when it breaks, or suddenly gets more expensive. Knowing that one breadcrumb can start the trail for further thinking.

[pibaker]

The medieval populace wouldn't blame food shortage on Joe Biden for sure. They would just blame the Jews instead.

Or maybe they would take it as divine punishment. Who knows.

[johnnyanmac]

They would understand the foot shortage came from bad crop yields or low trade.

But sure from there they would blame the bad weather causing that on their respective religion's directive. Or some other group for lacking resources they desired.

[tstrimple]

> Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American?

Probably yes. Our education systems and culture are so very different. Japan is far more structured and standardized. In the US, schools are a complete gamble unless you've got the means and motivation to explicitly move to an area with "good schools". Given the incredible number of adults who read below a sixth grade level, I'd fully expect the average US citizen to be less informed and less capable of informing themselves as the average Japanese citizen. This would translate into more Japanese citizens being familiar with things like water pressure.

[davidguetta]

The thing is you truly have a finite amount of fucks, also called time, to give in a day. Most people are too busy surviving or getting over some random heartbreak or issue at work to care about, or fighting for status.

but you are right that curiosity should be promoted more in school

[SuperHeavy256]

This is a good and important counter-point to the given article. If we as 'tech people' expect the layman to have a higher standard of tech knowledge, then what is to stop people from other fields from telling us to do the same? Truthfully, an average person won't develop expert knowledge of every field.

[krieger_857]

I wonder if that pretentiousness is present in other fields.

[tjhorner]

The post raises several points that I wholeheartedly agree with, but the framing is poor and honestly kind of elitist (or just short-sighted). Maybe to the point that I think much of it might just be bait, lol. For example:

> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level. Ask them to tell you the difference between their router’s public IP and the local IP of their laptop. Ask them to open a terminal and list the contents of a directory. These are not advanced topics. Twenty years ago these were things you learned in the first week of any serious engagement with computers.

What? Computers were everywhere in all kinds of domains by 2006, but you can bet that your average accountant of the time would most likely not be able to SSH into a server (nor should they need to...) I guess it really depends on what the author qualifies as a "serious engagement with computers."

[mattmanser]

They"ve basically got the dates pretty wrong. It's make sense if they'd said 35 years ago, that's when it was common to know that.

I'd say almost all of that became redundant for the average person with windows 3.1 release (34 years ago) or, maybe, more windows 95 (31 years ago).

I remember desperately trying to get two computers to talk to each other so we could play doom in the early 90s, whatever black magic we had to do seemed to take hours to get working.

The time we had 3 or even 4 computers playing Baldurs Gate together I swear we started trying to get the computers talking at 7pm and didn't start playing till 10 (but it was amazing).

[pibaker]

Even site administrators didn't need SSH in 2006. "Panels" were already a thing back then.

The author has a rather distorted view of how things actually were in 2006.

[frizlab]

> What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?

Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…

[slumberlust]

The water gnomes carry it there.

[QuercusMax]

Water is pumped to a water tower which is up high. From there it's just gravity plus siphon type effects.

[lamontcg]

> Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from.

Yeah, but at some point you need a plumber who at least has a passing understanding of where it comes from, and more importantly knows how to fix any problems you may have with your plumbing and its connection to municipal water/sewer.

And there needs to be someone employed somewhere who understands the whole municipal water supply and sewer system and how it is engineered and all the problems that it has.

Also, it is good to have the intellectual curiosity so that you could at least take a stab at it off the top of your head, and you wouldn't be averse to learning about it, if it suddenly became relevant to your life.

And there is a difference between the person who will hit a high priority "bug" in their life and will grind on it until they get it fixed, learning whatever they need to in the process, and people who just get stuck and try to avoid the problem.

As an example from work, I've been dumped into an open source codebase that I had zero familiarity with (keepalived) and found a missing ntohl() bug that affected Solaris/sparc servers (explaining quite nicely why it didn't affect Linux once the bug got found). And I did this when we were shipping keepalived in our product, fixing it under an extreme time crunch, and rescued a large contract with a Bank. This wasn't even a product that I was actively working on as a developer anymore either, but the devs on the product weren't familiar enough with C hacking.

I get the feeling that "kids these days" would just say "I dunno, Solaris is just cursed".

And that is an out of date, overly specific technological problem, but you can probably update that with any of the popular blog posts on this site where someone digs into some highly specific problem to find some incredibly detailed problem resolution. There's still people doing that. The stories are fairly popular. But it is weird to see so much "I don't need to know, and I don't need to care" sentiments on "Hacker" News in response to the (admittedly AI generated) title article.

[xyzzy123]

My point was meant to be a bit more subtle; that we all engage with abstractions of reality. Whenever I'm tempted to complain about people not knowing stuff, I pause and think about how little I really know.

In my grandfather's peer group, you were lacking essential knowledge if you couldn't rebuild an engine.

[lamontcg]

Interestingly, I've got a truck with a dead engine that I'm considering if I should yank it out and replace/rebuild it... Never done that before and don't know how to do it...