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https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

Sure it is. I've used Apples and Windows and before that MS-DOS for a long time. Your idea that you have some understanding of Apple's special evil merely shows you don't have an understanding of everyone elses.

I have a special place in my heart just for hating Apple. For you see they basically hate developers and are determined to make lives miserable for everyone who actually wants to do things professionally.

They won't let you compile on other machines and they won't sell decent servers.

There's a special place in hell for Apple, this hell to be precise http://smbc-comics.com/comic/p...

Plus their adverts are insufferable pretentious.

Obligatory SMBC. It's interesting that people can be persuaded to undergo all kinds of ridiculous virtual drudgery because it matches their schedules of operant conditioning reinforcement better than other ultimately more satisfying ways to spend those hundreds of hours. Like so many white rats.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

Is it really necessary to talk about extrapolation?

We just get manpons

Why do you expect people to be consistent?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

It's not all sweet peas and roses for men

Because the Ultimatum Game.

Indeed, it looks like it is time to have The Talk again...

https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

Atheist, noun, a spiritual blind man arguing there is no such thing as color.

Some of the most spiritual people that I know are Atheists.

An Atheist follows Atheism (meaning without theism; without theology).
Or, to put it conversationally: That book might be nice, but I don't necessarily believe some/any/all of what is written in it.

Truly, everyone is an Atheist, but they usually don't realize it.

Neither of us believe in the ancient Egyptian gods or their religious texts.
Neither of us believe in the ancient Roman gods or their religious texts.
Neither of us believe in the ancient Greek gods or their religious texts.
Neither of us believe in the ancient Norse gods or their religious texts.
...

So, the stack of holy books you don't believe in is 99 tall, and the stack of holy books I don't believe in is 100 tall.

So, I'm 100% Atheist and you're 99% atheist.

Now let's talk about this one special book you think you've found...

Seriously, wtf, how does this get on here?

Because this is shit science reporting to nth degree. What scientists have found is a more controllable source of neutrinos, ones that result from kaon decay, that can eliminate the variability that prevents neutrino experiments from being conclusive. That this was in any way connected with sterile neutrinos is because it was an accidental discovery from an apparently inconclusive experiment trying to find sterile neutrinos, but the discovery itself is no indication of whether sterile neutrinos exist or not.

There, the truth, now please never ever link to another shit site that does this again: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/...

So are ears. Pro Tip:

That won't help.

Don't confuse labia and ears.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

(don't forget to hit the red button below the comic)

Only a few years away from what?

The AI in those specific areas that are putting people out of work today is no more impressive than a hydraulic press that can exert many thousand times my personal strength. It is considerably less disruptive than the industrial revolution, though there is a strong correlation in causality. The industrial revolution used machinery to reduce human physical labour the same way robotics and AI reduces processing labour.

the achievements that have been made in narrow fields are going to start putting people out of work

This has already happened at a enormous scale. The funny thing is that the rate of AI augmenting and replacing jobs has actually slowed, it's just now AI is capable of (and cheap enough to) replace jobs that are visible, like a burger flipper, or a taxi driver, rather than the hundreds of welders, riveters, and painters it took to make a car.

AI is progressing, certainly, but nothing like what it will take to get to the point where we need to constrain an intelligence to protect ourselves. We are getting better at electronic automation of routine tasks, like driving, that are so easy for humans that we routinely relegate them to a background process while we converse, plan, entertain ourselves, or perform other higher functions, sometimes more than one at once. Or specific tasks like Chess and Go, which are actually games that in which human intelligence is terribly suited for. How did humans get beat, essentially by a computer brute forcing a decision tree. AlphaGo used a monte carlo tree search to go over millions of human and other computer Go games in order to beat one person. To me that is a stunning revelation to how incredible a brain is.

In the 1950's, in the dawn of the computer age, we all thought hard AI was right around the corner. Then we came down off the peak of that first mount stupid in the 60's and 70's when we realized we had no clue how to do it. Now, with AI drones delivering packages and AI taxis driving people, and Elon Musk spreading AI doom and gloom scenarios we are all OMG.... AI is here. The thing about mount stupid is that there can be more than one on a single enlightenment curve.

An AI taxi driver is made possible far less by the actual driving AI and more from the reduction in cost, miniaturization, and ease of obtaining ancillary technologies, like LIDAR, RADAR, SONAR, electronic cameras, GPS, inertial navigation, and the distrubted processing to go along with all those sensors to provide a driving computer with a complete picture. When mechanical engineering progresses that we can actually miniaturize the machinery required to make an android, then I'm sure we'll have them walking around our houses cleaning our kitchens. But they will still be dumb as kumquats. Being smart enough to pick up a glass and put it in the cupboard is not AI. It's simple kitchen automation.

How Internet Fighting Works courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

I get it,
I really do.
The "human anti-aging" is just a smokescreen.
The Real Reason for this is all too apparent. SMBC explains it all.

Look at the following usernames and see if you make any assumptions about the person behind them.

TwilightFan2006

300lb brony with a neckbeard: he's clearly a fan of Twilight Sparkle.

When people claim to be assumption free or totally race blind etc, it reminds me of this one:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/co...

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?i...

Even Kirk agrees

I'd feel a lot better if we knew HOW/WHY they worked.

I would too. Here's the thing, though: There are a lot of things we don't know why they work, only that they do.

Let's start with Gravity. Honestly, ask "why" enough times about even simple things and we run into "we don't know why, it just is" pretty quickly.

That was a beautifully euphemised line.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?i...
People only work for the sake of calories and shelter.

Employers only hire for the sake of more money in than out. A hire happens because it's gainful over not.

These are hard facts, our lord and savior The Bottom Line isn't subject to navel-gazing. "People work for the sake of work" wasn't far from the truth.

An employee only exists when s/he has something to sell upwards. And young Billy, the healthy 18yo hoping to pay for the absurdly gouged education rates of 2150, aware he will need a hyperspecialized skill to make it in 2150, will have nothing to sell.

I may be 30 but I should be probably knitting blankets for my grandkids. Y'know, to use in their terrafoam bunks.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2999

How are you seriously wondering if CANADA, the country with a maple leaf on it's flag, will be able to grow maple trees??

Are you sure it's a maple leaf? https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3670

This article reminded me it's about time I gave my kids the talk.

Yes, this is clearly the number one demon facing the internet, once facebook has protected us from this scourge we will all be able to rest easy again. Thank you for saving the internet facebook.

Yes, god forbid that people make improvements to non-critical things, eh? Puts me in mind of this comic.

Sexual pressure is always there.

First rule of biology: no matter how complex you think it is, you are wrong. It is far more complex.

A corollary of that is that if you think you can sum up half of human sexuality in 5 words, your statement is so simplistic so as to qualify as "not even wrong" .

These behaviors are inherent, because they make sense from an evolutionary point of view

Just-so storeis about evolution simple speculation. Having something merely not be instantly ruled out at a first glance by a scientific theory does not make it actually correct.

Your analysis is about on the level of this:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...

Seriously, go and speak to a research biologist, and an evolutionary one if you can. Until you've looked at, it's hard to realise how insanely tangled and complex it is.

I'm not sure if it counts as an article, but the costs of healthcare really are issues for lots of people. Zachary Weinersmith (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) did a public announcement to bring attention to such: http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...

Obligatory SMBC comic. (Yes it is SFW)

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

It's not xkcd, but it seems obligatory.

There is actual research showing that neuroticism affect women more than men

Even your link shows that the difference is by half of a standard deviation.

Obligatory SMBC comic about gene editing

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ind...

Obligatory SMBC reference: SMBC about gene editing

It's more likely to go down like this

This alarmism is based on an extrapolation of current conditions

I realize xkcd goes over the heads of many people, but the *joke* is that if you reduce the sample size enough (in this case, down to 2 days), you can make an extrapolation say whatever you want. If you need it explained in a webcomic, here you go.

We have detailed climate data going back to 1850, which means an 80 year extrapolation into the future isn't exactly a shot in the dark.

This is new and relevant. Automated houses are still cool, but insecurity and consumer spying is not. But people don't care.

Here is why people embrace the IoT no matter what.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/logical-fallacies

From the last panel of SMBC

Do you think we should acknowledge the difference between "should" and "can"?

A lot of what is coming out of the current administration appears to be hovering around the "technically legal" line.
That line is very often beyond the "the right thing to do" line.

Yes, we know that any nation can control who enters, why and how long they stay for.
Any nation can also have any laws they like and execute people they don't like as long as they aren't part of the international treaties regulating that.
That doesn't mean it is a justification for doing so.

I think you're thinking of mini vs micro USB http://visual.ly/micro-usb-vs-... . The third type is micro USB upside down http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id... .

Guess whose science dick just grew ten inches!

Oblig SMBC

>people these days, rarely seem to respond to a "Thank you" with a "Your Welcome" you're*
Lots of them are the diluted variety that doesn't actually mean "Thank you", much like how there's a certain version of "How are you" that you're never supposed to genuinely answer, only acknowledge with the word Fine, making for an absolute waste of three seconds with absolutely meaningless babble - it's meant to be ritualistic, a gesture. And there's no hard way to distinguish it from a sincere query besides the mess of context, body language, intonation, etc that we lean on.

Similarly, there's a hollow "thank you" in contemporary conduct that, functionally, is pretty identical to a "Good day." closing. Only even more meaningless.

This shit is pretty verbose when we write it out, and you're just supposed to "get it" to participate in society. It's rough on people who can't. I've sometimes thought that there should be like, community classes or something for people who've been isolated or deployed overseas or homeschooled or whatever for decades, and need a crash course on all the little retarded carousels we're stuck inflicting on ourselves.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/com...

In the absence of an xkcd, have some SMBC instead.

This comic is a more in-depth yet accessible explanation of quantum computers than anything I'd ever read on Slashdot.

If only Superman drank coffee he might have become immune to kryptonite*.

Superman has already moved on from caffeine.