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You never heard of Neil Gaiman? Wow, that's some level of ignorance to be bragging about.

Or just one of today's lucky 10,000

The obligatory xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/768/

Also, today's new college students are generally not millennials, since that is defined as being born between 1980 and 1996.
It's exactly like people complaining about the MTV generation with their short attention spans.

That sounds to me like a problem that can be solved with good engineering and proper design, just like many of the other environmental problems. I have spent something like a minute thinking about it.......

Engineers have been thinking about the problem for decades and haven't solved it. What are the chances you solved it with little thought?

And if I, with no expert knowledge, can think of what may well be a plausible way to address the issue, how much more could a proper team of engineers come up width, if they tried?

See this and this.

XKCD spot on as usual.

That sounds to me like a problem that can be solved with good engineering and proper design, just like many of the other environmental problems. I have spent something like a minute thinking about it.......

Engineers have been thinking about the problem for decades and haven't solved it. What are the chances you solved it with little thought?

And if I, with no expert knowledge, can think of what may well be a plausible way to address the issue, how much more could a proper team of engineers come up width, if they tried?

See this and this.

XKCD spot on as usual.

That sounds to me like a problem that can be solved with good engineering and proper design, just like many of the other environmental problems. I have spent something like a minute thinking about it.......

Engineers have been thinking about the problem for decades and haven't solved it. What are the chances you solved it with little thought?

And if I, with no expert knowledge, can think of what may well be a plausible way to address the issue, how much more could a proper team of engineers come up with, if they tried?

See this and this.

That sounds to me like a problem that can be solved with good engineering and proper design, just like many of the other environmental problems. I have spent something like a minute thinking about it.......

Engineers have been thinking about the problem for decades and haven't solved it. What are the chances you solved it with little thought?

And if I, with no expert knowledge, can think of what may well be a plausible way to address the issue, how much more could a proper team of engineers come up with, if they tried?

See this and this.

Your entomology is mostly correct, the draught part comes from an old English word meaning pull, this refers to the way a keg beer is poured by pumping the handle in long pulls as its a mechanical pump rather than an electric one as seen in modern pubs. English pubs still carry the traditional draught taps for serving real ale.

Olig. https://www.xkcd.com/1012/

That article just oozes propaganda: it's the Russians, again, and everything they got was fake anyway. Trust us! We are way too smart to get hacked!

The Russia has stated its interest in swinging French elections quite overtly and there is quite enough evidence to believe that Russian state is behind these activities (from signatures of the attacks to the metadata in the leaks). It's like you are trying to invoke Godwin's law during WWII. Besides, they didn't say they were too smart to get hacked, nor that they didn't get hacked. Just that they hacked and leaked made-up material.

And yet, science can actually give an answer to some of the "why" questions or at least attempt an answer - to me 5% truth is still better than 0% which is offered by religious answers.

For instance "why do we die?" - because unchanging organisms in a forever changing environment cannot adapt. You need death to promote life in this Universe we live in. Even the "eternal" microorganisms change when cloning so after a time it is not the same organism; the previous version disappeared [i.e. died].

"Why are we here?" - the answer is "because". And it is a good answer, much better than any "concrete" answer for which we have no proof. Since self-organizing structures [including the very beginning of life on Earth, i.e. organic molecule - replicator] stem from fundamental laws and considering the vast amount of time, space and matter available [hence the statement - everything that can happen happens, at least once] it is inevitable that life will arise. It is an emerging property of the system which means that likely no one "modeled" it in advance and things just go along within the frame of natural laws. Thus, we had no say, no plan, no direction, no nothing. It just happened. Therefore - "because".

"The meaning of life" - now that one is very easy. You just look around and you notice that [almost] all people strive for survival, procreation and happiness, where happiness is defined as the maximum fulfillment of the human needs [not wants!] - part of those needs are physiological and hence connected to survival and procreation and part are - let's call them "emotional needs" - the need to belong, to care and be cared for, to love and be loved, to be appreciated, to have dignity and sense of self-appreciation to feel useful to your family and the group you belong to and so on...... All the above is measurable and completely understandable to anyone that studied evolutionary biology, ecology and anthropology. Of course we have invented 1 000 000 other meanings of life but upon inspection they all break down to the above 3 points.

Brilliant summary of this post:
https://xkcd.com/1123/

P.S. I'm waiting for someone to make a kit that includes two or three USB C cables (USB C on both ends) plus a bunch of adapters: USB C to USB A, USB C to Mini USB, USB C to Micro USB, USB C to USB B, USB C to Ethernet jack, etc. Plus a USB to serial and USB to parallel and USB to IDE and SATA. It would be one kit that would let you connect almost anything to your laptop.

Your kit already exists ! And as a bonus it's only one cable.

You may think differently if your son does something like this xkcd comic. https://www.xkcd.com/1807/

While you're balancing on your chair wielding a sword?

Then you can interrupt, but if you don't bring your own chair and sword be prepared for defeat.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Who actually believes that any of these "one standard" things REDUCE the number of different accounts you have to have?

While you're balancing on your chair wielding a sword?

https://xkcd.com/1807/

My friend has one of these. I can't take a fart without Alexa making comment.

Solution: https://xkcd.com/1807/

My first computer was an Apple II purchased in 1981. Armed with VisiCalc, I was a a spreadsheet warrior.

After using CP/M and MP/M in '82 and '83, I got my first MS-Dos PC in 1982.

For ten years, I loved MS-DOS, and my personal computing world included WordStar, VisiCalc, dBase, Q&A, BASIC, Forth, and 1802 Assembler.

In 1992, I transitioned to MS Windows, MS Office, Access, Oracle, and never looked back.

In 2012, I joined a company where part of my job was to support executives who were struggling to use MS Excel on MacBooks.
In 2013, I bought an 11" MacBook Air not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't convince those executives that using Windows devices did not make them look old and "out of touch."

While I had to special order it, my MacBook Air has an i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD. (That size RAM and disk were not available in Apple stores at that time.) It cost almost three times more than if I had bought a Dell or HP laptop with similar specs.

For my own computing needs, I run Windows under Parallels on that MacBook Air and switch back to the Mac environment only when absolutely necessary.

So here we are in 2017. My MacBook air still looks like it is brand new. It still runs 100% of the software I need to do my job (especially Visio and MS Project). Even 3+ years later, the hardware specs are not antiquated. While I have a brand new Windows desktop at home, the Apple is in my hands the entire work day.

From a ruggedness and reliability perspective, my MacBook Air has been phenomenal.

While my next laptop will probably be a Yoga, (I bought one for my youngest son and he loves it), who knows ow many more years my 2013 MacBook Air will continue to be the machine with which I earn my living.

Obligatory XKCD Mac vs. Windows comic: https://xkcd.com/934/

XKCD has you covered (today, even!): https://xkcd.com/1831/

My hobby: extrapolating.

I'm rooting for viable fusion power as much as the next guy, but only time will tell if they will be able to reach those temperatures.
Until now, nobody has been able to make a tokamak fully work, so the burden of proof is on them.

I took a look at it and to me it appears to be a similar idea to the functionality of XSLT. Also a mandatory XKCD reference.

Anyone who works on unauthorized personal projects should certainly expect to be subject to firing. But as a supervisor I would make the decision to fire based on what is best for my employer. That depends on a lot of things.

I don't believe in automatic zero tolerance responses. The question for me is whether the company better off booting this guy or disciplining him. Note this intrinsically unfair. Alice is a whiz who gets all of her work done on time and to top quality standards. Bob is a mediocre performer who is easily replaced. So Alice gets a strong talking to and Bob gets the heave-ho, which is unfair to Bob because Alice did exactly the same thing.

But there's a kind of meta-fairness to it. Stray off the straight and narrow and you subject yourself to arbitrary, self-interested reactions.

Now as to Alice, I would (a) remind her that anything she creates on company time belongs to the company (even if we're doing open source -- we get to choose whether the thing is distributed) and (b) that any revenue she derives from it rightly belongs to the company. But again there's no general rule other than maximize the interests of the company. I'll probably insist she shut down the project immediately and turn everything over to the company, but not necessarily. I might choose to turn a blind eye. Or maybe even turn a blind eye until Alice delivers on her big project, then fire her and sue her for the side project revenues if I thought we didn't need her any longer. If loyalty is a two-way street, so is betrayal.

Sure, you may rationalize working on a side project as somehow justified by the fact your employer doesn't pay you what you're really worth, but the grown-up response to that is to find a better job; if you can't, by definition in a market economy you are getting paid at least what you're worth. If you decide to proceed by duplicity, you can't expect kindness or understanding unless you can compel it.

So let me get this straight. In this scenario your are Eve?

Compiling!

https://www.xkcd.com/378/

Completely relevant recent XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1827/ (Survivorship Bias)

i.e. there's plenty of people that have done the same initial things as anyone who wrote these books and didn't get lucky. You might as well read a book on how someone won the lottery.

More and more information is coming out that "peer review" is sort of a joke. The basic statistics of many studies isn't even verified. Check this on Ars: https://arstechnica.com/scienc...

While likely true an even more pressing problem is non-scientific clickbait headlines and juiced up summaries and articles about scientific papers/research to simply generate more revenue. No companies seem to care about long term irreparable harm to public consensus. Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/277/

https://xkcd.com/927/

So, exactly which part of this thing is a "foundry"? Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

I got my master's degree with this guy, and I had to take a Haskell course, or seminar, every semester. I was, and still am, pretty terrible at Haskell.

However, what I attempted to learn helped my Python out a lot. Map and filter are two of my favorites, and the other functional paradigms are occasionally useful to me as an actually working, productive, programmer. I'm happy I was exposed to those concepts, since they tend to come in handy. Yes, everything is Turing complete, and you can accomplish the same things without functional programming, or without high level language, or without computers, but that doesn't mean they are all equally useful to solving the problem at hand.

I recommend everyone become familiar with functional concepts in some way, if only to make them more well rounded. I don't advocate writing your next web application in Haskell though...

> Software upgrades often come with changes to the UI which often require that the user relearn how to use their software

And the old software and interfaces will go on needing to be supported. There's an amusing old XKCD cartoon about this.

          https://xkcd.com/1172/

And about 30% of them are auto-updating with random "changes" that probably started out as one of your suggestions, but BREAK MY WORKFLOW.

Obligatory xkcd

Because every change breaks someone's workflow. https://xkcd.com/1172/

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/882/

Nah, if you're a real programmer you'll be fine, a butterfly is all you need...

Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/

https://xkcd.com/678/

They didn't have a "2 year" option in that chart, but I think that the "5 year" option applies.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Seriously I have never even played it. It came out after I had already reached peak gaming in my lifetime.

I'm installing it now and will soon see what all the fuss is about.

I feel like this guy except I'm on a nearly 20 year lag.

I suppose I'll get around to Half Life 2 by the time I start drawing Social Security

Also https://xkcd.com/657/

https://xkcd.com/566/

Came here just to say this. After seeing it mentioned in the xkcd: Movie Narrative Charts several years ago, I thought it seemed out of place sitting next to the rest of those films, so I wanted to see what had warranted its inclusion.

When it finally showed up on Netflix a few years later, it blew me away.

It's the only movie that I have ever finished and then immediately rewatched. It's the only one that I even wanted to immediately rewatch, since normally I either want a break or want to let things percolate. But with Primer? Not so much. Every time I felt like I had a grasp on it, something would happen that would show me otherwise, but never in a frustrating way. After multiple viewings it holds up beautifully, with each viewing revealing just a bit more about how the world of the movie works and how the characters interact with each other. And with it being so short, it never overstays its welcome.

Well worth watching. And I believe it was even re-added to Netflix just a few months ago...

Crash. Wam.

It's a damn shame they never made any sequels to The Matrix.

Right, dead end, which is why they keep becoming better and better at various tasks, to the point that they're now entering our everyday lives? Because surely that's the very definition of a dead-end.

  Does anyone remember how terrible voice recognition used to be 1-2 decades ago? Because I sure do. The concept that you could have things like Siri, Google Now, devices like Alexa, etc get it right the vast majority of the time would have been laughable. Neural nets used to be too bad to use in these tasks at all. When Google made their first neural-net based voice recognition system (rather than the algorithmic matching ones from before) it got a 25% error rate. Now it's down to 8%. They're cropping up everywhere - most recently Skype's real-time translation service. Which is starting out a bit imperfect, and I guarantee you, once the neural nets get better with time, people will promptly forget how they didn't used to be as good as they'll have become, just like happens with everything else neural nets do.

On the image side, it's not just about image recognition (say, Google Photos). Facial recognition has gone from fringe to dangerously accurate. In my last job (medical imaging) we used neural nets to segment the brain. Which I find to be a rather amusing concept, artificial neural networks studying biological neural networks ;) They started off rather poor at the job, but by the time I left they were doing a better job at it than humans. Neural nets are also better lipreaders than humans. Really, the number of fields they've been expanding into in the past decade, and the progress over the past decade, is really staggering. One "hard AI" task after the next, they're getting better than humans. Remember this XKCD comic from just a few years ago? You can now download software to do just that sort of thing. It's not just about computing power advances, either; the learning algorithms themselves have been advancing by leaps and bounds recently.

Now, if you don't mean neural networks when you say AI, then what the heck do you mean when you say AI?

https://www.xkcd.com/678/

Apparently it wasn'tt obligatory enough for you to make a proper link

> Surely, you mean this one: https://www.xkcd.com/1807/

I'll see your XKCD and raise you a Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-...

Surely, you mean this one:

https://www.xkcd.com/1807/

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/327/

That will teach you not to sanitize your purchasing inputs. :)