Proof that nobody will ever know how computers work

dbal and lespig probably remember this.

The other day we're at a computer science seminar, and the speaker is from MIT, talking about graph algorithm type stuff.

His laptop stops working halfway through the talk. It won't show the next slide.

Uh oh, a simple problem with a computer! Its not doing what we want it to do. A group of top notch, world class, cutting edge computer scientists are sitting in a circle around a laptop which is temporarily malfunctioning.

Their best idea to fix it? Recompile the Latex.

The equivalent of kicking your TV. Screw with it until it works. Turn it off, and then turn it back on. Start over and hope it works next time. Fiddle with it.

These are the things we do with electronics, and if they work, we never look back to wonder what was actually wrong.

Recompiling the Latex worked, and of course the talk went immediately forward. No time to actually figure out what was wrong. We needed to hear about theoretical algorithms and how they were asymptotically better than other ones.

But what are you going to do? Its better than actually trying to understand circuits, fuck that.