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> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.

It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.


His 18yo son overdosed on fentanyl in 2018.

I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person.

He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352


He and been way off the rails for decades before that.

In fact, growing up in the very affluent part of my city, I saw a bunch of kids die using opiates to mentally escape the weird family fiefdoms where they [p/m]atriarch inexplicably wouldn't ever need for money, so went completely off the rails mentally. I was prescribed a bunch of opiates (including fent) after a bad ski accident, and can tell you that they basically work by turning down the volume on life around you. I can understand why someone would turn to them to mentally escape a bad family life.

About the only good thing I can say about recreational Xanax is that those kids are generally still alive in contrast to the ones who preferred opiates.


People are dying from recreational Xanax because it’s more and more cut with fent.

That is awful.

But his (first) divorce was in 2014 and his blog posts already seemed bitter around that time.

Edit: as another comment points out, it was a few years even earlier than that so I stand corrected.


His (in)famous sockpuppetry on Metafilter happened back in 2011, so he was a bit off well before his divorce or stepson's death.

Here's the link to that for context if anyone else is curious: https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...

his posts on that site are fantastic! Also, someone replied "Welcome to Metafilter Scott" on his first post.

He was already quite vocally pro-Trump during the primaries and 2016 presidential run.

He wasn't though. He was simply analyzing the communication styöe of Trump, using his hypnosis knowledge, and explained why and how it was better (more efficient) than the competitors. This turned out to be true, giving him the win, just like Scott Adams predicted.

The description of reality is not at all the same as supporting it. "Is" vs. "Ought to be".


His explanation why he endorsed Hillary Clinton was pretty lunatic though.

Can definitely see how that'd warm someone up to a politician who is crippling drug enforcement capabilities, addiction treatment programs, and addiction research... errr wait.

I suspect that having a family and knowing that blowback from your behavior will affect them is a moderating factor for a lot of people.

I suspect growing up in an era where community, the newspaper, radio and TV spewed religious, racist, and sexist content gradually increased sensory memory related neural activity that fostered biochemical and epigenetic effects that over time become effectively immutable.

Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.


So explain the existence of liberals and Democrats in America.

I did. Different genetic expressions. The intelligence to realize language is just memes, not truth.

Scott Adams put himself on a pedestal above anyone else in his comics; he was Dilbert. The only smart person in the room. He was always a celebrity obsessed with his own existence. Little difference between him and Tim the Toolman or a Kardashian.

Low effort contributor whose work people laughed at due to social desirability bias. No big loss.


That's a really wild, miserable reading of the strip. For one, Adams himself was a manager, not an engineer, so he had more in common with the PHB, or even dogbert/catbert than Dilbert. For another, he explicitly said Dilbert was based on a specific, undisclosed person he knew. For yet another, many strips were based on anecdotes/stories sent to Adams by his readers.

it doesn't take even a serious reading of Adams to realize he was dogbert, not Dilbert. He mocked Dilbert, he thought he was a loser that did understand how to manipulate the system.

> industrially, McD's in at least North America used beef tallow as one of the par-frying oils for their fries well into the 21st century

Everything I've read says that McDonald's switched globally to vegetable oil in the early 1990s. I think you've misremembered.


Right. They used solid blocks in the 1990s, but it was vegetable oil not beef tallow. Of course to make vegetable oil a solid block they had to make it a trans-far which is worse than saturated fat (as we now know, but didn't then). In the late 1990s they switched to a liquid oil, though I don't know how what it was (I suspect it still had a lot of trans fats, but I don't have information on the composition). I quit just after that, but I think they switched the fat used again in the early 2000s to something that was pure vegetable oil.

> This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.

Associative array is just a fancy term for map / dictionary. C++ has always had one of those, even before TR1: std::map (which is a tree under the hood). It does have the extra requirement that your key be ordered, which isn't part of the core definition of associate array[1]. But usually it's not a problem even if you don't actually need the ordering.

As I think you're implying, TR1 / C++11 added std::unordered_map, which is a hash table and doesn't need keys to be ordered (just hashable).

[1] It isn't part of the core definition of "map" either, which despite C++'s usage just means the same thing as dictionary / associative array. A lot of those early STL containers are confusingly named: e.g., in general, "list" just means some ordered sequence of elements, so it covers static arrays, dynamic arrays, and linked lists, but C++ uses this term for linked lists, probably the least likely understood meaning. It use of the term "vector" for contiguous dynamic arrays is very odd. But I'm now way off topic...


> I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.

That is just not what the word violent means (unless used figuratively but I don't think that's what you mean). It means hurting, or attempting to hurt, a person (or maybe an animal). Setting fire or blowing up a home which might have people still in it is certainly violent, but destroying property for the sake or property destruction is not.

Of course, deliberately attacking someone with a sledgehammer certainly is.


There are a lot of definitions for violence, but most would include "destruction" along with "harm", "pain", "suffering" and so on.

If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?

If my nation was at war with yours, and we dropped a bomb on your weapons factory, would you count that as violent, or non-violent?


FWIW, if you did that to my house I'd be upset and angry and not much inclined to use the word "just" about it, but no, I wouldn't say you'd been violent to me.

(I would say you'd been violent to me if you'd slapped me in the face. I would rather be slapped in the face than have my house ransacked and smashed up. Some not-violent things are worse than some violent things.)

If you dropped a bomb on a weapons factory that had, or plausibly could have had, people in it then that would unquestionably be an act of violence. If you somehow knew that there was nothing there but hardware then I wouldn't call it an act of violence.

(In practice, I'm pretty sure that when you drop a bomb you scarcely ever know that you're not going to injure or kill anyone.)

I'm not claiming that this is the only way, or the only proper way, to use the word "violence". But, so far as I can tell from introspection, it is how I would use it.

There are contexts in which I would use the word "violence" to include destruction that only affects things and not people. But they'd be contexts that already make it clear that it's things and not people being affected. E.g., "We smashed up that misbehaving printer with great violence, and very satisfying it was too".


> If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?

There's certainly implied violence. Like, if you done that once, maybe you'll be back tomorrow when I happen to be in, and actually be violent to me. And even if that weren't the case, I'd still obviously be very distressed about the situation.

But, having said all that, no I wouldn't say you had been violent, if you hadn't actually tried to hurt anyone.

If you dropped a bomb on an abandoned or fully automated factory, that you could be 100% sure doesn't have any people in it - then I still wouldn't count that as "violent" (except maybe figuratively), no matter how destructive.


I don't really understand the distinction here. Are you saying that it's not possible to harm someone by damaging their property?

Sure I destroyed their car and they weren't able to go to work and got fired, but I didn't physically attack them so no harm done.


One member did very violently attack a police officer:

> A police sergeant was left unable to drive, shower or dress herself after a Palestine Action activist allegedly hit her with a sledgehammer during a break-in at an Israeli defence firm's UK site, a trial has heard.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g54g1r15eo

Of course, one violent member does not make an organisation into a terrorist organisation. But, just as a matter of fact, there has been some actual violence against a person.


That article says "at least 19 protesters and one member of the security forces have been killed", although that was as of a few days ago.

The numbers you quoted are from the end of the article, which is about the previous demonstrations in 2022.

(In fairness, it's confusing because BBC News articles put almost every sentence into its own paragraph, which I think is intended to help low literacy people read them. But it does make it hard to follow the connections between sentences that really ought to be together in a paragraph, like in this case.)


Oh, oops… thanks for the correction. Must’ve skimmed it too quickly.


> Point being someone eating a couple bags of jerky over a workday would probably count as having eaten literal pounds of beef

For the purposes of this conversation, about the nutritional effect of your diet, that seems like a fair way to put it.


If I understand it right, in principle the compiler doesn't even need to do that.

It can just leave the result totally uninitialised. That's because both code paths have undefined behaviour: whichever of result.x or result.y is not set is still copied at "return result" which is undefined behaviour, so the overall function has undefined behaviour either way.

It could even just replace the function body with abort(), or omit the implementation entirely (even the ret instruction, allowing execution to just fall through to whatever memory happens to follow). Whether any computer does that in practice is another matter.


> It can just leave the result totally uninitialised. That's because both code paths have undefined behaviour: whichever of result.x or result.y is not set is still copied at "return result" which is undefined behaviour, so the overall function has undefined behaviour either way.

That is incorrect, per the resolution of DR222 (partially initialized structures) at WG14:

> This DR asks the question of whether or not struct assignment is well defined when the source of the assignment is a struct, some of whose members have not been given a value. There was consensus that this should be well defined because of common usage, including the standard-specified structure struct tm.

As long as the caller doesn't read an uninitialised member, it's completely fine.


Ooh, thanks for mentioning DR222 that's very interesting.


Any good rule of thumb like the one in GP's comment is wrong sometimes, and that's ok. Adding more caveats just dilutes it without ever really making it watertight (if you'll forgive the very mixed metaphor).

But even in complex applications, there's still truth to the idea that your code will get simpler over time. Mostly because you might come up with better abstractions so that at least the complex bit is more isolated from the rest of the logic. That way, each chunk of code is individually easier to understand, as is the relationship between them, even if the overall complexity is actually higher.


Technically (or, at least, historically), they should have used the indefinite pronoun "one" i.e. "...because their defense systems seem overly sensitive to one's email address". But I imagine that would've got more comments than using you/your.


No, using “your” in such a context is a manipulation tactic.


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