this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One must imagine Maths grads happy

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The answer is obvious. You need 2 trolleys to take both tracks.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Look at this genius here, optimizing the solution.. 😂🤣

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

People = good

People = good

Why is that so hard to remember?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

People = bad?

People = bad!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Dont make me get the spray bottle

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

well, with 2 trolleys it is the same amount of suffering as with 1

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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] 10 points 1 month ago

So the Zapp Brannigan approach?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month 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] 4 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

They used database to store integer...

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I thought that was for the sum of all positive integers (1+2+3+...). The sum if ones converges to ½.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month 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] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month 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] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I managed until university when I left calculus and entered "Linear Algebra" and man, I really don't like matrices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month 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] 1 points 1 month 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"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

My multivariate calc was a separate course from regular calc 1/2/3

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Arguably these are different amounts of bad even before considering this: We generally consider existing preferable to non-existence to some extent when suffering isnt taken into account, consider that if you murder someone quickly and painlessly in their sleep without waking them, they dont really themselves suffer from it, but people will still find you to be a murderer, and would object to the idea that you might do it to them. In the top example, killing the people actually kills them, but in the lower example, it arguably doesnt, because the experiences of the people involved never actually cease, therefore, the lower path seems to me to be preferable because you supposedly get equivalent amounts of "suffering", but different amounts of time that people spend in non-existence.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Morally speaking people could argue that torturing immortal people is worse.

However legally speaking to you don't kill them and therefore the immortals are preferred.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

No murder charge, just infinite attempted murder charges

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

That would mean you did it on purpose. But you didn't power the trolley. You "accidentally" flipped the switch... And left. Since you can't do more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Though I do wonder whether a sufficiently good lawyer could argue that it's not attempted murder if you knew they were immortal

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I think the ones in the loop become Cenobites.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Isn't Stockholm Syndrome fake?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Actually upon looking it up, there is some suggestion that it is fake.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

The abominable billionaire loop makes me happy

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month 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] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Or we could just untie them

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hell couldn't be real because humans would eventually fetishize any pain input and dump buckets forever.

Some webcomic I saw back in the earlier days of the Internet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Allegedly it isn't a place where you are tortured, but instead a state of permanent depression from being cut off from God. Just the former is easier for pop culture to portray.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

I mean, no? Its given in the question that option one is an infinite amount of people. Its not limited to just the existing human race.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

People really complaining about Calc 2?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Isn't the top case just how things are now?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

It can be, usually for college credit though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Programmer asks: how many bits for the integer?

At 32 bits it's "just" a Thanos snap with extra pain