To understand terminal capitalism, first you must understand recursion.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      3 days ago

      What is capitalism if not recursion? Spending more and more resources on falling into a bottomless pit.

      • neatchee@piefed.social
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        3 days ago

        Not to be pedantic, and I do appreciate the humor, but that’s not recursion either :3 Recursion doesn’t need to be endless. Recursive functions can absolutely have logical termination.

        • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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          24 hours ago

          What does capitalism do but logically terminate resources?

          But note taken. I just think the comparison is inspiring.

          • neatchee@piefed.social
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            12 hours ago

            Logically terminating resources does not imply a terminating logic loop. Clever wordplay, though.

            Recursion has a specific definition. It means solving a problem by breaking a process down into smaller and smaller self-similar pieces until reaching the “base case”. In programming, it (almost) always means a function that calls itself as part of its internal logic. Depending on what the function does and the conditions for returning a value from the function, it may do that one time, many times, or not at all. A classic example is the Boggle solver.

            I did say I was being pedantic :P

      • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        Oh, I meant the ping pong loop of the GitHub bot and it was pure technical nitpicking. But since you’re asking, the definition of recursion is a function calling itself. I find it difficult thinking about capitalism as a single function. For me it looks more like running an infinite loop on finite resources. But applying a technical term as a metaphor leaves a lot of room for interpretation, so there is no right or wrong