Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anp 2818 days ago
I use this word the way we did when I worked as a PC technician and help desker, where there's a lot of automation but then we sneak a bit of manual labor in to make it actually useful. Like how user accounts would be maintained in the correct state automagically.
3 comments

I've used it for decades to mean "automatically as if by magic" in the sense of Arthur C Clake's quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

To flip this adage around: calling your own tech as performing something "automagically" is tantamount to calling it "sufficiently advanced technology".

automagically: /aw·toh·maj´i·klee/, adv. Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/automagically.html

Well this interpretation certainly explains some of the reactions that word has gotten in my use of it!
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply disapproval, it was basically an idle thought since I see that replacement pretty commonly