I’m suspicious of the idea people are afraid of wizards versus wising up to the fact that wizards aren’t as wise and just as society presumed they were. They’ve found out that wizards are just people with a particular skill set.
Burn the Programmer
161–170 of 254 posts
Re: Burn the Programmer
#162Another 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…
"True Name" is what I'm reminded of most when I try to invoke tech support. Recently my ISP upgraded me to fiber and gave me a ... router. I would put some adjectives there, but I want to keep this post civil. Needless to say, I want to do some more advanced things with this device like enable restricted UPnP, maybe run some DNS-level ad blockers, port forward, etc. After some arguing with tech support I couldn't get…
As always, there is an XKCD about that ;-)
Re: Burn the Programmer
#163Considering 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…
Forth, I believe it was, rather than APL, and specifically for the simple semantics and quick composition of a stack-based language. I recall being impressed with the author's rather detailed, but still likely accessible to non-wizards, description of the decision process and its outcome.
My favorite bit was summoning the Interpreter from Starting Forth -- you could recognize him from the description before it was explained. I mean, if you've read Starting Forth already.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#164You 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.
Every normal person I know in real life thinks my code is wizardry. In fact the only people I ever, ever catch trying to pass off programming as just another profession, are programmers.
I wrote code for 8 years before encountering another programmer. During that time, I could barely believe that more than a handful of people in the world could possibly be navigating this rabbit hole effectively. It’s too complex and abstract - how would two people even communicate about it?
Turns out I was wrong about the first part, but a little too right about the second part. Even mathematicians find more agreement about what is true than programmers do.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#165Another 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…
"True Name" is what I'm reminded of most when I try to invoke tech support. Recently my ISP upgraded me to fiber and gave me a ... router. I would put some adjectives there, but I want to keep this post civil. Needless to say, I want to do some more advanced things with this device like enable restricted UPnP, maybe run some DNS-level ad blockers, port forward, etc. After some arguing with tech support I couldn't get…
The big difference between tech support and programming is that programming usually comes with a manual, while with tech support, you have to learn the True Names of the actions you want performed from some wise master who heard them from some other wise master, who... and so on.
Actually this is true of most bureaucracies: banks, governments, large companies, academia, etc.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The last three books were written by Brandon Sanderson. They were so good. I wish we could keep the first 2-3 books from Robert Jordan and have Brandon Sanderson rewrite all of the middle books up to his last 3 books. It would really improve the series. I'm loving Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series right now. The third one is coming out in a few days.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#167Getting hit pretty hard. To very briefly summarize, the article reviews an occasional trope in writing about our field, namely that it has some interesting correspondences with old-style conceptions of magic - from hermitical study of certain esoterica granting access to powers and principalities beyond the ordinary ken, through potentially hostile reaction to same among those lacking such secret knowledge and fright…
My server (where this guest article is hosted) is fielding some 20 HTTP GET requests/second and is holding up fine (load avg. is still under 1.0). I'm guessing there may be some routing problems — antipope.org is hosted in the UK.
It did seem a little atypical to see your blog struggling under HN traffic. Now I guess I know why!
Re: Burn the Programmer
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Unsong is not exactly rational fiction. The author itself claims it isn't (some people claim it is despite this fact, though).
I can see both sides of that argument, and I'd be lying to say I didn't consider Unsong rationalist fiction at least partly as an attempt to redeem the genre in my own estimation.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#169"...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…
> 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).
Ha! When I jumped into Linux during the summer of 95, I spent many many days and nights writing directly sendmail.cf rules, because I could not understand and use any of those damn M4 scripts... Handwriting sendmail.cf parts was more straightforward for me (for some value of 'straightforward').
20 years later, I have yet to get around to grasping M4.
Re: Burn the Programmer
#170Considering 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…
Similarly, the Ra story on qntm.org has magic be well-defined to the point of having an intentionally boring college lecture, with the magic spells being both consistent and recognizable. The author did a writeup of some of how the language is structured.