["Awkward Look Monkey Puppet", two images of a red monkey puppet from “Ōkiku naru Ko”. On the left, the monkey faces right and sideglances with wide eyes and contracted pupils, while the right image shows the monkey staring straight ahead.]
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
I understand 90% of the science behind what I do as a medical diagnostic technologist. It's still fucking magic as far as I'm concerned.
CTs and MRIs? Atom spin/relax releasing detectable energy waves that are somehow able to be read and aggregated by algorithms into a high detail image of the inside of a human body? Tell me that isn't magic and I'll call you a liar.
I majored in Computational Physics and I can tell you with certainty that electromagnetism is magic, and any machine utilizing said magic must be, by definition, magic themselves. You're right not to trust any of those "oh it's actually very well understood" snakes
Fun fact: According to Einstein's equations, electromagnetism arises when you add a fourth spatial dimension to your assumptions. String theory assumes between 9 and 11 and hypothesizes that the extras are curled up into tiny string that manifest as forces such as electromagnetism. HOW MUCH MORE MAGIC WOO-WOO CAN YOU GET
It may be similar for most professions. But the difference is that programming is much more accessible to everyone than medical stuff, or even car mechanics.
Lets take the example of someone finding solution X for [problem], but X is wrong, but not fatal:
Medical: possible malpractice lawsuit.
car mechanic: Lost $$$ buying wrong parts
Programming: Error hopefully caught by tests / QA. If the issue made it into production, roll it back to the prev version.
But it seems very likely other professions will also "google the problem"
Woodworker: how to do X joint, constructions for drawer, table,..
Car mechanic: likely cause of X, how to diagnose faults. Especially if they work on all cars
Repairman: same as car mechanic. Also diagrams, and pinout of chips.
Eletrical engineering: Parts, pinouts, troubleshooting issues with design
Cashier: What's the number for Bananas? (ok, they don't use the internet for that)
Waiters: Where was table 69?
Fast food worker: "Legal to get fired over eating a fry?"
Gets even worse the more years of experience you have. You end up being the solo dev trying to figure out a stupidly over complicated 20 year old piece of software written by a sadist that loves WCF and using tcp sockets to send data between classes in the same project