Recently I wanted to refer to the general populace of the divisions by zero, but it occurred to me we don’t have a good shorthand for it,. I.e. like one talks about “lemmings” or “redditors”. We could use something for members of lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Ideas?
These are mostly joke suggestions, but:
NaNs
nulls
voids
unhandled exceptions
… common theme here is the math/programming joke, but many of them also capture elements of anarchism, or can be interpreted as adopting a self-referential moniker which mocking the systems anarchists critique.
… probably it is a bit of a reach, but a good number of people refer to black cats as ‘voids’ these days, and … pretty decent history of angry black cats as symbols of anarchism.
You could also maybe l33tsp33k them up a bit?
Use ‘z’ instead of ‘s’ to pluralize?
first I didn’t understand, but this way “unhandled exceptions” sounds very cool. maybe a bit long though
Depending on what programming language you are using, and precisely how you’ve coded a function, which exact numerical data types, and functions/methods you are using…
Actually attempting to divide something by zero will result in either NaN, Not a Number, Null, or an Unhandled Exception, as an… output value/error type.
I tried to explain ‘void’ a bit better, Im not personally familiar with any code language that’ll have ‘void’ as an output/error type when you try to divide by zero… but most people use the phrase ‘null and void’, so, my brain associated that word in as well.
As far as how those terms refer back to an anarchist mindset?
I am ‘not a number’, I am a human being, so are all others.
Null or nulled out has been a cyberpunkish slang term to refer to both an individual being seen as inherently unspecial, not unique, made into just another consumer/commodity… as well referring to actually killing or otherwise neutralizing someone or something… for decades now.
It seems you get the less programmy meaning of ‘unhandled exception’, in the ‘become ungovernable’ sense, but now hopefully you also get the math/programmer meaning, and see how these all work as double entendres or at least have somewhat esoteric meanings.
… The problem is that they don’t work as well in common speech as a replacement for common nouns… with at least one of the reasons why that is the case being that evidently the multifarious meanings are too esoteric, lol, which is why I said I was mostly proposing these as jokes.
no I understand the programming side of it, I meant how “unhandled exceptions” translates to the real world that I didn’t get immediately (exactly that it’s similar to “be ungovernable”, as you said)