Yes, but also as a programmer, sufficiently complex code bases might as well be magical with all of the interactions between edge cases causing some fucky behavior.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is often called "the wizard book." Not because Abelson et al believed computers were actually magic but rather because there's a wizard on the cover and they compare the act of programming to spellcasting, giving instructions to the allegorical beings that live in the hardware. It certainly feels like magic.

The take on the left doesn't understand reality, and the take in the middle doesn't understand fun. The take on the right is trying to have fun but is spoken by someone who understands the take in the middle is the literal truth. If the person with the take on the right actually believes computers are magic then they're actually on the left no matter how much they work with computers.

For the record, Fuck AI and tech bros with a rusty pole.

What I mean is that computers are so complex they end up being very fragile, in a way.

A few years ago, a friend was having random issues with her PC. Random crashes, garbled data. Long story short, it ended up being a couple of faulty bytes on one of her RAM sticks.

I interpreted it as about like, microprocessor design and nanometer scale electronics and shit. Electrons are basically elves in my book.

Why the hell would you equate the expert of the field with a tech bro? You don't understand the meme.

If you want an explanation, current computer system, especially cloud systems, are so complex that even though yes, it's all deterministic, when so many things are depending on each other, including external interference (networking issues, data syncing delays...).

At some point you start wishing i was actually elves because I don't fucking know why lambda's boto get item got the version of the file half an hour before the last modification, even though the lambda was triggered by the file being updated, Carlos. I don't fucking know, different AWS endpoints might have different sync states maybe and it's not as reliably propagated as they tell us it is, what the fuck do I know about that. I've spent enough time in estigating this bullshit, relaunch it and pray the elves do the thing correctly this time, leave me alone.

Tech bros tend toward the left side of the curve in my experience.

Ok, but what with the magnetic flux?

well actually silicon is a semi-conductor. not entirely a metal.

Hah, I do radio engineering and no shit wrote this in a project report back in undergrad. "Radio engineering is often as much art as science" and I got five points off for that commentary.

👾WAGA LAKA BOODONGI NI CROPO NALINGKI👾

Bitflips are fun.

For a while, I managed a fleet of about 6500 iPod touch devices, and we would have random failures on devices where a simple re-image would solve the problem. I did a back of the napkin calculation, and our rate of those failures was almost exactly the expected cosmic radiation bitflip chance for the total surface area of all the storage chips in our devices.

No, not every problem can be traced to a specific cause. Sometimes the information required to do that has been lost (or never existed) and finding the root cause becomes impossible.

How would you prove some random radiation caused a bit flip to make an app crash without having equipment to detect it set up beforehand?

I once had a email that crashed the network card on a windows 2000 server. That was not fun to try and find the problem. After the 3rd occurrence the network card got binned

The 'more magic switch' is one of my favorite stories like that, right up there with the 500 mile email.

Youch!

Computers are fucking weird.

Back in the dark ages of late 90s/early 00s computing, I figured out that I could reliably crash a computer with a c++ script that printed char 7 (system bell) in a while loop, but if I added a semicolon in the next line the system would be fine.

It was fun putting the first exe as the shortcut on lab computers, as people would be sooooooo confused when their computer spazzed out and beeped at them at an ever slowing cadence when they tried to open a normal application. Never bothered how to do it on dual core systems, because I couldn't be forked.