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I teach a foundational media technology course at on of the bigger european art universities — I do the same thing with the students using a broadcast wave file
by atoav 3y ago
I teach a foundational media technology course at on of the bigger european art universities — I do the same thing with the students using a broadcast wave file.
The goal of the thing isn't to turn them into hackers, it is to give them a feeling what the stuff they work with is made of, what a file is. This is also a great introduction to talk about compression, metadata, encoding, decoding, sample rate, bitdepth and so on.
If you dive that deep into it, the settings in a typical media conversion program will suddenly become much less intimidating. My motto always was: this was made by humans so it should be possible for humans to understand it as well. And this is maybe the "hidden" lesson: If you bring enough patience you can go into the depth of nearly every topic.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- JohnFen 3y agoI absolutely love that you do this. There appears to be a trend to discount the value of knowing the low-level details of these sorts of things -- but even if you never actually work at that level, knowing what's happening "behind the scenes" increases and deepens understanding and can make high-level things that seem arbitrary or nonsensical make sense.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoFirst principles and curiosity > blithe unconcern about the "magic box". Likewise, coders who don't have enough understanding all the way down the stack including hardware are merely engineer posers in it for a paycheck.
- happybits 3y agoThanks a lot JohnFen. One reason for writing the post and trying to create GIF-images from binary, was to come as close as possible to GIF format and especially the LZW-algorithm. To understand it in an intuitive way. To get a bit closer to the minds who created the algorithm in the first place.
- philsnow 3y agoI forgot most of what little I learned in semiconductor physics and analog design courses in college, but I remember enough to know that nothing about computers is magic. Nothing. That knowledge gives me confidence that I can figure out anything having to do with computers given enough quiet time. On the other hand, I don't really know much about cars. If I had a 2024 model year car and something went wrong with it, I'd very quickly run up against a wall of arcane-seeming knowledge that I don't have easy access to. I don't know where I would start to learn everything about cars from scratch like I did with computers. There might be a name for this, but I don't know what it is.
- fsckboy 3y agocomputers contain transistors and how transistors work is by magic. before that, tubes. tubes also work by magic. before that, relays, which are based on electromagnets. electromagnets work by magic.
- philsnow 3y ago> how transistors work is by magic ok but it's "just" semiconductor band-gap physics, which my monkey grug brain can kind of just barely make out, if I squint > tubes also work by magic tubes work by "just" thermionic emission, or "tube physics", which grug brain has a better handle on > electromagnets work by magic okay, you've got me there, physics grug brain think magnets high magic.
- fsckboy 3y agotubes work by not just thermionic emission (that'd be a diode) but also by a sort of uncanny leveraging of inverse square laws in free space surrounding the grid. when the first tube amplifier was invented, it was by accident, it wasn't understood how it worked.
- throWaway229034 3y agoYou can make computers (in a non economical fashion) using pipes of water and water actuated valves. This can be done in a manner _highly_ analogous to transistor, tube or relay machines. That was what convinced me that computers are not magic.
- happybits 3y agoatoav: this sounds like at great exercise. Have you written any public article about that? The main reason for writing this article was * My curiosity - what secret is behind all strange bytes in a graphical file * To spend some time doing something weird, that I know have zero effect of my career and no chance of giving and benefits or profit in the future.