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To be perfectly honest, I find your comment well written but I'm not sure what you're saying. (I'm not trying to ignore your comment, there are just many things

To be perfectly honest, I find your comment well written but I'm not sure what you're saying. (I'm not trying to ignore your comment, there are just many things that I don't feel relate very much to mine. Plus, I've always been pretty bad at reading comprehension :)) So yeah, I'm not sure how this is a red herring. The point is that we take a lot of things for granted and even if each layer of how it gets to work the way it does makes sense, there's always a leap of faith to accept it will work at high speed/volume/scale. It might sound extremely naive but another way I look at it is that it's… intriguing to see that all of this has been built by human beings. The same kind of beings that make silly mistakes, forget to buy milk, enjoy Jersey Shore… Sure it's built upon centuries of previous results and research, but it still ends up coming from one guy's brain at some point. There's such a gap between the mundane things we do (i.e. mainly the things for our survival) and all the technology and science… For the electronic-related examples, that means we've been able to ride the speed of light extremely well, while also building components on a microscopic scale. And I find that remarkable for a bunch of (smart) animals.

Cushman 15y ago
Yeah, I kind of went off on a tangent there, I don't blame you for not getting all of it :P I think what I was trying to say in the beginning is that while I understand how it feels like a leap of faith, I don't think it really is. Like when I include a library, on some level I'm assuming it will really function the way the API suggests. But I don't have to take that on faith; I can read through the code, and see what it's actually doing. The code itself is an abstraction of something else, but if I take the time, I can eventually reduce it to an understanding of what's happening on a transistor level. I can't see what's happening in the CPU, but I can understand it. I can't hold the whole model of my code at a transistor level in my head, but that's the power of abstraction. I understand what's happening on each level on some scale, I understand how the levels interface with each other, so ipso facto I do understand the system as a whole. If it doesn't behave the way I expect, I can use that knowledge figure out why, whether it's because I made the wrong call or because there's a wire disconnected on my motherboard. It's not magical; it just seems that way when I don't pay close attention. Which is, in fairness, most of the time.

Cushman 15y ago

Yeah, I kind of went off on a tangent there, I don't blame you for not getting all of it :P I think what I was trying to say in the beginning is that while I understand how it feels like a leap of faith, I don't think it really is. Like when I include a library, on some level I'm assuming it will really function the way the API suggests. But I don't have to take that on faith; I can read through the code, and see what it's actually doing. The code itself is an abstraction of something else, but if I take the time, I can eventually reduce it to an understanding of what's happening on a transistor level. I can't see what's happening in the CPU, but I can understand it. I can't hold the whole model of my code at a transistor level in my head, but that's the power of abstraction. I understand what's happening on each level on some scale, I understand how the levels interface with each other, so ipso facto I do understand the system as a whole. If it doesn't behave the way I expect, I can use that knowledge figure out why, whether it's because I made the wrong call or because there's a wire disconnected on my motherboard. It's not magical; it just seems that way when I don't pay close attention. Which is, in fairness, most of the time.