Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

So, for this, the easiest way I’ve found is to look at it in the following sort of way:

Using the example of coding, you can already USE software, think of that like knowing how to DRIVE a car. Start with learning how to REPAIR the car (GUI building block code).

Then learn how to MOD the car with a kit (high-level object-oriented, TYPED code with an IDE or editor that does stuff like auto complete, syntax highlighting, and has add-ins that assist in getting the typed code to completion).

Then learn how to create your own car mods from “scratch” (get to the point where you don’t necessarily NEED all those editor widgets to help code)

Then learn how the car functions at a base level and how all the various chemicals, heat, and aerodynamics, pistons, filters, etc interact to make the car function (interacting with and modifying OS-level code/low-level languages with things like hardware access instead of applications that run on the OS)

THEN worry about the various chemicals themselves create the energy needed to generate power for the car (firmware on top of circuits and chips like the CPU/GPU/PSU, storage controller boards, audio chips, and motherboard/bios)

THEN worry about the actual molecular interactions occurring in the batteries or fuel at the atomic level (binary electrical functions of the parts themselves, where 1’s and 0’s are just current on or current off).

Just because the binary is there at every stage doesn’t always mean that understanding how the bonds between the “atoms” operate is going to make you a better programmer UNTIL you understand what you’re trying to get those atoms to do and why.