"You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"
I think bringing back that absolute bafflement intentionally once in a while is good habit, especially for people working in technology.
I am constantly amazed that computers work at all. The more I learn about it the more amazed I am that anything works. Especially software wise I see soo much duct tape on so many layers, like looking at a house of cards that could (or rather should!) crumble down any minute, because it seems to defy reality.
My illusions of technology were lifted after a course in advanced computer architecture. The true technical complexity is unfathomable enormous. I mean, correctly flickering 3 billion times per second on nm scale and being super sure you got the designs right? Cannot imagine.
And even if you did get everything right, every now and then a friggin' cosmic ray zaps through just in the right way to flip that one bit in your memory.
When I toured some kids around the Stanford cell therapy lab, filled with over a billion dollars of cutting edge equipment, the thing they were most impressed with was the eye wash station.
They MARVELED at the damn eye wash station. Technology that has been around for ... over hundreds of years and otherwise hasn't really changed. They asked more questions about the damn eye wash station than anything else, lol.
Back in 2008-9 or so I had a 3g altel phone during the Verizon merger. If I forced my phone to 3g I could connect to Verizon towers. It was such a great feeling tethering my phone to my laptop to play WoW at 70 MPH.
"You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”"