>I think it is like for a programmer to ask "How can one contribute to computer science?", while thinking about people like, Dijkstra, Knuth, or maybe even Carmack.

I had a conversation a day ago with a couple of high-school students who, were obviously smart (and a bit on the spectrum), but also lacking in broad knowledge, as one would expect from high-school students.

I think it revealed something about that sense of 'magic' or inaccessible talent. One of them mentioned the fast inverse square root function and marvelled about how even anyone could even come up with an idea like that because it seemed to him to be some transcendent feat to be able to realise casting binary floats into ints would be useful. They had looked at the function and couldn't fathom how something like that worked.

We had no computer to hand, but I asked him what 10^100 divided by 10^10 was. Smart kid that he was, answered instantly, correctly. I then asked him what operation he performed in his head to do that, and noted floating point exponents are just using 2 instead of 10. On the spot he figured out how the fast inverse square root worked. The magic vanished and it became accessible. Some people lament the loss of 'magic' in this way, but I think the thing that makes it special, in this instance and in the universe in general, is that it still works, and it isn't magic. It's real and the fact that it be that without invoking some unaccessible property makes it even more special

I do think this has been less pressing of a question for programmers. For the longest time there was infinite work to do, no matter your depth—implementing business logic, making frameworks more general, making sure things fit into cache lines—that was accessible to us non-geniuses. Maybe in the LLM era this sort of t-crossing and i-dotting will go away.

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