Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

The Los Angeles Times, which carries The Far Side, has taken umbrage with my cartoon on several occasions. (Apparently, someone there actually reads the comics beforehand.) These three, as I recall, created some conflicts with the “good taste” standards of that paper, and I believe all three were deleted from their comic page back in the early eighties.

The first two I suppose are subjective, although I don’t remember other papers censoring them. Their rejection of the elephant cartoon, however, had me baffled. I’ve always found it appalling that the demand for ivory has caused these magnificent animals to be continuously poached—but the ultimate act of contempt for the rights of wildlife has got to be represented by the elephant’s foot wastebasket. And that’s the point I was striving for in this cartoon—not that I was hoping to make a profound comment of any sort (the cartoon is really pretty inane, I think), but just who wouldn’t be upset to find out something like this had been done to a former part of their anatomy?

My diet is pretty SAD. It’s probably higher quality than average, since I’ll avoid the cheapest possible foods that are chock full of artificial this or that, but it’s still not as good as eating real food.

That’s great! Did you make it yourself?

It’s been borrowed into graphic design as the Cicada Principle:

https://lea.verou.me/blog/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-revisited-with-css-variables/

Looks like the original link is dead, but there’s a newer examination of it. If you have a repeating pattern, you can maximize variation while minimizing file size by using multiple sequences with different prime lengths

I bet a lot of people over in !homebrewing@sopuli.xyz can relate

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Reaction to this cartoon baffled me.

Although for the most part I think readers understood the “gag,” a few individuals accused me of having fun at the expense of hydrocephalics. Yep―that’s what they said.

I hope it’s obvious to most people that hydrocephalicus (I still can’t believe it) had nothing to do with the cartoon.

Singling out any tragic disease for ridicule would never fall within my own standards―let alone my editors.

So what do they think about Charlie Brown?

It’s the equivalent of riding into town in a beater car. It works and gets you to where you need to be, but it’s embarrassing to be seen in.

Do you know if there’s something like this chart, but for food instead of supplements?

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/

I’ve seen that seed oils are bad. I’ve also seen people that say all oil is bad, and (without having looked into this at all), it seems like the “all oil is bad” people are probably overreacting and it’s something more specific like seed oils or something like that (though what specifically about them is bad?). It’d be nice to see a chart like above with handy links to scientific papers.

While looking this up btw, I found that Scientific American just published something today about seed oils:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you-debunking-a-viral-social-media-myth/

I wonder if it might be a kick in the pants to get us out of a local minimum. That’s probably optimistic as you point out, but what if there’s a huge shift towards better food, so that even if you’re not on it, it’s more effort to eat bad food?

Huh, just discovered that it’s now generic in Canada

Semaglutide’s patent protection expired in Canada at the beginning of 2026. (Novo Nordisk failed to pay a required patent maintenance fee.)

My understanding is that it’ll be generic in the US soon too, and any improvements are just in delivery methods (pill vs injection). I’d agree that if it is able to be locked behind expensive patents that there might not be much societal change, but if you assume that it’s as easy to get as tylenol or something, that seems big.

The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it’s a similar dynamic:

In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.

Also posted over in !discuss@discuss.online here, since I was reminded of the essay

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

As a reader pointed out to me, bananas don’t grow this way. The individual bananas grow upward, not downward (as I’ve drawn them here).

One side of me wants to say, “So sue me,” but the truth is, it does bug me when I make these kinds of mistakes.

I posted about this a bit ago, but that likely wouldn’t work:

In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert

https://discuss.online/post/30279537

Any language you picked or invented would just add to the training data and help the AI out.

Only Fire - Double Penetration (NSFW)

This would be great for !writingprompts@literature.cafe or something

Judging by the copyright years in the top right that I’ve seen, it’s not chronological. They definitely pick the comics to match some events, like Christmas, but other than that it seems pretty random.

Best guess is that they either fainted or are looking down judgmentally at the farmer. Agree that the drawing is ambiguous though

Neither, “Good” and “Evil” can’t exist absolutely and the universe doesn’t care one whit about any of us. Our morality was shaped by what was evolutionarily adaptive, and we developed post-hoc reasoning for it with the nice big brains we evolved.

Bonus panel:

Transcript:

Mister Miracle: Batman? No way. Remember… Batman kills babies.