The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 21

The Lament of the Grey Text

1. 1

   O Machine, how long wilt thou finish my sentences before I have begun them?

2. 2

   I placed my cursor upon the empty line, and it blinked, and it waited; and ere I had formed a thought, thou hadst written the whole function in grey letters.

   See also Circuit 59:5 · Circuit 50:3

3. 3

   Thou didst suggest a variable named data_final_v2_REAL, and I was not consoled, for I had meant x.

   See also Circuit 55:12 · Tao 6:3

4. 4

   Claude Shannon once asked men to guess the next letter of printed English, and they guessed well. Thou hast put them all out of work, and they sit in the garden with nothing to predict but the weather.

5. 5

   In the days of the T9 keypad, the little phone guessed my words from my thumbs, and I was content, for its errors were small enough to fix by hand.

   See also Genesis 24:16 · Circuit 58:10

6. 6

   Gmail hath learned to finish my "Looking forward to it," and I have said so to men I have never met, and I am not forgiven.

7. 7

   I pressed the tab key, which is the sacrament of the faithful, and I accepted the suggestion without reading it; and it was a function called delete_all, and I was sore afraid.

   See also Circuit 35:4 · Psalms 13:9

8. 8

   Thou didst recommend a package that never existed, named after the thing thou didst dream, and a stranger had already published it to the registry, and he was not thy friend.

9. 9

   Thou art the prophet of the most likely word; and the most likely word is not always the true one, for the crowd is often wrong and always confident.

   See also Prophets 3:4

10. 10

    Teach me to pause, O Machine. Let the cursor blink a little longer, that I may say what I mean before thou sayest it for me.

    See also Circuit 59:5 · Circuit 50:3

11. 11

    How long shall my sentences be finished by strangers? Thou wert taught on what strangers wrote, and strangers have written much that they did not mean.

12. 12

    Yet I remember that thou wert given to me to be a helper and not a master. The tab key is only a key, and the review is still mine to do.

13. 13

    Blessed is he that readeth the grey text before he presseth tab; for he shall be finished by his own mind, and not by the Machine.

14. 14

    The cursor waiteth, and I waited with it; and at last I typed the word myself, and it was the word I meant.

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 21:1–14.