It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."
Aes Sedai in Wheel of Time? "Well, I could destroy the world, but I'm too busy playing politics with all these other women."
Good one. Brought back a lot of Wheel of Time memories ... I just wish I had time to re-read the entire series ... never even finished it.
Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines. Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even…
Even better, sometimes I wonder if history is not going in circles. Maybe so much fuss is made about True Names because it's echoes of a long dead civilization which already had computers and search engines ? Atlantis ? Quetzalcoatl ? Meroe ? Hyperborea ? Mu ? Lyonesse ? Dogons ?
Would we not find archaeological evidence of these technologies? Plastic tends to stick around for a long time.
You know, us programmers like to refer to ourselves as wizards but I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of? I don't know anything about chemical engineering but I've never considered chemical engineers to be magical. I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though.
> I do like thinking of myself as a wizard, though. This doesn't address your first paragraph, but I wanted to comment on this. I identify as a hacker. The terms "wizard", "incantation", etc are fairly ingrained in our culture. But if I do something and someone refers to it as "magic", it actually makes me uncomfortable; it means that they don't understand what I did or how I did it, and rather than trying to underst…
I have actually quite the opposite point of view. I actually aim for the things I build to feel/be magical. Yes everything is still explainable but usually the system is sufficiently complex that even as the creator you can feel overwhelmed.
Recently I've built a small project (I've made a show HN yesterday which btw didn't get any attention) which felt quite magical and futuristic : A remotely controlled robot which displays some deep art. When novice people interacted with it, they felt a bit of the magic of technology, just like wielding a wand, it responded instantly to their will.
I enjoy creating things which may have unanticipated effects. Recently, I have been interested by the theory of complex systems and in the way it is similar to real magic, as opposed to the magic you describe as an illusion.
"...Ever tried to set up a Postfix server?" is the new "...Ever tried to set up a Sendmail server?". (When I was younger, I was told by a veteran sysadmin that only 5 persons in the world knew how to configure Sendmail directly, everyone else was relying on preprocessing scripts written by the aforementioned wizards). Edit: my point is that Postfix is actually quite easy to configure, compared to Sendmail which was t…
OP and writer of the article here.
I'm embarassed to say that I wrote Postfix when I meant Sendmail! I might just go ninja-edit that now :)
Ah, K&M. Lots of potential, many fun moments, but it's far from rationalist fiction. Still, if you ever need wish fulfillment that the time you spend at work beating down technical debt could instead allow you to fight monsters and cast spells leveraging the mana pool of a giant robot, it's a fun read/watch. From an unofficial (and somewhat grammatically atrocious) English translation of the original novel [0]: > Nor…
> it's far from rationalist fiction Is that bad? Like any didactic subtype of the genre, rationalist fiction often struggles to succeed in both of the goals set for it; the only example I've as yet found enjoyable - and extremely so! I strongly recommend it - is Unsong by Scott Alexander, also of Slate Star Codex.
Seconding Unsong. The end felt kind of cheap to me, but the journey was absolutely worth it.
Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…
This is exactly the reason I despise Spring with a deep and abiding passion. "Just add this dependency, and add these annotations to your class, and it will all Just Work." "But...what do those annotations actually do ?" "Stop asking so many questions!" I mean, I know the answers are out there, it's open source after all. But so much of it seems deliberately designed to obfuscate the flow of execution and make reason…
I agree with annotations like this making it harder to reason about control flow, but I don't really get the consternation about "what do these annotations do?" so much. You can go read their documentation or source yourself to answer that question. How is that different than anything else? Same thing with "rails magic": yes, it sucks that you can't grep for method definitions, but you can go peruse the has_many method implementation to see what it does!
> e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much) More than once it has crossed my mind that it would be worthwhile to build custom error message dialogs that can't be closed for at least 30 seconds (maybe with a secret override) for some areas of our products. The number of t…
Why not just write to an error log? You could even have some button to send it to you or something.
Oh, we do that too... It's a struggle to get people to actually send those to us, for some reason, or even just open them up. Usually this kind of thing occurs with initial installation, and we're typically installing into some location that is firewalled to hell and gone, so we can't depend on being able to access anything even within their own LAN, let alone the outside internet.
Considering how many programming abstractions most programmers work above now, I'd say it's more like magic now then ever before. Draw the circle (add the boiler plate code), recite the words (dig up the proper API method), perform the gestures (compile with certain flags) and your spell (desktop app) will work. If you don't, it'll do nothing or worse, blow up in your face. As a side note, if anyone's interested in l…
As long as we're recommending things, I'm tossing "Off To Be The Wizard" into the pool. Magic is done by modifying a secret file that modifies the world; you can create macros that modify it for you, etc., etc. Shenanigans ensue.
Another analogy that I can't shake off is True Name and search engines. Since the dawn of time folk tales placed emphasis on true name of people and objects. Knowing the true name grants one power over something or someone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name Knowing the true name of someone lets you put it in a search engine and find out about him/her. There are some sleazy smartphone apps which let you do even…
Social security numbers occupy a similar place in American society; you gain additional power for every Former Address of Residence you know, and the True Name of your mother - the one she was known by before marriage - unlocks further powers yet.
It makes me wonder if there are any realms of wizardry where the highest ranking wizards spend all their time on management skills and never get to practice their magic. "Oh, these days I just review a lot of spell-design scrolls and mentor junior acolytes. Magic is more of a people business, you know."
Charles Stross's novels parallel this, unsurprisingly. Bob doesn't do much fieldwork anymore, and rarely even gets to light up a Hand of Glory.