You put it better than I did. I'm younger than you so I had IRC & phpBB to lean on, but that still meant clawing out the advanced knowledge from the hands of the elders. It's where I learned that the best way to get a real answer is to first say something wrong. But at least smart enough to get a response.
The feeling of mysticism and challenge is dispersed when put into an easy to grasp format. This enables more people to learn enough to reach the skill floor, but it doesn't teach those with an able mind to reach for the ceiling. I see this nowadays a lot, most people around me who didn't grow up with this culture are much worse debuggers. That's not because of their technical skills, but a lack of tenacity. Having answers be far far away means that when you start finding them regardless, you gain an inner mindset of "no matter how hard this is, eventually it is understandable". Seeing what other people could reverse engineer with extremely poor resources inspires one to try harder when there's no solution in sight. It's also taught me that I am _nowhere near as smart_ as I thought I was. To a hilarious degree. Somehow this is not a paradox.
Very well put! Although I didn't know it when banging my teenage head against assembler, throughout my long career in tech I found the combination of tenacity, humility and "down to the metal" sense of how computers work served me very well.
The feeling of mysticism and challenge is dispersed when put into an easy to grasp format. This enables more people to learn enough to reach the skill floor, but it doesn't teach those with an able mind to reach for the ceiling. I see this nowadays a lot, most people around me who didn't grow up with this culture are much worse debuggers. That's not because of their technical skills, but a lack of tenacity. Having answers be far far away means that when you start finding them regardless, you gain an inner mindset of "no matter how hard this is, eventually it is understandable". Seeing what other people could reverse engineer with extremely poor resources inspires one to try harder when there's no solution in sight. It's also taught me that I am _nowhere near as smart_ as I thought I was. To a hilarious degree. Somehow this is not a paradox.