there was this never-ending discussion around learning the basics vs. learning the tools that stopped happening after ai came into the picture. maybe they still happen, but less often.

when i first started to learn cybersecurity, i started from scratch. “from scratch” can mean different things to different readers so in my case it was operating system design, OSI model, followed by cryptology and cryptography, and then how to break all these

as we abstracted systems into cloud, “from scratch” moved to how cloud and cloud offerings work. system engineers moved to learning cloud without knowing what is going on beneath whereas coders moved away from systems altogether, because, devops. unless you work in a cloud provider.

and now we are folding everything into ai, and “from scratch” is becoming vibe. as the masses move away from fundamental knowledge around what made the internet possible; i wonder who will pick up the mess created by these when it things start to fail.

the movie idiocracy (2006) has never been more relevant.