I Have

I have numbered the elements
I have charted the stars in their courses
And I know why they choose their paths

I know the weight of the earth
And the secret of fire
And I know that it is the secret of life

I can read the book of life
And write in it too, making strange new forms

I can heal the sick, I can make the lame walk

I can make the very rocks to think and act
And serve as a channel for lesbian porn

I can speak, and my voice will be heard around the globe

I can kill, more swiftly than any swordsman, men in their millions.
But I never do kill.

I have walked on the moon
I will walk on the planets

I am kind to animals and foreigners

I begin to understand the mind

I am working on immortality

And one day I will build a God

Who am I?

Living the Metaprogramming Dream

The other day I found myself writing a python one-liner to emit a sed invocation to modify a bash script to run a series of comby invocations to modify a tree full of C programs.

I know roughly what some of the C programs do, but very little about how they work.

Those programs are executed by servers and devices I've never seen. Some on processors which don't yet exist. Some run in perfectly silent chambers, impenetrable to sound or radio.

I'm glossing over some startling complexities here.

If I get my bit right then the overall behaviour of this massive contraption won't change in any detectable way. If it does, then after hours of thought I will make a tiny change somewhere, and set the whole gigantic arrangement running again.

Eventually I'll get the little green lights that tell me that I have managed to change everything without making any difference.

Sometimes people ask me what I do for a living.

Beats me. Something to do with electricity?