this one's gonna be a bit bleak; contrary to what you may guess from the title, it is not about Current Events in US Politics. I have 3 years to entirely reorganize my life, for entirely different reasons.
see also: solderpunk's The Standard Salvaged Computing Platform.
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Originally posted on the fediverse. Doing some PESOD.
so i was looking through the codebase of a rather widely-used C++ FOSS project. one that's known for its simplicity and minimalism, in fact!
of the things:
object.setSortMode
#define constant, btw. because we want our indirection system to be kinda checked by the compiler.class Foo with property Foo foo_ and method initMyFoo(Foo& foo). i don't get why the method doesn't just operate on the class itself, it would be basically impossible for it to be used on anything other than this->foo_.anyways, im not gonna name the actual software project, because i do think it's good and i dont want to publicly shit on FOSS devs unprompted. i just hate how aggressive the misapplication of patterns that could be useful is.
like, string indirection is handy! DI is handy! there are plenty of cases where "initialize this thing based on the state of this other thing" is necessary! but the overuse of these patterns where it's not necessary and likely never will be leads to an ostensibly simple program being utterly labyrinthine to get a foothold in. this is a simple program, that basically just runs a library and renders a list from it, whose code is written like it will ever do anything more than render that library's data. it's designed for "loose coupling" of things that are just never going to not be directly coupled.
it's not an underperformant application, it's not a memoryhog, it's just written to preempt a fundamental change in design and purpose that has yet to come in the last 2 decades of the software's existence. genuinely, what is the point?
Vote for Kamala.
With all that being said, let's talk about lesser evils.
For years, I misunderstood the trolley problem. Rather, I did not see the significance. In one case, 5 people die, in the other case, just the 1 does. Obviously, you go with the case where only 1 dies. 5 people are saved from imminent death. What could be complicated about that?
I have since discovered that the difficulty here, for some, is one of framing. Some people cannot bear to be the one to throw the switch. To them, throwing the switch is acting to kill one person, and that makes them a murderer. To them, their inaction makes them innocent.
You may be one such individual, dear reader! You may think this way! Do know, if you are, that I am talking to you specifically when I say: You are selfish.
This framing of saving 5 people as murder only works if inaction is framed as "minding your own business". It only works if, by doing nothing, one assumes irrelevancy. That's not how it works.
There's a refrain that's been popular recently. That the solution to the trolley problem is to, "Stop that guy who keeps tying people to trolley tracks." It's clever, but it's naive. In the real world, sometimes the guy is just too good. There are times where the only way to stop the bad thing is to cause a different bad thing.
Inaction is an oxymoron. Being a physical thing in time means you are always acting. Even the ground beneath you is undergoing constant heat transfers. You can't not do something. Inaction is not "minding your own business," it is a deliberate choice to do fucking nothing. By choosing a course of action where you do not prevent something, you become a second cause for it to happen. You become a murderer of 5 instead of 1.
Obviously, were anyone really in the trolley problem, a number of complications could arise. You could freeze, hesitate, panic, etc. There are a number of ways one's behavior could be involuntarily limited in crisis. To anyone with survivor's guilt, I am not talking to you.
As for what I am talking about,
If you are not explicitly aligned with Donald J. Trump, you have a moral duty to vote for Joe Biden.
I don't like this. I dont like that this is the case. I dont like that the Best Available Option is a cop-loving israel-supporting half-senile bastard. I have even been known to hate it, but I understand the situation. There is no way to keep Trump out for 4 more years but to get someone to have more electoral votes, and there is no realistic way to do that but to back Biden.
This is not about Joe Biden.
This is not even about the Dems.
This is about praying for the death of Donald Trump to come soon and making sure he can't do shit before then. This is about keeping my rights, and the rights of my friends. The rights of my fucking mother.
How self-centered do you have to be to think of it any other way? "Ohhhh I could never vote for Biden because XYZ :/" Suck It Up. The world is shit, and you will die if you cannot bear to pick the lesser evil. If you are gay or trans or queer or bi or whatever else, you may get yourself killed. You're not choosing to not support Biden, you are choosing not to stop Trump.
If you can have that on your conscience, you need to go ask yourself why that is. Why you care so much more about your self-image than anyone else. Why you can live with being so overwhelmingly selfish and self-centered, and yet can't bear to do anything else.
Figure it out soon, and fix it.
Oh my god suck it up. Yes, Biden is senile. Suck it up. Let him get elected, at the worst chances are that Harris will 25th his ass, and at absolute worst he croaks in office. In either case, we get a black woman president and don't actually have to deal with Biden. He is bringing with him an administration that has been generally positive, especially compared to Trump. We can expect more strong anti-trust legislation, for one, even if nobody's home in Biden's head.
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