A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
This reminds me of this old hacker koan:
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. [Tom] Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
Well it'll work, until the unfixed root cause break the machine again.
what if the root cause was some system variable, which got reset on boot and never happens again (for example some code you wrote accidentally triggered lower voltage for your cpu, and you have hitches)
Just ask Tom to reboot it again.
You don't really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.
"Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves."
I thought there was a chance that AlexisFR would respond without realizing that I was repeating the important part of the koan as a joke, because you don't always see the context when looking at replies to your comments. But I didn't expect that a random person who had apparently just read the koan 5 seconds earlier would already have forgotten it.
you don't have a soul, but the particle detector does
You are part of the wavefunction. There is no collapse, just entanglement.
I'm just going to leave this here: Wigner's friend.
In Timelike Infinity, there's a group following that logic through to its conclusion, committing a bit of terrorism on the galactic scale to make Ultimate Observer-senpai notice them from the end of time and the universe.
Batshit insane, 10/10, one of Baxter's tamer plotlines.
It's the equipment used.
Isn’t it lawful neutral chaotic
