alt Hacker News> The issue with this is that we don't know how it works. Generally speaking, we know how the level of abstraction that we were born with works.
What? Definitely not. I went to university and my first two years were subjects where I had to understand really deep levels of abstractions. I had to build logic gates, I had to work with hardware, wires, etc. I didnt see the point back then (I never used any of that professionally). The same about algorithms, databases, and a lot of things. But now I find it valuable and thankful that my professors (and whoever designed the career) considered important topics that I had to lear.
Replies
how did you make the transistors? made your own vacuum chambers?
i had to make logic gates and so on, but i wouldnt say i really learnt it, even if back in highschool i learned all the different things a 555 timer can do
Exactly.
Please get used to this sort of depressive, absurd and out of touch tone from HNers, it’s literally all they do now. Don’t bother calling people here hackers anymore, they have checked out emotionally and spiritually.
Yes, thats exactly what uni is for.. To learn all those previous centuries of stuff before you can either start contributing to the corpus yourself, or go get a job (Where you will pick up more immediately useful stuff)
We really dont understand how AI is working, even the earliest "genetic algorithms" could be incomprehensible, but computer systems in general, they're not really that complicated.. its like an audio mixing desk..it looks insanely complicated until you realise it's just the same few knobs repeated many times for many channels. High level languages, compilers, assembly, machine code, nand, mosfets. A single person really can understand it all.
You started with logic gates. How much EE did you do, or the actual physics that makes the transistor possible? Those are the previous (deeper) levels that people had to know before they got abstracted away.