I love when you read the early implementations of some algorithm and you're like "this makes sense, it seems like a reasonable way to extract truth from the universe". Then you keep reading and it goes "modern implementations represent a significant improvement over the Shit For Brains Method, whose usage is confined to computer scientists cooking eggs on their laptops. This one has the number 9801 as a load bearing part of the algorithm, the guy who came up with it claimed his god gave him the idea."
It really reinforces the theme that reality doesn't care all that much if it makes sense to us.
I like this quote that deals with the same kind of idea

























