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by objclxt
4672 days ago
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> There are large problems humans don't have answers to, but we're busy making things then figuring out how the things we made work Many technologies have been developed or accelerated through the need to reverse engineer something. I would argue the techniques developed to break the Enigma Code during WW2 had profound effects on computing generally. Often reverse engineering a technology can also allow you to make improvements the other party has yet to realise, catalysing new ideas and research. Not that all this means you are necessarily wrong, although perhaps it is a little too idealistic to hope for a world where information isn't a valuable currency? |
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Imagine a company where Team Database releases a binary-only library to the rest of the company. They won't tell you how it works and you can't talk to them, but it seems to work well enough. Then one day, Team Website wants to do something else with the database (a new type of query, new type of storage model, something non-trivial). In this backwards company, Team Website spends months reverse engineering the library and protocol to hack their own functionality into it. That's mad, right?
A large view presents two views of knowledge: things humans know —and— things humans don't know. We're circling around rediscovering what other people have done while they sit there quite able to give us what we want to know.
Now, adversarial conditions prevent such blanket sharing: capitalism, sovereign nations, war, etc.
Think of Intel. In some ways, they control the pinnacle of CPU design that humanity can surface at this point in time. We don't have anybody to ask "well, what comes next?" in the 10 year CPU roadmap—we have to discover the future along the way.
We should spend more time asking "well, what comes next?" and less time rediscovering what people already know how to do (modulo it making you better at actually discovering new things, or just for fun, or for cyberwar, etc).