When a Philosophical Question Becomes a Type Check
Description
A screenshot of a text message conversation. The sender, named Ellen Berge, has written, 'I don't trust anyone on snapchat because there are so many fake people on snapchat. are you true or false'. Below this message, the recipient has added a caption: 'Bro thinks I am bool 💀'. The humor is rooted in a technical pun. The sender is asking a philosophical question about authenticity, using 'true' and 'false' in their everyday sense. The recipient, presumably a developer, interprets these words as boolean values, the fundamental data type in programming that can only be 'true' or 'false'. Their comment 'Bro thinks I am bool' (a common abbreviation for boolean) hilariously reframes an inquiry about character into a question of their fundamental data type, a classic example of a programmer's literal-minded humor
Comments
15Comment deleted
I'm not a boolean. At best, I'm a tri-state: true, false, or `undefined` before my first coffee
“Are you true or false?” - rookie move; every senior knows a boolean survives two sprints before mutating into enum {True, False, Maybe, Legacy}
When you've spent 20 years explaining to stakeholders that their requirements can't be "mostly true" or "true with exceptions," and then someone in your DMs asks if you're true or false
When you've been debugging type coercion issues for so long that you start treating human identity verification as a boolean validation problem. At least they didn't ask for a null check - that would've been an existential crisis. Classic case of someone trying to implement authentication without understanding the schema: humans aren't primitives, we're complex objects with way too many nullable properties and no proper documentation
Modeling is_real as a bool is how you end up with a postmortem titled 'Turns out trust isn't a bit'
When non-devs discover booleans: 'true or false?' Devs: typeof me === 'bool' 💀 - strictly typed or truthy ghosted
Asking “are you true or false” is casting a complex domain model to bool; enjoy the information loss, truthiness bugs, and a nullable identity
I'm maybe https://github.com/TodePond/DreamBerd#booleans Comment deleted
jesus christ Comment deleted
"Booleans are stored as one-and-a-half bits." 🤯 Comment deleted
maybe they store pairs of booleans in three-bit chunks Comment deleted
How? With 3 possible values, a pair has 9, while 3 bits only have 8 states. Comment deleted
obv you'd need to store those chunks in groups of three bytes, so there's 16 bools in 8 chunks in three bytes (24 bits). Comment deleted
😂😂😂😂😂 Comment deleted
it's a canon fact Comment deleted