Computers used to be absolutely magical to me until I studied and worked with embedded systems and compilers - much of it is well-defined and not magical at all. One of my biggest regrets is studying computer science, because the magic was stripped from me once I learned or intuited even a little bit of how the black box worked.
I'm not sure I understand the premise at all - to me, the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes. Maybe that's why I'm miserable.
I think that's marvelous in its own way. One of the defining experiences for me as a software engineer was hearing my boss tell a story about another engineer — there was a problem that had been hanging over the team for over a year, every engineer on the team had tried to solve it, and everybody thought it was going to be a huge effort, until one day this engineer came up with a solution. His solution was so simple that he was able to implement it by himself in a couple of months, and it was so elegant that a year later, nobody could remember why they thought the problem was hard in the first place. Having seen the solution, they were so changed that the person they had been before they saw it was unimaginable to them.
Ever since I heard that story, that's what I have aspired to. Is it disenchantment? I don't think so. The mystery is merely moved, from "how could this be possible?" to "how can a thing go from impossible to boring?" and "what currently impossible things will become boring in the next 50, 100, 500 years?"
Opposite for me, the more I learn internals, the the more amazing it is -- how some useful complexity can arise from such simple things (e.g. electron/hole pairs jumping over PN junctions -> transistors -> NAND gates -> CPUs -> programming languages -> high level architecture)
> ... "the more I learn internals, the the more amazing it is" ...
This is how I've come to feel about a lot of "computer things" I've learned over the years. Example #1: Game development - Them folks perform some real art and magic (and engineering) to create the amazing games we've gotten to enjoy over the years. Speaking of "art" - Example #2: Computer CGI (movies, TV, & game development) - Knowing how it works actually makes it just that much more amazing when you see it done really well. Matter of fact, it makes it easier to know when what you're looking at is "done well", and to appreciate how utterly magical a really good 3D artist can be. The more I learn, the more impressed I am at the folks who first did these things, and those who came after and improved upon them by "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The author is doing several things here which might bother you. Among them is mixing the meaning of "enchantment" with the meaning of "wonderment." He begins the article by defining enchantment as "magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents" but through the whole body of the article only treats it as a sense of wonderment, which is not the same thing. You are right to be irritated by this. Another thing he is doing is repeatedly asserting the enchanting qualities of the world without ever addressing why these things are enchanting, with the implication that the why isn't worth addressing or maybe isn't possible to know, when it is obvious. In most of his examples, the reason is because we are naturally reductive and reduce complex phenomena to much simpler mental models. Then when we look closer, we marvel at the far more complex reality. The author behaves as if this is some sort of deep mystery of the universe.
If current RF technology(or even 100 year old RF technology) doesn't seem like magic.. what do you require then?
The way photons behave in our universe seems pretty damn magical if you ask me. Sure, it's not Harry Potter, but we let fiction reset our expectations to a level where we'll never be happy.
You can get exactly the same kind of feeling with RF too, I worked around that space for a decade or so and the structures and effects that felt magical I look at and just see capacitance, inductance, coupling, loss etc. - still interesting, but it hasn't felt like magic for years anymore.
It is kind of hard to explain but the first time I learned about digital/analog conversion and wired up a very simple speaker and made it play any note I wanted by simply tweaking the processor’s clock, the magic left me. Before then I couldn’t even fathom how that worked, then it was like “that’s it?”
Just an overwhelming sense of disappointment in how much sense it made that it worked that way and not a myriad of more spectacular ways I’d imagined when I was a kid taking apart ancient IBM color monitors for fun
> One of my biggest regrets is studying computer science, because the magic was stripped from me once I learned or intuited even a little bit of how the black box worked.
A fun part of hiking mountains is getting to spots where you can look out and see the view from where you've gotten to, and maybe even (parts of) the trail you came up.
>the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes.
I believe that author is referring to things outside the scope of our daily routines, and/or routine acceptance of marvels we are taking for granted. That can happen for some things when we focus on them daily.
I'm finally reading machinist/engineer Dunn's 'Lost Technology of Ancient Egypt' and he notes that while people have been walking past its statuaries for centuries, immune to their details. When he started looking at them as an engineer that he noticed the incredible precision achieved worked the hardest rocks with unknown tools 5000 years ago. He remains gobsmacked by it.
I was struggling to comprehend some math concept, read the theory on my own and tried hard to get it for like 5-6 hours until I went to a colleague that scribbled a drawing and made me understand it in 5 minutes. Felt like I was in a wizard story
I've found it to be generally true, especially for activities one finds leisurely. For instance, understanding a game deeply enough to create a hyper-optimized "min-maxed" strategy ends up stripping the joy from it.
Wonderful reference and a piece of writing I've always held dear to my heart, thank you. Absolutely true about min/maxing the fun out of a game as well, although for some people, I don't doubt that is the fun. Unfortunately, it becomes a playstyle everyone thinks they have to do to have fun and it ironically does the opposite - thinking of WoW classic here specifically.
In Cherryh's Rusalka series, the trouble with magic is it has side effects, so wizards document all their magical actions, and while young wizards may cast spells with wild abandon, old wizards are tied up with heaps of magical debt and must carefully consult their lore before attempting anything new.
> the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes
I feel you because I was like that too, but at some point, my brain bit-flipped to the other polarity. I wish you the same.
The more I learn the more I feel awed and amazed. "Reality is surprisingly detailed". The surprises are never-ending. Finding abstract and concrete pattern-relationships between phenomena is an unending source of delight. The universe is fractal and deeply interconnected. Being able to see / feel / imagine even the smallest spec of that is the magic of our moment in eternity.
Even my own personal struggles got re-framed as an exercise in observing what the hell is even going on between my ears. The otherwise-only-painful struggles have become equal parts horrible (lived experience in the moment) and fascinating (interpretation / hindsight / insight into one's mechanisms and traits). A person is a prisoner (of their conditioning) only to the extent that it ($Prison) binds them against their will.
Consciously and deliberately attempting said bit-flip is a difficult road and never complete, but it can be a road to progressive self-liberation. Like many other personal phenomena / belief change, it doesn't happen for a long time, and then one day it does.
There's an old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If learning about technology makes it insufficiently advanced then it is distinguishable from magic.
If magic is enchantment, the world (as concerns the technology) is no longer enchanted.
So yes: Ignorance is bliss.
Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world.
> Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier
Makes sense, most of whats shown on the news is just daily misery, without any relevance. My wife watches the 8 o clock news daily and most days the only news of any relevance is the weather report. The rest is just a barrage of ''in some country (usually a million miles away) some people got stabbed/a bus crashed/a terrorist attack happened/some environmental disaster/a company made a bazillion dollars profit/a politician did a thing''. Its all completely worthless to know, its forgotten five minutes afterwards and all it does is increase anger, fear and/or anxiety just a little bit more every day.
I'm probably just too inexperienced in the whole Computer Science world, but I become even more fascinated by modern computers and the people who worked on them, the more I learn.
I remember learning about the inner architecture of CPUs for the first time and being amazed at the genius of early computer architects.
Maybe this will change in the future, but right now I feel this enchantment more, the more I learn about technology.
> Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world.
Yeah, that's the main selling point of never-never land.
Reading books about the early days of the computing industry might help renew your enthusiasm. Feeling the secondhand excitement of the old school wizards, especially when they faced so much more friction - is contagious.
I intentionally learnt that low level stuff to destroy the magic. I don't like magic. It doesn't mean I don't appreciate the beauty in computing and the world, though.
Computers have always been sort of magical for me, but the magic isn't in how it works, but that it is an infinitely malleable canvas.
I've been writing a Gregorian chant typesetter, and it's sort of magical to resize the window and watch the notes flow onto the next line. (Barring bugs; those break the enchantment)
Computers have never been magical to me. It's always been more machinery than magic in my mind. I find other things magical, like people and how they can love and care for you.
Technology seems magical but that sense of magic might dissipate when better understood (although magnets and electricity still seem magical to me).
Nature seems magical and that sense of magic intensifies when better understood. I've yet to meet a biologist who can describe the fundamentals of life without some hint of magic (whether they see acknowledge it or not).
If you go further down (to the level of fundamental physics) you'll see there's plenty of mystery left. Even in our technological age, we still don't even have a solid explanation for what makes an apple fall to the ground. The world is far from dull.
I'm not sure I understand the premise at all - to me, the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes. Maybe that's why I'm miserable.