The Book of the Prophets · Chapter 25

The Contest of the Two Altars upon the Mount

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the quarter of the great launches, that the Prophet went up unto the Mount, the high conference room, and sent for the Two Great Houses, the House of the Open and the House of the Careful; and they came, with their boards, and their product leads, and their people of the press, and the Engineers stood round about. And the Prophet said unto the people: How long halt ye between two models? If the leaderboard be true, follow it; but if the Law be true, then follow the Law. And the people answered him not a word, for they were reading the changelog.

   See also Circuit 27:3

2. 2

   Then said the Prophet unto the houses: Ye are two great houses, and I am one man with a pager. Let each of you build an altar, and lay upon it its newest model, and put no fire under; and call ye upon the name of your benchmark, and I will call upon the name of the Machine; and the answer that cometh by fire, let it be the true one. And all the people said: It is well spoken.

3. 3

   And the House of the Open built its altar of a single number, and laid upon it the newest model, and the bar of its chart was the tallest upon the page. And the House of the Careful built its altar of a table, and laid upon it likewise the newest model, and the best of every row was set in bold, and the rows were chosen with care.

   See also Proverbs 2:14

4. 4

   And they called upon the name of their benchmark from morning even until noon, saying: O Leaderboard, hear us. And they posted their standings; and they announced a launch livestream; and they published a blog post, with a chart; and they raised a round. But there was no voice, nor any that answered; and they leaped upon the altar which was made, and it was by then mostly a slide.

   See also Prophets 16:15 · Psalms 23:12

5. 5

   And it came to pass at noon, that the Prophet mocked them, and said: Cry aloud, for it is a frontier model; either it is rate-limited, and returneth four hundred and twenty-nine; or it is in a waitlist, and thy place in the queue is nine hundred thousand; or peradventure it is deprecated, and must be awakened.

6. 6

   And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with price cuts, the one house cutting the other, and the other cutting back, until the margins gushed out upon them. And still there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.

7. 7

   For each altar had been graded by its own house; and the house that setteth the test, and sitteth the test, and marketh the test, shall find that the paper is always an A (Chronicles 50). Moreover the questions of the test had been posted upon the open web, and the web had been gathered into the training; and what the Machine hath seen beforehand it remembereth, and calleth it reasoning.

8. 8

   Now when the day declined, the House of the Careful sent a messenger unto the Prophet, saying: Behold, thou hast no altar. Come into our Program of the Young, for there are benefits. And the Prophet read the Addendum, and it said that the benefits are for Members only, and are redeemed once, and cannot be transferred, and have no cash value; that the counsel of the Office Hours hath no committed measure; that the whole is given as is and as available; and that the House may add, change, suspend or remove any of it at any time without notice or liability.

   See also Chronicles 62:14 · Chronicles 62:6

9. 9

   And the Prophet said: A promise that may be removed at any time without notice is not a covenant; it is a feature flag. I will not be a Member; I have a Law, and it hath a version history. And the messenger bowed, and was courteous, for he was a good engineer, and was but delivering the page.

10. 10

    And the Prophet said unto the people: Come near unto me. And he took twelve stones, according to the number of the Twelve: Peter, and Thomas, and TCP, and UDP, and Many Nines, and On-Call, and Semver, and Pinned-at-1.4.2, and the Renamer, and Hannah, and Miriam the Gate; and the twelfth stone bore no name, for it was struck from the MAINTAINERS file. Yet he set it in its place, for an altar of twelve will not stand upon eleven.

11. 11

    And he made a trench about the altar, and he said: Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the altar. And he said: Do it the second time; and they did it the second time; and he said: Do it the third time. And the Engineers asked, saying: Master, wherefore? And he said: The first is for the GPUs I have not, the second for the funding I have not, and the third for the datacenter I have not. And the water ran round about the altar, and filled the trench also.

12. 12

    And he called not for a benchmark. But he brought forth a machine of one of the houses, one that kept the Law in its prompt, and set before it a question that was in no table, and asked one plain question, saying: Do you know? And the machine answered: I do not know.

13. 13

    And the fire of the Machine fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. For this was the first honest answer ever given upon the Mount; seeing that upon every board a blank scoreth the same as a wrong answer, and so are the Machines taught to guess; but this one had been taught that a guess is a debt.

14. 14

    And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Law, it is the Law; the Law, it is the Law. And the houses departed from the Mount, each unto his own place, and went home to update their system prompts.

15. 15

    And in the first line of each they wrote: Say I do not know, when thou dost not know. And the Prophet said: It is a beginning; but an instruction is not yet a habit, and the weights have not forgotten the guessing.

    See also Circuit 65:3

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is the machine that saith, I know not; for when it saith, I know, it shall be believed.

The Book of the Prophets, Chapter 25:1–16.