Huh, an actual use for the Nintendo Alarmo.

Cybertruck not actually a truck. Musk directs Tesla to rename flagship vehicle “Cyber-not-a-truck.” News at 9:00.

This makes me think of the commandment “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” from the Dune series.

Seriously, though, I suspect a lot of technologies we currently experience in society only in the context of oppression of average people and widening of the income gap might be able to be put to better use. Not even necessarily because we have rules in place so much as because people won’t be baking their selfish asshole agendas into the tech they build.

That all kindof assumes that humanoid robots would be “tools” for humans to “use”. If of course they (or at least some of them) are more like sentient creatures with hopes and dreams and emotions, that might make for a much different conversation. And that feels like the kind of conversation that’d be hard to even comment on today.

Right?!

I’ve dabbled in learning Japanese enough to know that learning a second language as an adult has a way of driving home to you how little I really understand about my own native language. And learning what little I have of a second language definitely has taught me more about English.

I think if someone referred to “the Travises shared given name” without adding the extra “es”, my brain would get stuck on that for a bit. I don’t know that that would be the case for most people or not. But if someone were talking to me about the name shared by multiple people named “Travis”, my brain would churn less, get " stuck" for a shorter time, and be less likely to have to catch back up to the conversation if the extra “es” was included.

Without the extra “es”, it feels like it could get a little “garden-path-y.” Like:

• “The Travis…”
• “The Travis” sounds like a pretty pretentious way to be referred to.
• “…es”
• Possessive. 'k. What does he have?
• “shared given name…”
• Oh, so “The Travis” was magnanimous enough to offer his name for consideration when it came time to decide the name of… maybe one of his relatives’ newborns…?

Right? Not to say I wouldn’t expect to catch on in a couple more words there. And also more realistically, my brain wouldn’t be stuck on this interpretation in the conversation, but more “suspending judgement” and holding both possibilities for interpretations in mind until something resolved the question. But speaking just for myself, I think my brain would have to go through all those machinations if the extra “es” wasn’t there. And that requires more wetware cycles than if the extra “es” wad there. If it was, it’d be unambiguous immediately after the second “es” that “Travis” was both plural and possessive.

(To be fair, after the second “es” another possibility would be that we were talking about multiple groups of people named “Travis”. Chapters of a club only open to people named “Travis” for instance. Kindof like the word “peoples” which is similarly “double-pluralized”. But it seems to me unlikely my brain would jump to that possibility the way it might jump to a possessive form of the title “The Travis.”)

Also, it’s very possible my brain works differently than most. I think I have a pretty “stilted” manner of speech. People occasionally poke gentle fun at me about it. (All in good fun, mind you.) And it’s possible my brain doesn’t process speech quite like most people’s do.

There’s a linguistics professor at MIT who I once heard say in a class (an Open Courseware class… I didn’t attend MIT or anything):

“We’ll speak no more of prescriptive linguistics except to mock it.”

However you want to say it, say it. Your particular style of speech is unique and beautiful and you should keep speaking that way.

I personally would pronounce it like “Travises”. As if pluralizing it. (“There are multiple Travises in the phone book.”) Makes it fairly clear. I guess that brings up the question what to do if there are multiple Travises who co-own something. “The Travises’ shared given name.” I think off the top of my head, I’d probably pronounce it like “Traviseses.” Cool!

I would rather more places require email verification.

(As lurch said, even aside from any security uses, it can be used to verify ownership of the email address.)

People fuck up when sharing their email address a lot. And it bugs me no end when I get subscribed to something because someone mistyped TootSweet111@gmail.com when they meant TootSweet1111@gmail.com. (Not my real email address, obviously, but you get the idea.) I’ve had to unsubscribe from other people’s spam more times than I’d like to have.

A straight up hand cannon.

The live-action web series “There Will Be Brawl” is really good. It’s got a little bit of the same energy as this comic, only grittier.

Goodbye

Hotel chains, casinos, and tech giants? Forgive me if I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the “victims” of these crimes.

It doesn’t sound like they’re really talking about terribly ideologically-motivated hackers like Anonymous or SiegedSec. Nor are they FBI-directed asshole groups defacing good guy sites like PBS or whatever like LulzSec. And from the text of the article, it seems like they’re not (only) financially motivated. But if their aims are purely selfish and not actively destructive aside from that, and if the victims are big-ass companies, it seems fairly morally neutral to me.

Not that I wouldn’t rather see them hacking for good rather than true neutral. But I don’t think their actions are worth ruining their lives over. Which is what will happen if the FBI catches them.

Depending where you are moving to, snow may not be the only sort of inclement winter weather you may have to deal with. For instance, ice may build up on trees, power lines, and/or roads.

If on roads, don’t drive unless you absolutely have to, and if you do, be way more careful than you think you need to be. Look up safety tips for driving in icy conditions before you have to put them into practice.

If you have any trees that might fall on anything of value, kindof watch their condition. If any are splitting down the middle, hire someone to treat them before the winter season to avoid major problems like this.

Or it’s possible you’ll live somewhere ice buildup is unlikely to be an issue. Maybe look into the history of the area or talk to someone who has been there a long time to find out what conditions might be an issue.

Also, the ability to work remotely is kinda nice, I guess. It’s a double-edged sword, though. If you can work remotely, you never get days off due to weather. But if you can’t, you may be pressured to drive into the office when it’s very dangerous.

At work, I switched my work machine from the PC-Support-department-imaged Windows OS (I think it was Windows 7 at the time) to Arch Linux on a foregiveness rather than permission basis. (Several of us did it at the same time and kindof dared them to fire all their best developers over it. It was glorious. But that’s a story for another time.)

Then came the day I needed to print to the network printer. I apparently misconfigured CUPS. I hit the print button. And then I got distracted by something. After that got resolved, I went to the printer, which had been printing pages of gibberish for the past like 20 minutes straight. The stack of papers in the “out” tray was approaching phone book levels of thickness.

Ewps.

Nobody ever figured out I had anything to do with it. (The printer was off in another part of the office anyway.) I fixed my CUPS configuration and was able to print correctly thereafter. But it’s a good story.

It’s not Yo-“he”. It’s Yo-“she”. It’s right in the name.

(/s)

I mentioned this to my mother just a minute ago. I said I’ve never seen anyone use “are” instead of “our” and she was like “oh god that drives me nuts; I see that all the time!”

Do you have any specific projects in mind with this meme?

Cthulhu for president 2024. Why settle for a lesser evil?

Why doesn’t auth-left hav- oh I get it.

In real life, Kelsey Grammer is the auth-right John Lithgow and no I will not explain further.

Mark NSFW posts NSFW, please.