Computer Science

Limited knowledge. Not enough to be useful, but enough to be dangerous.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -Arthur C. Clarke

From daily work to recreational content, from massive process centers to the smartphones in pretty much each of our pockets, computers are everywhere. Like it or not, the computer has diffused out into pretty much all aspects of daily life. At the time of writing, I cannot for the life of me think of a day that I was not looking at a screen for some part of the day.

But most of the people I talk to treat these machines like black boxes or Chinese rooms; without understanding of what the device does. Input goes in, output comes out. No comprehension of what the little bits-and-bobs do.

That's not to say that I have full understanding of every single computer. Nor am I saying that I understand any computer from the low level all the way up. But I do understand that my knowledge is limited and there is no way that I'm going to understand anything to the degree of a professional.

Speaking with people who have done computer science all of their lives, it has been weird to see that my generation is (arguably) the most literate. Having grown up with computers but before the wide adoption of smartphones, this is the easiest way to move information between people.

Still, I wish that I had adopted computers more than I did, starting with the command line terminal before being introduced to the desktop GUI. It feels like it's more of a crutch now; something to fall back onto rather than knowing it is just another simpler, if slower, way of moving data around inside the computer.

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