Slashdot Mirror

Schwarzschild's cats are much more interesting...

This is a pattern that I recognized. There's a class of people that are smarter than the US average, yet still rather stupid and arrogantly over-confident from an actually smart point of view.

E.g. Randall Munroe of xkcd or Ricky Gervais are famous examples.

They simply LOOK and ACT smart, but they aren't really that smart. They're just not utter and complete morons.

No shit.

Yet cargo-cult Slashsheep refer to XKCD as some sort of font of perfection.

Identify the fundamental errors...

With their C-x M-c M-butterfly.

https://xkcd.com/792/

Funny how the internet is friendly to the bad guys and never the good guys. Domain stolen / hacked? Providers put the genuine owner into auto-reply hell with no exit or resolution. Youtube now gets exploited to shut down channels and the huge Googleplex-owned platform has no humans available to help the folk who make the platform successful.
We need a fundamental shift to "fix" the internet. Because quietly the model has mutated to: https://xkcd.com/2105/

IMHO, it's long time, to break apart the conept of a browser. Into [parts] ... instead of indulging in the inner-platform effect.

I see -- so you're calling for the release of a BRAND NEW browser to handle this problem. I christen this new browser: SystemB

If only we _could_ break Chromium, et all into pieces, but they're too tightly wound together. Hence the new version. :-(

Round-up causes cancer, albeit only slightly increasing the risk and then only to those directly handling it, according to the available evidence, but Monsanto has used sophistry ("The active ingredient doesn't cause cancer!") to convince people otherwise.

There is zero evidence of that. You're referring to the additives in roundup, but those additives are basically soap, or detergent. The one study which claimed to find a link essentially added soap to a petri dish of cells, and was then amazed when it did bad shit to them.

XKCD on point as always:
https://xkcd.com/1217/

Is it possible that roundup could cause cancer? Yeah, there's some tiny possibility. But if it does, it would be in concentrations so high that you would pretty much be bathing in the stuff. No consumer is ever going to get cancer from roundup, and no responsible agricultural worker will either. Don't bathe in roundup, and don't drink soap; you'll be fine. For those who do ... well, there's always a Darwin Award.

They're probably just hesitant to reveal the real story, that Opportunity has simply chosen to stop responding to us. https://xkcd.com/1504/

Also: https://www.xkcd.com/1098/

I'm keeping my license plate analog. If my license plate were to have discrete letters and digits, that would just make it easier for cops to identify me.

Did you get vanity plate 88BB8B8 or O0O00O0?

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Good thing he didn't get 1I1III1, isn't it?

I'm keeping my license plate analog. If my license plate were to have discrete letters and digits, that would just make it easier for cops to identify me.

Did you get vanity plate 88BB8B8 or O0O00O0?

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Did they break your workflow? https://xkcd.com/1172/

My first reaction is to think that when we program the bottom-level assembly language for that math, it has to be done in a human-expressible manner, line by line. The numbers are as they've always been, discrete, maybe even more when you consider transistors and their 0/1 nature. And parallel work is just a populated version of code running linear as ever then convening, as in a human group brainstorm.

Still, your point stands. Maybe we can reach simultaneous conclusions without immediately becoming attached to one, as staggered thoughts can. Maybe the gap in speed will change how we conceive an idea, a concept, including calc-based things.

OTOOH, your brain is doing non-decimal calculus every time it catches a frisbee or baseball. I've heard it argued that brains, as compared to CPUs, are still ahead on power (but extrapolations say we'll overtake that). Which is consistent with how insanely broad human knowledge is. Most people don't realize that an instruction like "spread peanut butter on bread with the butter knife" is a massive tome of code. Writing firmware that says

Never harm a human

is assuming a lifetime of experiences. Even now a courtroom is struggling to decide whether a "harm" definition was met.

Your precious smartphone can do hard math and store bitmaps, but your brain doesn't struggle to identify a bird https://xkcd.com/1425/

Every time I see a string of slashes brackets, dots, and numbers all proceeded with s/ I can't help but think: https://xkcd.com/208/

Congratulations.

If I found myself in a parallel universe, the first thing to check would be the Internet and WP, if none then moving on would be the right choice - unless, of course, it's raining donuts ;-)

In a similar situation I would check https://xkcd.com/566/

obligatory: https://www.xkcd.com/538/

The line between flirting and serious sexual misconduct has already been blurred. By people wanting greater excuse to complain and leverage it as a tool of power.
Serious sexual misconduct used to be pretty much just shy of rape. And almost universally, it was something that people would rally against.
Now it's become "they brushed against me, and I can find advantage in claiming sexual assault". By dilution of the meaning, you have a corresponding decrease in the reaction of sizable quantities of the population who correctly observe the dilution. So now, with sexual assault becoming just what someone can get away with saying it is, large swathes of the population are now treating it with very little credibility. And there's no clear immediate way to distinguish between some minor infraction, and some major problem.
XKCD had a very clear message on exactly this: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/c...
All that's happening is that someone is pointing out the state of things as they are now, and allowing people to determine if they would like to get a clear definition in place, or just arbitrarily decide to string people up because they choose to define behaviour as something on an ad-hoc basis where it serves their agenda.
The big hint is that one way allows people to to accurately assess the meaning of an accusation and judge their reaction commensurately, and the other way leads to metaphorical burning of the witches.

These bugs were mainly the result of improperly validating/sanitizing input. Once again. The developers weren't thinking about hostile input when they were writing code, and didn't test corner cases. It worked for them!

There's this one too. $5 wrenches are easier to come by then bulletproof encryption algorithms.

Not everyone's like this. How do you find someone like that?

Obligatory xkcd

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. -- Humpty Dumpty

How generous of you to give me all of your stuff.

During the Little Ice Age, surface temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere dropped by about 2C, and sea ice expanded while snowfall decreased. The coldest and densest water in the ocean is Antarctic bottom water, which forms as ice freezes on the surface. The ice is nearly salt free, which means the seawater left behind is extra salty, and thus dense, so it sinks. When it reaches the bottom, it can't just immediately flow toward the deepest part of the sea, because there is no monotonic slope. Instead it fills basins close to the ice shelf, and only flows to deeper water when those are full. Yes, this can take centuries. Reason: The ocean is big. Really big.

Here is an excellent description of the topology of the ocean bottom. Especially look at the last map, showing the deep basins around Antarctica.

another is that most people don't like computers. Computers are tools to them. They hold the same feelings towards a computer that most techies hold to a spanner wrench. Less so, really, since your spanner wrench doesn't break all the time due to complex maintenance requirements.

Microsoft isn't likely to hide data mining. Again, most people don't care about privacy. They've got bigger problems in their lives, like paying rent, getting healthcare or figuring out how to save enough for college. And you know what, they're right. Privacy violations aren't the principle tool used to control and oppress people, as others have long since noticed

https://xkcd.com/1499/

This. It's a shame that what passes for "AI" is doing useless shit like... opening the blinds, turning on the lights, showing you traffic and your calendar and turning on NPR. Or turning on a freakin' disco ball and firing up the "Glitter and Glowsticks" playlist.... good lord. instead of, say, monitoring crops for ripeness, searching for weeds (and even removing them) or correctly identifying crows and aiming microwave emitters at them if they get too close to the plants.

Yeah, but if you want a computer to do anything smart like that, you're gonna have to work really hard at inventing one that can: https://xkcd.com/1425/

The base price of a Tesla dropped from $70k's to $49k in 2017/2018, and now down to $44k in 2019. It will continue to drop.

Then I guess I will wait to buy a $5k Tesla in 2027.

My brother-in-law got a couple of them for Christmas. I did try ordering creamed corn, but he didn't link it to an Amazon account with purchase capabilities.

At the moment, he just uses it to stream various radio stations. At some point, he wants to put the outside light switches on it.

No, the problem is all the people who seem to think "GNOME or KDE?" is the blocker rather than this. If you're a gamer Linux is fairly useless when it comes to AAA games. Heavy productivity suites like everything from Adobe equally so. And a lot of the very light users would probably be better off with a Chromebook. Yes, you could say that LibreOffice is close enough to MS Office, GIMP is close enough to Photoshop, there are fun independent games on Steam and so on... but it's not the same. Or you have some funny driver issue because your laptop never officially supported Linux, I mean there's a reason there's dedicated shops and models for that. As long as your "desktop paradigm" is not entirely dysfunctional, it's not the problem.

Science is not Religion. One is for people with working minds, the other is for the rest.

Funny, because "Science" seems to be the one that's constantly telling us these days that dudes like this are the sane ones in the world or that repealing a couple regulations will extinguish all human life.

If you're not at or to the right of chemists on the Scientific Purity Scale then your intellectual authority has been, for the time being at least, revoked. I realize this is undeserved in many cases, but until someone can draw a big bright line between the parts of science that have been hopelessly contaminated with politics and the parts that haven't, it's the only solution.

We're getting closer and closer to that XKCD dream life: https://xkcd.com/810/

We are constantly reinventing the wheel.

https://xkcd.com/2044/

Each generation of programmers seems to think they have more insight than the previous, but ends up repeating the same mistakes.

There's this widespread mistaken belief that radiation is not normal, and is only created by nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Radiation is completely normal and is everywhere around you.

The highest radiation dose most people receive in a year actually comes from their own bodies. There's a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium, and our nervous system needs potassium to function. Likewise, foods high in potassium can give you an elevated radiation dose. The radiation sensors at our border checkpoints designed to detect terrorists trying to smuggle in a dirty bomb are forever being triggered by cat litter, tiles, and foods high in potassium like bananas, nuts, etc..

After that comes rocks - mainly granite, but also things like beach sand. They have trace amounts of natural uranium which is radioactive. Having granite countertops in your kitchen substantially increases your annual radiation dose. The radon which can build up in your basement if you live in the mountains comes from rocks. Radon is one of the byproducts of uranium's natural decay chain.

After that is cosmic rays from space. Living at higher altitudes increases your exposure to this radiation source, since there's less atmosphere above you to absorb it. A transcontinental flight exposes you to about as much additional radiation as a medical x-ray. All the people who fled Japan after Fukushima by flying home unwittingly subjected themselves to more radiation during the flight than they would have received from Fukushima if they had just stayed in Japan.

Anyhow, uranium is water soluble. As a result, seawater has a much higher concentration of natural radionuclides than you normally encounter on land. So if you're that paranoid about radiation, you shouldn't swim in the ocean (you shouldn't even go to the beach, where the sand and sun will irradiate you). The increase in radioactivity from pre- to post-Fukushima is tiny compared to natural levels. The reason we know it's coming from Fukushima is not because the water has suddenly become radioactive. It's because the radioactivity is coming from certain isotopes which have short half-lives so have long since disappeared as a natural radiation source. Fukushima was the only recent event which created a bunch of those short-lived isotopes, so we know that if we detect radiation from those isotopes, that they must have come from Fukushima.

https://xkcd.com/720/

I'll just leave this right here.

I'm as displeased with google's user experience design/data collection/china appeasing choices as any leather-armchair pundit, but I feel compelled to point out here that it's not google's fault assholes are attempting to sort their ad-laden javascript monsters to the top of your search results. Google knows that if they don't deliver useful results users will stop using their searches, and their searches are where they serve ads and thus make money. They want to make you (or a generalized population that has your habits) happy with your searches, so they're constantly tweaking their search systems to reduce SEO'd garbage. The endgame is probably akin to https://xkcd.com/810/

There is an O(1) solution to this NP-complete problem.

There is an O(1) solution to this NP-complete problem.

Not unlikely... if you look at a typical day's log of articles for deletion they're overwhelmingly bios and/or their creative works trying to make themselves "notable". But if you look at pages like deletionpedia you can find things like Main Belt asteroids with a subpage for each one that got mass wiped. For a wikipedia with room a page for every London tube station and a list of all the Pokemon characters, you may say these tiny little rocks aren't significant in any way. But they're factual, not self-promoting and somebody put a lot of effort into creating it. Then somebody said meh insignificant and *poof* it was gone. I have no problem in believing there's a lot of editors that legitimately got pissed and left.

I've had corrections auto-reverted by bots even though they were properly documented and cited. Some, if not many pages are effectively owned by a small number of edit Nazis who will revert anything you do making the "anyone can edit" into hollow words. There are ways to complain but 99% will just give up and walk away rather than become wiki-lawyers just to correct a damn web page. To be fair, they also have a big problem with vandalism so I understand why some are very possessive, but the practical effect for anyone not into that war is that you buy into the slogans, do something good and they piss on it.

Also you don't really get any positive feedback when you contribute, it's not obvious how many read anything you added and would like to give you a thumbs up. All you really get is the occasional frosty piss, it's for the most part very thankless work. Which may have its effect on who stay on and how they behave, this is their way to power trip and own their little snippet of Wikpedia... *insert Gollum meme here*. I did contribute a bit in the early days when there was a lot of obviously important stuff that wasn't on WP and it was more like "let's just expand and throw shit at the wall and see what sticks", once it became more like this I got out. I mean I understand the page on Hitler is controversial... but I don't want to be in wiki-court about main belt asteroids.

P.S. No, that's wasn't mine if you think that...

You, sir, are a wikistine*.

*A malamanteau of Wikipedia and philistine.

https://xkcd.com/2044/

That number also gets my goat, but for a different reason. Actually, two different reasons. First, that number is meaningless without knowing what it was in past years. Actually I guess that could apply to all numbers. But second, it is the only number not represented as a percent. I cannot help but wonder if this is an example of this xkcd.

This is probably the perspective you're looking for: https://xkcd.com/1732/

I would love to do this.

https://xkcd.com/463/

You mean this one: https://xkcd.com/1234/

XKCD covered why these maps are stupid.

I love how everyone is so quick to make these super deep jumps in logic using only this single 1-dimensional metric.

"Should I move out?" could mean California has more basement neck-beards than everywhere else. But it could just as easily mean that the basement neck-beards in California are at least considering moving out, whereas everywhere else they don't even bother.

Obligatory xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/676/

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1102/