The Demon Machine | Hacker News Reader

The Demon Machine

blog.jgc.org

101 pointsjgrahamc11 comments

Henry Kissinger has famously said that power is better than sex. Well, clearly he isn't a programmer!

Actually, what Kissinger famously said was that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac, which is something somewhat different. I imagine he is describing it as a one-way function...

Just to test my understanding on this sentence (I have re-read it 4 times now), JGC is saying that if Kissinger was a programmer, he would be saying "sex is better than power"? I think I have totally missed the meaning of this - could someone please point it out to me?

My interpretation was that programming is better than either sex or power :)

> It's the same little voice that still drives me on to write just another line of code, to perfect just another little routine.

I've experience this feeling myself, and I don't think it's a phenomenon limited to programming. I've had similar 'demons' urging me to do just another edit-pass over my writing, or in some web project, to tweak a UI/UX component just a little bit more. If there is a demon here, then it's likely present within all human creative endeavors.

Odd, I don't hear any audio on the video; is it just me?

There is no audio; I had nothing to say.

The mention of a speech synthesis module, combined with a comment on how demonic the voice is, adds up to an expectation - the metaphor is misunderstood as real.

> Truly, that voice is demonic.

Being Halloween, I was waiting to hear something scary.

The phrasing is somewhat confusing, I had to reread it after being confused at the lack of sound in the video and the mention of a voice synthesis module. The "voice" refers to the voice in the subsequent paragraph, the one driving the programmer, not the computer.

That works.

Interestingly, it shows that the previous commenter and myself both read the article the same way, one that I don't think a typical author would necessarily assume. I skipped the video entirely, upon reading the first words of the following paragraph went back and played the video, eager to hear that voice module.

Humans are weird.

I modified it to make that a little clearer.

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