Recent Comments

1. about 7 hours ago on Pearls Before Swine

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

2. about 7 hours 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.

3. about 7 hours 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…

4. about 8 hours 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).

5. about 8 hours ago on Gary Markstein

   “But… but… Hunter’s laptop !!!!!!!!”

   “But… but… Benghazi! !!!!!!!”

   In at least that one way, they really are conservative: They never quite get over a prior insulting lie about a liberal target. Didja notice the orange one ranting about Obama maybe a week ago? As though he was still competing against his IDEA of a hateful person.

6. about 8 hours ago on Kevin Kallaugher

   Mmm. Yeah, kind of. Though those wings SHOULD be depicted trying to drag the whole bird in THEIR direction.

7. about 8 hours ago on Tim Campbell

   I grew up with racial prejudice that was never explicitly taught to me in words. But the behavior was so clear that my subconscious had no doubt at all that “those people aren’t good”. That town had a literal “other side of the tracks” (though it wasn’t tracks): On our side, the roads were mostly paved, on their side, mostly not. On our side people had lawns (which was really stupid in that climate, but hey: 50s) and on their side mostly not. And folks from their side had mostly blue collar jobs while on our side even if you were blue collar, you were likely to be the foreman… or sole proprietor. And in school my all-white cohort and I avoided “them” except when they were sitting adjacent in class.

   It took me YEARS (decades even) to get over it because I didn’t even know I WAS prejudiced! … which makes fixing it difficult. For the most part though, I AM over it and that’s been a relief. And I don’t live there any more, which did help with my recognition. BUT, deep down, if I see a group of folks hanging out, speaking something that sounds like Spanish, I STILL have an immediate negative response. That I recognize and overcome, but it’s clear that 60 years isn’t enough to 100% decondition 15 years of being prejudiced.

8. about 8 hours ago on Dana Summers

   So I went and looked it up online (always a source of perfect truth, as we all know). Seems he was attending a (must have been small) concert and got to sit in for a song. Did he even choose it? (could be). Was it an “appropriate song”? I have not a clue… but it was clearly in the band’s repertoire, so THEY think it’s a good song.

9. about 18 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

   As always, the smart money is on watching what they DO not what they say.

   And as you point, what they do ranges from really awful to (very VERY occasionally) not too bad — with the great majority being in the “nothing” category.

10. about 18 hours ago on Rob Rogers

    I fail to see the point. The Cheeto has indeed fallen asleep albeit not on camera because cameras aren’t allowed in thr court room. Biden has not. How is this ’toon appropriate?