It’s a pun on desert/dessert. At first you think they’re in a desert and the character pronounced it wrong/author spelled it wrong, but the final panel reveals that it was accurate and they’re on top of a large dessert, which is possibly also a desert as well

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

He’s being abducted by a UFO and wakes up inside of it to see random teens instead of aliens, is the joke as far as I can tell. I found the last panel online used elsewhere but it seems to be a common stock photo and not a meme or reference on its own.

Man, Google AI is the gift that keeps on giving (stupidity)

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?

Yeah, I’d be fine with crossposting here, if that’s not seen as spammy or anything

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/

Does Green Lantern have to maintain line of sight to power his creations? Would they have to make him watch?

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.

For more in that vein, see Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, by Larry Niven

Thought this was a fair look at speed in both Rust and C. It doesn’t really try to answer the question, so much as examine some ways of thinking about it. For those not aware, the author is someone heavily involved in Rust, but I didn’t feel like that biased the article.

Was reminded of this essay from this post, which asks about speech synthesis.

Looking back towards excitement over stuff like Big Data, the hype wasn’t exactly misplaced, it just lacked for compute and a bit of optimization. I remember talking with a linguist probably a decade ago who said that trying to do NLU (putting aside arguments about “actual” understanding) with Big Data is like trying to build a ladder to the moon. It turns out that we can build a pretty good ladder.

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 use RunnerUp from F-Droid and it works great:

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.runnerup.free/