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To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.
Transcript
[Three people sit along a table with dishes and drinks in front of them. Cueball is walking in, a plate with food on it in one hand, a laptop in the other.]
[Blondie looks down at her bowl. She has a cup with what appears to be a lump of coal in it.]
Blondie: I've got... Cheerios with a shot of vermouth.
[Cueball 1 has a plate with some kind of cubic food on it. He has a cup of what appears to be two lovebirds in it.]
Cueball 1: At least it's better than the quail eggs in whipped cream and MSG from last time.
[Cueball 2 has a plate with a several lumps of some form of white stuff on it. They have a cup of what appears to be some kind of superfluid flowing out of it.]
Cueball 2: Are these Skittles deep-fried?Cueball 3: C'mon, guys, be patient. In a few hundred more meals, the genetic algorithm should catch up to existing recipes and start to optimize.
We've decided to drop the CS department from our weekly dinner party hosting rotation.
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Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.
Transcript
[Cueball sits at a desk in front of a computer, leaning back in his chair with both hands down to his side. There are cans on the desk and more crushed ones on the floor.]
Cueball: I just wrote the most beautiful code of my life.[Zoom in on Cueball and top half of desk.]
Cueball: They casually handed me an impossible problem. In 48 hours and 200 lines, I solved it.[Curved lines with arrows divide the comic into two possible end panels, labeled "Academia" and "Business."]
Academia:
Professor: My god... this will mean a half-dozen papers, a thesis or two, and a paragraph in every textbook on queuing theory!Business:
Boss: You got the program to stop jamming up? Great. While you're fixing stuff, can you get Outlook to sync with our new phones?
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Can't and shouldn't.
Transcript
[Megan is sitting at a computer.]
Computer: Speech2Text Commander
Computer: Bug #167801
Computer: Speech recognition fails on young child voices.
Megan: Hmm.[The view enlarges to show a man sitting at another desk.]
Megan: Hey, can you do me without a condom? We need a young child for something.
Cueball: Okay.[A pregnancy test is displayed. The label indicates not pregnant.]
Pregnant
Not pregnant[Megan is typing on the computer.]
Megan typing: Bug #167801
Megan typing: Status: Closed
Megan typing: Reason: Could not reproduce.
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It's even harder if you're an asshole who pronounces <> brackets.
Transcript
[Above the first two panels there is a caption:]
Signs your coders don't have enough work to do:[Cueball sitting in an office chair at his workstation, with Ponytail standing behind him.]
Cueball: I'm almost up to my old typing speed in Dvorak[Cueball is standing next to a server rack pointing at it while looking the other way at a Cueball-like guy. There are three sections filled with servers, two of them together, and space for several more above and below and between those two and the one at the bottom. Behind the rack wires comes down tot he floor from all three servers together and the wires then exits the panel to he right along the floor.]
Cueball: Our servers now support Gopher.
Cueball: Just in case.[In a frame-less panel Megan is standing near her workstation to the right speaking to Cueball to the left.]
Megan: Our pages are now HTML, XHTML-Strict, and Haiku-compliant.
Cueball: Haiku?
Megan:<div class="Main"> <span ID="Marquee"> Blog!</span></div>[Ponytail sitting in an office chair at her workstation.]
Ponytail: Hey!
Ponytail: Have you guys seen this webcomic?
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Just make sure you don't have it maximize instead of minimize.
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[Code displayed, presumably from an IDE.]
def getSolutionCosts(navigationCode): fuelStopCost = 15 extraComputationCost = 8[There is a giant arrow pointing to the next line.]
thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost = 999999999 waterCrossingCost = 45Genetic algorithms tip:
Always include this in your fitness function.
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And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.
Transcript
[Above a bar graph:]
11th-grade activities:
[The y-axis is labeled:]
Usefulness to career success
[Above the x-axis are two small bars and one huge bar. Below the x-axis, each bar is labeled:]
900 hours of classes
400 hours of homework
One weekend messing with Perl
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I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.
Transcript
[Cueball is standing in a desert with lots of rocks lying around. He is narrating his own situation. The first panel spans the entire width of the comic. The first line of text is written to the left of him, the second line to the right.]
So I'm stuck in this desert for eternity.
I don't know why. I just woke up here one day.[The next four panels take up the second line of the comic.]
[Cueball stand in the desert.]
I never feel hungry or thirsty.[Cueball walks in the desert.]
I just walk.[Zooming out while Cueball continues to walk in the desert.]
Sand and rocks[Zooming far out as Cueball again just stands in the desert. First line of text, above him, is a continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line is below him.]
stretch to infinity.
As best as I can tell.[The next three panels take up the third line of the comic. The last takes up half the width.]
[Cueball is sitting in the desert, in a contemplative position. First line of text above him, the second below.]
There's plenty of time for thinking out here.
An eternity, really.[Cueball is sketching stuff in the sand. First line of text above him, the second below.]
I've rederived modern math in the sand
and then some.[Three different graph types are depicted. First line of text above them, the second below.]
Physics too. I worked out the kinks in quantum mechanics and relativity.
Took a lot of thinking, but this place has fewer distractions than a Swiss patent office.[The next eight panels take up the fourth and fifth lines of the comic. All pictures are the same size.]
[Cueball is walking along the desert, laying out rocks on a line. Four have been deployed. He is laying down the fifth and has a sixth in his other hand.]
One day I started laying down rows of rocks.[Cueball, with a rock in his hand, continues to deploy rock 16, in a more intricate pattern. There are grid-lines in the sand (5 rows, 6 columns), with each intersection either empty of filled with a rock. No rocks lay anywhere but at an intersection on the grid.]
Each new row followed from the last in a simple pattern.[Zooming out showing even more laid out rocks. Cueball is seen directly from above, and we see his shadow falling on the grid of rocks (7 rows, 14 columns).]
With the right set of rules and enough space,[Continues to zoom further out showing clear triangular patterns (with no rocks) in the laid out grid of rocks. Cueball is not seen. (8 rows, 42 columns). First line of text above the grid, the second line below.]
I was able to build a computer.
Each new row of stones is the next iteration of the computation.[Zooming far out (no Cueball) with rows intersected by five clear V lines on top of them. The V's are drawn inside each other, with the smallest V at the top right, and the other V's starting just to the right of the previous one, and then continuing the same distance past the previous V, as the total length of the first V. The "" in the first line of text above this grid references to the footnote below written in a smaller font.]
Sure it's rocks instead of electricity, but it's the same thing. Just slower.
*Turing-complete[Cueball stands in a contemplative pose (on a clean white background - i.e. no dessert).]
After a while, I programmed it to be a physics simulator.[A black panel with white drawings and text. A small white dot (a particle) is labeled by two arrows coming of two binary strings.]
Every piece of information about a particle was encoded as a string of bits written in the stones.
00101010 00101010[A Feynman diagram showing two particles interacting. Two arrows going in and out with a snaking line between them.]
With enough time and space, I could fully simulate two particles interacting.[The next two panels take up the sixth line of the comic. The second panel takes up three-quarters of the width.]
[Cueball standing before the vastness of the desert, with his programmed lines of rock stretching to infinity.]
But I have infinite time and space.[A black panel with white drawings and text. Depiction of two large galaxies, one with four jets coming out of its center, the other a flat disc. Several smaller galaxies and/or stars are shown around them.]
So I decided to simulate a universe.[The next four panels take up the seventh line of the comic. They are of similar widths.]
[Cueball is walking by his grid of rocks, lines indicate he has just thrown another rock down in its place. It falls so hard it sinks into the sand that splashes out around it. The 14 rocks above him lie on the grid, four others below this grid have not been used yet.]
The eons blur past as I walk down a single row.[Zoom far far out to show multiple rows of rocks. It is not very clear that there are several triangular patterns (with no rocks) in different sizes in the laid out grid of rocks. There are about 50 rows and 90 columns. There are six large triangles on top of each other at the left edge. To the right, there are three even larger triangles from top to bottom, the one in the middle further to the left than the one above, but further right than the bottom one.]
The rows blur past to compute a single step.[Shows the placement of two particles in the simulation.]
And in the simulation...[The two particles have moved just long enough as to not overlap with their previous positions, shown as an after-image with faint gray lines. The text continues directly the one from the previous panel.]
another instant ticks by.[The next two panels take up the eighth line of the comic. They each take up half the width.]
[A Cueball-like person (you) observes a mote of dust vanish.]
So if you see a mote of dust vanish from your vision in a little flash or something[Cueball is standing between two rocks on the ground, while holding two rocks, one lifted up to his head. The first line of text is above him. It is a direct continuation of the text in the previous panel. The second line stands below to the right of him.]
I'm sorry. I must have misplaced a rock
sometime in the last few billions and billions of millennia.[Cueball stands in the "clean" part of his infinite desert, in front of the vastness of his infinity of infinite lines or rocks.]
Oh, and...[A Cueball-like student sits in a classroom with his head in his hands, Megan sits behind him, and a teacher points to the blackboard. A clock shows the time at five minutes to ten.]
If you think the minutes in your morning lecture are taking a long time to pass for you...
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True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.
Transcript
[Cueball sitting at computer.]
Cueball: I'll just comment out these lines...// MD_update(&m, buf, j);
// do_not_crash();
// prevent_911();
In the rush to clean up the debian-openssl fiasco, a number of other major security holes have been uncovered:
[A two-column table is shown:]
Affected System
Security problem
Fedora Core
Vulnerable to certain decoder rings
Xandros (EEE PC)
Gives root access if asked in a stern voice
Gentoo
Vulnerable to flattery
OLPC OS
Vulnerable to Jeff Goldblum’s PowerBook
Slackware
Gives root access if user says Elvish word for “friend”
Ubuntu
Turns out distro is actually just Windows Vista with a few custom themes
