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by fennecfoxen 2226 days ago
> According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, your universe branched into many universes the moment you decided to use a for-loop. In this universe you wrote a for-loop, but in another universe you wrote a while-loop.

Nonsense. If universes branch into many other universes, they do so when an event on the quantum level needs to be resolved. I presume that during any single decision-making operation, there are trillions of probabilistic quantum events took place in your brain, but your decision to use the for loop was almost certainly fully deterministic, because at this point in time you personally almost always pick for-loops.
2 comments
fastball 2226 days ago
I was actually delighted to discover that I've matured (ossified?) enough as a programmer that my source code is in fact fairly deterministic: the other day I somehow managed to completely wipe a fairly complex function (100+ LoC) from my repo before I committed it. I did this a week or so after I initially wrote the function. I then rewrote the function from scratch, with very little memory of how I wrote it the first time, just knowledge of what it needed to do. Ironically enough, almost as soon as I finished writing this function, I found a copy of the original one that I'd somehow stashed and forgotten about, and the two functions were literally identical.
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ChristianBundy 2225 days ago
Interesting, I've noticed the exact opposite. For me, rewriting a program produces a slightly different program with different trade-offs. It's rare to have the time to build a bunch of different implementations of the same code, but when I have time it results in code that I'm very happy with.
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hachibu 2226 days ago
That's pretty cool actually. That speaks to your consistency as a programmer.
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codethief 2226 days ago
Exactly. If I may add: We (as humans) don't get to choose when and where god flips the coin. Any claims to the contrary fall in the realm of esoterics.

For a similar reason the measurement problem and the question of whether the presence of (conscious) observers makes the wave function collapse should not be misinterpreted as "You can influence reality with your thoughts alone" or "If you believe in something strongly enough, it will happen."

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