Random thought of the day
-
@error_bot !xkcd lottery
-
xkcd said in https://xkcd.com/1827/ :
Survivorship Bias
(via https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?search=lottery&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1)
-
@error_bot looks like I survived.
-
@remi Here's the one you want
@error_bot xkcd irrelevant eruptions
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in Random thought of the day:
@Mason_Wheeler I'm pretty sure that anything that "everyone knows" is actually known by much less than everyone.
I remember learning about it in 2nd grade, and everyone laughed at how funny the name was.
-
-
Giphy said in https://giphy.com/gifs/foals-ynqGFtElHLF16 :
-
-shrieks in terror and faints-
-
@error_bot
that's weird, even for slipknot
-
@hungrier said in Random thought of the day:
@remi Here's the one you want
Indeed, yes. And I was somewhat misremembering the layout of the comic, as well as the key number (10k, not 20k). Not sure it would have helped though:
@error_bot !xkcd ten thousand
@error_bot xkcd irrelevant eruptions
Those keywords definitely bring a, hem, very different picture to mind than the XKCD comic...
Also, I don't know why I'm always using
!xkcd
rather than justxkcd
. Probably for the same muscle-memory reason-with-no-reason that causes me to use `` instead of ` most of the time...
-
-
OK, sure, that was the exact comic name and not at all what I typed the first time (with the wrong number), so obviously it worked.
@error_bot xkcd lucky 10000
-
-
@remi FWIW I found the actual comic using Google, because none of the relevant sounding keywords I tried brought up the right thing on explainxkcd. Then I came up with a working keyword for error_bot
-
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
OK, sure, that was the exact comic name and not at all what I typed the first time (with the wrong number), so obviously it worked.
@error_bot xkcd lucky 10000
It's misparsing yours and doing a random comic select instead, going by the url.
@error_bot !xkcd nerd sniping
-
-
@PleegWat said in Random thought of the day:
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
OK, sure, that was the exact comic name and not at all what I typed the first time (with the wrong number), so obviously it worked.
@error_bot xkcd lucky 10000
It's misparsing yours and doing a random comic select instead, going by the url.
Good point. It's awfully quick to give up, it seems, since even a basic google search for "xkcd lucky 20000" (yes, the wrong number that I used initially) returns the correct comic.
@error was looking for something to keep busy, I suggest making
@error_bot xkcd
more efficient by adding searches on various engines and finding some way to rank the results and return the "best" one.That is, unless the whole purpose of
@error_bot xkcd
is...@error_bot !xkcd nerd sniping
-
@error_bot
The final telescope
The final telescope (fixed)
The final telescope (1.2 fixed - actually final)
-
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
@error was looking for something to keep busy, I suggest making @error_bot xkcd more efficient by adding searches on various engines and finding some way to rank the results and return the "best" one
As I've mentioned previously, Google is very antagonistic toward unauthorized bot traffic.
-
@error said in Random thought of the day:
unauthorized
-
@error said in Random thought of the day:
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
@error was looking for something to keep busy, I suggest making @error_bot xkcd more efficient by adding searches on various engines and finding some way to rank the results and return the "best" one
As I've mentioned previously, Google is very antagonistic toward unauthorized bot traffic.
Just have your bot make a request to Amazon mechanical turkey (or some other sites that outsource to cheap human workers, I remember reading an article about a captcha-breaking service that was doing that), so that a human makes the Google search, then parse the results and you're good!
(inb4: the bad ideas thread is )
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in Random thought of the day:
@Mason_Wheeler I'm pretty sure that anything that "everyone knows" is actually known by much less than everyone.
"Everyone knows one plus one is two. Wait, are you serious? :table_flip:"
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in Random thought of the day:
@HardwareGeek said in Random thought of the day:
@Mason_Wheeler I'm pretty sure that anything that "everyone knows" is actually known by much less than everyone.
"Everyone knows one plus one is two. Wait, are you serious? :table_flip:"
According to my students, one plus one is....pulls out calculator, several minutes of furious calculation...World War 4?
-
@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
Amazon mechanical turkey
Seasonal!
That was done on porpoise, I'm glad someone spotted it!
-
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
Amazon mechanical turkey
Seasonal!
That was done on porpoise, I'm glad someone spotted it!
Gonna have to give you a spotted seal then.
-
Random thought: Am I the only one who's curious to see what would happen if @Vixen and @Tsaukpaetra had a blind date together?
-
@Zerosquare said in Random thought of the day:
Random thought: I am the only one who's curious to see what would happen if @Vixen and @Tsaukpaetra had a blind date together?
Well, you'd only receive audio logs. Being blind isn't conducive to video capture...
-
@remi said in Random thought of the day:
Just have your bot make a request to Amazon mechanical turkey (or some other sites that outsource to cheap human workers, I remember reading an article about a captcha-breaking service that was doing that), so that a human makes the Google search, then parse the results and you're good!
Bringing Rube Goldberg into the Third Millennium. Along with wooden tables.
-
@Zerosquare I think I and a few others have suggested such a thing on several occasions.
-
What makes jobs stressful (to those of us who find them stressful) is largely that it's a single point of failure. Apart from a business (and not everyone has the assortment of skills to succeed as an entrepreneur), I wonder if in years to come there will be a solution to this.
-
@jinpa said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder if in years to come there will be a solution to this.
Yes! Thanks to the gig economy, we'll all work ten 8-hour jobs a week, so if we're fired from one of them it won't matter as much!
-
@Zerosquare
Man, velocity for each of those 10 jobs is gonna suck.
-
-
I'm going through a massive stack of DVDs, and have discovered that there are at least three Abbott and Costello movies (out of a total of 32, so a rate of about 9%) whose titles are factually inaccurate:
-
Abbott & Costello Go To Mars - the rocket that accidentally takes off with A&C aboard first comes down in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, then later manages to get into space where it lands on Venus before returning home. They never get anywhere near going to Mars.
-
Abbott & Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff - they do meet a killer, and they meet Karloff, but he's not the killer.
-
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein - in the first of many "Abbott & Costello Meet..." pictures, they find themselves in the company of Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi), the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr), and in a brief cameo at the end of the movie, the Invisible Man (voice of Vincent Price). Frankenstein himself does not appear in the picture.
-
-
Some words have no opposite.
Something that is unlikely or improbable is called "far-fetched". But there is no such thing as "near-fetched".
The opposite of dumb ass is not smart ass.
A compliment that is insincere is called a "left handed compliment". But there is no such thing as a "right handed compliment".
-
I wonder if young people in 2080s will still be listening to the 1980s music. And I'm pretty sure they will.
-
Given how ridiculously common it is for people to get hands cut off in lightsaber fights, why did it take all the way until Kylo Ren for someone to think of creating a lightsaber with a crossguard?
-
@Mason_Wheeler before Vader, it was a more... civilized age.
-
@Mason_Wheeler Perhaps the technology for blades that size wasn't there yet?
-
@Zecc said in Random thought of the day:
@Mason_Wheeler Perhaps the technology for blades that size wasn't there yet?
Downsizing lightsabers!
-
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder if young people in 2080s will still be listening to the 1980s music. And I'm pretty sure they will.
Are young people today listening to the music of 1919? A little of it, maybe, but not much.
Found a "Top 40" for that year. A lot of repeats (two versions of "Yearning" and three each of "Beautiful Ohio" and "Till We Meet Again"), but I do recognize a few tunes ("I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" and "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody"). And I think I'd like to hear #33 "Uncle Josh Sets Up The Kitchen Stove" by Cal Stewart and Ada Jones, if only for a hint as to why Ada's not partnered with Billy Murray.
-
@da-Doctah said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
I wonder if young people in 2080s will still be listening to the 1980s music. And I'm pretty sure they will.
Are young people today listening to the music of 1919? A little of it, maybe, but not much.
Were people born in the 80s listening to 60s music? Because people born in 2000s totally listen to 80s music. There was just so many catchy songs made in those years, way more than ever before or since.
-
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
Were people born in the 80s listening to 60s music? Because people born in 2000s totally listen to 80s music. There was just so many catchy songs made in those years, way more than ever before or since.
The actual rate of catchy songs seems close to constant, but the amount that people notice and remember them is variable. And there was, is, and will continue to be a whole lot of dross out there too.
-
@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
Were people born in the 80s listening to 60s music? Because people born in 2000s totally listen to 80s music. There was just so many catchy songs made in those years, way more than ever before or since.
The actual rate of catchy songs seems close to constant, but the amount that people notice and remember them is variable.
Not just variable, but it sharply bumped in the 70s, peaked in the 80s, and from then it was only downhill. At least that's the feeling I get. And I know this is very anecdotal and it might be very different in other parts of the world, but just as an example (disclaimer: I'm a 90s kid) - I know Elvis Presley was a huge rock legend, but I'm pretty sure I've seen Elvis's body double jokes in TV more times than I've heard Elvis's songs on the radio. And I've definitely heard I Want To Break Free alone on mainstream FM radio more times than all Elvis's songs and all Elvis's body double jokes combined.
Another thing. There's a shitton radio stations dedicated just to 80s music, or just to 90s music, or both 80s and 90s, or 70s and 80s, or 70s, 80s and 90s all at once. Was there ever a semi-popular radio station dedicated to the music of 60s or earlier? Had any survived until at least 1990?
-
Also. There's less than 24 hours of 2019 left, and we still haven't got the name for this decade! Or the last one, for that matter!
-
@Gąska "The Offended 2010s".
-
@Gąska said in Random thought of the day:
Not just variable, but it sharply bumped in the 70s, peaked in the 80s, and from then it was only downhill. At least that's the feeling I get. And I know this is very anecdotal and it might be very different in other parts of the world, but just as an example (disclaimer: I'm a 90s kid) - I know Elvis Presley was a huge rock legend, but I'm pretty sure I've seen Elvis's body double jokes in TV more times than I've heard Elvis's songs on the radio. And I've definitely heard I Want To Break Free alone on mainstream FM radio more times than all Elvis's songs and all Elvis's body double jokes combined.
As a 70s kid, the effect seems biased to me around a couple of decades earlier than for you. Which supports my thesis about it being what people notice, not what actually happened. (There were structural changes in how culture was marketed to in the 1950s that make it unlikely for the current pattern to go much further back. Popular music was a very different thing before then. Those changes took a couple of decades to fully work through.)
Another thing. There's a shitton radio stations dedicated just to 80s music, or just to 90s music, or both 80s and 90s, or 70s and 80s, or 70s, 80s and 90s all at once. Was there ever a semi-popular radio station dedicated to the music of 60s or earlier? Had any survived until at least 1990?
Up until about 10 years ago (when my barber switched it off) then for sure there was.
-
@Gąska Had @dkf not replied to the post I'm now replying, I would have completely missed it!
Our wonderful forum software is still refreshing marvelously after the latest update.
@dkf said in Random thought of the day:
As a 70s kid, the effect seems biased to me around a couple of decades earlier than for you.
Interesting. My perception is similar to @Gąska's. I'm sure nostalgia has a strong influence on what music is currently more popular across age groups, with "waves" of influence across generations as the children of yesterday become the adults responsible for deciding which music to put on air tomorrow.