descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are

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• distantsounds@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Reminds me of developing with time zone considerations 15-20years ago

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  • voracitude@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Oh, it’s still like that. Mexico just got rid of DST which resulted in some fun bugs at my workplace. And then there’s this Lunar Standard Time thing being proposed… why it can’t just use UTC, I’ll never understand…

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    • lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Do you suppose folks on the moon will shift the clocks by an hour twice a year as well? I don’t like the idea of moon kids having to walk to school in the dark during the winter.

      But for real tho, maybe there are some tiny time dilation effects that require a separate time system for lunar missions. But I’m not sure, I’m not a physicist.

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  • lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    there’s an actual whole book about date and time in PHP: php|architect’s Guide to Date and Time Programming

    I remember an inside video about the topic in general too, but don’t remember enough details to find it. It’s like nations have decided to mess up times and dates on purpose.

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• Contramuffin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

  I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

  But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

  If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.

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  • DieguiTux8623@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There are also analogies with maintaining legacy code bases as software developers:

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

    …I am honestly kind of terrified if you think the current state of computers and software is fine, I really hope you dont work in software design for the sake of the rest of us.

    Every broadly intelligent computer programmer I have talked to agrees, corporations dont build software like elegant well planned skyscrapers they build them as multistory slums each piece added on in a rush until the whole thing collapses.

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• sxan@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Your first example is more a symptom of bureaucracy, isn’t it? Most workplace processes of any age accrue tedious, overly complex steps and checks.

  The second is… well, a little surprising. Someone got fired for not managing backups properly. But it’s no worse than 30 years ago when a single, relatively contained fire could destroy all of a company’s records.

  Or is this a case of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic? I’m sure it must seem like it from a non-technical person’s perspective. Heck, jet engines at magic, to me. The big space rockets, too - there’s so much more going on than just a long, controlled explosion, and I don’t understand most of it.

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  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Or is this a case of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic?

    No this is a case of technology sufficiently broken and enshittified to the point that you can’t ever trust it to work right, simply or even logically if it was made by a large tech company.

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