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Comment by grues-dinner | Hacker News Reader

The original idle clicker. With modern materials, vacuum pumps, and magnetic bearings for the mechanics and lithography for the writing, we can pump those numbers up!

All silent in the monastery except for the ultrasonic whine of thousands of prayer turbines.

Prayer ring gyros, encoding the prayers into ultra-fast laser pulses going round millions of turns of optic fibre may be a competing technology.

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Reminds me of the Electric Monk from Douglas' Adams "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" [0]

It's essentially a robot built to believe things on behalf of its owner, offloading the tiresome burden of religion to a machine.

In the book it is explained as a natural evolution of other machines, like a dishwasher washes dishes for you, a VCR watches TV for you, an electric monk believes for you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...

Finally, a real use for ChatGPT

Related, I highly recommend the short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.

https://hex.ooo/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html

Reminds me of bitcoin for some reason. There are some logical reasons for these things to exist, but from outside perspective, it's just more advanced ant mill.

Just write a 10 TB hard disk full of plaintext mantras and let that bad boy spin at its usual ~5k rpm for a cost effective 50 PB of mantras per minute. Or go MAAS and write a few them into S3.

With S3 you risk the prayers sitting static in solid state storage

The Arthur C Clark story Nine Billion Names of God is cute on this theme :D

I would joke something akin to that's why china is winning but that would be too much bad karma for me to handle

technology wont count as the prayers were not written out by someone with reencarnatory mojo at a monestery, and then the prayer wheel sold to help both the new owner with carma and the monk and temple survive with money,also the physical action of spinning the wheel while the one holding is praying would count as intentional, a remote powered machine may likely be a stretch, or most likely with buddists,"bit prayers", ha! would have value inversly proportional to there speed of execution, lest the ancient megga temple prayer wheels loose there "value"

It's hard to say where rules lawyering ends and hermeneutics begins, but as I am aware it's presumably somewhere before installing an EUV etching machine on a Tibetan mountaintop, I am joking.

That said electric (and wind and water-powered) prayer wheels do actually exist, so there is some prior art.

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