Meet one of my former D&D characters: Kronos, master of space and time (chronurgy wizard), accidentally turned himself into a grung while experimenting on frog familiars. Jokes that he is his own familiar now. Also has a frog familiar. Claims it is himself from another timeline. Campaign goal: to recover his lost powers. Secret: is delusional, or is he?

I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

while (0){};

Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…

https://xkcd.com/979/

Generally speaking, I like duck typing for function inputs, but not as much for function outputs (unless the functions are pure mathematics).

Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)

Get her to help you make meme templates from that obscure anime, as a bonding exercise. ;)

How did you switch to Azerbaijan?

Well, you could try it with your kids and see how it goes 😁

Got any good one liners from your old sets?

The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.

The perspective on this one keeps throwing me off. That cat feels like a tiger in this photo.

All this shows is that other countries (China, etc.) will have carte blanche if they have nukes. If they don’t, they’ll get them. Imagine a nuclear armed Venezuela going after their neighbours because conventional intervention is too risky suddenly. Blah.

No, but the blanket style is. ;)

I got it decades ago from my grandfather, who could very well have bought it from a random truck stop or something.

One cat is an owl ;)

Mass Effect 1 citadel

Atwood is also one of the sanest centrist voices I’ve ever read, in essays and interviews. (Centrist by Canadian standards – probably quite left by US standards). She always seems to be acutely aware of institutional inertia and how things like independent courts are vital to free societies. Wish there were more like her.

Everything else went up due to tariffs

The tops of the clouds on the night side of Venus are about -45°C. So it’s not actually glowing like the image implies. But in infrared, you can reprocess the colours to make a delightful image like the above.

Well, I know you’re implying the greenhouse gases will kill us all. And that might be true, but probably not in ten years.

My bananas are mouldy and I don’t know why