polonius-rex

collin

the Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major is deafening

deploys your code to your dev environment

The simulation designer would not be creative enough

now you’re making assumptions about how the creators of our simulation think, when we also know nothing about them

why would you assume they think in the same way we do? why would you assume what they do would even be considered “thinking” by us at all?

fall somewhere on the spectrum of having a complete inversion of the rules of their universe or having an exact copy of the rules of their universe

• you think the creator of the simulation is capable of specifying each rule of our universe, but not just inverting all of them?
• “somewhere on the spectrum” includes positions closer to a complete inversion than not, so even if you take this as given - which you probably shouldn’t - you still can’t make claims with any certainty

there are natural limits to what would be conceivable

firstly, i don’t think that holds true under the laws of our universe

secondly, why would it hold true under the laws of theirs?

okay?

“influenced by” doesn’t tell us anything about the concrete rules of the simulating universe

Or maybe whoever simulated our universe intentionally deviated from the rules of their universe for the fun of it.

likely it’s being run on a jupiter brain or matrioshka brain

if you accept the premise that our universe is a simulation, why would you assume anything we know about it follows the rules of the simulating universe?

it’s semantic

at the end of the day everything boils down to sequence and branchifs

shut your mouth

yeah i mean if you grok the underlying workings of scanf then there’s no problem

i’d just argue that the problem is understanding what you need to understand is the problem with straight c, and with any language like c++ where you’re liable to shoot thineself in thy foot

How? They go where they point, or to NULL, and can be moved by arithmetic. If you move them where they shouldn’t go, bad things happen. If you deference NULL, bad things happen. That’s it.

what part of that is explicit to how scanf works?

All of C++? That’s unreasonable, it’s even in the name that it’s very expansive.

similarly, “all of pointers” is unreasonable

“all of pointers” can have a lot of unexpected results

that’s literally why java exists as a language, and is so popular

Plus all previous operating systems, all supercomputer climate, physics and other science simulations, all the toaster and car and so on chips using bespoke operating systems because Linux won’t fit, every computer solving practical engineering or logistics problems numerically, renderers…

sure, and the quantity of code where true low-level access is actually required is still absolutely minuscule compared to that where it isn’t

Once you understand pointers

once you understand C++ the pitfalls of C++ are reasonably consistent

I’m not sure I’d class much of OS programming and all embedded and high-performance computing as small

there are like what, 3 operating systems these days?

assume those are all written entirely in c and combine them and compare that to all code ever written

a footgun isn’t inherently bad, it just implies a significant amount of risk

yes, if you need the ability to code on a low level, maybe C is necessary, but the times where that is actually necessary is smol

also rust

exposing the machinations of the underlying CPU with no regard for safety is like, the definition of a footgun

people say this but C is significantly more batshit than javascript

oh you used scanf? one of the basic functions of our language? sorry that’s got a buffer overflow vulnerability so now your application is compromised

actually it says 8h meaning it’s only 8 hours old

i wouldn’t want to program in pure assembly either but asm is definitely powerful

use typescript and don’t look too hard at the infrastructure

good luck doing frontend development without it, but it can also do backend development

it can do everything