As someone with formal education in electrical engineering, electricity is magic and we are wizards

Just remember to include a 666 timer

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

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

I once tried writing a bit with demons being like the "demons" sometimes used in philosophy where they're more like mysterious, reality altering things that sort of hide between our understanding of the universe and the unknown as opposed to scary monster things. It didn't really go anywhere. The person I was writing with vanished on me. I still think it's an interesting concept though and it sort of fits this post

Edit: I realize this is an odd concept, this is what I mean by "philosophical demon" lol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_(thought_experiment)

In thought experiments, philosophers and scientists occasionally imagine entities with special abilities as a way to pose thought experiment or highlight apparent paradoxes.

The word "demon" here does not necessarily connotate a demon, a malevolent being. For instance, when William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) came up with the Maxwell's demon, to highlight the implications of James Clerk Maxwell statistical interpretation of thermodynamics. He used the term in analogy to daemons in Greek mythology, supernatural beings as unseen forces of nature.

Don't share this with the Republican conspiracy theorists or they are legitimately gonna start spreading that on their Q boards.

SMT?

The demons tell me they like it

Heretical machine spirits

The dark mechanicus at work I see

So that's why Windows Explorer has to be restarted every 30 minutes!

none of the things in this picture involve silicon in any way

With how small feature sizes are on chips, I wonder what sort of easter eggs the designer have hidden in them.