I have never contributed to an open source project before, so if we exclude the third part this is the reverse of my habits. The stuff I do for work is bare minimum garbage, I freely admit. I really do not like my employer.
I always feel like my code is the best in personal projects when I don’t need to conform to whatever style and architecture has been decided on by history and committee.
My most arcane pieces of code (abusing null references to make the garbage collector handle object deletion kind of cursed) are usually posted publicly somewhere… If it works and all that.
This prospect doesnt bother me in the least. I’ve already been replaced 5 times in my life so far. The soul is a spook. Let my clone smother me in my sleep and deal with the IRS instead.
Makes me wonder how many times I’ve been replaced. Also makes me wonder if I just died yesterday and today I’m actually a new person. I have no evidence that yesterday happened except for a memory of it, and let’s face it, since it was a public holiday, that’s a pretty foggy memory
I wonder about that. During the deepest part of sleep does your brain have enough activity to maintain a continuous stream of consciousness? If you go through two sleep cycles in a night does yesterday you die, and you from the first sleep cycle who only dreamed die, and you’re a new consciousness in the morning?
yeah, went down this rabbit hole recently: what if I’m the .001% that lives until <max age variable for my genome>? or what if ‘me’ is an amalgam of all the ones that die, and I get to live all those lives until the variable runs out.
Damn dude. Was each time a death? I think a someone’s following me around and snuffing me out. Mandela Effects keep happening. Also I’m getting elf ears? Reality is weird.
I’m sorry I understand those words not in those orders though, are you saying the soul is an olde timey anti-black racial slur or that it’s inherently scary?
Spook is from the german “spuking” which means haunting. Its use in this context comes from the german philosopher Max Stirner who is infamous for the memes where X is declared to be a spook.
Understanding what exactly spooks are is somewhat challenging, and plenty of people get the wrong ubderstanding about what is meany by spooks. But at least in the meme way of using the word, a spook is anything you think is a fairy tale, or nonsense that you don’t care about.
Kil’n People by David Brin - it’s a futuristic Murder Mystery Novel about a society where people copy their consciousnesses to temporary clay clones to do mundane tasks for them. Got some really interesting discussions about what constitutes personhood!
The joke is that there are some people who think that by uploading themselves into a machine “to live forever,” their consciousness will also be transferred, like when you travel by bus from one city to another. In reality, you “upload yourself,” but that yourself is not you, but a copy of you. So, once the copy is done, you will still be in your original body, and the copy will “think” it is you, but it’s not you. It’s a copy of you! So, you continue to live in your body until you die, and, well, for you - that’s it. You’re dead. You’re not living. You’re finished. Everything is black. Void. Null. Done - unless you believe in the afterlife, so you’ll be in heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever, but the point is, you’re not longer on Earth “living forever.” That’s just some other entity who thinks it is you, but it’s not you (again, because you’re dead.)
This is represented by the parameters being passed by value (a copy) instead of by reference (same data) in the poster’s image.
It wouldn’t be you, it would just be another person with the same memories that you had up until the point the copy was made.
When you transfer a file, for example, all you are really doing is sending a message telling the other machine what bits the file is made up of, and then that other machines creates a file that is just like the original - a copy, while the original still remains in the first machine. Nothing is even actually transferred.
If we apply this logic to consciousness, then to “transfer” your brain to a machine you will have to make a copy, which exist simultaneously with the original you. At that point in time, there will be two different instances of “you”; and in fact, from that point forward, the two instances will begin to create different memories and experience different things, thereby becoming two different identities.
Also, if this is an organization setting, I’m extremely disappointed in your PR review process. If someone is committing vendor code to the repo someone else should reject the pull.
Pretty sure they meant to not have review. Dropping peer review in favor of pair programming is a trendy idea these days. Heh, you might call it “pairs over peers”. I don’t agree with it, though. Pair programming is great, but two people, heads together, can easily get on a wavelength and miss the same things. It’s always valuable to have people who have never seen the new changes take a look. Also, peer review helps keep the whole team up to date on their knowledge of the code base, a seriously underrated benefit. But I will concede that trading peer review for pair programming is less wrong than giving up version control. Still wrong, but a lot less wrong.
Well, to share my perspective – sorry, I mean, to explain to you why you’re wrong and differing opinions are unacceptable:
I find that pairing works best for small teams, where everyone is in the loop what everyone else is working on, and which don’t have a bottleneck in terms of a minority having much more skill or knowledge in the project.
In particular, pairing is far more efficient at exchanging information. Not only is it a matter of actively talking to one another just being quicker at bringing information across, there is also a ton of information about code, which will not make it into the actual code.
While coding, you’ve tried two or three approaches, you couldn’t write it as you expected or whatever. The final snippet of code looks as if you wrote it, starting in the top-left and finishing bottom-right, with maybe one or two comments explaining a particularly weird workaround, but I’d wager more than 90% of the creation process is lost.
This means that if someone needs to touch your code, they will know practically none of how it came to be and they will be scared of changing more about it than at all necessary. As a result, all code that gets checked in, needs to be as perfect as possible, right from the start.
Sharing all the information from the creation process by pairing, that empowers a team to write half-baked code. Because enough people know how to finish baking it, or how to restructure it, if a larger problem arises.
Pairing is fickle, though. A bad management decision can easily torpedo it. I’m currently in a project, where we practically cannot pair, because it’s 4 juniors that are new to the project vs. 2 seniors that built up the project.
Not only would we need to pair in groups of three to make that work at all, it also means we need to use the time of the seniors as efficiently as possible and rather waste the time of the juniors, which is where a review process excels at.
Yeah… Usually if you join a company with bad practices it’s because the people who already work there don’t want to do things properly. They tend to not react well to the new guy telling them what they’re doing wrong.
Only really feasible if you’re the boss, or you have an unreasonable amount of patience.
Usually, the boss (or people above the boss) are the one’s stopping it. Engineers know what the solution is. They may still resent the new guy saying it, though, because they’ve been through this fight already and are tired.
Dude, put content warnings on this. I have trauma from shared drives and fucking Jared leaving the Important File open on his locked computer while he takes off for a week, locking out access to anyone else.
There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!
Soma is a wonderful game that covers this type of thing. It does make you wonder what consciousness really is… Maybe the ability to perceive and store information, along with retrieving that information, is enough to provide an illusion of consistent self?
Or maybe it’s some competely strange system, unkown to science. Who knows?
I think the definition of consciousness needs to not be solely about abilities or attributes. It needs to account for the active process of consciousness. Like a hair dryer can burn things… but a fire is things burning. Without the active nature its simply not conscious.
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