Showerthoughts
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
LessWrong is a deeply strange place and you have to be careful with it, but the sequence on maps and territories is a pretty good introduction: https://www.lesswrong.com/w/map-and-territory
No. In interpreted languages that is kinda true, in compiled languages that is definitely false.
The code is a simplification. It has a direct relationship to what actually happens, yes, but most often glosses over the details (even in C and other very low level languages)
Not so. The code may be the same, but the code is the map, not the territory. The code is not enough to understand the territory, even with mock data, c.f.
Our staging environment contains data that matches Production as closely as possible, but was not sufficient in this case and the mock data we relied on to simulate what would occur was insufficient.
I'm not sure they are the same thing. And maybe there are layers to this. A code base can be a representation, a map, of some real-world thing. A physics engine in a game maps to real-world physics. A robotics control program maps to a set of movements that accomplish a task. But there is another layer that I think is more what the saying is about. As a software developer you have a mental map of your software. You have some understanding of how it works to accomplish its goal. And your mental map, your understanding, may be complete and correct and it may not be. This is one of the most common sources of defects in code. I think my code is working this way, but actually it's working that way, so when it runs it does something I don't expect.
The code is the map, but the territory would be the abstractions we use of the real world (and ideas). We only use what we need and is what we put in the code, it's useless make an abstraction 1:1. Just read about the topic, so I'm still digesting some things.
Example?
PHYSICAL WORLD
The thing : [A rock]
The map artifact : rock. Size, location, chemical composition.
SOFTWARE
The thing : x=1;
The map artifact : x=1;
So for one thing, there's no translation loss. That's a big deal.