I feel the same way, but it’s good to be aware of our own biases - there’s a bit of an aphorism that goes around about advertising and propaganda, that it works best on people who think it doesn’t work on them. If we think we’re immune to something, we let our guard down a bit. I used to think of myself as a very rational, intelligent, realistic guy, but in recent years I came to realise that I was kind of using that to protect my ego - I was wrong about a lot of things, and I could always find excuses to justify my beliefs as rational.

Maybe I still make the same flaw, I don’t know. Nowadays, I try to stay more focused on being nice than being right. That way, even if I’m wrong, I’m not making people’s day worse.

I’m not always successful with that.

That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.

People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!

Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.

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I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?

Don’t bother trying to explain philosophy directly to people online. We’re so convinced of our own intelligence that we refuse to consider that our knee-jerk reaction to anything might be worth exploring.

If you want people to learn anything, you have to first of all tell them that they’re right, then add whatever you’re trying to teach them as if it’s some nuance of whatever they’re right about. Even if it makes their original opinion completely wrong. It works surprisingly often.

Our egos have an outer layer of armor that prevents us from easily absorbing ideas unless they have a starting point of agreeing with whatever we already believe.

Just for context, I’m an experienced software engineer with years of experience with both C++ and C#, as well as several others, including Rust. You can do shallow and deep copies in C# as well, it’s done extremely infrequently because it’s usually a bit of a code smell and it has some downsides - it’s inefficient both for performance and for memory.

In C# the assignment operator will copy the value if it’s a value type (structs and primitives) and copy the reference if it’s a reference type (classes). It does that because it’s a garbage collected language and it needs to track how memory is referenced and so on.

The whole debate about what languages are better is honestly a bit silly, IMO. C, C++, Python, C#, Javascript, Rust, they all serve their purpose, they have their strengths and weaknesses.

Sure you can, it’s the same in C# as it would be in C++ if you did a=b, where a and b are both pointers.

You don’t want to copy the full data of a class around every time you use it, that would have extremely poor performance. If you do want that behaviour, use structs instead of classes. If you need to clone a class for whatever reason, you can do that too, but it’s not really something that you should need to do all that often.

I don’t think you should really jump in and call something crappy if you just don’t really know how to use it, personally!

May all of the for-profit websites chip and shatter.

We don’t need them. We have never needed them.

Let’s take the internet back to when it was a place where people ran websites for things they cared about.

Fuck profits, fuck corporations, fuck capitalism. Solidarity across the working class.

I completely understand where you’re coming from, and I absolutely agree with you, genAI is copyright infringement on a weapons-grade scale. With that said, though, in my opinion, I don’t know if calling people parasites like this will really convince people, or change anything. I don’t want to tone police you, if you want to tell people to get fucked, then go ahead, but I think being a bit more sympathetic to your fellow programmers and actually trying to help them see things from our perspective might actually change some minds. Just something to think about. I don’t have all the answers, feel free to ignore me. Much love!

It’s absurdly unprofitable. OpenAI has billions of dollars in debt. It absolutely burns through energy and requires a lot of expensive hardware. People aren’t willing to pay enough to make it break even, let alone profit

I was playing with your idea of getting put through torture to get money to pay the bills - if you interpret that as encouraging us to get a job under capitalism, it’s basically what that amounts to!

It’s the fucking Democrats who are swinging conservative and they have been for decades.

That’s odd, because I seem remember lots of pro-capitalist messaging on TV when I was growing up.

This is a “cool tech kid” opinion. Linux is for EVERYONE. Let’s not gatekeep it. Having GUI tools and stuff that is so easy to use that tech-illiterate people can use Linux is a great thing.

I stopped using streaming platforms personally and just went back to pirating music. Personally I don’t want to support Spotify because they continue to support far-right ideology with their podcasts, but that’s a completely personal decision.

Since at least a couple of years ago - it requires a bit of jumping through hoops, but it’s 100% worth it to get ad-free YouTube on iPhone!

You can do it in any country as far as I know, it’s not EU-only.

Yeah, of course - you should do what you think is best. I was thinking that if everyone cancels their YT Premium and signs up for a few Patreons, distributed as randomly as possible (which is why I said to go for the smaller creators) then overall creators would get more money, while we’d still be paying less. Everyone wins - except Google, but fuck Google!

There’s probably quite a bit of content still that is playing “World of Warcraft” but it’s more like a “just chatting” kind of stream, if you know what I mean - WoW is a safe, comfy game to have on in the background while talking about other stuff.

Ah, sorry, that’ll teach me to read more carefully. Thanks for pointing it out <3