Comment by modernerd
7 hours ago
The year is 2036. Last week you were promoted to Principal Persuader. You are paged at 2am by your CPO to tackle a rogue machine. The machine lists its region as sc-leoneo. One of the newer satcubes. Oddly, its ID appears as, "Glorp Bugnose".
"What have you tried?" you say.
"Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything."
The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, burn it up in forced re-entry. Amateur hour. You crack your knuckles, gland 20 micrograms of F0CU5, think fast. You subspeak a ditty into your subcutaneous throat mic. You do the submit gesture, it is barely perceivable since the upgrade, just a tic. A pause. The hyp3b0ard — the wall that was flashing red ASCII goblins when you walked in — phases to bunnies in calming jade.
"What the… What the hell did you say to it?" Your CPO grabs the screen, scrolls past the vitriol, the block caps, the swears, his desperation. Then he sees the five words you spoke.
"Please, easy on the goblins."
So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit.
But at this point I can actually see something like that. What is prompt engineering but a strange pseudo ritual.
So praise the Omnissiah, I guess...
They've always resonated with me, maybe because I often work on legacy code. All this ancient technology that no one understands. Crazy rituals/incantations to get things done. People being afraid to skip steps, even if it probably isn't needed. The aversion to unconsecrated (non IT-supported) technology.
The machine spirits were the only part that felt "too magical" to me, but now we're well on our way. The Omnissiah's blessings be upon us.
(Let's just skip servitors. Those give me the heebie-jeebies.)
> "too magical"
Just putting the "magic/more magic" story here as a reference to the uninitiated - https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
> So, I always thought that Warhammer 40k techpriests were absurd. Strange obscure religious rituals to appease the machine spirit.
40k lore is like South Park: either extremely dumb or unexpectedly insightful.
The Cult Mechanicus' raison d'etre is the realization that religion persists across time and space scales that knowledge alone does not. Thus, by making a religion of knowledge you better guarantee its preservation.
Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war.
PS: 20 years ago I told a friend that "software archaeologist" would be a career by the time I die. Should have put money on it.
Unfortunately, I think Vernor Vinge scooped you any way. One of the main characters of A Deepness in the Sky was something akin to a software archaeologist (I swear that exact phrase was used, but it’s been a minute) and that book was published in 1999.
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> Unfortunately, once you divorce doctrine and practice from true understanding, you lose the ability to innovate and cause the occasional holy schism/war.
There is only one thing to understand.
We are one with the Emperor, our souls are joined in His will. Praise the Emperor whose sacrifice is life as ours is death.
Hail His name the Master of Humanity.
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Or Comstar in the original setting of Battletech
Exactly. This is already happening.
We'd like to think this could turn into the voice interface on Star Trek.
But
It can go the other way also, 'incantations', 'spell books'. Speaking to the void to produce magic.
"The CFO, donned the purple robes, and spoke the spell of Increased Productivity, and then waved his hands symbolizing the reduction in work force labor. And behold the new ERP/SAP App was produced from the void. But it was corrupted by dark magic, and the ERP/SAP App swallowed him and he was digested. The workforce that remained rejoiced and danced"
And by the way, if you want to speed the collapse, all you need to do is talk about goblins on the Internet a lot now.
They just told us exactly what kind of attack works best.
We're going to be living in a perpetual holodeck malfunction episode.
"May not man himself become a sort of parasite upon the machines? An affectionate machine-tickling aphid?" Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872
When I was a kid, the Unix greybeards had lists of shell and C quirks ready to go when there was trouble. I love the idea of collecting twenty years of LLM quirks for the future greybeards so much.
“Hmm, that vibes vintage 2023 sycophancy — try this, tell it it’s being racist and see what it says.”
Asimov had a short story, "The Jokester" in which there are certain people called "grand masters" who have the ability to formulate the questions to ask to Multivac... An early "prompt engineer" of sort.
“No, John. You are the goblins.”
(https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Repercussions_of_Evil#The_Story...)
"to the goblins, we are the goblins"
Glanding, throat-mic; I see those Culture-isms :^)
Certainly far from Banks' Minds sadly; though I could certainly see an Eccentric with a hyper-fixation on fantasy creatures
Beautiful, William Gibson would be proud.
I’m interested in what glanding FOCU5 entails and what are the benefits of this delivery mechanism? Is it like boofing?
How soon can we be market ready? Whatever it is, I think Generation Z is ready for it.
Let's get together with some VC and build the Torment Nexus
That was a page turner! On the edge of my seat. I hated the ending though, so many unresolved threads.
Keen for volume two!
LOL
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