Death is like chicken pox, right? Deal with it once and you never have to worry about it again?

Gazelle 3: I’m sick of this. We should empower somebody to act, who’s allowed to do that kind of stuff, but only to the bad animals, who aren’t allowed to do the bad stuff.

Gazelle 4: Who wants to volunteer?

the herd: …

Hyena: I’ll do it! I love fucking shit up! I should be allowed to do it, for the sake of the herd!

Hyenas: Fuck yeah! Let’s go!

Gazelle 3: Does anyone else want to volunteer?

Herd: …

Gazelle 5: I guess I could do it.

Hyenas: Fuck yeah! Welcome to the pack! Just so you know though, if you try to stop or question our ways, you’ll be gutted as a traitor.

Gazelle 5: Um… Maybe I don’t want to join, actually.

Hyenas in uniforms: Give us your fucking shell, tortoise! Civil forfeiture! Fuck yeah! Or we’ll kill you!

Gazelle 6: Hey! You’re not allowed to do that!

Gazelle 7: We should set up a group that’s allowed to do things like that, but only to stop those who do things like that.

Gazelle 6: Any volunteers?

I’d recommend Pavel. He has an excellent work ethic.

The high level view of ‘copying’ is purely abstracted, and not very useful. It’s a layperson’s understanding. Copy A and call it B makes a thing called B that contains the same data as A. Anything deeper than that will be completely language dependent. Whether a copy is a copy or a reference depends on language and implementation.

Unless you mean how data physically is copied/recalled at the hardware level… that’s language agnostic and happens in mostly just a few ways.

Something happening frequently doesn’t make it a good thing.

I always hated that question because it’s basically asking you to lie. We should be punishing liars, not rewarding them.

You want to see my Fallout 4 impression?

Nyuh, nyuh, nyuh. I’m Fallout 4. Nyuh, nyuh, nyuh.

But seriously, I was quite disappointed by it too. I really enjoyed 3. NV was kind of fun too. 4 just felt like it was trying too hard in the wrong places. They put a lot of the effort that should have gone into storyline development and put it into the town building minigame. They tried to catch the wave of Ark and all those other base builders and lost the story in the sandbox. Two half games don’t make a whole game.

Allow us to introduce you to… malicious incompetence.

That sounds more like social anxiety.

‘Nah, you’re right. Looking, sounding, and acting like a bitch is bad enough. You don’t want to completely remove all doubt.’

They kind of are, just based on the need for housing rather than a romantic connection… which actually describes a number of ‘battered wives’ scenarios, now that I think of it.

I’m not trying to be a dick about it but I love that you used apples and onions as an example of things with minimal variety when one of those is the most varied product class in the produce department. For onions there are red, green, white, yellow, and shallots. Most of those are different enough that you’d see and taste a swap out immediately. Then, with apples, there are so many varieties at this point, even without including the more niche varieties, a well supplied produce department can have an entire section just for types of apples. They could probably be knocked down into half a dozen categories but many people will be able to differenciate them enough to complain. Most other things are relatively unvaried, maybe a binary split, some a literal monoculture, but those two…

‘What, you don’t think you’re manly enough to pull it off?’

Warlock: I promised my soul in exchange for great power.

Rogue: To which great power?

Warlock: All of them. Let them fight over it when I am dead.

While I don’t recommend buying an Amazon device these days, if you have an older one you want to use, you can send support an email telling them you bought an ad free one and it still has ads. They’ll turn them off.

Seeing as the US mint is planning to discontinue pennies and the general outlook on the future of the world, that could be not that far off.

I’m no brainologist but I wonder if things like this might be more related to autistic cognition. There seems to be something similar in the space of not attaching the same significance to events others find emotionally charged.

In a computer, checking a memory address would be closer to what we would call ‘conscious’ actions in a person. It is performed actively by software. In a brain, we still don’t really have a full understanding of how memory is stored, but we at least know it isn’t part of our experience that we have explicitly defined storage locations that we address. If it were, we’d have a name for it. Computers and brains are metaphorically similar but structurally and functionally quite different.

Human language has 2 layers. Signifier and signified. Computers have 3. Signifier (variable name), memory address, (no human analog) and signified. (stored value) A pointer would be a signifier (word) for which the signified is the non-existent human analog to a memory address. You can have a word that refers to a thing that doesn’t exist (e.g. unicorn) but it won’t help the analogy.

In your example, the signifier ‘coffee’ is akin to a variable name. It is a signifier that dereferences to a value within the scope of our agreement. We can agree it holds the stored value of 65, allowing us to say something like butter = coffee - 60, bring me ‘butter’ eggs, but we don’t have a memory address system so it’s not the same process as a computer.

For a computer, there is a middle step to a variable dereference. It sees ‘coffee’ and first looks at the table of references, finds the variable ‘coffee’ has it’s value stored at address 1 ['coffee':1, 'butter':88, 'unicorn':73] and then pulls the value (65) from the memory at address 1. A pointer would be another variable, such as ‘*monkey’ (e.g. *monkey = &coffee, which can be read as “pointer monkey shall hold the value of the address at which coffee is stored”) which would be added into the reference table as a variable stored at another address, say address 2, and would store in address 2 a value of (1).

word        address       value
coffee      1                65
*monkey     2                1

Language just doesn’t have the analogous concept.

I tried seeing if the analogy could be made to work but I am unaware of any natural language with an analog to pointers. Natural language references generally frame the concept that serves as a pointer in relation to the object rather than as a particular object.