To be fair, I wouldnt be that shocked to find out thats how the maintainer of some core library exists. Permanently on life support, because no one else can understand their code.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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I think you just described every COBOL programmers retirement.
Basically the Emperor of Mankind, being kept alive else all of humanity as we know it is doomed.
"He's coding! I need a red bull, cargo shorts, and quiet classic rock, stat!"
NO that is the WRONG kind of coding!!
We need a monster, a short skirt, some stripey colorful thigh high socks, and Vocaloid music!
The heart beating is not a good definition of being alive in my opinion. The heart stopping temporarily doesn't mean you died, you were just in terribly grave danger.
If a person is defined by their heart, what does that make a heart transplant?
utterly useless definition.
no, we should use the heart beating as a definition. why? because then I can say I'm undead and have died twice. that's very cool 😎 pls don't take that away from me 🥺 :(
As an old and now retired medic. My personal definition of dead was if you made into the back of my amp-a-lamps or not. If you did you weren't dead-- you were merely having a bit of a bad day. I might have needed to do your breathing for you and I might have needed to make your heart pump blood. But until some doctor somewhere decided you weren't worth his time and effort, you were still alive. Because I don't haul dead people.
So, by my definition as a trained and professional medical person, you where never dead-dead. Just someone have a bad day among many others having a bad day at that time.
And how is lichdom treating you? Have you raised an army of skeleton warriors yet?
But if you've died, then were undead, and then died again, you'd be un-undead right? So alive? It's basic double jeopardy.
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We are all the cardiac system of Theseus on this glorious day.
It's a good thing that the lack of a heartbeat isn't the ultimate definition of dead. But it can be one of the markers of dead.
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My heart stops after every beat. Fortunately it has always started again before the next one....so far.
people say quitting smoking is hard. I don't understand, I do it multiple times a day.
We use a lot to define being alive not just the heart. The heart stopping is just an easy way to pronounce someone dead. What you described is called a pause. Not really the same thing. Brain death is also a thing. Any organ transplant allows you to function when otherwise you wouldn't be able to.
I meant like, when someones heart stops and gets restarted again with cpr or a defibrillator or something. People often call that being dead, and coming back.
So if someones heart stops we don't actually shock them. That's a medical show myth. We shock them if they're in something called a lethal rhythm. Which is the heart beating but not actually pumping blood. Very similar to the heart stopping and will eventually lead to the heart giving out. CPR keeps the blood flowing which keeps oxygen moving throughout the body preventing permanent damage. We give medications to restart the heart. They don't really die until these interventions are stopped. Some people also have a pacemaker that detects their heart going into a lethal rhythm and will take over the electrical impulse until their heart goes back to normal. By the definition of the heart stopping this person would technically die and be brought back too. So I see what you're saying but I wanted to add some context that this is pretty complex. Even more so when you bring in people deciding when they don't want these interventions.
Brain oxygen levels are the most important one iirc
Because once those hit a certain danger threshold there's not much to 'bring back' right? I vaguely recall reading that somewhere.
Brains fail catastrophically and unrecoverably pretty quickly after being starved of oxygen. I don't like the chances of the frozen people who hope to be reanimated in the future
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Hey why do you think they call it "grave" danger
i know this is a joke, but i find it quite interesting those two words have completely different etymologies.
Grave as in burial site comes from an old proto indo european word for "dig", while grave as in serious comes from french.
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Yeah the poster talking about "coding" is talking a bit of nonsense. "Coding" here is slang for "code blue" which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. "Coding" is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.
And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an "arrest call". It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other "codes" that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.
Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn't have other meanings). I wouldn't be surprised if some US hospitals also don't use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.
In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an "arrest call". It is unambiguous
I'm pretty sure the emergency services have another kind of arrest
So we used a color system that's mostly standardized. Code blue is respiratory or cardiac arrest, code red is fire, code gray is security, etc. we're changing to plain language as that's been shown to be best practice. Everything is still a code though. We've had code trauma, code stemi, code stroke. We also have rapid response for anything that doesn't meet a code criteria but still needs assistance. My favorite was code brown for severe weather alert as that was our slang for cleaning a patient.
Nothing you've said is wrong, but (at least in the screenshot) the OP didn't say anything about it being used in anything official. It's a relatively common term in everyday language thanks to medical dramas which use coding a lot, and it's even in the Merriam-Webster medical dictionary.
Not to invalidate what you've said! Just pointing out that it not being used in official contexts doesn't make it nonsense to use elsewhere, like on some forum.
Thank you for these insights!
CPR doesn't bring a decompensated body back to life. You gotta figure out the problem in order to do that and fix it. That's what the algorithms we use in a code is for (as opposed to the algorithms you guys code). That's the real esoteric necromancy. Epi, bicarb, epi.
https://hospitalhandbook.ucsf.edu/04-comprehensive-acls-algorithm/04-comprehensive-acls-algorithm
But they are literally dead
Not having a heartbeat and not breathing doesn't mean you're dead. Intensive care departments are literally full of people with medically paralysed breathing muscles (i.e. not breathing) on ventilation machines. People go onto heart/lung bypass machines everyday to have heart surgery and their heart is stopped. You just need to keep oxygenated blood going around, keeping those tissues alive till you get the heart and breathing back online (this is what CPR is trying to do).
When the brain stem is dead tissue, then you're truly dead (but even then you can be kept "alive" artificially if you're already on a ventilation machine in a suitable intensive care).
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And they'll stay dead if all you do is CPR. CPR alone is closer to necrophilia than necromancy.
Only when you stick your tongue in their mouth.
Which is fun, don't get me wrong, but sometimes things are busy and you don't have time.
Sometimes they only need a couple compressions
Usually they're not dead when that happens. I personally have never had that happen in any of my codes but all my people are connected to continuous cardiac monitoring so I generally know what's happening before I even see them.
Dead is more of a legal than a biological definition nowadays. There's definitely some leeway.
being dead is surprisingly flexible with modern medicine
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getting all the relevant equipment and personnel
Yeah, doesn’t sound like the kind of coding I’m familiar with.
Isn't this the plot of the Matrix?
Depends if you go with the original idea, or the battery idea designed by Hollywood execs who didn't think the audiences would understand.
... thus proving that Hollywood execs and the people they make their changes for are only good for batteries*, but I digress.
* For legal reasons, this is a joke. I have to say this because some Hollywood execs have more lawyers than braincells**.
** For all the same reasons, this is also a joke.
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It reads like two Chatbots having a conversation
Hey!
Necromancy gets a bad name.
Code on into the great beyond
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