Pics or it didn’t happen.
I’d say it mostly hits the same targets as other programming-related comics. The minimum you need to know are these three things:
- makefiles are an old tech used to help compiling programs, and are thus fairly precise. There are already many programs that will create a makefile for you.
- neural nets are a type of AI where an 80% success rate if often considered good. It basically learns by trial and error, but can actually learn to do decently at a lot of things that humans could only do before.
- Zsh and bash are are two different interpreters that a makefile might use. They are quite similar in syntax, but can produce slightly different outputs.
So Cueball is using advanced tech to do something poorly that computers can already do just fine. This is the opposite of what most programmers do, which is finding new ways to use older tech to do new things.
It’s absurd, but it would also be a pretty neat achievement if he pulled it off. It would kinda be like teaching your new robot dog to change the channel on your TV. There are easier ways to do to change the channel, but it would still be impressive.
Or using a 6 figure robot dog to pull your rickshaw.
Well, that would explain it…
He was late on that one. It wasn’t up as of Tuesday morning.
That fooled me for a few seconds. At first I thought he meant borders that are straight lines but angled from latitude or longitude lines. Those we already have (e.g. California-Nevada). Nope, he means angled vertically.
That’s not nearly enough of a nightmare for GIS people.
Define the vertical component of the border as following a line between a spot on Earth to Olympus Mons on Mars.
What’s the angle of the border below ground? Major ramifications regarding mineral and water rights.
/not actually taking this seriously.
I may not be the first to make this observation or request, but I would like it very much if XKCD should become an official character script.
OK, I liked this one.
Recently, I found the easiest way to post links to the strip is to just type in the entire url. When I started this thread, I copied the url from the xkcd page. A couple-three weeks ago, that url changed to a link and when I copied it, that link was retained through the copy function. Well, I didn’t want a link, since that doesn’t generate a OneBox with an image of the strip, and I’d have to delete half the text to get it to just a url. I tried a couple other ways, but realized that as short as the url is, just typing in the whole thing is the least work.
I use a little utility called PureText to add a paste command that strips away all formatting. It’s perfect for stripping off URL hyperlinks, for example, as well as fonts and colors. It’s basically the same as if you had pasted the text to Notepad, then copied the text from there.
Why don’t you simply copy and paste the URL from the address bar?
I use the Chrome extension Copy as Plain Text.
I believe “Paste as plain text” is now a built-in option in Chrome (for Windows, anyways). I see it in my right-click menu, and I’ve never installed an extension for it. I can even use the keyboard shorcut Ctrl-Shift-V.
Oh, and I suspect that @dtilque goes the front page of the site, so copying the URL from there would only be https://xkcd.com. So I understand copying the “direct link.” I would just suggest using “Paste as plain text” or Ctrl-Shift-V.