• 3 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 24th, 2023

help-circle






  • I do really like the error system in rust for its descriptions. I guess the difficulty for me, which maybe will go away after writing more rust, is that my intuition for what is efficient and what isn’t totally breaks down.

    I find myself passing copies of values around and things like that, it might be that the compiler just takes care of that, or that I just don’t know how to do it well but that’s often the point of friction for me.

    Totally agree on the refactor though, most of the time it doesn’t even take that much time since you know the skeleton of what you want at that point!





  • While I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that we need to emphasize quality over quantity, so long as software pays well there will be people who don’t care. In my university I’ve met a fair few people that complain about having to learn about compilers, assembly, and whatnot because “I’ll never need to know that in my actual job”. While to some extent in the United States you can blame the fact that classes just cost a ton, I think it’s a sad reality that, barring some key change in the way our whole education and economic systems work, there will be unimaginative apathetic people that will ruin things for the rest. Plus people are fallible or something I dunno. But yeah void pointers are my jam because I don’t have to wait precious clock cycles making new ones jk.



  • If individuals have committed crimes, they’ve clearly broken the social contract. Your mention of retribution is especially interesting when we consider the Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest known sets of laws, which introduced ‘lex talionis’ or ‘the principle of retribution’—likely the origin of the ‘an eye for an eye’ concept.

    The idea of retribution does seem to tap into something intrinsic in our sense of justice. However, it’s important to note that during Hammurabi’s era, resources were much scarcer than today, making the sustained imprisonment of criminals impractical.

    So, what is the underlying purpose of modern incarceration? In no particular order, it seems to be: isolating individuals from the public to prevent further crimes, serving as punishment to deter criminal behavior, and rehabilitation.

    Torture, I believe, doesn’t make us safer nor does it contribute to rehabilitation. This leaves punishment to deter criminal activity. This can be seen either as a warning to potential criminals or, for those not facing life imprisonment, as a means to reduce recidivism.

    Therefore, we’re left to balance the human rights of the individual against the potential deterrent effect of torture in preventing future crimes. Even in this simplified scenario, discounting the message sent by tacitly accepting state-sponsored torture and the diminishing impact of additional punishment on those who act irrationally, torture seems to serve only to satisfy a base desire for vengeance. We should not lower ourselves to such methods, aligning us closer to those who commit these heinous crimes.


  • The impulse to seek retribution against those who have perpetrated heinous crimes is a natural human inclination. Yet, it’s vital to remember that even those who commit the most grievous offenses are, at their core, human beings endowed with certain inalienable rights. In the context of warfare, the use of torture to extract information is undeniably a reprehensible act. It stands to reason, then, that torture employed solely as a means of inflicting pain for punishment’s sake is even more morally indefensible. However, I perceive a well-intentioned undercurrent in your remarks. Your response appears to reflect a person who retains a sense of empathy towards others, an attribute that is commendable.


  • The closest I can come to agreeing with you is community service as a punishment or as a means to reduce one’s sentence. However, especially given what constitutes a crime is some of the bad states, and the evidence of coercion for working these jobs, it seems as those there is a perverse incentive to keep people working for little pay. At the very least, this work, if not something you have to volunteer for, should be assigned as part of the punishment from the court, deducting it against the other punishments levied against them: being in prison for xyz amount of time, or paying xyz fine, but this seems like it would need to be well regulated to avoid abuse.



  • I think what he meant was a response to your question of why don’t we turn him into fertilizer. Their insinuation that turning people into fertilizer would go against due process and the right to trial. The use of “silly” I believe was sarcasm. However to be fair you could be saying that the outcome of a fair trial and due process would be a punishment in the form of turning him into fertilizer. However I think we can make the assumption based on their comments that they are against capital punishment. Either way I think we can all agree that his actions have no place in our society and that he should meet with the full force of the law for his crimes.


  • I understand your wish to bring attention to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. However, it does everyone a disservice to equate the Israeli Government with the victims of the Holocaust. They are not the same people, and it is disrespectful to the memory of the innocents who died both during the Second World War and today.

    We can be mature enough to name evil where we see it, and not fall prey to the tribalistic notion that one’s lineage is inextricably tied to one’s actions today. In the same way that it is wrong for children to take on the debt of their parents, it is also wrong to judge a child based on the lives of their parents. Each person, and by extension their generation, must stand solely upon the actions which they take.

    This is the only way for the conflict in Gaza to end; we should not pick sides based on our preconceptions. Instead, we should look at the information, acknowledge the impact of the fog of war on that information, and do our best to make informed decisions with whatever little power most of us wield in our day-to-day lives.