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I guess I fully deserve this as some sort of karmic retribution, because I'm usually the person in the room who's frustrated about people poking things they don't fully understand, about folks continuing to spitball rather than looking a layer deeper, and the one who over-obsesses over details. It took me a very long time to accept that sometimes ignorance is not only acceptable, but optimal, and it continues to challenge me to this day.

You mention "being hackerly". Imagine you were reverse engineering some gnarly 100 MB obfuscated x86 binary. Surely you can appreciate that especially if you have a specific goal, it is overwhelmingly preferable to guess, experiment, and poke than to kick off some heroic RE effort that will take tens of people years, just so that you can supposedly "fully understand" what's happening. Attention is precious - not everything is worth equal attention. And it is absolutely possible to correctly guess things from limited information, and is even essential to be able to.

You find base64 encoding interesting enough that you were able to either recall detailed facts about its operation from memory here, or looked it up quickly to break it down. How is the author, or me, not doing so is any evidence for you we're:

- ignorant about how base64 works and always have been

- don't care about (CS) things at depth in general

These are such immensely strong claims to make. Surely you can appreciate that some people just have different interests sometimes? That they might focus on different things? That they can learn things and then forget about them? That to some level everything is connected, so appealing to that is not exactly some grand revelation of missing a "key piece"?

Few years, or I guess more than just a few years ago, in college, I met up with a former classmate from primary school. He was studying history and shared some great (historical) stories that I really enjoyed. But then another thought formulated in my mind: if I had to actively study this, rather than just catch a story or two, I'd definitely be dropping out. And that's when I realized that there can be value to things, they can be interesting, yet at the same time it's OK for me not to be interested by them or pursue them deeper. Just like how I think it is perfectly OK to be interested in this pattern, but not care for the underlying mapping mechanism, as it is essentially irrelevant. The fun was in the fact, not in the mechanism (in my view for the author anyways).