> Most people, especially non-tech technical people, could crash through the TCP article and come out the other side with at least a high level understanding of it.

Careful, I think you might be committing an https://xkcd.com/2501/ error.

What even is a protocol? What is a host? What is a ‘stream of octets’? Wiki helpfully tells you octets are also known as ‘bytes’.

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lucassz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with you here, but what's special about tech is that many of us learned all these terms fully casually while using computers as children and teenagers, which would be much less common for a chemist. That makes programmers see a lot of things as computer literacy that most people have rather than specialized knowledge.

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avisser 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My argument is that all the vocabulary for computer science are things. Even if they are virtual, they are tangible. You can draw a picture and label a box "bytes".

Nothing in the ChatGPT conversation is tangible. It's all in the realm of concepts.

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jameshart 5 hours ago | parent [-]

A ‘Byte’ is not a concrete thing and the fact you think it is speaks to the degree to which you have immersed yourself in a mental model which thinks of ‘information’ as if it is a real concrete thing, to the extent that you don’t even realize the levels of conceptual abstraction you needed to build in order to internalize what a ‘byte’ is.

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com2kid 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A byte is quite real. On old machines you could open them up and literally point to where bytes were physically stored in memory.

Now days of course the chips are small so you have to point to where the multiple gigabyte chips are at.

But they are still quite physically.

Heck a C pointer points to an actual physical location on your machine, if you ignore the MMU.

	▲	jameshart 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wow and TCP sends a stream of those microscopic memory cells?