[tehmillhouse]

When understanding a new "magic", there's this beautiful moment when you grok it, and the abstraction poofs away.

It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring.

It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out right.

It's when your understanding of the top-down structure snaps together with the bottom-up mechanics of the building blocks. There's no space left for the ghost in the machine to haunt, and you go "Oh. huh". I live for that moment.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

I went through an EE degree instead of a CS degree in undergrad specifically so I could peel back this magic and really understand what's going on, to some detail, down to the electromagnetism level. It is indeed a very freeing feeling to be resting atop so many layers of abstractions, with the understanding that if you ever had to, you could go down to any one of them and kind of feel your way around.

I think for me the biggest magic-killing moment was when I realized that CPU clock cycles, timing trees, etc. were all just ways for us to shoehorn a fundamentally analog thing (how much voltage is in area X?) to a digital thing (does area X have enough voltage? yes? OK, call it a 1 and let's move on already!). Somehow to me that feels like the ultimate "leaky" abstraction, although of course decades and trillions of dollars have gone into making it ever more watertight for 99.99-several-more-9s% of the time. At least to the end user. Your mileage may vary if you're a TSMC researcher or something, of course.

[bena]

I've always felt the whole binary/digital thing was one of the most clever bits of compromise with the real world I've ever seen.

You have this thing, you want to be able to translate its value into something useful. In this case, the amount of voltage in a circuit to a number. And you spend so much time trying to make sure the voltage level passed is rock solid, that your read is equally solid, etc. Until you realize that you'd have to invent so many more industries just to do this one thing that you just give up and say the only thing you can know with certainty is that there is or is not voltage passing through the circuit.

Then you need to be able to translate "ON" and "OFF" into actual usable values. And eventually coming down to a base 2 counting system so that 4 circuits gives you 16 distinct values seems obvious in hindsight, but had to be a revelation when they realized it.

[pclmulqdq]

I work with FPGAs and embedded systems occasionally, and you have no idea how amazingly watertight the phone/desktop/server CPU abstraction is in comparison to what you get the moment you do something slightly weird. A combination of the chips, the firmware, and the OS does so much work to give you the abstraction of "machine runs code and it just works."

[fragmede]

for me, it was latches and creating a CPU which instructions could be fed into. but it wasn't a "lost the magic" feeling, it was a "that's amazing!" feeling.

[asimovfan]

“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.” ― Isaac Asimov

[dvektor]

Keeping true to your username :)

Man I'm not going to lie tho... I just could not make it through the foundation series

[Lerc]

That's the difference between technology magic and illusionist magic, When you see how the trick is done with illusions it's always a bit of a letdown because the answer is usually prosaic, the 'magic' vanishes and it becomes a trick.

When you understand how a piece of technology works you get that beautiful moment.

[tialaramex]

I've never got that. I feel the same way in either case, if your trick was easy everybody would do it. Sleight of hand tricks for example, if you're good they're completely seamless, I could never hope to reproduce and yet I know exactly how it's done.

Take that Penn & Teller trick where the live audience is just lying - that's a bit lazy, we're not supposed to have some great admiration for this trick they're just showing you it's an option to just have the live audience lie to the recorded audience and that "works". Whereas their transparent version of cups and balls is the opposite, you must be a sleight of hand master or this won't look like anything.

[Joker_vD]

I've recently done reading "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Harris and Harris, and the part about microarchitecture had this exact impression on me: "oh, so we just demux the opcode, enable/disable the necessary signals/paths and it all... just works out in the end, if the clock is fine. Huh. Well, in retrospect it's kinda obvious."

[AnimalMuppet]

> It's when you take apart a mechanical clock and keep looking for the time-keeping part, until you figure out that there isn't a time-keeping part in there, it's just gears and a spring.

The time-keeping part is arranging gears and a spring in a way that will, in fact, keep time.

> It's when you learn about integrated circuits and full-adders, and keep trying to understand how a bunch of transistors can do Mathematics, until you figure out that there isn't a mathematics-doing part in there, it's just circuits and wires, arranged in a way that makes the voltages come out right.

The mathematics-doing part in there is the arrangement of circuits and wires in ways that can actually do arithmetical operations on voltages.

It's not magic. But an adder, while never more than a bunch of circuits and wires, is still a mathematics-doing part.

[harperlee]

Well to be pedantic: the time-keeping part isn’t the gears but a pendulum.

The spring gives energy to the pendulum, but that can’t effect more than in its amplitude: the period of a given pendulum is constant. Later springs demultiply the tick tack of the pendulum into desired units.

The heart of the clock is that choke on energy though a period.

Thats also why the famous phrase: clocks dont measure time but other clocks.

(Please dont mind the grammar: writing on mobile)

[quesera]

I was certain that you were going to conclude with a paragraph about LLMs.

[tehmillhouse]

I was this close to concluding with a paragraph about Buddhism and the Self. Which is basically the same thing, but from the first-person perspective.