I'm having trouble understanding just why I would want to use bitwise operators in a high-level language like Python. From what I have learned of high- vs low-level languages is that high-level ones are typically designed to that you don't have to worry too much about the machine code going into a computer.  I don't see the point of manipulating a program bit-by-bit in a language that, to my knowledge, was designed to avoid it.
Almost anything using transmission protocols will end up using bitwise operation at some point - a set of flags that are all true or false will normally be combined into a single byte for up to 8 flags to save on bandwidth and short of having a dictionary of 255 values to decode it - don't laugh I have seen it done in more than one language in one case with very large number of if else statments - when at most a few bitwise operations were all that was needed.
What are the advantages to using bitwise operations over boolean operations in Python?