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Perhaps a dose of pragmatism is needed here?

I am no CS major, nor do I fully understand the inner workings of a computer beyond "we tricked a rock into thinking by shocking it."

I'd love to better understand it, and I hope that through my journey of working with computers, i'll better learn about these underlying concepts registers, bus's, memory, assembly etc

Practically however, I write scripts that solve real world problems, be that from automating the coffee machine, to managing infrastructure at scale.

I'm not waiting to pick up a book on x86 assembly first before I write some python however. (I wish it were that easy.)

To the greybeards that do have a grasp of these concepts though? It's your responsibility to share that wealth of knowledge. It's a bitter ask, I know.

I'll hold up my end of the bargain by doing the same when I get to your position and everywhere in between.


Graybeards love to yap. Just talk to them or consume the wide amount of material already out there.

It takes curiosity on your part though. Handwaving about practical concerns taking priority is a path to never getting around to it. "Pragmatism" towards skills is how managers wind up with an overspecialized team and then tell themselves it was inevitable. The same can happen to you.


Nearly every time I attempt to tell people how much understanding fundamentals matters, it’s dismissed as being unnecessary knowledge.

I can’t make anyone want to know how things work, and it’s getting tiring being continuously told “no” when I ask.


My daughter who is studying CS (unexpectedly) actually listens most of the time. Which is surprising. But then she tells me her classmates used AI to cheat on assignments so much that the prof had to change the weighting of the assignments to be 0.

I just don't get paying to "learn", and then using AI avoid learning.


Some fraction of "students" are not, in fact, paying to learn. They're paying for a credential that claims they learned. Degrees tied to lucrative jobs tend to have a higher proportion of these people than ones that are less directly applicable.

There are so many resources, for example, https://cpu.land.

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