We have used too many levels of abstractions

I think this is because of the effect OP is describing: no matter how much time you spent studying, the odds that you learned about the specific thing that will make the difference in your work this week are slim because the technology is so broad and deep. Odds are that what you choose to intentionally study is irrelevant to your work.

You've picked a slice to learn about, but those who were working on it as it got layered know it all. Once you have that kind of knowledge, the odds of being able to explain some unexpected behavior approach 100%, but acquiring that knowledge took decades.

I've found a method that does work pretty well is to dig really deep into the topics that come up in your actual work. Instead of a random sample of fundamentals, find the parts of your job that feel like magic and explain that magic. Skipping over V8 and straight to the CPU might not be useful for a JavaScript dev very often, but a deep understanding of V8 is relevant more often than you might think.

I've worked with CUDA programmers who weren't aware of what "architecture" means in the context of computing until I asked them to consider running binary code meant for NVIDIA on AMD GPUs.

I've worked with network administrators who couldn't conceive of the simple math behind something like single IP, 64k ports and approximate memory per entry in a NAT state table to figure out that it's actually not impossible to have NAT states that persist indefinitely.

I've worked with people to whom I've had to explain that bits are bits, and just as in the audiophile world where there's a huge amount of money and energy spent to try to convince people that pricey bits are somehow better than cheap bits, so unless you process them differently, they're bits and are exactly the same.

There's this tendency to believe and follow trends, even when there'e ample evidence of how these trends aren't much more than marketing fluff and more often than not lead to dead ends. It's fine if others want to believe the marketing fluff, but when they want me to change my workload to support something because it's "all the rage", I have to put it in terms they understand ("You love Go? Great. Now what if I told you to use Rust because it's all the rage, and I expect you to rewrite everything in Rust?")

It's unfortunate that students aren't taught more history of computing. If they were, they'd likely learn that computing is computing, and that things don't really change that much, and that if you make and use things that aren't different for gratuitous reasons, they'll still be around and relevant years from now.

I was curious about your statement, so I looked it up:

> ABS increases stopping distances on surfaces covered with gravel, snow, or other loose materials. In such situations, a locked tire digs into the snow or gravel, pushing it forward and forming a wedge in front of the tire, which brings the vehicle to a stop

Source: https://itstillruns.com/do-brakes-work-ice-snow-6162289.html

I think we are real inflection point between an analog world and a digital world. I also think that the Bronze Age never went away and analog techniques will just develop into craftsmanship.

I haven't posted a link to these Autonetics parts in while so I will do so again.

What I love about Autonetics is that they were solving the inertial guidance problem in whatever computing form they could get a hold of.

I'm working on a proper website but the images linked here represent the inertial guidance problem being solved with discrete components arranged in circuits and later those circuits integrated in silicon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonetics

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YG4TcsmGWIVSf

Some Nixdorf 820 photos

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/memory-storage/8/...

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0Y59UlCqNHCjx

I rarely do any of that, usually my abstractions are container layers, a libc, and then a kernel between me and registers and dma. But that is a lot more layers than you'd think. I can't even understand the boot process on a modern machine with tpm. And i have no clue how many processors or controllers are in my computer. Every usb controller has an entire arm core in it, mice and keyboards have 8051 running c-ish code someone somewhere wrote, there is no bottom to the complexity.