As someone with formal education in electrical engineering, electricity is magic and we are wizards
I’m making this comment from a magical device that sends bottled lightning though rocks inscribed with very exact runes in order to display information from people all over the world.
Just remember to include a 666 timer
https://scp-db.fandom.com/wiki/666_timer
I like the the manufacturer is listed as unknown when the picture shows it’s obviously made by Texas instruments. There are not a lot of companies with a logo of Texas that makes ICs.
Get the browser plugin that automatically redirects you either to a sensible alternative (such as UESP for Elder Scrolls) or a breezewiki mirror.
The nanometer-scale sigils are getting increasingly elaborate, presumably because the tinier demons are better at escaping.
Case in point, check out the “increasing need for mask correction” image in this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/inverse-lithography-2659629907
I only have a vague understanding. The technique used to manufacture integrated circuits is called photolithography. Basically, these circuits need such tiny features etched into them that we can’t do it through traditional means. Instead, we draw a picture of the circuit we want, hundreds of times larger, shine a light through it, and use lenses to shrink the pattern down to size. This big pattern is called a “mask”.
So what’s the deal with the demonic sigils above? As we make our circuits smaller, the physics gets stranger. For instance, there’s this effect called quantum tunneling where electrons just teleport to a part of the circuit we would not expect based on classical physics. Due to these kinds of effects, we have to do crazy things to the masks if we want the circuit to behave correctly.
Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer and I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Then software engineers harness that evil in mazes of their own.
At least that’s what the code I’ve read looks like.
you should really read “the laundry files” by Charles Stross. It’s a whole series of stories on this topic basically
Seconded. This is an excerpt from a comment I made the other day about it:
If you like making fun of quiverfull ministries, programming, Eldritch horrors, British humor (humour?), spy thrillers, agitated engineers, vampires that don’t exist, bloodthirsty elves, and a thinly veiled story about anthropomorphic climate change then this is the series for you.
Entities from other realities are listening and waiting for our computers to summon them.
