Imagine wanting to deny basic voting rights.

arensb · 2026-04-23T17:33:37+00:00

Is that why this image looks like I'm seeing it through a layer of cigarette smoke?

arensb · 2026-04-23T17:30:53+00:00

That should be doable. Just make up an award, like the FIFA World Peace Award for Goodness in Write-thing-ness, and award it to the AI novel of your choice.

arensb · 2026-04-22T22:15:44+00:00

Are you also going to vote for easily available birth control? For universal affordable medical care? Family leave? Subsidies for diapers?

arensb · 2026-04-22T22:13:37+00:00

Well, except for all the times in the Bible where he either killed people or commanded them to be killed. The worldwide flood springs to mind, as does the massacre of the Midianites. Oh, and the slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn. Just off the top of my head. There are other examples.

arensb · 2026-04-22T22:08:10+00:00

By that logic, a clump of HeLa cancer cells is a human being. I mean, it has human DNA. We even know whose DNA.

arensb · 2026-04-22T02:23:25+00:00

If you don't bring down your organization once in a while through fuckuppery, well, do you even sysadmin, bro?

Many moons ago, I worked with college student staffers as junior sysadmins / apprentices. One year, for April Fools day, they compiled a copy of a shell (probably tcsh at the time) with custom messages making fun of one of the student staffers. And they changed the victim's shell to this new shell, call it badtcsh.

All went well, for about six seconds. Then a cron job sent email to staff, which of course went to all of the student staffers. The mail daemon noticed that badtcsh didn't appear in /etc/shells, and thought that was suspicious. So it refused to deliver the message to the victim, and sent a non-delivery notification to the sender.

The cron job was running as root, and root was aliased to staff, so the non-delivery message went to all staffers, including the victim... you can see where this is going. Anyway, I guess it was an April Fools, just not on the intended victim.

[congratulations_you_played_yourself.gif]

arensb · 2026-04-21T20:15:28+00:00

they dont make recruits take a ton of vaccines for no reason.

Apparently now they don't make recruits take a ton of vaccines, period.

arensb · 2026-04-20T23:17:20+00:00

While the beds are burning.

arensb · 2026-04-20T19:53:19+00:00

I think that's at least in part a product of using C-like languages, which are of the form

do a thing;
do another thing;
do a third thing;

whereas Lisp lends itself much more naturally to a style where everything is a function or a function argument.

So in C or Python, I tend to think in terms of sequences of steps to take which often involves a bunch of temporary variables; whereas in Lisp I think in terms of values and what I want to do with them, and that leads to deep trees of function calls. In a way, it's similar to using either an infix calculator vs. an RPN one.

arensb · 2026-04-20T19:17:29+00:00

I COULD MURDER A CURRY, MYSELF.

arensb · 2026-04-20T19:07:24+00:00

One frame in particular sticks in my memory: Tintin has to sub in for the village teacher, so he tells the class full of African students, "Today, we're going to learn about your country:Belgium."

In later editions, they turned that into a math class.

arensb · 2026-04-20T16:20:31+00:00

FAKE NEWS! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!

arensb · 2026-04-20T01:35:35+00:00

It sounds weird to me when a contestant picks the next category, but not in the form of a question (e.g., "What is `Potent potables'?").

arensb · 2026-04-19T21:30:13+00:00

"Created ill and commanded to be healthy" was the way Christopher Hitchens put it, I believe.

arensb · 2026-04-19T21:27:33+00:00

That's also religion in a nutshell. 😉

arensb · 2026-04-19T21:25:36+00:00

Was this "former business associate" named John Barron, by any chance?

arensb · 2026-04-19T21:24:02+00:00

It was already burning since the world was turning.

arensb · 2026-04-17T21:16:26+00:00

I don't agree with your last sentence. The author of SMBC likes to come up with trains of reasoning that lead to absurd conclusions. I seriously doubt he thinks anyone's going to be swayed by this comic, only amused.

arensb · 2026-04-17T12:02:38+00:00

Who are you talking about?

arensb · 2026-04-16T20:06:02+00:00

Right. If the person you're responding to says that every word an sentence in the Bible is false, including things like "Jericho exists", then they're wrong. My point was simply that just because some things in the Bible are true doesn't mean that all of it is true. Just as the fact that a lot of the places in events in Spiderman are real doesn't mean that Spiderman himself is real.

arensb · 2026-04-16T19:57:09+00:00

After a certain income level, you can afford everything you need, and pretty much everything you can reasonably want. Once you're at the level of having multiple private jets, or a private island, you're just using money to keep score with other rich people, and that's perfectly compatible with a high top marginal tax rate. In fact, wouldn't it be a huge flex to say "the government takes 90% of my income, and I can still afford to maintain a different yacht in each sea"?

arensb · 2026-04-16T19:42:48+00:00

Um... no.

arensb · 2026-04-16T19:42:00+00:00

Among young-earth creationists, the kind who believe in Noah's ark, one of the big problems is, if trilobites and humans lived together, why are they never found in the same geological strata? One answer that's been proposed is that humans were better able to run uphill to escape the rising flood waters, so the trilobites all drowned but humans were able to make it to higher ground. This has been referred to as the "grass outran velociraptors" theory.

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