Recent Comments

1. about 23 hours ago on Frazz

   In fact, what works for me is looking up the lyrics… all of them… and singing quietly along with the youtube. Once my subconscious knows how it ends, the earworm dies…

2. about 23 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Yikes, tofu is CATCHING?? Better wear a mask!

3. about 23 hours ago on Pickles

   The pencil test also comes to mind. Yes, I know we’re talking about a male here…

4. about 23 hours ago on Kevin Kallaugher

   Those presidential caricatures are correct. Same in sports: The refs call the foul on the person who retaliates for a foul. Basically, if you want to call attention to something, try to hide it!

5. about 23 hours ago on Clay Bennett

   (I don’t much care who cleans Traitor Trump’s diapers…..)

   I certainly care that it not be me!

6. about 23 hours ago on Mike Luckovich

   It’s not a political party. It’s a cult. And that explains anything you need to understand.

7. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   I see that you’ve passed beyond infantile puns and into the realm of the profane, eh?

8. 1 day ago on Scott Stantis

   AI is already on track to replace a lot of the people who add no creative aspect while they work. There’s going to be a huge upheaval around the economics of replacing an office full of data-entry types or phone support folks who work from a standard question tree w/ programs. But it’s inevitable. We already HAVE phone trees, for instance, which are frustrating and often useless. An AI, if well trained will actually be better than that. The jobs that remain will be effectively only those that are creative in some sense. And even then, I can picture a manager telling his phone “Ms AI, I need a way to …” and the AI will be able to “…” because it was the manager who DECIDED that needed to be done.

   It’s going to be “interesting times”. I’m sort of hoping that the apocalypse happens AFTER I’ve shuffled off the coil.

9. 1 day ago on Speed Bump

   When I learned to program (in Basic and assembly) there WAS no recursion… at least I never needed or wanted it, though of course I COULD have used recursion even then. But none of the books went there. Then I went back to school and learned Pascal which was the choice that year for beginning programmers… and began on C. Still non-recursive. THAN I took a “language of the week” class which included Lisp early on. I. Could. Not. Grok. It. But at a friend’s suggestion, I bought a small book called The Little Lisper and read it all in one sitting. Nope. So I came back to it that evening and read it AGAIN. And went to bed in an iterative universe. And dreamed. And awoke in a recursive universe, where I’ve now been living for … 35 or so years.

   PS: Prior to that I had a degree in mathematics which I never really used. But once the universe became* recursive, I suddenly understood that mathematical induction uses EXACTLY the same viewpoint as recursive programming… which still feels like a major insight to me.

   *  Well, at least my understanding of the universe…

10. 1 day ago on Joel Pett

    In a Banana Republic the rich and powerful don’t DO crimes: They make the laws, and so whatever they WANT to do is legal (for them).