My mother tells me a story about a Christmas I was too young to remember. She had stepped out of the house for a few hours and left me with my step-father. When she arrived, every toy I had received for Christmas was destroyed. Each rendered completely non-functional.
Flash-forward twenty-something years, and I still break all my toys; But usually on purpose. I've broken computers, phones, gadgets, and gizmos. I've found bugs while playing videogames and browsing websites. My desktop is a 10-year Ship of Theseus that constantly gets new parts...and not exactly by choice. I can't even begin to count how many times I've flashed a fresh install of Ubuntu or Windows. It never stops; The constant need to understand how something works. This quickly leads to screws being twisted off and an iFixIt scraper prying off a plastic shell housing a PCB underneath, or DevTools and Ghidra spinning up. But in learning how to break things *correctly*, you learn how to *assemble*.
I take for granted the repair skills I've learned over the years. I don't just mean when I learned how to solder from a YouTube video and replaced the charging port on my old laptop. I mean the things I consider 'intuition'. The way you just kind of *know* "Oh, theres probably clips holding this shell in place", or "Mark all of your screws so you remember which size goes into which hole". None of this is truly intuition, but the result of learned experiences. Sure, I learned the "CompTIA 6-Step Troubleshooting Model", but I knew them by a different name before getting A+ certified. They were just "the way you solve problems" as far as I was concerned, and I for sure wasn't consulting CompTIA at 16 fixing the family's computer issues. I think it's important to reflect on not only your blind spots, but also the things you consider 'common knowledge' but in fact are not.
When you first setup your own VPN, it sounds easy in theory. "I'll setup some software on the host, setup some software on the client, maybe open a port or something, and we're set." And sure, WireGuard does make it seem that easy under the hood. But then you want to expose devices that can't run the software. --Broken-- Time to learn about IP Tables. While you're at it, better learn about masquerades, forwarding, NAT hairpinning, policy routing, and why one missing AllowedIPs entry can make the whole thing feel cursed. Once you've pulled out all of your hair, you can discover MTU issues, DNS leaks, and the joy of debugging “it connects but nothing routes” at 1:00am, and suddenly your “simple VPN” is a full-on homegrown networking course you didn’t sign up for. And why do you need a VPN at home? Well, how else would you control your lights from your phone anywhere in the world, without exposing that to the public. Is it critical? Not in the slightest. But its possible and I can make it happen...through hell or high water.
The thirst for knowledge sends me down rabbit holes faster than the rabbits can dig them. I've done deep dives into how photography works, steam engines, and ancient mythology. I've dug into the source of every cliche in my vocabulary, and strive to add more. Want to change your own watch battery? How hard could it be....? Sometimes, I feel as though I accidentally became a Systems Administrator as I just wanted to know 'how computers work'. I only even really wanted to know if I could fit a computer in my backpack and play Steam games via some phone pairing (This was years before Valve released SteamLink and made my dream into built-in functionality)
And this leads me to why I believe I have such an obsession with what we call "Complex Adaptive Systems". The textbook definition is "a system that is complex in that it is a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble may not be predictable according to the behavior of the components." I like to think of them as the "black boxes" of the world. Systems that which: We know how they work and whatever rules that govern them. We can measure both the inputs and outputs but have no idea what the output will be for a given input. Systems like AI, Stock Markets, and even the Internet to some extent. These fascinate me as you can understand a given system perfectly, but at best, be able to 'predict' an outcome to a degree of confidence, never 100%. What will ChatGPT's response to a given prompt be? Will Nvidia's stock go up off this news? Will this Twitter post go viral? Nobody can ever say for certain,
Still...to me, the Holy Grail is a non-functional device. It's already broken. You can't break it *more*. But maybe...just maybe... you can get it online again.