Tech Culture onhttps://geekyschmidt.com/categories/tech-culture/Recent content in Tech Culture on<url>https://geekyschmidt.com/images/papermod-cover.png</url><link>https://geekyschmidt.com/images/papermod-cover.png</link></image><generator>Hugo</generator><language>en</language><copyright>Copyright ©2002-2026, Nicholas Schmidt; all rights reserved.</copyright><lastBuildDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:22:00 -0400</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://geekyschmidt.com/categories/tech-culture/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><item><title>The Danger of Abstraction: Why Deep Technical Curiosity is Still an Engineer’s Best Assethttps://geekyschmidt.com/post/2026-06-22-passiontechai/Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:22:00 -0400https://geekyschmidt.com/post/2026-06-22-passiontechai/<p>The year was 1997. A younger, spikey-haired version of myself was running a shiny AMD K6 processor on Debian 1.3 &ldquo;Bo.&rdquo; At the time, I was working at a German ISP doing UNIX System Administration. It was a trial by fire where I learned how practical networking functioned whilst supporting customers in two languages.</p> <p>Flipping through an issue of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Shopper_(American_magazine)"><em>Computer Shopper</em></a>, I came across a DEC advertisement for their 500 MHz Alpha chip.</p>