Programming/Coding is witchcraft/magic just modernized...

SomaSpice

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Why, yes, coding is poring over esoteric instructions and sigils until the machine egregore does your bidding, and the computer screen is akin to a crystal ball.
 
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Taleisin

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consonant

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i'd think that it's a pretty nerdy take but i feel flattered that someone thinks that something i can do is magic
 
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shinobu

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The article itself is pretty bad and wishy-washy, but the idea of software approaching magic is definitely true unless we do something about it. And here I mean magic as in an effect caused by chanting some spell or drawing a specific magic circle without understanding the why behind each word or each line in the sigil, to follow the analogy. I don't mean magic in the more esoteric sense that you can see discussed in other parts of the forum (I don't know anything about that but it's closer to LARP from what I see)


This talk describes the problem pretty well. The old programmers who can actually wrangle the computer at the lowest level are not the majority anymore, and universities and most common jobs (where you used to learn from your seniors) aren't teaching the fundamental knowledge of the field. Web developers and data scientists and machine learning developers are working with tools they don't understand in order to produce their work. Now, I'm not saying that what they do is bad, but that we're piling up layers over layers of stuff on top of our computers, and we can't peel away the layers because the guys who know what's behind the scenes are dying and/or not teaching what they know (or what they teach can only be done in-person because it's mostly tacit knowledge that can't be written down, so they have to mentor others and even if they wanted to do that they can only teach so few people).

I don't know what the solution is and the dominos are falling. We still have good programmers supporting the lower layers of scaffolding but for how long?
Anyway, we still have a lot of young programmers interested in the lower levels of development and there's a lot of open source code that you can read to learn how they did it. I'm still hopeful, but the industry is going the other way (because it's cheaper) and in the short term this isn't bad, so change won't happen there (just like how we keep polluting the environment because it's cheaper, and industries won't stop until the air is literally unbreathable or governments around the world impose heavy carbon taxes with fines that are a big percentage of yearly revenue rather than fixed fines)
 
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Outer Heaven

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I think magic is used so vaguely nowadays because everyone comes at it from such a different viewpoint. Talk to 10 different people into witchcraft and youll get 20 answers as to what it is. Pop culture and atheism make this problem even worse. People throw around the connection between tech and magic like its nothing just because of hearing "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." somewhere without knowing where it comes from.

In my religion what magic can do is very clearly defined. Its entirely illusion. Removing any working with demons since that's its own separate category, magic simply works by messing with people's senses and perception but does not have any tangible effects on the real world. The best example of this is the confrontation between Moses and Pharoah's sorcerers. Moses' staff turned into a real snake as a miracle, while the sorcerers used magic to enchant the crowd's eyes into thinking that their ropes and sticks turned into snakes. Its because of this that I don't think tech is witchcraft. If anything things like propaganda and the media are closer to witchcraft than tech is.
 
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Taleisin

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Everyone who is enjoying this thread should read this book
Ra.jpg
 
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<SIXX>

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The article itself is pretty bad and wishy-washy, but the idea of software approaching magic is definitely true unless we do something about it. And here I mean magic as in an effect caused by chanting some spell or drawing a specific magic circle without understanding the why behind each word or each line in the digil, to follow the analogy.

This talk describes the problem pretty well. The old programmers who can actually wrangle the computer at the lowest level are not the majority anymore, and universities and most common jobs (where you used to learn from your seniors) aren't teaching the fundamental knowledge of the field. Web developers and data scientists and machine learning developers are working with tools they don't understand in order to produce their work. Now, I'm not saying that what they do is bad, but that we're piling up layers over layers of stuff on top of our computers, and we can't peel away the layers because the guys who know what's behind the scenes are dying and/or not teaching what they know (or what they teach can only be done in-person because it's mostly tacit knowledge that can't be written down, so they have to mentor others and even if they wanted to do that they can only teach so few people).

I don't know what the solution is and the dominos are falling. We still have good programmers supporting the lower layers of scaffolding but for how long?
Anyway, we still have a lot of young programmers interested in the lower levels of development and there's a lot of open source code that you can read to learn how they did it. I'm still hopeful, but the industry is going the other way (because it's cheaper) and in the short term this isn't bad, so change won't happen there (just like how we keep polluting the environment because it's cheaper, and industries won't stop until the air is literally unbreathable or governments around the world impose heavy carbon taxes with fines that are a big percentage of yearly revenue rather than fixed files)

Its crazy really, like im just getting into the programming realm im a total absolute beginner. But i cant help but ask the question "how tf does this reaaaaaaally work?" Like yea i can memorize all these commands and code and whatnot but someone had to create that somehow. Now ik for me personally i will never know, this is like a fun little hobby for me but i often do wonder the truth behind it all. I guess i can also say this extends to other aspects of life as well not just programming. Def gonna watch this vid im super into this atm.
 
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<SIXX>

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I think magic is used so vaguely nowadays because everyone comes at it from such a different viewpoint. Talk to 10 different people into witchcraft and youll get 20 answers as to what it is. Pop culture and atheism make this problem even worse. People throw around the connection between tech and magic like its nothing just because of hearing "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." somewhere without knowing where it comes from.

In my religion what magic can do is very clearly defined. Its entirely illusion. Removing any working with demons since that's its own separate category, magic simply works by messing with people's senses and perception but does not have any tangible effects on the real world. The best example of this is the confrontation between Moses and Pharoah's sorcerers. Moses' staff turned into a real snake as a miracle, while the sorcerers used magic to enchant the crowd's eyes into thinking that their ropes and sticks turned into snakes. Its because of this that I don't think tech is witchcraft. If anything things like propaganda and the media are closer to witchcraft than tech is.
Interesting, but you are saying that a 'miracle' and "magic are complete opposites from one another ? And your reply got me to think well maybe tech is all illusionary "magic" i say magic but like you said its so vague nowadays.
 
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Everyone who is enjoying this thread should read this book
View attachment 28947
Thanks for the rec. For the past half a year or so I've been working on a novel with the central theme being what if there was a cabal of the world's most capable computer engineers who also happened to be initiated into the Esoteric mysteries. Their end goal being to incarnate Ahriman (the Zoroastrian evil deity who Rudolf Stiener attributes as the Being who seeks to subjugate humanity via mechanistic servitude). I think this is all fertile grounds for interesting fiction, but ultimately there is a border between fiction and reality.

Not being an extremely technical person, I can only really comment with my poetic sensibilities in mind. But I see a near endless stream of correspondences between the ambitions of magic, and what computer science is working towards. Artifical Intelligence just appears to be a digital humunculus, an attempt to create a falsely living thing. One that can think, but lacks a divine soul. Then there's also the belief among the tech-elites that tech can solve all of humanities problems, it was once believed that magic could do just that. Specifically in esoteric circles it was rumored that in Egypt there was a city entirely organized according to magical principles, and that it was a Utopia (I forget the specifics, but Eliphas Levi talks about it in his History of Magic). Magic also relies on contacting realms that transcend matter (As above so below) and with computers you interact with digital space, which is almost other worldly in a way.

There's also the historical fact that science often had magic as it's shadow, and that the two are more connected than many like to admit. It's quite well known that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, but I believe even Einstein is reported to have a copy of Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled on his desk. Not to suggest that Einstein was a Theosophist, but it seems he at least deemed those ideas as worth exploring. Then there's also the fact that one of the main founders of modern science, Francis Bacon was very interested in alchemy. Etc.

Science has proved much more effective than magical methods ever have, however it seems to lack an imagination of sorts. All of the ambitions of science seem to get their ideas (either explicitly or subconsciously) from magic. That seems to be another major reason for the constant comparison.
 
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Outer Heaven

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Interesting, but you are saying that a 'miracle' and "magic are complete opposites from one another ?
Only in that miracles are real warping of the laws of reality while magic is a cheap illusion. They arnt equal opposing forces.
illusionary "magic" i say magic but like you said its so vague nowadays.
By my definition something like VR could qualify but most tech doesnt.
 
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We do know how low level items work and the knowledge is out there for those that want to learn it. Starting from electrons and moving into the components that make up the actual hardware isn't tremendously difficult. Can someone start from zero and make a new item? Possibly, but most wont. You could start with IoT and start tinkering with embedded stuff. Components like resistors, capacitors, leds, and much more are all readily available. Don't want to make an item from scratch? Okay, just buy an integrated chip that does everything you want. Plug and play. In software we are now at the plug and play stage where you can just download and install tons of packages to get shit done. Is it smart to add a ton of cruft? No, but you do it anyway to avoid reinventing the wheel. This is where things like tree-shaking come into play, or at least should.

Things are now in the software space and the knowledge of how it all is put together isn't really relevant to getting things done. Do you really need to know how the internet works to send a stupid hello world across a TCP/IP connection? For the unenlightened, the process of how the internet works might as well be arcane spellbooks. How do nodes on the internet find each other? How do they update state to know their neighbors? How does your packet reach your ISP? How does your wifi know when to listen for your packet in a congested environment? How do your packets reach Agora? Most neither fully grasp the complexity that is at their fingertips, nor care to actually learn how it all works.

You wouldn't ask a sorcerer how the spell book is made. It callous and insulting to devolve the hard sciences of software into a summary of "that's just magic kekw XD." While in some sense it may seem like magic, its actually very real and often annoying hard work went into making sure that it works. A lot of very hard work, and a lot of money goes into making sure things work. The flat earth equivalent of software is to compare it to magic. It summarizes what is complex, difficult, and very real, into a summary of "its just magic XD." Just like most flat earthers wont go out to find evidence and ignore real evidence, most people wont sit down with components and actually assemble a rudimentary computer.

Awful toll bait article.
 
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Deleted member 1930

So computers are demonic

I don't disagree. I think the internet is a false prophet
 
So computers are demonic

I don't disagree. I think the internet is a false prophet
You are gonna have to back up that assertion with evidence or even credible claims and also an explanation as to why you are using demonic devices.
 
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You wouldn't ask a sorcerer how the spell book is made. It callous and insulting to devolve the hard sciences of software into a summary of "that's just magic kekw XD." While in some sense it may seem like magic, its actually very real and often annoying hard work went into making sure that it works. A lot of very hard work, and a lot of money goes into making sure things work. The flat earth equivalent of software is to compare it to magic. It summarizes what is complex, difficult, and very real, into a summary of "its just magic XD." Just like most flat earthers wont go out to find evidence and ignore real evidence, most people wont sit down with components and actually assemble a rudimentary computer.
I get what you're saying, and I agree that there is this sentiment going around right now that's essentially "Wow, Science is so coool it's literally magic", but anthropologically speaking that reduction is as insulting to magic as it is to science. Regardless of whether you believe there to be any validity to magic or not, the elaborate systems devised to calculate the constellations for astrology, dense and elusive instructions written to transmutate metals, and rigid systems of symbol manipulation for devising sigils all took devoted practice and required technical know-how. You might argue that none of that matters since astrology, alchemy, or sigilistic magic might all seem like superstitious nonsense (and from an objective/material standpoint I'm inclined to agree), but anthropologically speaking these were systems that were intricately complicated and required much dedicated study. A grimoire on demonology would be just as dense to the average person as an instruction set on x86 assembly
 
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I think coding is like magic (at the least to the common internet user that spends most of their time on the four horsemen of social media, like the AMOUNT of people who believe if they get banned from insta, FB, or Twitter that they LITERALLY believe they have NOWHERE ELSE to go for an online presence) , especially the way people react when you tell them that you made a site without using Wix or Squarespace
But honestly you could say the same thing about art as well...
But once you know how it works then its no longer mystical
 
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Deleted member 1930

You are gonna have to back up that assertion with evidence or even credible claims and also an explanation as to why you are using demonic devices.
A) all the internet does is lie and spread despair. It's either used for greed, vanity, lies or spreading fear

b) no one is perfect everyone can be tempted
 
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