Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards
etiennefd.substack.com
etiennefd.substack.com
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/the-lau...
The central premise is that magic and computation are essentially the same thing, information/entropy exchange that can open channels to other multiverse inhabitants when performed at sufficient scale. As computers have become more powerful and widespread, a secret government agencies have been drafting those who stumble upon particularly dangerous algorithms -- which can invoke bugs and close encounters.
So the central protagonist of an IT guy for the UK secret ministry, "The Laundry". Visual Basic macros are not allowed!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Manual
Legit.
""" > dig in remote places > extract extremely rare rocks > perform a forming spell on the rocks > extreme heat and pressure are required > inscribe microscopic arcane sigils into your magical stones > imbue the stones with lightning > the stones gain anima > the stones speak in a language incomprehensible to all mankind > certain trained warlocks can control the powers of the stones > they learn the language of the stones > the warlocks harness the magical stones powers to bring forth light and image > the rest of the population is in awe > you can now access Fortnite p**n anywhere you want from the palm of your hand """
I imagine myself trying to cast a spell like that and having to go through fifty iterations to even begin to start doing the right operation without killing the person; and even when fully trained making tons of error while doing it complete with much swearing and cursing.
I then start imagining how a spell academy would create tests for spells to test of unexpected consequences on the patient etc...
It's amazing how much complexity is hidden in a simple spell in fantasy.
This also explains why our protagonist has time to go around doing adventures and casting spells, while many of the other wizards seem to be old greybeards living in towers. They are actually doing a totally different kind of magic, writing the spells, debugging them, etc.
A good name for someone who only casts spells could be a magician on a conjurer.
On the other hand, when telling a story, I think it makes sense to make it so that the main character is a wizard just because it has the most cultural cachet. And most people don't want a story about debugging. So either we could be skipping over their day-job debugging (most programmers also have decent computer skills as a side-effect, so when the village is attacked by goblins it makes sense that some wizard would suddenly be flexing their more directly applicable skills). Or wizard could be something broad, like "general STEM person," and the main character is in some applied subfield. Or the magic creators could have some other job title (Mage, although that sounds a little generic for some reason... Sorcerer among people who are into games is sometimes mapped too closely to the wizard/sorcerer distinction from D&D, but not every magic system has to follow D&D tropes and it does have a good pun built in... or something like spell-weaver could be made up).
Magic is just programming.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18616975-off-to-be-the-w...
This is more or less how AonDor magic in Sanderson's Elantris works. You spell out what you want to do in a sort of kanji language, often with unexpected results. And you have to draw the characters really accurately for it to work.
https://aphyr.com/posts/353-rewriting-the-technical-intervie...
One point of clarification: Teotihuacano ≠ Aztec. The Aztecs discovered the ruins of Teotihuacan (and named it such) and incorporated many of its motifs into their own art.
thanks for this, true aztec gold ...
ls node_modules
Here a short description from some bookseller for the first book "The Wiz Biz":
It all began when the wizards of the White League were under attack by their opponents of the Black League and one of their most powerful members cast a spell to bring forth a mighty wizard to aid their cause. What the spell delivered was master hacker Walter Wiz Zumwalt. The wizard who east the spell was dead and nobody—not the elves, not the dwarves, not even the dragons—could figure out what the shanghaied computer nerd was good for. But spells are a lot like computer programs, and, in spite of the Wiz's unprepossessing appearance, he was going to defeat the all-powerful Black League, win the love of a beautiful red-haired witch, and prove that when it comes to spells and sorcery, nobody but nobody can beat a Silicon Valley computer geek!
They were full on multi-threaded.
Never mind the doubled up domains of several of the gods. Redundancy? Failover? Backend ftw.
Maybe they should have enabled multi-region sooner?
> The Obverse-End Wizards know how to make the Smoke colorful, and make it display letters in a myriad styles, and allow the Onlooker to manipulate the Smoke themselves.
> The Reverse-End Wizards have magics to move knowledge along the many threads of the Web, bringing it to the Smoke for the Onlooker to See, or from the Onlooker to some distant node of the Web where it will be processed into something of use
> The Obverse- and Reverse-End Wizards commonly work together; sometimes they are even the same person, and we call them the Full-Stack Wizards (stack is a corruption of tzahua, meaning to spin or weave, referring to the Great Web).
I rather enjoyed using that while it was still live and I was trying to understand how building an OS from source code worked in the 00s.
But I enjoyed it. Even as a descendent of the Tarascans!
My corollary of that law: "Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from boring technology." [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
[1] https://www.quora.com/Are-Google-software-engineers-really-d...
This is a very good corollary, and something I have complained for a long time as it pertains to fantasy fiction (sorry if this is off topic). Modern fantasy authors tend to fall over themselves to over-explain and over-elaborate on "systems of magic" in their works. Many people like that, but I find it often takes away from the "mystery of magic" and results in science-lite element than actual magic. Tolkien was one who did magic correctly, with sufficient vagueness and poeticism to preserve the sense of mysticality in magic.
Sorry for the rant, it's been years since I wanted to write this!
But their masterpiece, of course, is Stalker.
Pardon me, but isn't the book titled 'Roadside picnic' upon which the movie 'Stalker' was based?
I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings and I have a grudge with the ring(s), because all I'm thinking is that Sauron is a misunderstood magic engineer that managed to fit a miracle of power into the tiny space of the ring. As the story progresses, I muse about the "magic subsystems" and "magic dev-ops", not to mention the amazing "find-my-ring" mental manipulation subsystem which figures so prominently in the story.
Tokien sees all of it as "bad, reproachable perversion that must be destroyed," and the Lothlorien elves give up their really pretty land in a heroic sacrifice to destroy the "evil of the ring tech."
To put it as a mobile tech example, I suspect that cell-phones cause autism in kids. At the same time, my phone is free of games and social-media apps, and it is incredibly useful to find places, check my bank saldo and buy train tickets, among many other things. But if I were Tolkien, we would be throwing the One Phone into a volcano, and after it all cell-phones would stop working and we would be back to using horses to send envelopes with letters. That way, we wouldn't need to find a way for our kids to play with each other in person instead of obsessing with our "rectangular obsidian mirrors".
Ha! I read that and the outline of a whole epic adventure just shot through my mind.
It's not as annoying if vague magic causes, or can cause problems, though. Even The Lord of the Rings contains some hard magic: when Frodo puts on the ring, he turns invisible, but becomes more visible to shades. The useful effect is a pretty well-defined and discrete! The full extent of the costs and dangers are less clear, though- which gives you a great feeling of foreboding every time Frodo puts on the ring, or is in a situation where it might be needed.
Harder magic more often gives a character a toolkit, and it means you can have a them come up with a novel combination or application of the abilities they have available to them to solve a problem without it feeling like an ass-pull. It's like a murder mystery, where you can wonder at what the answer is ahead of time, try to pick up on clues.
I think there might be two different genres wearing the same face, here. I like "scientific fantasy" as much as "fantasy", but in general they might appeal to different people. In the fantasy book 'the misenchanted sword', the main character doesn't understand magic (he's just a scout), but when his sword ends up enchanted to 'protect him' (no other information given), he does what a real person might do- he tries to figure it out, see if it follows any rules! Along the way, he sometimes misunderstands or doesn't know enough, and consequently makes bad decisions. I really liked it, and I wouldn't have liked it as much if the main character hadn't been... doing science on his sword!
I agree that a lot of stories that incorporate harder magic systems also lack some poetry, but I don't think that's necessarily because of the hard magic. I think there's a selection effect going on, where the type of author most likely to write a story with discrete, well-defined powers is also more likely to have a discrete, well-defined, non-mysterious approach to the whole story. I recently read a story called 'Wander west, in shadow' that has characters with pretty discrete magical abilities (they can learn to use more of 'the Art', but they each only know a few tricks), but magic and the world in general feels mysterious and broad. You know what the characters can do, so when they cleverly improvise it feels earned, but you don't know exactly how big the world is, and the characters are continually coming across things they don't understand. I got a 'Tom Bombadil' or 'Elven tools aren't magic, or are they?' vibe from a few parts of the story, for example. I really recommend it.
https://www.deviantart.com/elgrimlock/art/tezcatlipoca-13654...
This has always been my favorite version of him I have seen over the years
That got a good laugh from me.
"We won't say much about desk top programmers" and we better not even mention embedded engineers.
There is a world outside web, ya know!
I am not an experienced VPN user (about a month) and I've noticed weird things like Google asking me if I'm a robot or making me solve a Captcha. I only got the VPN so I could torrent in peace, which it does well.
As for Google, god forbid we were allowed to scrape the master scraper in peace, so you get automatic captchas (damn grainy ones too) if you try to google with a VPN on, in my experience.
The nature of our universe as we understand it today, and by understand I mean that we can show our constructs are at least partially supported by reality, is far more magical and glorious than anything our ancestors could dream up. Yes - the universe is absent of life (and gods) as far as we can see so far. But the universe is far more grand than anything we dreamed up and human accomplishments through harnessing the magic of our world has put many of our ancient gods to shame.
Humans are amazing and this universe is magic. Don't let people rob you of that.
These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself.
These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.
So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson
It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.
It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.
Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.
Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954
So I agree, all science has done has helped us to gain a more objective understanding of our shared experience. We still have no idea what the hell is up with the universe, everything above it I guess, is doing existing in the first place.
Thinking through all of this has made me realize as an atheist I haven’t actually been engaging the religious honestly. If this is how they view the universe I and most atheists have been strawmanning them, and what they actually believe, without even knowing.
No matter the implementation details the fact I’m here looking at a universe is freaking weird. If I wasn’t here a lifeless universe existing would still be weird because wherw does it originate
Painkillers on the other hand seem like magic to me.
Search turned up this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416003 "Why does anything exist?"
… and also these: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-universe-m... https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/is-the-univers...
Looks like it's reading time!
To be clearer, I don't think physical reality is math as we currently understand it, but if there's an aspect of reality that is non-mathematical and you can prove it you've won every significant prize available and started a conceptual revolution without comparison (no, human notions such as "love", beautiful as they are, don't count as we can't begin to mathematise these anthropomorphisations).
We need to study more math :)
I believe that in the minds of most people, the notion of magic essentially means the ability to use willpower to modify physical laws, or at least that physical laws are ultimately a product of a conscious will (often the will of a God, not a Human - but still a will that can be pleaded or bargained with through prayer or ritual).
And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic. Not only is it impossible to extend your will to the world, it turns out that it is in fact the conscious will itself that is subordinate to physical laws, not the other way around - or at least this is what science is currently strongly hinting towards (we would know for sure if we had a much deeper understanding of the workings of the brain, and how consciousness arises out of it).
It's important to realize that this is vastly different from what scientists/philosophers throughout history have generally believed - even upto fairly recently, some form of Descartes-like dualism, with a mechanistic physical universe and a non-mechanistic spiritual universe of the mind (and God) being the most common way of picturing the world among most scientists even in the 1800s or later.
ahh good, so which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?
What does “deterministic but not predetermined” mean?
We can go into the details of what various interpretations of QM mean for determinism vs indeterminacy (e.g. MWI implies that there is fundamentally no randomness of any kind at the universal level, and everything is predetermined, but also every possible outcome will happen; Copenhagen implies a kind of epistemological randomness - the outcomes of measurements are random, and it's meaningless to talk about anything other than the outcomes of measurements; Pilot Wave theory implies that QM only has randomness in the sense that Newtonian mechanics already does - we can't measure the starting state well enough to say for sure what would happen, but the process is fundamentally deterministic and peredetermined).
However, there are only two possibilities: completely random (nothing can predict or influence which value the wavefunction will take after collapse) or fully determined (what you're eating for lunch today could be predicted by studying the initial state of the universe at the time of the Big Bang). There is currently no room for any other possibility in physics.
Free will in the fundamental physics sense is most likely an illusion, probably one that confers mental hardiness in face of adversity out of one’s control.
However, it could be an emergent phenomenon and thus irreducible to individual quanta anyway: more than a sum of its parts. Fundamental interactions do demonstrably yield complex structures itself capable of higher order interactions.
And if your definition of consciousness makes rocks or electrons conscious, I don't think you're really capturing what most humans mean by the concept.
Note: animism or something like the Hindu concept of Brahman still imply the same kind of consciousness that I'm talking about. The soul (for animism) or Brahman itself are the conscious things, they just happen to live in/encompass rocks or electrons.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_t...
Though, the loss of magic is most likely more correlated with approaching this mostly rationally and analytically, than our scientific progress as a species.
You seem to be confusing your personal semantics with fundamental truth (we're all slaves to this tendency, I think). If you're looking for magic you need to look inward, not outward. And see if you can make that voice of reasoning be quiet for some extended time.
Also, IIT has no basis at all. They've just found some measure that satisfies the property "human brains have more of it than insect brains, and insect brains have more of it than rocks do". Nothing else makes the II measurement in IIT related to consciousness, as far as I've ever found.
so the harnessing of nuclear power was not due to willpower..?
and of course reality is dual- otherwise what is mathematics made of? or how is anything similar to or separate from anything else, without some out-of-band judgement?
Let me put it like this. We know that we can use water to grow vines, harvest and ferment grapes, and make wine. However, we still see Jesus/God turning water into wine as a magical event.
Harnessing nuclear power is like turning water into wine by using it to grow grapes. We have discovered that certain materials have the property that they become very hot in certain conditions, and we can use our willpower to move our hands and feet to build machines that do this.
But magic refers to us (or some other being) using its willpower to achieve such effects directly. Just like you or I can will our hands into moving, a wizard or god can will the seas into parting.
> and of course reality is dual- otherwise what is mathematics made of? or how is anything similar to or separate from anything else, without some out-of-band judgement?
What is a Linux made of? Ultimately, it is some configuration of fundamental fields that defines it, either in a computer or in our brains.
Now, did Linux, or Pyhtagoras' theorem, exist immediately after the Big Bang? In some sense, you can say that they did, because a hypothetical sentient being would have been able to formulate them just as much as we can today.
But then, in this sense, the Empire State building also existed at the time of Big Bang. In a much more concrete sense, no - these things only started existing when they were thought up or built by some human minds, and in this sense the copy of Pythagoras' Theorem in my mind is just as much a physical object as Linux is on my phone and as the Empire State building is in Manhattan.
It's interesting that this is how you defined magic, because in a very real sense the ultimate purpose of most science is precisely to use our willpower to modify (what we previously believed to) physical laws.
Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
When humans achieved “heavier than air flight” they didn’t do so by modifying (or subverting) any physical law - they applied imagination to state of the art knowledge of what the laws suggest about reality to create technology that overcomes gravity by harnessing natural phenomena (thrust + angle of attack + properties of air = lift).
"Prescriptive" means "requiring" or "normative, specifying, prescribing", while "proscriptive" means (more specifically) "forbidding". It has only a negative sense of saying something is not allowed, while "prescriptive" includes a broader sense of specifying or ordaining something in any way.
I don't agree at all. The purpose of science is to understand physical laws well enough that we may predict how various objects work. Sometimes this allows us to make things that we previously believed impossible possible. Sometimes physical laws and limits turn out to be different than we thought, other times we simply find a better way to work within the same laws we always knew.
> Physical laws prevent human beings from flying, or breathing underwater, or viewing individual atoms. Until we literally used our willpower to design machines to overcome these "laws."
I don't think anyone has ever believed that one of the physical laws of the universe is "human beings can't fly". We have always known that heavier than air flying was possible (since birds do it). The notion of humans flying (or breathing underwater, or seeing really small things) with some kind of assistance has existed probably since pre-history, but definitely since antiquity - have you ever heard of Pegasus, or Hermes' winged sandals, or flying chariots and such? Airplanes are just a scientific realization of those ideas.
> I have no doubt that eventually our collective willpower will be used to modify other "laws" we believe today, like the law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Pretty magical if you ask me :)
This is also something you are wrong about. If you look at the progress of science, at least since the 1600s or so, we have almost universally discovered new fundamental limits, not the other way around.
Given Newton's laws of motion, we thought that we could reach any speed we wanted to, if only we had the right technology. It was a new discovery that actually speed is limited. We also thought that an object can have any density, until GR showed that past some density, it ceases to be an object in the usual sense (it becomes a black hole). We used to think that energy can vary continuously between any two values, until we discovered that it can only vary by fixed quanta. We used to think that we can measure the position and velocity of an object to arbitrary accuracy, but then we discovered Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
So, as science advances, I'm looking forward to finding out what other thing we currently think is possible will turn out to be impossible.
This spirit-physical duality is mainstream in the West, however you are reaching when you say that every culture and their thinkers held the same beliefs.
The word is historically accurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_magic Prior to the scientific revolution at least, this really is how "tech" was conceptually understood.
(This becomes quite clear when considering how e.g. Newton was equally involved in highly "scientific" (by a modern standard) and highly "occult" pursuits. The two would've been essentially indistinguishable at the time.)
For example, is it really true that people viewed the construction of chariots, windmills or watermills etc as a magical endeavor?
I do know that for a long time smithing had a magical mistique around it, so yes, some things we view as technological today were viewed as magical in the past. But the distinction between magic and "tech" I think has always existed.
Pre-modern people understood that natural magic was just a matter of having limited understanding of the physical world. They would have been comfortable calling it "technology." The really big conceptual change came when people stopped believing in the plausibility of demonic magic.
In mathematics we're currently living through what is from one vantage a dark age that started when Spaniards arrived in Yucatán. So stuff they had was just...but it's cool I managed to salvage some. It actually works out great in digital circuits, uses the exact same number of transistors as current stuff but better answers. Well however it is wildly incompatible with the current way things are done and can literally induce brain pain or headaches or confusion when explained. Only time I felt pain from thought. And it screwes up mathematical ability for hours.