Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

The Los Angeles Times, which carries The Far Side, has taken umbrage with my cartoon on several occasions. (Apparently, someone there actually reads the comics beforehand.) These three, as I recall, created some conflicts with the “good taste” standards of that paper, and I believe all three were deleted from their comic page back in the early eighties.

The first two I suppose are subjective, although I don’t remember other papers censoring them. Their rejection of the elephant cartoon, however, had me baffled. I’ve always found it appalling that the demand for ivory has caused these magnificent animals to be continuously poached—but the ultimate act of contempt for the rights of wildlife has got to be represented by the elephant’s foot wastebasket. And that’s the point I was striving for in this cartoon—not that I was hoping to make a profound comment of any sort (the cartoon is really pretty inane, I think), but just who wouldn’t be upset to find out something like this had been done to a former part of their anatomy?

It’s been borrowed into graphic design as the Cicada Principle:

https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-revisited-with-css-variables/

Looks like the original link is dead, but there’s a newer examination of it. If you have a repeating pattern, you can maximize variation while minimizing file size by using multiple sequences with different prime lengths

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Reaction to this cartoon baffled me.

Although for the most part I think readers understood the “gag,” a few individuals accused me of having fun at the expense of hydrocephalics. Yep―that’s what they said.

I hope it’s obvious to most people that hydrocephalicus (I still can’t believe it) had nothing to do with the cartoon.

Singling out any tragic disease for ridicule would never fall within my own standards―let alone my editors.

So what do they think about Charlie Brown?

It’s the equivalent of riding into town in a beater car. It works and gets you to where you need to be, but it’s embarrassing to be seen in.

The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it’s a similar dynamic:

In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.

Also posted over in !discuss@discuss.online here, since I was reminded of the essay

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

As a reader pointed out to me, bananas don’t grow this way. The individual bananas grow upward, not downward (as I’ve drawn them here).

One side of me wants to say, “So sue me,” but the truth is, it does bug me when I make these kinds of mistakes.

I posted about this a bit ago, but that likely wouldn’t work:

In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert

https://discuss.online/post/30279537

Any language you picked or invented would just add to the training data and help the AI out.

Only Fire - Double Penetration (NSFW)

This would be great for !writingprompts@literature.cafe or something

Judging by the copyright years in the top right that I’ve seen, it’s not chronological. They definitely pick the comics to match some events, like Christmas, but other than that it seems pretty random.

Best guess is that they either fainted or are looking down judgmentally at the farmer. Agree that the drawing is ambiguous though

Neither, “Good” and “Evil” can’t exist absolutely and the universe doesn’t care one whit about any of us. Our morality was shaped by what was evolutionarily adaptive, and we developed post-hoc reasoning for it with the nice big brains we evolved.

I’ve noticed that. Shoutout to !smbc@discuss.online btw, where I post SMBC comics daily. I wonder if Zach would be amenable to integrating with the Fediverse somehow, seems like that would work nicely for comments.

I think he drew an eighth note just because that helps get the joke across easier than a whole note. It’s more instantly recognizable as music, even if you’ve never learned how to read it.

I thought these two books were good. Written by a neuroscientist talking specifically about grief:

https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/books/the-grieving-brain

https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/books/the-grieving-body

One crucial thing is that the popular conception of grief as 5 sequential stages is completely wrong. Those are 5 possible options out of more that you’ll likely bounce between over time. Grief is also not improved by a hangover, so it’s best to avoid alcohol and the like.

Some people will never admit it and go to absurd lengths to hate on him, like the person that wrote this article, Mamdani picks his mentor: The woke, radical, anti-Israel YouTuber Ms. Rachel:

Why would the man about to be sworn in as mayor of America’s largest city elevate a woke, anti-Israel YouTube children’s entertainer to his inner circle, appointing her as a prime member of his inaugural committee?

Simple: Because Mamdani himself is a child.

I thought it was parody at first, but it seems to be real.

As much as possible, I don’t use proprietary software. I bought a Pixel phone specifically so that I could run GrapheneOS (which has been great), and the only non-FOSS stuff I use is basically web tools for communication, like Slack/Discord/etc. As much as web-as-a-platform sucks (and it has many shortcomings), at least things tend to just work now on Linux, one way or another.

Some background on this comic:

Before I start work on any cartoon, I usually have a fairly good idea what the caption is going to say.

In this instance, and in the last few moments of my deadline, I uncharacteristically made a sweeping change of the entire thing. Originally, the caption read, “Look, but don’t touch―or the mother will throw it out.”

I still have no idea what came over me that made me suddenly see it another way, but when the cartoon was published it seemed to generate a favorable response from more than a few people. And I always found that to be sort of interesting. Does this mean we all have a latent desire to stuff worms into a baby―or is it just me?

My read is that it’s a low-effort “She’s so ugly even the predators don’t want to eat her”. Maybe it was a reference to some current event?

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

After completing this cartoon in the “deer” version, it just didn’t click with me, humorwise. I tried it again with bears, and I suppose, because of their ability to stand on their hind legs, they more closely approximate a group of guys standing around doing the same thing―and, to my eye, making it more effective.