Learning how to talk to machines is difficult.

I studied this very slightly as a teenager, then in college I paused to study the history of ideas, followed by a study of commerce in the developing world for another 20 years. Over the past two years I've managed to find some time to survey the stack, and it is discouraging, but I think I will be able to manage, if I do not fumble my finances. Hah, that is always the biggest risk.

There are four legs to the stool.

1.

A bit of machines memory requires 1 "D flip-flop" : there are 4 gates in a DFF, and each gate needs like 4 transistors & change. For example, an Apple M4 has 28 billion transistors, and the manufacturing process takes like 4 months - fortunately you can make a few hundred at a time, but there will be like 16% waste. These things are arranged in hierarchies of control, like an army of factory bots passing electrons around 4 billion times a second, with many layers of prep, parallelisation, and quality control, on the size of a postage stamp. 

2.

Sending instructions to these bots, is what software programmers do. Instructions written in near-human languages are translated a few times, until the machine understands it perfectly. Most of your friends who are programmers give zero fucks about how this gets done - they leave translation to bots. A programmer is also a bot, albeit a slightly creative one. A programmer decides, from toolkits known as logic, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, how to write programs to get thing done. You've probably noticed that many programmers are quite focused here, and really don't want to know about the other three legs of the stool - and that's totally ok, because some people just need to focus, otherwise nothing gets done.

3.

Telling the programmers what needs to actually get done are a bunch of business and public policy managers, pushing various political agendas : shareholders need profits, customers want entertainment, and someone needs to worry about public health, scientific progress, weapons manufacturing, and all that other stuff.

4.

All politics is rooted in economics, and all economics is rooted in states of mind. Most people you'll meet are in possession of a mind, some are in possession of more than one. Almost none bother to quantify this - most people don't think about quantifying their perceptions of their own consciousness - many think about it, but don't think it's possible. Boy oh boy, this is a whole other issue of it's own. But this post is about machines, not phenomenology.

The ultimate goal is opaque.

All of this proceeds through time, under the bumbling tyranny of fates unknown - again, most people give zero fucks about that, as they are more concerned with the locality of their puny little bodies, hairspray, perfume, family, friends, i.e. lives.

And being aware of this, a civilised person must conduct themselves with some modicum of moderation, i.e. reason ( rootword : ratio ).

I rarely feel up to the task, as I am generally quite far behind my peers. But, I try to comfort myself with the thought that we all have different paths, and we each take different amounts of time to get things done, based on what other things we have to do which others do not.

Such is life ...