Or when the company says “well, we have to collect all your personal data in order to (technobabble happens here)”…
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I mean, Im a dev-in-test now and I dont know whats happening. It’s all magic to me!
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I’ve ended up going down a slightly weird road by going fully open source in 1999, so as consumer electronics has increasingly meant “closed-source computers” I’ve had less and less to do with them. I would have no clue how to use a modern TV or smart audio player, but I have my home-built hardware to do the same jobs.
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Not what’s supposed to be happening, in my experience!
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I did that for a while, but it seemed like to much like work. I started about when you did (2000, probably); I understand it’s less work these days. But it’s still too much like work.
I must admit, the only difference to my mind between technology and magic is knowing the science behind it.
I am fully aware of the science behind flying, or electricity, and still my mind struggles to comprehend how a thing so heavy as a Jumbo can fly, or how we put rockets and satellites in space. I think a little bit of “magic dust” is involved 
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Don’t tell them or they’ll all want some!
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I know. Take a car with a combustion engine for example. Most people have a rough idea how that works and what a car can or cannot do. They can drive one, maybe even with stickshift.
But now new technology is introduced numerous assistants help you stay in your lane, keep your distance, assist with breaking, automate gear shifting etc. Some cars do not even have a combustion engine anymore. There are cars that can drive all alone without a driver. Or are there?
Enter all those stories about Tesla drivers… doing dumb things. Many of them don‘t really know what their car can or cannot do right now.
Every time software gets involved the abstraction level of any technology advances by leaps and bounds and suddenly something people used to „mostly understand“ becomes magic.
When we last visited the US, my friend already had a car with all those modern assistance systems. She drove like a mad-woman and I was sitting at the edge of the seat wondering how much I could really trust that the car would stop on time in the rain if something happened.
Also: there is no software without bugs. Just saying. While I do sometimes wonder how big planes stay in the air this is only partially my inability to understand physics. There is a lot of software in airplanes….
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(And adaptive cruise control relies on pulse-doppler radar. We know all about how to spoof pulse-doppler radar because it’s been in use for decades in missile seekers. All it would take is a moderately smart bad actor to cause lots of emergency braking…)
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This is what I do for a living.
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You don’t need to go as far as IT based technology. I know that the Turbo of an engine does something-something with air and the fuel, and it goes faster. That is as much as I need to know.
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Stand on a street corner, saying “here, missile, missile”?
England is so weird.
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That’s pretty much it. Some of the aircraft systems we make take the output of a radar/missile and “do some magic” to make it appear that we’re elsewhere.
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“Rocket Sockem Beams” was the Churchill branded version of that board game in the UK right?
I had a look at quantum computing once. Now that is magic.
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So I just spent most of my morning debugging why my Firefox suddenly couldn’t access any websites anymore.
I had a triple update last night: dsl modem, OS and browser all updated. Something broke.
Browser also stopped removing parent.lock file from the profile when I quit the program and then wouldn’t restart. A new profile fixed my issues–now my partner has the same problem. A friend on a Mac said a reboot helped. Syncing over some files from the old profile broke the new profile again btw. So…
I guess something something with file permissions–which are fishy on windows at the best of times.
This would be enough to switch browsers if I had not just read how firefox is the last true open source community based browser–aka not google or apple controlled–that has a significant number of users. And even that is terribly small. I think it hovers around 5% of users.
I had the same problem this morning, but just rebooting worked fine (I’m also on a Mac).
I wonder what it was.
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Rebooting didn’t help with mine. Maybe another two times might have done it. Sometimes windows is like that.
It wasn’t just you with firefox this morning.
Twitter told me to go to about:config and turn off “network.http.http3.enabled”. That solved it immediately.
I know nothing, so that could have turned the world’s internet off or told my PC to explode, but I did it and it worked.
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I break my tech stuff so often that I immediately assumed it was something I did–too many extensions f.e.–so I never bothered to check the wider internet. German tech news also had an article about it. Yeah well now I have a cleaned up fresh profile and it turns out, after I decided to forget the old one there wasn’t much that was missing from my synced account.