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Cake day: September 3rd, 2024

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  • leftytighty@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    6 days ago

    This is a fair point. It becomes a matter of which questions we’re asking as a society, though. Of course we are not at a stage where capital is the only driving force for science (thank goodness for public funding) but it’s not far fetched that we might be, and a world where questions are only asked in the context of profit generation (and unsatisfying answers are suppressed) is a dystopian world indeed.

    It’s fair to say capitalism is having a negative impact on science (e.g. journals) but it’s not as dire as what’s suggested


  • leftytighty@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    7 days ago

    Capitalism isn’t just about “things need funding” the point of the meme is that capitalists determine what gets funding. A socialist state might put economic force behind other scientific endeavors, ones driven by capital are intended to create profit. The profit motive drives innovation instead of the pure ideological pursuit of truth or any other driver.



  • I basically stole your comment but made a worse version. On this note, though, there’s sometimes value in using words like “fix” or other kinds of tagging or consistent formatting in the sense that you can do a meta-analysis of the repo history to look at trends (like the ratio of fixes to feature work) over time.

    Issue tracking software obviates that, somewhat, but having that info embedded in the repo history lets you go further and look at which files have the most fixes etc.

    Existing tools out there sometimes do this exact thing, but it can be manually done as well



  • Worth noting that this is stored in the repository alongside the code changes and can be referenced in the future if someone is trying to understand that code or fix a bug in that code.

    For large projects spanning long periods of time sometimes the best way to find a bug’s cause is to scour the projects history to find out which commit caused the bug to appear, and if that commit doesn’t have a good description you’re unnecessarily disadvantaged when trying to find out why it caused the problem or what assumptions were going into the original code.