5-in-5 Day 5

sean
sean
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

For the final day of 5-in-5 I create a computer suicide app based on the euthanasia machine from the book Death’s End, the third book in the trilogy that starts with The Three Body Problem.

The machine presents you with the same question five times (where X is a random number between 1 and 5):

Do you wish to terminate your life? For YES, select X. For NO select 0.

Suicide machine question

If you answer YES to all five questions the application deletes your /usr directory.

To test this, I used a directory within the project. Here is the before and after shots of running the application:

List of folders before & after

As we can see, the process deleted the .test-delete folder. To run in not-safe mode we just have to follow the comments in the code:

Comments in code explaining how to run not in test mode

To better explain how this app works, here is a video of the final product:

Video of suicide app

With this project I wanted to ask questions about our digital selves and the distinction between our data and ourselves. What does “suicide” mean in the context of the permanent destruction of our data? Does the deletion of our contained (local files only) digital selves resemble the termination of our lives in any way? And what do we lose if we do this (and what do we gain)?

The code can be found here.

sean

Written by

sean

im the guy who sucks. plus i got depression. http://twotabsofacid.com

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