cannot believe that we taught rocks to whisper Secret Numbers so vast that their names have never before and will never be spoken again in the long span of human time, and we use them to key databases for e-commerce systems

This talk explores the cross-cultural concept of animism—the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a soul. It will explore how this concept can be applied to any computer system, not just those traditionally recognized as AI.

I periodically get email from folks who, having read “Accelerando”, assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it’s time to set the record straight and say what I really think.

Short version: Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

Oh great Vessel of Honour,
May your servo-motors be guarded,
Against malfunction,
As your spirit is guarded from impurity.
We beseech the Machine God to watch over you.
Let flow the sacred oils,
And let not the sorrows of the Seven Perplexities
trouble thine pistons.
Let flow the blessed unguents,
And may thine circuitry remain divinely blessed.

An experimental set-up to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software.

The Order was formed on 1st January 2000 to:

• Celebrate the beginning of Christ’s Third Millennium
• Honor Saint Isidore of Seville as the Patron Saint of the Internet
• Promote the ideals of Christian chivalry through the medium of the Internet

I am a Computational Theologist Emeritus. What does that mean? Ah, that is a question for a computational hermeneuticist.

An egregore… is a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals.

A visitor at the home of Niels Bohr, famous atom scientist and Nobel Prize winner, was surprised to see a horseshoe hanging over the door.

“Do you, a sober man dedicated to science, believe in that superstition?”

“Of course not,” replied Bohr, “but I’ve been told that it’s supposed to be lucky, whether you believe in it or not.”

If you didn’t know radio existed, the whole thing would sound like a bunch of pseudoscientific hokum.

So-called “radio waves” are invisible, transmit energy, easily penetrate matter, including stone walls and human bodies, and can be heard hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away if you prepare the right occult configuration of metal wires.

Right.

“What you’re looking at is a salt circle, a traditional form of protection—from within or without—in magical practice,” explains Bridle. “In this case it’s being used to arrest an autonomous vehicle—a self-driving car, which relies on machine vision and processing to guide it. By quickly deploying the expected form of road markings—in this case, a No Entry glyph—we can confuse the car’s vision system into believing it’s surrounded by no entry points, and entrap it.”

In a Tibetan lamasery, the monks seek to list all of the names of God. They believe the Universe was created for this purpose, and that once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 (“nine billion”) and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology to finish this task in 100 days.

Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There’s magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It’s what’s next after electricity.

Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon.” See also heisenbug.

A collection of anecdotes around debugging systems which are, clearly, haunted

Focusing on low ritual magic is, I believe, the way to highlight the least known practices that are pervasive in the process of software development, the form of digital production I’ve witnessed the most due to my journey. These practices are loosely grouped by association and purpose without a professional taxonomy. I document what I see around me.

There is fear among some ML/AI practitioners that one day they will train a minor god so well that it will become a Great God; and that unlike the Great Gods of old, who are powerful but whose behavior is predictable, this new Great God might go rogue and destroy the world. There are endless debates about this in wizard circles.

We also have a strange level of personification of the machines and computer programs on which we work - machines are said to be “fighting over” resources, protocol handlers sometimes “get confused” when given incorrect input, and the phrase, “this subroutine’s goal in life is…” is quite common. The personification of the these machines isn’t literal, but it’s not totally figurative either. Sometimes computers do things we just can’t understand.

If you don’t properly shutdown the session then you risk getting the spirit of the author trapped in your machine and no one wants that.

There is no actual organization that goes by the name Knights of the Lambda Calculus; it mostly only exists as a hacker culture in-joke. The concept most likely originated at MIT. For example, in the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures, Gerald Jay Sussman presents the audience with the button, saying they are now members of this special group. However, according to the Jargon File, a “well-known LISPer” has been known to give out buttons with Knights insignia on them, and some people have claimed to have membership in the Knights.

Oh you better believe your humble author is a button-carrying member.

The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations.

You have a machine now. But is it truly yours until it has executed a program of your own devising? The native tongue of the Macintosh is Pascal, once a favored tool for instructing the arts of computer science. Alas, as Unix has trampled all opposition, its own systems language has, in nepotistic glee, monopolized the minds of countless students. Ominously taking its name from the speed of light, C has become a mental cage that traps so many…

Oh, I do apologize. These battles were fought long ago. It’s far too late for tears. Sometimes I lose myself.

See, there’s no such thing as “artificial intelligence.” Google conquered Hell in the late 90s, and we use damned souls to run our algorithms.

Over the years there have been many interpretations and frameworks of interpretations about tarot; but I would like to introduce a meta-framework for using tarot cards as a debugging tool.

I believe our best chance at preserving the integrity and dignity of our tradition is to return to our Pythagorean roots. We should become a cult.

Purify the all-spying eye!

Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you know?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard? And your TV is supposed to only use its camera to follow your gestural commands, but it’s a bit suspicious how it always offers Disney downloads when your children are sitting in front of it.

Posts generated by a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and some of Eric S. Raymond’s writings.

See guru, lord high fixer. See also deep magic, heavy wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain dance, voodoo programming, wave a dead chicken.

Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result.

The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words “magic” and “more magic.” The switch was in the “more magic” position.

You draw an eight-by-eight grid on the whiteboard, and neatly arrange eight queens together in the center. They face each other in a tight circle, to converse as equals.

“Er, no—that’s not right. See? This queen could kill any of these four, in one move.”

“Are you really unable,” you ask, voice as calm as stone, “to imagine eight powerful women in the same room without them trying to kill each other?”

11. Iteration

“Do these things, then do them again.” The second program we learn to write is a loop that spews “Hello!” infinitely. Some loops are finite and some are infinite, and no computer can tell the difference, says Turing. The windmill peacefully grinding grain is a loop, but so is the sorcerer’s apprentice’s buckets flooding the castle.

A program that creates an ouroborous of quines.

“If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview.”

Also the inspiration for the title of our own little intermittent webcomic.

Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:

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