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Apologies, but I still don't know how to respond in a situation like this. Can I ask how you would respond to this case yourself? I hope you can at least see wh

Apologies, but I still don't know how to respond in a situation like this. Can I ask how you would respond to this case yourself? I hope you can at least see why I found it difficult to swallow when people shut down my comment telling me there's zero similarity between a 99.99% case and a 100% case. It seems needlessly hyperbolic to me at best, and quite obviously frustrating. Looking back, I almost feel like it baited me into this. How do you see this from your standpoint? Does it feel like a good-faith comment to you that they can't tell why I would see 99.99% and 100% as similar?

300bps 5y ago
I hope I can answer that for you. The core issue is that you are taking the original point out of context and kind of robotically parsing snippets. Context is important. For example, chimpanzee DNA is 99% identical to human DNA. Without context you could make the argument, “They are almost identical!” and be correct. But in the context of discussing the ability to fly to the moon and return safely, the two genomes are completely different.
- dataflow 5y ago
  I appreciate the reply. I don't understand what context you believe I was missing? The analogy is incredibly confusing to me too, because humans are more than their DNA: you obviously can't hardlink humans, nor could you replace them with stubs that call some "common" humans, it's not like the obstacle to doing these goes away even with 100% equal DNA vs. 99%. But with computer code, you very much can (for example) easily replace all the executables with a combined one that gets hardlinked with different names, such that they behave differently depending on argv[0]. They don't even need to be 100% identical for us to be able to do this; it works just as well with 1% identical code—you just end up with bigger combined binaries. This is the Busybox approach (notice it combines executables that have hardly anything in common), and it's in fact exactly what Clang already sometimes does (like on MSYS2); one would think they could take the same approach here. This is also precisely the context of the comment I replied to was saying, right? This is the context I was replying to. It's so confusing to me that you claim I'm missing context when I was in fact addressing the context I saw directly—and it was the other comments that were not.

300bps 5y ago

I hope I can answer that for you. The core issue is that you are taking the original point out of context and kind of robotically parsing snippets. Context is important. For example, chimpanzee DNA is 99% identical to human DNA. Without context you could make the argument, “They are almost identical!” and be correct. But in the context of discussing the ability to fly to the moon and return safely, the two genomes are completely different.

dataflow 5y ago
I appreciate the reply. I don't understand what context you believe I was missing? The analogy is incredibly confusing to me too, because humans are more than their DNA: you obviously can't hardlink humans, nor could you replace them with stubs that call some "common" humans, it's not like the obstacle to doing these goes away even with 100% equal DNA vs. 99%. But with computer code, you very much can (for example) easily replace all the executables with a combined one that gets hardlinked with different names, such that they behave differently depending on argv[0]. They don't even need to be 100% identical for us to be able to do this; it works just as well with 1% identical code—you just end up with bigger combined binaries. This is the Busybox approach (notice it combines executables that have hardly anything in common), and it's in fact exactly what Clang already sometimes does (like on MSYS2); one would think they could take the same approach here. This is also precisely the context of the comment I replied to was saying, right? This is the context I was replying to. It's so confusing to me that you claim I'm missing context when I was in fact addressing the context I saw directly—and it was the other comments that were not.