• Tar_Alcaran
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    148 months ago

    Ah, but eventually the trolley breaks down, and in the case of the reincarnating circle, you end up with zero deaths (but a whole lot of Therapy)

  • @[email protected]
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    88 months ago

    Cant you just take people from the track with reincarnating people? They might have to die a couple of times, but thats nothing compared to infinity

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    I’d do top case since the number of people killed would converge to -1/12 meaning no suffering

  • @[email protected]
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    228 months ago

    I go for option 1.

    In all programming languages that I know, integers have a maximum number. E.g., in C that’d be 2,147,483,647. After that, you would run into an overflow, resulting in either…

    • a crash (train stops, no more deaths),
    • death count suddenly turns negative (all people previously killed are suddenly alive again and even new people are generated out of nowhere) - until we reach the next overflow when people disappear and start dying again
    • or - if it’s an unsigned integer - death count resets everytime we reach the maximum limit

    So compared to option 2, we have a chance of stopping the death count. And even if the train keeps running, we have essentially option 2 but the same people only die very rarely. If we assume a cycle of 1 death per second and an integer boundary of 2,147,483,647, that’s just one death every 68 years per person involved. Seems more fair to me compared to 100 people constantly dying over and over again.

    • @[email protected]
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      68 months ago

      Or is it like a Y2K death trolly and when the overflow happens the universe doesn’t catch the exception and things get weird. Like suddenly any number can be divided by 0.

    • @[email protected]
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      58 months ago

      Yeah okay but by that logic you’d also have to quantize time and the suffering would end either way in a finite amount of time.

  • stinerman
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    128 months ago

    Where I’m from Calc 2 is integrals. That wasn’t so terrible. It was Calc 3 (vectors and series) that was the hard one.

    • Kogasa
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      68 months ago

      At the universities I went to, Calc 2 was integration, sequences and series, then Calc 3 was multivariable. They really pack all the harder parts into 2.

      • stinerman
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        18 months ago

        We were on quarters, so we had calc 1-4. Makes sense that Calc 2 was rough if you were on semesters.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 months ago

        I thought this was taught in high school. Curriculums differ drastically between countries, don’t they?

    • Codex
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      48 months ago

      I managed until university when I left calculus and entered “Linear Algebra” and man, I really don’t like matrices.

      • stinerman
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        48 months ago

        I made it through. My degree is actually in math. 15 years ago, I used to know what an abelian group is!

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        I found linear algebra super hard until I learned it a second and then third time, from different angles. I found it harder to understand when it was taught in a pure maths context, but coming at it from the applied side made me go “oh, so that’s why that’s like that”

  • Ice
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    8 months ago

    Programmer asks: how many bits for the integer?

    At 32 bits it’s “just” a Thanos snap with extra pain

  • @[email protected]
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    48 months ago

    Also, Option 1 would essentially mean the end of the human race. Assuming the rate of killing is faster than the birth rate it would mean everyone dies soon

  • Kogasa
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    28 months ago

    It can be, usually for college credit though

  • @[email protected]
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    68 months ago

    Well their heads aren’t on the tracks and they’re immortal, I bet we could rig some kind of device to make them total praplegics and then work on a direct neural interface so they can use computers while they lay there endlessly having their bodies painlessly trisected.