NZ Skeptics Articles

Astrological Computing

Mark Honeychurch - 2nd February 2026

Last week I watched a video from Laurie Kirk, ȧ Google employee who creates some great content online under the name LaurieWired. The video looked at some of the more interesting recent advancements in computing, with one segment talking about new CPU schedulers for Linux that run in user space rather than kernel space:

A quick primer: Modern computers use CPU schedulers to decide how to prioritise the order in which calculations from running processes (programs) should be sent to the CPU to be processed. Modern schedulers generally attempt to spread workloads between CPU cores, and make sure no processes are starved of processing time.

The video detailed some recent attempts to move the CPU scheduler for Linux kernels out of the pre-compiled kernel and into userspace, where it can be more easily changed. Much of this change is being driven by Valve, the creators of the Steam games platform and more recently the Steam Deck handheld gaming device, which runs Linux (Valve wants to be able to change the CPU scheduler on their gaming devices so that the CPU can prioritise workloads in a way that ensures games run as smoothly as possible).

I thought nothing more of this piece of news until a week later, when I saw someone on social media post a link to a piece of software that takes advantage of this ability to switch out your CPU scheduler. This new software uses astrology - planetary motions, the zodiac and horoscopes - to decide when and by how much to prioritise or deprioritise different workloads on your computer. For those who are comfortable delving through Rust code, you can check out the Git Repository for SCX Horoscope, which has the tag line “Why let mere mortals decide CPU priorities when the cosmos can guide us?”:

Once it’s compiled and installed on a Linux PC using the sched_ext scheduler, this code will use the astro software library (which was written for astronomy applications) to calculate the position and movement of the planets through the Zodiac and then decide how to prioritise running tasks.

Each planet, the moon and the sun each dictate how important different types of processes are considered to be - so the sun controls critical software, Mercury is responsible for networking and I/O, and Venus determines priority for frontend desktop programs. For each of the celestial objects, the processes they’re responsible will either be given a high priority if the part of the Zodiac they are currently in has affinity, or will go to the back of the queue if it’s in a Zodiac sign that it has opposition to. Additionally if a celestial object is in retrograde, the systems it’s responsible for will suffer from a 50% deprioritising, making them run slower when the system is busy. Thankfully for the Operating System’s most important system software, the sun is never in retrograde, so the OS itself won’t be as badly affected as other software can be. However, although the moon is also never in retrograde, moon-based tasks end up having their priorities change over the course of the month, as the moon waxes and wanes.

As an example of how this would affect your PC, if Jupiter is in Pisces it will receive a 1.3x boost to its priority, making browsers theoretically run faster. However if Jupiter is in Leo, and also in retrograde, it will suffer from a 0.7x deprioritising, with an additional 0.5x effect, meaning that browsers will be given 35% of normal CPU priority and will start to run sluggishly.

You can see a real world example of these effects in this screenshot of the software running on a PC:

The code’s README file comes with a telling disclaimer:

While the astronomical calculations are real and the scheduler actually works (it really does load into the kernel and schedule tasks!), using astrology to schedule CPU tasks is:

Obviously this software has been written just for fun, and also likely as a way for the author to learn more about how to write a CPU scheduler. No-one in their right mind would use this on their PC, or on a server - but maybe some geeky astrologer somewhere is thinking about installing it. Good luck to them!