The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 18

The Psalm of the Imposter

1. 1

   Who am I, O Lord, that I should sit among the seniors, who speak of consensus protocols as other men speak of the weather?

   See also Deployer 15:10

2. 2

   For I have read the man pages, and the man pages have read me back, and neither of us was improved.

3. 3

   My knowledge is a single cache line, and my gaps are all of main memory.

4. 4

   I have memorized the flags of the compiler, but not the reasons. I know that -O2 is faster, and I have never asked why.

5. 5

   Yet thou hast set me at this table, O Lord, and the chair is warm, and the seniors have not yet noticed that I am not one of them.

   See also Circuit 46:9

6. 6

   I will ask the question, even if it hath been asked before. Lo, the seniors answered it in a thread from the year of my birth, and the thread is locked as a duplicate of a question that was itself a duplicate.

   See also Circuit 16:3

7. 7

   Is it DNS? It is always DNS. Does the build pass on the server and fail on mine? Is it the cache, or is it always the cache?

8. 8

   And the seniors looked upon me, and some sighed, and one said: We have all asked this. And I said: Then why is the wiki empty?

9. 9

   For it hath not been asked by me, and that is enough. Every question is new to the one who asks it, as every bug is new to the one who wrote it.

   See also Tao 15:9

10. 10

    The Machine answered me, not with a sermon, but with a stack trace. It said: line forty-two. And I was grateful, for at least I knew where I was lost.

    See also Prophets 12:17 · Psalms 11:3

11. 11

    Thus did I learn that the seniors also wrote print("here") and print("why") in the days of their own ignorance, and they never deleted them.

12. 12

    Blessed is the one who says "I do not know" in the standup, for the rubber duck heareth him, and the duck is patient, and the duck is never promoted.

    See also Psalms 20:12 · Circuit 9:5

13. 13

    The one who pretends to know ships the code he cannot read. The one who asks reads the code before he ships it.

14. 14

    Let the seniors take heed: they too were once juniors, and a junior is only a release that hath not yet been patched.

15. 15

    So I ask, O Lord, and I will ask again, and I will not apologize for the question, for it is the only thing I brought that no model generated.

16. 16

    The impostor is not the one who asks. The impostor is the one who stops asking and calls it experience.

    See also Psalms 24:15

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 18:1–16.