Am a civil engineer working in tech now. I never felt like engineering was magical, we studied materials and stresses and tested stuff and built things.

While I know software engineers basically do the same things in a digital concept (hardware included) they are basically speaking arcane words that make the machine do things like conjure up images, transport information across the world at the speed of light.

Maybe fantasy writers should write more infrastructure into their stories for their wizards, like undersea cables or satellites built by the generations before

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[–] kersploosh@sh.itjust.works 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

RF engineering is witchcraft.

[–] jayrhacker@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

Oh, it's worse than that, it's not garden variety "make jimmy fall in love with me" magic; it's "call forth the daemon spirit of Fourier to transform the spectral flux into symbols for the sacred converter to interpret via the MCS scrolls into a cursed message posting to kbin…"

[–] al177@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 9 months ago

Most GHz RF designs are a PCB with a bunch of copper sigils and a single transistor.