This is what happens when you hire a philosophy major.

When you are programming and you feel philosophical

How Javascript handles Infinity:

Infinity * 1 == Infinity
Infinity * 0 == NaN
Infinity / 0 == Infinity
0 / Infinity == 0
Infinity + Infinity == Infinity
Infinity - Infinity == NaN
Infinity / Infinity == NaN
NaN & Infinity == 0
NaN && Infinity == NaN
NaN || Infinity == Infinity
1 % Infinity == 1
Infinity << 1 == 0
Infinity >> 0 == 0
Infinity | 0 == 0
Infinity | Infinity == 0

That's kinda philosophical, isn't it?

This happened today in my German class.

The teacher was talking about Leibnitz’s philosophical approach to mathematize the German language. At some point, he asked, “Well, do we have any computer people here? Who of you is taking the CS course?” I raise my hand. “What’s the language all computer scientists speak?”, he asks. I answer, “Well, there’s not /the one/ programming language that every computer scientist knows, but-“
“Well, you use zeros and ones. You interact with the computer in binary, ‘cause that’s what the computer understands”, he cuts me off. I give a friend of mine a “what the fuck is he talking about” stare as the teacher rambles on about how “Computer scientists write binary code to program”. My friend looks visibly confused as well.

Dear “non-computer people” of this earth, please either know your facts before you decide to vomit liquid shit, or just stop trying to explain half-truths altogether. You teach German and Philosophy, not CS, nobody expects you to know how programs are coded. Otherwise you’ll make a fool of yourselves and will look like a fucking idiot who has no idea what they’re talking about.

Signed, RantSomeWhere.

I, my dev friend and a non dev friend were having a deep Philosophical chat
NDF - while we are here on earth, we should give something back to the mankind
DF - Yeah man! (sarcastically pointing at me) But this guy never gives anything to anybody
Me - Oh I have contributed a lot to the mankind. You should check my github profile.

Needless to say two of us burst out laughing while one was giving blank stare.

One of my high school classmates, who is in med school, after learning some basic Python, once tried to psychoanalyze devs for saying Hello World in their first programs.

"Why do programmers always have to say 'Hello World' in their first program?" Lea mused. "Like why is it the default? Do programmers have this mindset that we will say 'Goodbye World' eventually?"

"Because that's what it's in the tutorials." I simply replied. "Nothing Freudian or Jungian about it. That's just it."

"Well what's the philosophical reason behind 'Hello World'?" She mused. "Is it the programmer's equivalent of a crying baby after being birthed?"

"Nothing Plato-ish or Aquinas-y about it Lea, lol. It's just 'Hello World'!" I laughed. "Hello World is just a sample string."

"Why is it that programming tutorials use Hello World, then?"

"Well did you actually say 'Hello World' in your first program?" I, a real dev, asked.

"Yeah, did you?"

"No. My first program per programming language is always 'Maganda si Jenny kaysa sa inyong lahat!' (Jenny is prettier than all of you!)."

There's nothing psychological about Hello World, Lea. 😂

Aw shucks.

"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"

There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.

One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?

If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?

Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.

How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?

What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"

The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?

Been a long long time guys, been really long time.

Though I check dR everyday for notifs, comments and mentions, I am unable to go through my feed and/or interact with you all. Something that I miss a lot.

I often want to rant or post something but just lack the time, enough motivation or ability to structure my thoughts into words.

Lots going on in life with new side projects which I have been nearing completion. New role at work and job hunt along with offline socialising. Have been spending time with family too.

I really really want to be more active here and talk to you all. To my old friends here, I want to have fun with you all with trolling each other and sharing some really great tech (and philosophical) knowledge. To new folks, I want to discuss awesome things we both know.

So if you know me already, tell me what's happening guys? Let's get back to some fun.

If you don't, drop by and say hi, let's talk fun stuff.

I am Floydian. I love music (Rock/Metal), also a Product Manager at Oracle who was a tester earlier. What do you do and what do you like?

Google translate translated lorem ipsum into this philosophical nightmare

Philosophical question: If you develop an application but no one uses it.. does it even exists?

My CEO uncle: "anyone can program."

A quote from when we were discussing strategy for my sit down with the CEO of a company I was applying at (FYI, his advice was to research the company, be familiar with their long term strategies and such). I get that there's no need to prove my technical prowess to a business exec, but it isn't because "anyone can program."

I mean, sure, in a philosophical sense, anybody has the capacity to learn. But developers aren't a fungible asset. Treating them as such leads to ruin.

Here's a thought!

Our bodies are mortal. And they are like flowers: they grow, blossom at their best and then begin their slow degradations, deaths.

Our mind is what seems to be the essence of _us_.

Now suppose someone finds a way to copy our minds into some tech so they could survive our bodies' deaths. Making us sort of immortal. Sounds cool, eh?

But that would make a copy of your mind. You would still be stuck in your mortal body while your copy would be immortal. Would you be happier to die knowing that it's YOU who is dying and not your copy, rather than dying w/o leaving a copy of you behind? Is a copy of you still YOU?

It could be YOU for others. But is it YOU for you?

Around 6 years ago I started at this company. I was really excited, I read all their docs then I started coding. At every code review, I noticed something was a little off. I seemed to get lots of weird nitpicking about code styling. It was strange, I was using a linter, I read their rules but basically every review was filled with random comments. About 3 months in I noticed, "oh! there aren't actually any rules, people are debating them in my code reviews!" A few more reviews went by and then I commented, "ya I'm not doing any of this, code review isn't a place to have philosophical debates." All hell broke loose! I got a few pissed off developers, and I said, listen I don't care what the rules are, you just need to clearly fucking articulate them and if you want to introduce one, I don't care about that either just don't do it in the middle of my review. I pissed off 1 dev real bad. Me and this dev were working together, the QA person on the team stood up and said "hey! you know what I love about your code reviews?!" The other dev and myself looked at each other kind of nervously, "I love that you're both right, these are all problems!"... 1 year later (and until now) me and the other dev are still friends. Leave it to QA to properly identify the bug.

-Actually put my inspirations to use
-put knowledge to use
-rent a server
-write philosophical essays
-upload them to the server
-do some Java Projects

2 hour meeting to brainstorm ideas to improve our system health monitoring (logging, alerting, monitoring, and metrics)

Never got past the alerting part. Piss poor excuses for human being managers kept 'blaming' our logging infrastructure for allowing them to log exceptions as 'Warnings', purposely by-passing the alerting system.

Then the d-head tried to 'educate' everyone the difference between error and exception …frack-wad…the difference isn't philosophical…shut up.

The B manager kept referring to our old logging system (like we stopped using it 5 years ago) and if it were written correctly, the legacy code would be easier to migrate. Fracking lying B….shut the frack up.

The fracking idiots then wanted to add direct-bypass of the alerting system (I purposely made the code to bypass alerting painful to write)

Mgr1: "The only way this will work is if you, by default, allow errors to bypass the alerting system. When all of our code is migrated, we'll change a config or something to enable alerting. That shouldn't be too hard."
Me: "Not going to happen. I made by-passing the alert system painful on purpose. If I make it easy, you'll never go back and change code."
Mgr2: "Oh, yes we will. Just mark that method as obsolete. That way, it will force us to fix the code."
Me: "The by-pass method is already obsolete and the teams are already ignoring the build warnings."
Mgr1: "No, that is not correct. We have a process to fix all build warnings related to obsolete methods."
Mgr2: "Yes. It won't be like the old system. We just never had time to go back and fix that code."
Me: "The method has been obsolete for almost a year. If your teams haven't fixed their code by now, it's not going to be fixed."
Mgr1: "You're expecting everything to be changed in one day. Our code base is way too big and there are too many changes to make. All we are asking for is a simple change that will give us the time we need to make the system better. We all want to make the system better…right?"
Me: "We made the changes to the core system over two years ago, and we had this same conversation, remember? If your team hasn't made any changes by now, they aren't going to. The only way they will change code to the new standard is if we make the old way painful. Sorry, that's the truth."
Mgr2: "Why did we make changes to the logging system? Why weren't any of us involved? If there were going to be all these changes, our team should have been part of the process."
Me: "You were and declined every meeting and every attempt to include your area. Considering the massive amount of infrastructure changes there was zero code changes required by your team. The new system simply worked. You can't take advantage of the new features which is why we're here today. I'm here to offer my help in any way I can with the transition."
Mgr1: "The new logging doesn't support logging of the different web page areas. Until you can make that change, we can't begin changing our code."
Me: "Logging properties is just a name+value pair dictionary. All you need to do is standardize on a name and how you add it to the collection."
Mgr2: "So, it's not a standard field? How difficult would it be to change the core assembly? This has to be standard across all our areas and shouldn't be up to the developers to type in anything they want."
- Frack wads smile and nod to each other like fracking chickens in a feeding frenzy
Me: "It can, but what will you call this property? What controls its value?"
- The look I got from both the d-bags I could tell a blood vessel popped.
Mgr1: "Oh…um….I don't know…Area? Yea … Area."
Mgr2: "Um…that's not specific enough. How about Page?"
Mgr1: "Well, pages can cross different areas, and areas cross different pages…what do you think?"
Me: "Don't know, don't care. It's up to you. I just need a name."
Mgr2: "Modules! Our MVC framework is broken up in Modules."
DevMgr: "We already have a field for Module. It's how we're segmenting the different business processes"
Mgr1: "Doesn't matter, we'll come up with a name later. Until then, we won't make any changes until there is a name."
DevMgr: "So what did we accomplish?"
Me: "That we need to review the web's logging and alerting process and make sure we're capturing errors being hidden as warnings."
Mgr1: "Nooo….we didn't accomplish anything. This meeting had no agenda and no purpose. We should have been included in the logging process changes from day one."
Mgr2: "I agree, I'm not sure why we're here"
Me: "This was a brainstorming meeting as listed in the agenda. We've accomplished 2 of the 4 items. I think we've established your commitment to making the system better. Thank you all for coming."

- Mgr1 and 2 left without looking at me or saying a word.

Was reading an ebook about Golang in the garden. Having read the first chapter I looked up. And only then noticed this view... What is the philosophical lesson?

do {
liveLife();
} while (you != dead);

Why is there a - 1 plus option? Just listened to a podcast by stackoverflow where they explained how they removed the down vote option on comments out of the idea that you cant be wrong on what you think..
Just throwing an idea

ATLAST THEY REMOVED THE NEXT BUTTON!
I have read it so many times that 90% of Google users never click the next page button and thought , that's completely true, even I don't do that. Why don't they remove it?Nice philosophical move, Google.

Although , to think about it,i guess they are smartly hiding a trick to respond back on the site-priority accusations : "No , we are not moving the local sites to later pages while featuring in the Google search(than the ones who are paying us hefty loads of for ad-money, or say amazon). You see, their is no 'next' page. They are all there on your screen. Just get a 30 inch long screen and you will see them all. "

:|

People who speak in puzzles during code reviews - fuck you! Just say what you want to say without being philosophical about it. Want me to change the name of a function? Let me know, instead of ranting on about some other shit. I should not have to ask you twice for every god damn comment what you mean, you prick. It’s just annoying and a waste of time.

Every once in a while I start to question my development principles and start to read articles, especially software philosophical, and try to improve my practices, aswell as find several trade-offs between my own best practices.

!dev philosophical

Quality vs Opinion

I have a feeling that these things have always been at odds with each other and now with the constant connectedness it has just become more apparent that most people don’t understand the difference (or even realize there is a difference for that matter)

Let’s face it. Most people have awful taste. They listen to whatever new music their radio station decides was hot. They watch whatever show everyone else is watching. They are manipulated by large scale news organizations...

Basically, most people are sheep.

The problem is that sheep are a dangerous combination of loud and stupid. Giving these loud stupid sheep a platform to amplify their voice is a bad idea for a society, but a great tool for the pigs to manipulate them.

“Frightened though they were, some of the animals might possibly have protested, but at this moment the sheep set up their usual bleating of "Four legs good, two legs bad," which went on for several minutes and put an end to the discussion.”

This isn’t confined to one political party or view, it isn’t geographic, it isn’t based on education, it isn’t based on wether a person is ethical or not...

It’s universal.

You can translate “four legs good, two legs bad” into Agent Orange and his followers chanting “lock her up” just as well as it could be translated into the angry leaders of the modern feminist movement.

In both cases (both on opposite ends of the ethical spectrum) you have the loudest dumb, angry sheep getting the even dumber sheep to chant along, wether it is good for them or not.

Now to loop this back. The problem is that dumb sheep are emotional. They truly believe that they are NOT dumb and that their opinions and emotions are a measure of quality.

I FEEL bad, and you are talking to me, so you must BE bad.

I don’t LIKE this amazingly well made movie, so it must BE bad.

And anyone else who has a different opinion is just wrong. Anyone who try’s to explain the merits of the other side is either my enemy or is stupid.
^^^
Their opinion, incorrect.

————

Now for the tough part...

Most likely, based on probability, you are a sheep.

Yes, you! The smartest person you know. The guy/girl who has a degree or masters of a PHD. The person who builds amazing software. You! Are. A. Sheep. And you are dangerous to the world.

To put a cherry on top.

No, you opinions are not important. Your feelings are fucking meaningless. Your morals are worthless. Your voice has as much value and a loose asshole fart from a fat guy trapped in a deep well in Siberia.

But don’t get down about this. It’s doesn’t make you any less of a person. Remember that almost every person who has ever lived in history has been a sheep. They have chanted one useless, dangerous, misguided, harmful chant after another through the ages.

————

To those of you who try not to be sheep. Just keep trying to get a little better every day. When someone says...

“We do it this way because we have always done it this way”

... be skeptics. Explore the merits and logic of the situation.

And if you are tired of being led by stupid sheep then save some money, build something cool and start your own business.

Just remember, you will always need the sheep. They will be your employees, your friends, your bosses, your investors etc.

Treat them well, don’t hate them, and if you ever find yourself leading a pack of sheep then try to keep a healthy distance from their chanting while leading them down the right path.

They will thank you for it in the end.

———

PS. For those of you thinking “this is very judgemental and self centred”

All I can do is to try to speak your language....

Baaaahhhhh, baaahhhhh, bahhhhh

Which translates form sheep to human as...

“Eat a dick. Have a nice day”

When someone asks for help, a typical programmer gives you philosophical comments.

When you have to do an assignment for university but the sheet with the instructions is so badly formated, that you have to read the whole sheet again to find a line. BTW the prof also have a philosophical degree.