I'm a burly dude with a spoon...

and I just got hit with a shovel. This is more for me than for anyone else, just to remind me about a thought I had.

Sir Isaac Newton allegedly once said ,"If I have seen far, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants". Well this statement is wrong (at least as it relates to me,maybe there were some incredibly smart guys that did all the work leading up to his discoveries but what ever.) I am a computer guy. I'm good with code. A code monkey. I've been thinking about computers wrong this whole time.

When you think about a computer, you think processors and motherboards and hard drives and screens and the internet and programs and protocols and bits and bytes and RAM and CPU and ARP and TCP/IP and UDP and LMNOP and QRSTUV and ASDF and... AND. And they're all connected in some horrifyingly arcane and eldritch way, of which only those who are already mad can truly comprehend. And without this complete knowledge one can do naught but cantraps. Without it, I will never become a computer wizard of legend, with computational power enough to destroy the great firewall on my glorious quest through the tubes of the internet to find the holy grail of computing: P=NP. Instead I feared that I would fall by the wayside, pedalling scripts of DDoS and warning young adventurers not to follow my path lest they too are reaped alongside the zombie processes. But now, I understand the proper way. Before, I have tried staring into the abyss to gain its insight and have always blinked when it stared back. But now I see that the knowledge I seek was not in the centre, but in the writing on the walls and this metaphor is really falling apart.

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Since high school, computers and their inner workings have seemed to be gigantic, monolithic works of blood, sweat, and tears with the impenetrability of a stone wall. As the years of collage have gone by, I've learned bits of how computers work with their frames and pointers and registers, but I didn't feel like I was close to understanding what I really wanted to know: Everything. I wanted to know how to use a computer to do anything I wanted. I felt like I was playing a game, about as well as anyone else, but I could see some people doing incredible things that I could hardly comprehend. And I though, maybe if I learn a bit more I'll figure out what the cheat codes those people are using and be, The Best! Well today I had an epiphany of sorts, so maybe it worked. just wish I'd gotten it sooner.

If you look close enough, nothing is a monolith. In networks, there are layers; you don't just throw out a bunch of 1s and 0s and hope that it works. There's like 3 layers of figuring things out between "I wanna tell that guy this stuff", and "100101011010101001010100101011". The operating system is at least 2 levels above the hardware and this text on your screen is based on half a dozen things in the level above that. If you looked deep enough you would see that all this is caused by flipping transistors in the bare metal. But you wouldn't see much else. This whole time I've been trying to find the direct relation between the transistors and the web page. But only the truly mad or truly naive, try to see the bottom of the abyss from the top.

As far as the cheat codes go, if this even is one, the ideas I had about computers were very strongly reflected in my code. I wrote my code, line by line, only leaving my primary function when it was absolutely necessary, as if everything needed to be read and understood in a single sweep. As if you could look at the whole code at the same time and understand every little thing it did. Whenever I looked back over old code, even a bit at a time, all I could see was an unorganized mess. If you wanted to see what the code did, you could read through it, line by line, holding my variables in your head as if you were a computer running it. But no one can understand it while looking at the whole thing. Frankly that is kind of obvious in retrospect. God I am an idiot. Lets see if I can make up for that.

'The strongest walls are built, not from boulders, but from small stones.' 'If you look out and sort of blur your vision, all those trees kinda disappear and turn into something vaguely forest-shaped.' 'Sometimes the easiest method you know is the hardest method there is.' 'If you think something’s the easiest way, you have to know you’re wrong.'
Those last two were from a super good web comic called Prequel. The last one is less relevant to this situation but I think I should remember it anyway.

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Back around 1970, two guys named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie made the Unix kernel (and it was good), but it could have been better. Then, in 1983, a man named Richard Stallman took the idea, and tried to make an open source version, but it could have been better. Then, in 1991, Linus Torvalds make the Linux kernel. But it can always be better. All this was based on stuff from Turing, Edison, Tesla, Franklin, Faraday, Kelvin and countless other mathematicians, inventors, physicists, and natural philosophers throughout history.

Newton didn't stand on the shoulders of giants. He stood on the shoulders of normal people, who were in turn standing on the shoulders of others, all the way down.