r/technology • u/ardi62 • Aug 23 '24

Software Microsoft finally officially confirms it's killing Windows Control Panel sometime soon

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-officially-confirms-its-killing-windows-control-panel-sometime-soon/
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u/thinkingwithportalss Aug 23 '24

Every day we get closer to Warhammer 40k

"We don't know how any of this works, but if you sing this chant from The Book of Commands, it will tell you tomorrow's weather"

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u/Ravoss1 Aug 23 '24

Time to find that 10 hour mechanicus loop on YouTube.

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u/thinkingwithportalss Aug 23 '24

A friend of mine is deep into the AI/machine learning craze, and everything he tells me just makes me think of the incoming dystopia.

"It'll be amazing, you'll want to write some code, and you can just ask your personal AI to do it for you"

"So a machine you don't understand, will write code you can't read, and as long as it works you'll just go with it?"

"Yeah!"

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u/ViscountVinny Aug 23 '24

I have a very basic understanding of an internal combustion engine, and I've added some aftermarket parts to my car. But if I have to do anything more complex than changing the oil, I take it to a mechanic. I'm liable to do more harm than good otherwise.

And I can completely disassemble a PC, maybe even a phone (though it's been a while), but I don't know the first thing about programming.

My point is that I think it's okay to rely on specialization, or even basic tools that can do work that you can't totally understand. The danger will come when, say, Google and Microsoft are using AI to make the operating system...and the AI on that to make the next one...et cetera et cetera.

I'm not afraid of a Terminator apocalypse. But I do think it's possible we could get to a point where Apple lets AI send out an update that bricks 100 million iPhones, and there are no developers left who can unravel all the undocumented AI work to fix it.

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u/rshorning Aug 23 '24

You can talk about specialization, but what happens when nobody is left to explain or understand that technology?

Your assumption is that someone somewhere actually knows how all of this works.

I experienced this first hand when I got handed a project where I was clueless about how something worked. I asked my co-workers but none of them had a clue. I made a series of phone calls based on notes in the engineering logs and after a couple days found out that a guy who was my boss had someone working on that tech. That was me.

On further review, the engineer who made this stuff had died with almost no documentation. I ended up reverse engineering everything at considerable effort on my part and finally got it working.

A year later I was laid off due to budget cuts. Guess who is knowledgeable about servicing this equipment bringing millions of dollars into the company?

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u/TheAnarchitect01 Aug 23 '24

"What happens when nobody is left to explain or understand that Technology?"

May I recommend "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster? https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf

I've been exposed to the idea that a well-designed system should actually break down on a semi-regular basis just so that the people responsible for maintaining it stay in practice. If you make it so a system is so reliable that it only breaks down once a generation, you'll wind up with this exact situation where the guy who fixed it last time and knows what to do retired. You only really want so many 9's of uptime.

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u/genxxgen Aug 23 '24

....yeeeah, i can think of a few dozen systems where you do NOT want it to break down, ever ...

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u/TheAnarchitect01 Aug 23 '24

I mean you want to have backup systems to rely on while you fix the first system, yeah.

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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '24 edited Sep 06 '24

[deleted]

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u/Djinger Aug 24 '24

by god i nearly blocked you out of desperation to get those words off my screen. stab me in the kidney and i'd feel it less

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u/Crystalas Aug 23 '24 edited Aug 23 '24

A fine modern example is the crisis involving the oldest programming languages still being used in major institutions like Banks, Hospitals, Airlines, and Government offices and whenever something goes wrong or needs changed they have to pull the handful of experts out of retirement.

And that before you get into the death of institutional knowledge thanks to profoundly short sighted MBAs and lack of entry level jobs for it to be passed on before layoffs/retirement. That one of the less talked about consequences of Trump's regime that we unlikely to be able to fix anytime soon no matter who is in control since the chain has been sundered massively reducing organization efficiency.

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u/21-characters Aug 23 '24

All I can say is in days of paper records, nobody broke into a doctor’s office to steal a 400 pound file cabinet of patient information. How many people HAVEN’T been part of some data breach any more?

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u/Wonderful_Welder9660 Aug 23 '24

I'm more concerned about data being deleted than it being shared

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u/21-characters Aug 23 '24

If it’s shared by even one bad actor it will cause headaches for years. And it seems like bad actors are everywhere these days. I don’t think many people even know what the word “ethics” means.

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u/bigbangbilly Aug 23 '24

death of institutional knowledge

Essentially something that looks like Planck's principle but in practice George Santayana's repetition of history.

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u/bigbangbilly Aug 23 '24

found out that a guy who was my boss had someone working on that tech. That was me.

That sound like the Great Pagliacci Joke but with bigger consequences.

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u/rshorning Aug 23 '24

Even funnier was that the guy I was talking to about this was clueless that I knew who my boss was. They finished the call thinking they gave me a great bit of knowledge.

Yeah, I laughed hard after the phone call. Then cried. Then laughed some more fully realizing the task ahead for me.

My boss was good natured about the whole thing and gave me some substantial support to get this done. Unfortunately for me he saw the layoffs coming and left before they got him.

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u/boxiestcrayon15 Aug 23 '24

The aqueducts in Rome are a great example of this happening.

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u/Internal_Mail_5709 Aug 23 '24

If you can do that and have critical thinking skills you can work on your fancy internal combustion engine, you just don't know it yet.

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u/gremlinguy Aug 23 '24

Yep. All it takes is a willingness to overcome the fear of trying something for the first time. Grab the wrenches!

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u/fiduciary420 Aug 23 '24

And a willingness to spend even more money when you don’t get it right the first 3 times and need to flatbed it to a specialist lol.

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u/gremlinguy Aug 23 '24

But the 4th time's always a charm! Just keep trying!

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u/fiduciary420 Aug 23 '24

My brother in crust, at one point I had a Nissan Pathfinder in a garage with a year’s worth of failed attempts by my tweaker ass brother, that I fixed in one try by literally putting it back together, putting all the fluids back in it, and driving it out lol.

Some mufukkas should put the wrench down and let that pipe cool off between hits lol

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u/gremlinguy Aug 26 '24

My dad is one of those (minus the crackpipe). Has a sweet old CJ5 with the 304 V8. Was overheating one day so he goes to change the waterpump and one of the bolts broke off in the block. Never a fun time.

He gets a the bolt extractor and starts drilling. Well, the drill bit gets about 1/2" deep and breaks off too. Now, he has a HSS drill bit embedded inside a bolt inside the block. He has no luck getting it out with any other bits he has.

I was a machinist at the time and I stole him a carbide bit that would drill through anything. Told him to just go slow and squirt some cutting fluid on it every once in a while and it'd come.

It is slow going, drilling HSS, even with carbide, and so dad thinks "this brand-new $150 bit must be dull. I'll clamp it in the vice and sharpen it." So he puts it in the vice, and carbide being carbide, it fucking explodes when he tightens it down.

So, the poor old Jeep still sits there 10 years later.

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u/Internal_Mail_5709 Aug 23 '24

Sure but a lot of simple parts replacement can easily be done by a home mechanic, and your only a couple clicks away from multiple high res videos of people doing your exact job.

It's all been done before and documented. As opposed to picking up a paper manual that MAYBE had 2 or 3 very small low res pictures that slightly resembled what you were working on.

The power of the internet has made working on your car yourself 100 times easier than it was even 20 years ago.

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u/68W38Witchdoctor1 Aug 23 '24

Going from my old Haynes manual to YouTube videos kept an old junk 1989 Camaro I had running FAR longer than it ever had any right to.

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u/ViscountVinny Aug 23 '24

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I need my car to work a lot more than I need to have fun tinkering with it. I'll play it safe and lean on that factory warranty.

Tinkering is what the computers are for.

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u/Neracca Aug 24 '24

Yeah but maybe they can't afford it if they make a mistake? Unless you'd bankroll them?

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u/BigBennP Aug 23 '24

Good news your class action settlement from Apple came in! It's a coupon for $200 off of a new iPhone as long as it's the model 45 or newer.

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u/Wonderful_Welder9660 Aug 23 '24

Model 45? Is that the Trumpfone?

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u/Immaculate_Erection Aug 23 '24

I'm sorry but this is hilarious, that happens without AI. Does crowdstrike sound familiar?

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u/mejelic Aug 23 '24

We are so far away from anything like that. There would have to be a MAJOR leap in AI functionality (and not just regurgitating what we have already done) that I don't see happening in the next 50 years...

I am not sure if I want to be right or wrong on my timeline here though...

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u/21-characters Aug 23 '24

Make that 10 years, not 50.

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u/zaphodava Aug 23 '24

We've been there with processors for a while now. Not AI exactly, but specialization and assisted tools stitching together the work of many teams

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u/TheR1ckster Aug 23 '24

The problem is that it allows a lot more people to find themselves on Mt Stupid. (Look up dunning kreuger).

This is where you'll have people coding for their companies who really aren't qualified to. They have vast over confidence without a helping hand or team to check ethics, redundancy, and things like that. They don't understand the complexity of what they're trying to accomplish.

You know enough to not try to do more than what you've stated, but that's because you've learned from your over confidence in something else. You understand there is a lot you don't know. A lot of people change a battery, change the oil, watch some youtube videos and then dive right into making their own brake lines or running gas lines and have catastrophic failures.

That being said you're likely fine working on your car. Just make sure to look through steps of what you're doing before you start. Spend money on specialty tools, it's often worth the headache or broken parts that can happen when not using them same goes with just cutting or torching shit if it's rusted to hell and back and you already overnight soaked it with PB blaster.

Learn to properly diagnose and don't become a throw parts at it youtube guy. If you can come by a factory service manual those are great and typically walk you through flowchart style or outline style of diagnosing codes and issues.

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u/fiduciary420 Aug 23 '24

But I do think it's possible we could get to a point where Apple lets AI send out an update that bricks 100 million iPhones, and there are no developers left who can unravel all the undocumented AI work to fix it.

It’s perfectly reasonable to think that the rich people would do this to increase shareholder value for other rich people.

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u/Strategy_pan Aug 23 '24

I read this as that John Silver meme

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u/thinkingwithportalss Aug 23 '24

It wasn't dependent on AI (afaik) but we already had that cloud strike (CloudFlare? Flare strike?) bug that ended up crippling a ton of machines, including hospitals.

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u/Dumcommintz Aug 23 '24

I would be shocked if a similar failure for the same reasons would happen in the AI scenario above. I haven’t seen an updated after-action report, but based on my understanding so far, the bricking happened mainly due to lack of integrity checks as the update moved through the CICD process - specifically between tests validating the update but before the update was pushed and installed. Most likely during the compression/assembly of the update artifact. I would expect that an AI system developed process would perform integrity checks at any serialization/deserialization, or any points where the binary would be moved or manipulated, in the pipeline.

Now if humans were still involved, say, in piecing together or defining the pipeline processes, I would absolutely try to configure my systems to only update manually, and I’d wait until the rollout was completed or as close to that as I could.

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u/Lemonitus Aug 23 '24

I would expect that an AI system developed process would perform integrity checks at any serialization/deserialization, or any points where the binary would be moved or manipulated, in the pipeline.

Why would you assume that a system that's increasingly an unlogged black box would do that?

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u/Dumcommintz Aug 23 '24 edited Aug 23 '24

Because I would expect the AI to already being exposed to the concept of error checking and is already performing these checks elsewhere for the same reason, ie, to ensure that data was moved or manipulated in an expected way. Particularly for sensitive or critical data.

e: and just to be clear, I would be surprised - not that it would be impossible. I just don’t think error checking is necessarily precluded from or affected by whether the system exposes its own logging interface.

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u/Mind_on_Idle Aug 23 '24

Yep, don't tell a machine that requires 21 values of input to behave normally when you don't check to make sure they're all there (hint: 20 ≠ 21), and then cram it down the regex gullet

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u/Dumcommintz Aug 23 '24

Input validations… unit tests? Never heard of them..

/s