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Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

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Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#61

Post by jamesog »

bbor wrote: post #56
jamesog wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)

Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter æ was used in Old En…

"Aesthetic" gets even stickier! In the UK I tend to more commonly hear it pronounced as "es-thetic".

The Great Vowel Shift indeed makes written English much more confusing than it perhaps should be. English is already a messy hodge-podge of a language, then our writing system started to get standardised (or standardized, if you're American!) right as pronunciation started to change, leading to the written version of words suddenly no longer being anything like the pronunciation.

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#62

Post by compressedgas »

pantulis wrote: post #15

Of course it's not the origin of the usage, but I always found Lovecraft's quote from Lactantius to be pretty adequate: "Demons have the ability to cause people to see things that do not exist as if they did exist. -- Lactantius"

http://blogicaster.blogspot.com/2011/10/lovecrafts-lactantiu...

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#63

Post by saltcured »

bbor wrote: post #56
jamesog wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)

Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter æ was used in Old En…

Hmm, I'm a Californian and I pronounce daemon as demon, understanding the first vowel as the same vowel as for Aesop. Indistinguishable from the vowel in "beam" and "niece".

But I pronounce the first vowel in aesthetic differently. For me, it's somewhat in between the vowels in "bed" and "bad" but closer to the former.

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#64

Post by n4r9 »

eru wrote: post #33
n4r9 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing that the daemon's ability to allow only fast molecules through the gate depends on knowing their position and velocity simultaneously?

But the daemon doesn't need to know them all that precisely.

I think you'd have to be pretty precise to know if it's heading towards a hole that's only just large enough for it.

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#65

Post by iwaztomack »

everfrustrated wrote: post #39
twobitshifter wrote: post #25

Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?

I pedantically use day-mon (working/servant spirit) to distinguish from dee-mon (evil spirit) but I suspect I'm very much in the minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon I've never found any significance to associate the unix term with Demons and consider it a mis-association.

Don't let MAGA hear you... they'll start banning and burning linux boxes.

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#66

Post by Vecr »

JD557 wrote: post #5

Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion: > Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work. I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon? 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max…

It probably (if the calculations are right) is unable to actually do much of anything useful (because it's too complex to avoid being extremely correlated with the rest of the universe ("embedded")), and even if it could it wouldn't be better than a standard ASI in most real-world situations.

That's assuming you aren't trying to claw back more energy than you lose, I'm pretty sure that's not possible to reliably do without crazy hypothetical physics.

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#69

Post by somat »

sgarland wrote: post #32
burcs wrote: post #23

Saw this on a conspiracy theory subreddit recently, thought it was absolutely hilarious: "Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong"

I told my eight year old the “we taught sand how to think” joke, and he loved it, and also indulged me in a brief explanation. It really is absolutely wild that it all works when you go to the absolute fundamentals and start working forward.

The funny thing is that before that we taught light bulbs how to think(thermionic logic), and before that we taught magnets how to think(relay logic) and before that we taught levers how to think(gear logic)

Re: Origin of 'Daemon' in Computing

#70

Post by dpassens »

JadeNB wrote: post #55
dpassens wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was going to justify that by saying it's the same as /usr/bin, but that's also short for binaries, so should also be an 'ai'.

> Surely the logical pronunciation is the way you'd pronounce it in library, so a long 'ai' rather than any kind of 'i'? Yep, that's what I meant to say with: > … never noticed until I heard someone else say it with a long 'i' that that was obviously the logical pronunciation. But maybe the sentence structure was too tortured for it to be clear what I was saying. > Though I personally always use the short 'i'. I was…

> that's what I meant to say

Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant long 'i' as in extending the duration of the 'i' sound, like in 'beep' vs 'bip'.

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