> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.

I used to have this joke(?) with my friends: remember Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur Court"? The titular Yankee basically upends the (faux) medieval society he gets transported to, "inventing" all sorts of technological miracles.

Well, I'm a software developer but don't come from an engineering background (I mean actual engineering, not programming). I don't even understand how electricity or the telephone work (I mean, old fashioned telephones, let alone current mobile networks). If I was transported to 2 or 3 centuries to the past, I wouldn't be able to explain modern technology to other people, let alone actually build it.

I sort of understand how steam machines work, and I could "invent" the printing press. I guess. But anything related to circuitry, electricity, chemistry, engineering of any sort, I wouldn't be able to even begin explaining them to King Arthur.

My introduction to the knights of the round table would go something like this:

"We are questing for the Holy Grail, oh noble stranger from a far away land! How can you help?"

"Depends, which version of Python are you running?"

At a very general level once you move past subsistence farming you become reliant on society to provide your needs. And in turn provide some value that can only come from spending your time on things other than farming. And that is I suppose how civilization advances. Its kind of funny to work backwards though, because even subsistence farmers are reliant on society for protection -- they are farmers not soldiers after all. I think about this a lot, how important trust is to going anywhere in modern life. And how little choice there is anyways. I also think about how most people don't think about it at all, or very much, and wonder if knowing how fragile we are makes me happier and more productive, or less so.

Not to mention that when the power goes out, the illusion fades fairly quickly. Learned that lesson myself in the Texas snowstorm early this year.

The most impressive thing to me is toilets. Just click a button and your waste disappears. Don't know where it goes or how it gets there and pay almost nothing for the privilege.

Toilets are amazing and I feel privileged every time I use one. Girlfriend thinks I'm nuts.

Well, you didn't just find a cave, it was made for you by other people. Interdependence is a hallmark of social species such as Homo Sapiens. Even your caveman ancestors were probably reliant on one another in many ways.

>It seems that someone asked the great anthropologist, Margaret Mead, “What is the first sign you look for to tell of an ancient civilization?” The interviewer had in mind a tool or article of clothing. Ms. Mead surprised him by answering, “a healed femur (thigh bone)”. When someone breaks a femur, they can’t survive to hunt, fish or escape enemies unless they have help from someone else. Thus, a healed femur indicates that someone else helped that person, rather than abandoning them and saving only themselves.

At least the cave man could go out and get water. Or have some reasonable expectation of finding food. Good luck!

Great for you, I hope you enjoy your cave.

> Then I realized that I don't know how to build the systems that I was relying on for my supposed superiority, or even how some of them work.

I'm sure if you just sat down with a pen and paper you could come up with a DIY solution.

Not to mention that many of the skills needed by the original cavemen to survive are gone in today's society. In other words, if we were to compete with the original cavemen in their environment, we would most likely fare rather poorly, at least in the short term.

Not trying to glorify off-the-grid living or anything, but I think it's interesting to think that in some (very specific) ways, the cavemen were actually superior to us.

> I'm really just a cave man that found a nicer cave.

You aren't really - most cavemen didn't even understand that fire is possible, and wouldn't be able to consistently operate a lighter if they found one (it'd probably be put on an altar and worshipped instead, as it should). You might not be able to build your entire cave, but your education alone is a _huge_ advantage!

> I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.

Cluster berries, from raspberries to pineapples, are never poisonous. Avoid berries that resemble blueberries or currants unless you're able to identify the plant: we grew up with blueberries and know the leaves, but we avoid anything currant-like because we'd have no idea if they're actually, say, chokeberries. Avoid anything that looks like baneberries.

Here in Maine, we forage for raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, and (mostly low bush) blueberries, but don't risk others.

I would recommend you buy a local book on foraging. Keep in case of emergency. But give it a read (at least the first few chapters) so you can get a basic understanding of how to forage without killing yourself. I also recommend keeping viable seeds and a camping shovel around as an insurance policy.

These items aren’t in my earthquake bag (I have enough energy bars to last until the National Guard shows up). Instead these are for a Carrington Event type of solar storm, civil war or some sort of other long-term disaster.

But you could probably devise a scheme by which you feed all of your students an assortment of berries and figure out which ones are safe based on which students get sick or die.

as an NYC-born, growing up with bi-monthly boy scout meetings and yearly "wilderness camps" (pitching tents in open fields, pit latrines, war games/survival, etc.) really helped fill in that gap :)

i wonder if there's anything like that for adults

> I could not even try to discover which berries are edible without killing myself.

Eat a small amount and see if you get sick? Science in the wild...

I do contracting dev work and my specialty is being able to drill down into any part of the engineering assets, ops, sec, dev. People think someone like me is slow and expensive until they have a problem that no one else wants to touch.

> I doubt even a very skilled engineer would know how his own machine works all the way down

Knowing how it works, and being able to build a new one, are also two very different problems. For example, there are plenty of Computer Science folks who learned how to design chips (layout the circuits, write the microcode, etc) - but you need a whole extra background in EE and Physics to be able to fab said chip...

> There's probably a lot of people with multicloud setups patting themselves on the back at the moment.

And there's probably an equal number troubleshooting why it didn't failover the way it should, while their upper management starts questioning what they're paying for.

> Surely we are way past the point where someone knows how the whole thing works, all the way down.

I've met a few people who can rightfully lay claim, but yeah, an incredibly rare set of skills.

That said, there is a recent revival in building systems from the ground up. While you can't manufacturer your own transistors, it is quite possible to understand everything from simple logic gates to ALUs to older style CPUs and memory buses.

P.S. That Paw Patrol shit hit me right in the emotions. Awesome site.

Disagree.

Wanting to evolve differently doesn't mean halting.

It's a call not to devolve.

On-prem, maybe, but if you include co-located equipment and managed hosting I don't even think it's more rare in absolute terms. Just smaller as a percentage of overall hosting.

There's (still?) a lot of on-prem and managed hosting. It's probably the majority of hosted services. Otherwise VMWare wouldn't be doing as well as it is.

He was working too hard:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=toasting+bread+over+cam...

At least you'll have something to eat.