I kinda love how I’ve found myself getting in the habit of using “integer-overflowing” as a term for “doing something to such an extreme that you end up accomplishing the opposite.” truly the programming brainworms are settled in.

…although it isn’t just because of being a Tron fan. The first time I started thinking about it in this way was years and years before that, when I first found out about the concept of integer overflow

…which was through that story (urban legend?) about the videogame Civilization, where Gandhi is the Most Peaceful world leader in the game, and so if you do something that makes him MORE peaceful it loops back around to Most Violent and he starts dropping nuclear bombs

which even back then, I found particularly interesting in a pattern-recognition way

partly because I’ve read that the real Gandhi was… actually sorta like that? in a way? at least, in the sense of being so opposed to violence that he would rather treat Hitler as a friend (and thus further enable Hitler’s violence) than try to fight him

…