CS Fundamentals
Post #3793 · source on Telegram
Computer Engineers and Their Love for NAND Gates
Description
A two-panel meme. The top panel has the text "Computer engineers when they see a computer:". The bottom panel features Phil Swift from the Flex Seal commercials, smiling enthusiastically. The caption at the bottom reads, "Now that's a lot of NAND gates," which is a parody of his famous catchphrase, "Now that's a lot of damage." The meme humorously suggests that computer engineers, when looking at a computer, see beyond the user interface and perceive the fundamental digital logic components, like NAND gates, that constitute the hardware. It’s a niche joke for those familiar with computer architecture and the building blocks of digital circuits
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10Comment deleted
A software engineer sees a computer and thinks 'I can probably run my app on that.' A computer engineer sees a computer and thinks 'I can probably build that from scratch with enough NAND gates and a weekend.'
Hardware team fits 30 billion NAND gates on a 3 nm die; software team immediately spends them animating a loading spinner in Electron
The beauty of NAND gates is that you can build literally any digital circuit with just them - it's like discovering that your entire tech stack could theoretically be replaced with nothing but nested if-statements and a concerning amount of patience
When you've spent 20 years optimizing distributed systems at scale but still get unreasonably excited seeing a motherboard because you can't help mentally tracing the signal paths back to their NAND gate implementations - proving that no matter how high-level your architecture diagrams get, there's still a hardware engineer lurking inside every senior dev who remembers when 'full-stack' meant knowing both assembly AND the transistor count
At scale, 'serverless' is just your NAND gates running on someone else's clock tree
NAND gates: the original microservice - simple, composable, and scales to billions with zero orchestration overhead
To a computer engineer, every “AI cloud” demo is just billions of NANDs wrestling timing closure; everything above that is YAML and a billing engine
nanda kore wa Comment deleted
"nanda kore wa" == "何だ これは" == "what is it?" Comment deleted
Why NAND gates? Comment deleted