arendjr

Okay, I’ll spend one last reply on this, because I don’t appreciate getting a strawman assigned to me. I didn’t say getting “every character’s expressed desires being instantly granted” is the main thing making fiction interesting. I said it’s seeing actions play out that you normally don’t is what it makes it interesting. That’s quite a different thing.

And no, I still don’t think it’s a major plot point. It’s a plot point, yes, but the movies also left it out without real impact to the plot. That’s not a major plot point to me.

that’s a reason to have Beverly suggest it. Not a reason to have it actually happen.

Sorry, but that's just silly. If it were brought up as a suggestion that didn't happen, that would be even weirder than it actually happening. As a writer, you don't go around finding reasons to block your character's ideas, because that's a horribly anti-climactic thing to do, teasing your readers for no purpose, but worst of all, you don't get to see how the action pans out if it does happen, which is the primary thing that makes fiction interesting to begin with.

And no, not every action needs foreshadowing either. In the grand scheme of things, this whole scene that people fuss about isn't a major plot point in the book. I read the book twice (though even the second time was a while ago), and I had pretty much forgotten about it, until I saw people complaining it. But it still seems as if you think King has some moral obligation to guard and guide the actions of his characters. He doesn't, and thankfully he doesn't, because his books are more interesting for it.

As a writer, I disagree. Writers often write thinking from the perspective of their characters. If something makes sense from the character’s perspective, they’ll write it. It’s not an endorsement by the writer, it just makes for a natural and believable progression and that’s why the book is better for it.

I can bet you King never decided that he should include such a scene because it would make the book better. He did it because he was writing from her perspective, and it popped into his mind as something that made sense for her to do.

It’s not a fantasy, not an endorsement, and not a post-rationalisation either. And knowing his writing style, upon reflection he probably felt it belonged for shock value alone. Writers do have a knack for pushing boundaries, and he’s certainly got a taste of it.

I think there is an objective good. That goodness is Life itself. So long as we treat all Life with respect and try to live a life of balance, that makes us good. You are right though that this is still a very simplified view, and what it means to "live in balance" can depend on the situation or environment. But it's a starting point at least.

As for forgiveness, it's a choice. If someone makes an honest mistake, it should be easy to forgive them, as whatever harm they caused was not intentional. But if someone makes a wilful mistake, it will be harder to forgive them. And yet, because forgiveness is a choice, we can look at the reasons why someone acted in a manner that was harmful, and still decide to forgive them, especially if they repent.

As for consequences, those are results of our actions, whether intentional or unintentional. They are not strictly related to the concept of forgiveness, but generally speaking, we find it easy to forgive someone if their actions are harmless, or if the consequences don't affect us personally. But if someone's actions do affect us, we find it harder to forgive, regardless of whether something was an honest mistake or not. But the key to forgiveness, in my opinion, is that we need to look beyond the consequences and look beyond how we were personally affected. Forgiveness is a choice, and that choice is easier to make if our emotion is not muddied by consequence.

Silver actually interacts horribly with and ruins the flavour of some foods. There’s a reason why silver cups often have gold plating on the inside to not ruin the taste of wine.

I’d stick with the steel any time.

I dunno, I have a Framework laptop and had a keyboard issue with it. It still worked, but one of the keys didn’t register well. So they sent me a new keyboard and I sent them back the old one after I’d swapped it. Not a single day was I without my laptop, which sounds quite unlikely compared to other laptop brands and the support you get (or not) with those. No buyer’s remorse here.

Captchas are getting out of hand.

I can take this one: Because he doesn’t actually care about creating anything of value. If he truly believed in it, you’re right, Twitter or even Tesla’s software engineers would be on the chopping block and he’d replace them with AI as soon as he can. But he doesn’t.

He knows this is a longshot. Most likely to fail, but very profitable on the near-impossible chance that it works. But he doesn’t care even if the odds are truly impossible. Because this is an investment opportunity, so people will throw money his way, no matter what the odds.

People assume he’s an idiot, and he is. But he’s not stupid, at least not in every way. He certainly has a skill for separating others from their money, which he happily takes advantage of.

Don’t tell that to the kids in Finland 😉

https://santaclausvillage.info/activities/santa-claus-main-post-office/

That’s fair, although technically you could catch SIGSEGV and release resources that way too.

Also, given that resources will be reclaimed by the OS regardless of which kind of crash we’re talking about, the effective difference is usually (but not always) negligible.

Either way, no user would consider a panic!() to be not a crash because destructors ran. And most developers don’t either.

“An abrupt exit”, more commonly known as a “crash”.

If you’re going to argue that an exit through panic!() is not a crash, I will argue that your definition of a crash is just an abrupt exit initiated by the OS. In other words, there’s no meaningful distinction as the result is the same.

I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. While I don’t share your conviction, I do admit it’s certainly a possibility.

The advantage of doing things that way is that code becomes much more portable. We may finally reach the goal of “write once, run anywhere”, because the AI may write all the platform specific code.

It does make a big assumption that the AI output is reliable enough though. At times people will want to tweak the output, so how are they gonna go about that? Maybe if the language is based on Markdown, you can inject snippets of code where necessary. But if you have to do that too often, such a language will lose its appeal.

There’s a lot of unknowns, but I see why it’s a tempting idea.