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possibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?
by hnriot 13y ago
possibly that someone clearly very smart wasted his/her intellect doing this, rather than advancing the species by curing obesity, heart disease and cancer?
- scott_s 13y agoWhich is a silly notion. Everyone needs entertainment and to have fun. Some people do it in different ways than others.
- Noxchi 13y agoThe first two are already curable (with food).
- raldi 13y agoDo you feel the same way when someone bakes a cake, takes a walk, watches a sporting event, knits a sweater, or writes a poem?
- ionforce 13y agoI think that people view art as a side effect of abundance. It is something that naturally arises given a surplus of some thing. The point of contention here is that someone of that level of intellect has "wasted" their talent on art, rather than productivity, which "should" come first. For varying definitions of "should" and "wasted", of course.
- gambler 13y agoThe effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.
- cpayne 13y agoIt depends on the quality of cake you are eating. There's a massive difference between a chocolate birthday cake for a 4 yr old or Profiteroles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiterole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiterole
- raldi 13y agoYou have no idea how long it took to write this program. I bet it's less than the amount of time a typical baseball fan spends watching games over the course of a season. P.S. Knitting a sweater takes forever too. Especially if it has buttons.
- bennyg 13y agoWho cares about whether a person should build an Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks or go try to solve cancer? Pushing humanity forward is great - and so is finding personal happiness and growth through exploration. Don't knock one or the other; in fact, don't knock any at all. Both are ways to ascribe meaning to this meaningless place.
- jlgreco 13y agoThe sort of attitude he is demonstrating is backed by some sort of perverse notion that "smart" people somehow owe so much more to society than the rest of humanity that they should not have hobbies because that would delay them paying back their debt. I don't know what could cause somebody to adopt such a twisted notion, but I think the roots of it go deeper than I care to know.
- breadbox 13y agoI also know plenty of people who waste their intellect painting canvases, when they could be advancing the species by doing something practical. Shall we shed a tear for their wasted efforts as well? But of course not. Art is its own justification. And this program, my friends? This is art.
- gambler 13y agoArt that only exists for the sake of existing, without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind - art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make it any less wasteful use of human time and attention. Personally, I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved.
- epidemian 13y ago> without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind I hope you're just being sarcastic.
- breadbox 13y ago"I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved." Nor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine. I respect it because it stimulates my mind. My imagination is moved by it in much the same way that it's moved by holding an acorn in my hand while contemplating a fully grown oak tree. Or studying the math that causes z <- z^2 + C to describe a ridiculously intricate shape. Or implementing my own minimal Lisp interpreter from scratch. Or trying to understand the Banach-Tarski paradox. These things stimulate my sense of wonder because they're like a magic trick, but there's no trickery involved. And when I contemplate them, I learn more about the world. Art cannot aspire to much more than that.
- gambler 13y agoNor will I, or much of anyone else, I imagine. Yet people gladly upvote stories about computers implemented insite Minecraft and life-size spaceships made out of Lego blocks. Are you saying it has nothing to do with the difficulty involved? I doubt this story would be equally well received if there was some easy way to achieve the same result. If you take difficulty of the task out of the equation, what will be left? How much of what's left is genuine creativity and skill, and how much is mere patience?
- lifeformed 13y agoSmart people are too burdened with the responsibility to save the world to spend on leisure.
- nazgulnarsil 13y agoWe don't owe you shit, it was like this when we got here.
- scythe 13y agoThis criticism could also be applied to, say, the entirety of pure mathematics. What is sad is that the author probably has no plan to explain how it was accomplished, which prevents anyone from learning from this.
- omoikane 13y agoThe author has explained it, here: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20130715/p1 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20130715/p1 In the "spoiler" section: """ Normally quines are made like this: s = (something that generates your own source code) puts s At the same time, a Ruby program that outputs a Perl program looks like this: puts "print(\"...\");" If you combine these with quine methods, you get a multi-quine that goes between Ruby and Perl: s = (something that generates your own source code) puts "print(\"#{ s }\");" Theoretically you just repeat this process. Except, there are the following practical problems: - Need proper escaping + Lots of old languages do not support C style of escape sequences. + Depending on languages, you need to escape interpolations. - Cobol and Fortran programs have troublesome constraints + Need 7 spaces on the left and less than 80 columns per line, etc. - Naive escaping will cause intermediate files to get too large. + JVM Strings have 64K size limit. + Languages like Intercal and Whitespace will become unbearably slow. In order to avoid these, Perl requires something like ppencode, Java needs LZW compression to avoid string size limits. Cobol's line length limit was satisfied using Closure generator, Fortran's line length limit was satisfied using Coffeescript generator. People who are interested should see the generated code. """ In general, there isn't any standard method to making quines. You just keep on tweaking the code until the input and output matches, mostly by trial and error.
- wicknicks 13y agoI don't think people want to spend all their time trying to fight cancer or heart disease. Once in a while, you really need to get your mind to work on entirely useless things. IMO, that sort of mental workout makes people tackle the real hard problems better.
- wpietri 13y agoIf I make a ranked list of all the ways that people spend their time, I cannot imagine a sensible scoring algorithm that puts making a quine relay lower in value than posting an internet comment bitching about somebody making a quine relay.
- jbranchaud 13y ago+1, imagining the scoring algorithm you mention would even rank higher than the posting of that comment!
- shawn-furyan 13y agoVery funny. I think it might be possible to come up with a sensible algorithm that yields such a result. If so, it would definitely have $time_spent in a denominator somewhere :) [edited to improve wording]
- aerolite 13y agobitching about someone making a quine relay takes like 10 seconds, though.
- saraid216 13y agoThat's because there's only ten seconds' worth of intelligence going into the bitching. A truly worthwhile bitching would take at least an hour.
- andyhmltn 13y agoSo are you saying that if he had not spent his time doing this, he would have cured cancer? You're forgetting the amount of people this will inspire to go on and create amazing software.
- Seeless 13y agoThis wasn't made by a doctor or a biochemist.
- chernevik 13y agoSo the guy who did this must spend his time solving the problems people cause for themselves by eating too much, exercising too little? And smoking? I don't think so.