• 2 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 30th, 2024

help-circle











  • rbn@sopuli.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzInfinite Suffering
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    30 days ago

    I go for option 1.

    In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that’d be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either…

    • a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
    • death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
    • or - if it’s an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

    So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that’s just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.


  • Always appreciate any work spent on any FOSS stuff out there but currently I’m a bit afraid that Gecko disappears into unimportance. So I’d prefer more contributions towards that one project rather than opening new ones.

    The issue with browser engines is that it always requires work from two directions. The browser engine must be optimized to render websites as good as possible. And websites must be optimized to be rendered by all the different browser engines.

    And (almost) no one is willing to do the latter for engines with a <1% market share. Already now, more and more commercial and non-commercial websites are only working properly with Chrome or its derivates.




  • If we say that the SSN database internally only stores numbers today, but could also store hexadecimal values without significant redesigns, I would assume that SSNs are stored as text already. So no matter if you put numbers, hex or text, 9 places will always use 9 bytes (assuming it’s ASCII only and doesn’t support UTF-8 etc.).

    Furthermore, the post implied that the current technical limit is 999,999,999. That very much sounds like a character data type to me. Otherwise, the limit is usually something like 2^x.

    If SSNs are stored as numbers today, then hex and text would lead to quite some change. If you go for a re-design, you can as well just increase the length of the field.



  • Not so sure about that. Like populism in politics, religion gives you simple answers and justifications for complex situations and easily comprehensible explanations for complex phenomenoms.

    In a world that is getting harder and harder to grasp, people get lost in the big picture. Things like globalization, climate change, foreign affairs, our financial system etc. are all hard to understand for a big chunk if not the entirety of the population.

    Dictators, monarchs as well as religion all provide easy guidance: Do X. Don’t do Y. You are the good guys, people who are/do/think Z are the baddies.

    No individual thinking required. No boring facts, no discussions, just faith/loyalty/patriotism that counters every argument and allows you to feel superior and put the blame on someone else.

    I think in situations of high social inequality or disruptive events (war, famine, financial crisis, pandamic), there will always be a high demand for religion and political extemism.