For software to run on a computer, it needs to tell the computer what to do, “display this picture of a flower”, “move my character to the left”, “save this poem to a file”.

And for a bunch of different software to all run on the same machine, they all need to use the same basic set of instructions, this is called the machine’s Instruction Set.

Because the instruction set has to work for any software, these instructions don’t look that readable to us, instead of “show this flower” they might be “move this bit of memory into the processor”, but software builds up millions of those instructions to eventually display a flower.

Intel processors used a set of instructions that were called x86, and then when AMD made a rival processor, they made theirs use the same instruction set so that their processors would be compatible with all the software written for Intel processors (and when they needed to move from 32bit instructions to 64bit instructions, they made a new set called x64).

Meanwhile Apple computers for a long time used processors built by IBM that used IBMs PowerPC instruction set.

Now many companies are using the ARM instruction set, but ARM is still a private company you have to pay licensing fees to, so RISC-V is rising as a new, truly open source and free to use instruction set.

You work a job that uses PowerShell and you refuse to learn or use it. You are creating problems for yourself.

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Because an object is good at representing a noun, not a verb, and when expressing logical flows and concepts, despite what Java will tell you, not everything is in fact, a noun.

I.e. in OOP languages that do not support functional programming as first class (like Java), you end up with a ton of overhead and unnecessary complications and objects named like generatorFactoryServiceCreatorFactory because the language forces you to creat a noun (object) to take an action rather than just create a verb (function) and pass that around.

Answer: there’d be far less software in the world, it would all be more archaic and less useful, and our phones and laptops would just sit at 2% utilization most of the time.

There’s an opportunity cost to everything, including fussing over whether that value can be stored as an int instead of a double to save 8 bits of space. High level languages let developers express their feature and business logic faster, with fewer bugs, and much lower ongoing maintenance costs.

The point I’m making is that philosophers are trying to answer questions and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be getting PhDs, since a PhD is not given for just knowing a lot about Philosophy, but for discovering something new in the field.

Much like how martial arts is no longer as useful for self defence in a world with handguns, but instead makes for very good exercise and social connections, and is just fun.

Except that a key difference is that no one gives out PhDs for martial arts. Yes you can get a black belt, signalling that you are as skilled as the top tier martial artists (I assume, I don’t do martial arts), but you cannot write a peer reviewed paper and get a PhD on karate because that would require learning something new about it and publishing it.

Philosophy in how the common person relates to it may just be as a mental kata that helps to improve their cognition and emotional regulation, but philosophy as a profession and academic discipline is still very much concerned with trying to answer questions and find ways of constraining the infinite to relevant possible answers.

No, I honestly just started here, and started playing around with the example, and then started turning that into what I wanted and googling when I needed to: https://ochafik.com/openscad2/

For 3D Modelling / Printing, if you have even a little bit of programming / scripting ability, OpenSCAD is amazing.

It’s basically just a small scripting language for generating 3D objects and performing 3D modelling operations and its so handy to be able to store important info as precise variables, and create new objects and cuts and stuff just with for loops and if statements.

I use the web version a lot of the time, and while it could use a little work, it’s pretty amazing.

Sure, but at a fundamental level philosophers are not just sitting there asking questions with no purpose. They’re still seeking new understanding and information which is a form of answering questions.

I would argue that it absolutely applies to both existentialism and epistemology. Epistemologists frequently concern themselves with questions about the limits of human knowledge and understanding without actually going there themselves.

Philosophers literally invented formal logic to help them answer questions. Yes they are trying to answer questions and constrain the possible answer space where they can’t.

The problem with philosophy in terms of understanding the bigger questions in life is that advanced physics (edit: and neuroscience, chemistry, math/stats, etc) has answered many questions that were previously in the realm of philosophy, and you can’t really understand what’s possible in reality / what constraints there are on abstract philosophy without understanding advanced physics and science.

Of course the problem with advanced physics is that it takes so much time and effort to learn and understand thoroughly that you often end up as a not great communicator to the average person.

Or, to be cheeky: physics aims to take the largest and most complicated concepts in the universe and explain them in the simplest possible language, and philosophy is the opposite.

And Canada as a whole has a massive real estate affordability crisis, with Toronto housing being exceptionally unaffordable relative to real wages.

Yes we do. FPGAs and memristors can both recreate those effects at the hardware level. The problem is scaling them and their necessary number of interconnections to the number of neurons in the human brain, on top of getting their base wiring and connections close to how our genetics build and wires our base brains.

Licensing reduces the number of guns in circulation and ensures that their owners are more responsible than the average unlicensed owner, making their guns less likely to end up on the black market.

Outside of potentially a car or truck, all of those things take significant time and planning.

The reality of most murders is that they do not happen when given a cooling off period. Similar to suicides, they’re often situational and in the moment.

Because every other country with similar problems can be slapped with the label of “underdeveloped”, I assume?

What countries are you thinking of?

“Gun violence” is not a cause of death. Murder is.

Technically no, a bullet wound is, or a stab wound, or blunt force trauma, but murder is the legal definition of a crime that involves death, circumstances, and intent.

Do you think if they took away the guns, people would just stop being violent? Or that they would just find another tool?

I think that they would find another tool, be forced to decide whether to commit to a close quarters fight to the death instead of sitting back and spraying from a distance, and in the vast majority of situations the overall outcome will be far less severe and easier for police and security to contain.

Have you really thought about it?

That’s not why.

Lol, yes it is absolutely part of the reason.

It’s because not enough people care

Yes, that is also part of the reason.

and because police work for the government and secure the interests of the government, so putting them in jail is essentially kneecapping yourself if you’re a politician.

No, that is the case in literally every single other country too.

Again, nothing to do with firearms and everything to do with culture.

Sounds like a gun owner in denial, not a reasoned point.

What’s insane is thinking that we are the only country in the world with a problem with violence.

You are the only developed western country with a problem as severe as yours. You’re the only one where there are regular and repeated mass killings. You are the only one where violence, and specifically gun violence, is a leading cause of death amongst children.

The Nice, France mass murderer killed more people with a commercial truck than any mass shooter in history.

Yes and more Americans have been killed by gun violence in 2024 so far.

I’m not as hardcore as most, I run windows as my main OS, but I do love my LG Gram 17" laptop from ~3-4 years ago.

It’s powerful enough for general use, webdev, and very light 3D modelling, and it is insanely light and portable. I have a 14" MacBook at work and the gram is lighter than it, thinner, not that much bigger, and far more durable.

Great keyboard and trackpad, giant screen (I wish it was brighter but this is the version from 3-4 years ago), and surprisingly solid Bluetooth, microphone, thunderbolt etc.