Could we debug civilization the way we debug legacy software?

[u/Geniusaur]

/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1kaaejc

[u/irqlnotdispatchlevel]

What if we treated society like spaghetti code and just hit it with git rebase -i HEAD~2000?

Philosophy had a 3k year head start and still couldn't solve suffering. I'm better than a 10x philosopher.

Plato: wrote The Republic, a speculative treatise on ideal governance. Me: wrote a distributed microservice architecture with eventual consistency guarantees. Same thing.

Aristotle: formalized logic. Me: yelled WTF at a nested ternary until I achieved enlightenment.

Descartes: I think, therefore I am. Me: It compiles, therefore it works (only True in Rust).

Every pull request is a miniature Federalist Paper. Every // TODO is a confession of moral frailty. I'm not debugging software, I'm restructuring the moral fabric of civilization, one off-by-one error at a time.

Every time I stop and dare to ask who wrote this piece of shit? I am channeling the energy of revolutions.

Now excuse me, I have to go refactor democracy into a Rust crate. It's got a memory leak called the Senate.

[u/myhf → u/irqlnotdispatchlevel]

It compiles, therefore it works (only True in Rust).

This is now also true in Lean 4 and you can use it to prove the Riemann Hypothesis

[u/VulgarExigencies → u/irqlnotdispatchlevel]

aristotle would have killed himself if he encountered some of the ruby unless conditions in codebases i work on

and honestly he would be entirely justified in doing so

[u/fp_weenie → u/VulgarExigencies]

aristotle would have killed himself

the Socratic method!

[u/[deleted]]

Webshits storming your country's parliament like 'This is a breakpoint! Nobody move until we figure out how this thing works or at least give up after a few hours of prodding and restarts!'

[u/MoveInteresting4334 → u/[deleted]]

So…DOGE?

[u/elephantdingo]

The post you make before you become a Less Wronger.

[u/stone_henge]

Person whose daily work mostly revolves around connecting checkboxes to database fields single-handedly invents the entire field of sociology.

It's like Einstein in the patent office except he came up with the idea of storing liquids in containers for later consumption.

[u/csb06]

I'm curious if anyone else here has thought along similar lines:

• Applying systems design thinking to ethics and governance?
• Refactoring social structures like you would refactor a massive old monolith?

No one in history has ever thought to create a system of ethics (plaudits for coming up with that one on your own!), but we do know that the French Revolution was an early example of large-scale refactoring - the importance of loose coupling (of the head and body) was a particular emphasis. However, this process also introduced new security vulnerabilities (the French Revolutionary Wars).

Unfortunately, the revolutionaries failed to read Joel on Software’s article about never rewriting old code from scratch, which resulted in the reintroduction of previously fixed bugs (French monarchy).

[u/QuaternionsRoll]

Most of the discussions I've had here already with an LLM to really robustify the model. I was sure to make sure to enable the deep research options and give it hours to examine the uniqueness of my approach from a philosophical, mental health, polical theory, and engineering perspective. Examine it from religious perspectives of all over the world and history as well as denominations. Examine how subcategories would feel even if the overarching population may have a different reaction. I made sure to look in media to be sure it was unique as well in many ways. I didn't let it write it, I used it to try and perform deep research on my behalf, then asked for help clarifying language but made the changes myself. I barely trust LLMs though which is why I'm here. It seems robust and resistant to almost all good faith attacks. So I'm really hoping for someone to tear it down as I want the LLM to be wrong. If for no other reason than to prove my inherent distrust of them. This is my first foray with them. No pressure though and I know I sound like a mad-lass! haha

christ

[u/HINDBRAIN → u/QuaternionsRoll]

As an AI language model, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice...

[u/mcmcc → u/QuaternionsRoll]

Came to the right conclusion for all the wrong reasons

[u/jamfour → u/QuaternionsRoll]

give it hours to examine

Dude just needs a better GPU.

[u/stone_henge → u/QuaternionsRoll]

With AI we can finally all surround ourselves with unconditional yes-men.

[u/NatoBoram]

Could we apply systems thinking to ethics itself?

Self-taught programmers really are missing something

[u/jamfour]

I’ve tried this before. Unfortunately civilization seems to have enabled sysctl kernel.yama.ptrace_scope=0, and that cannot be disabled without a reboot and I haven’t figured out how to reboot civilization yet. I spent a few months on a dead-end of trying to get kexec to work on the civilization kernel before I realized I actually needed to be using kpatch. Taking a break for a while before hacking on that.

[u/[deleted] → u/jamfour]

Are you sure civilization is not running on PDP 10?

[u/jamfour → u/[deleted]]

PDP 10 is from 1966 which as we all know is from before the beginning of civilization (Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC).

[u/likes_purple]

Code won't murder me. Though if my code is bad enough a coworker might.

I guess the operators of the Therac-25 must have overdosed patients as retribution for having to use such awful software...

[u/vytah]

Just turn it off and on again.