Fish are fishy.

Envy versioning is how a lot of smartphones are named. But most of them settled on current year (YY).

They don’t need to. But they know what an engine is, don’t they? Even if they know nothing else about it? It’s the part of the car that goes vroom and makes everything else possible.

Yeah, of course. I think I was misunderstood, which is probably why I got so many downvotes.

Most tasks are possible (and often trivial, given access to the right library) with traditional programming. If it’s possible to do them this way, this is by far the best approach.

Of the things that are not reasonably doable this way, like determining whether a photo is of a bird as in the comic, quite a lot of them are possible nowadays with machine learning (AKA “AI”), and often trivial given access to the right pre-trained model. And in this realm, I would say success rates are very often higher than that. Image recognition is insanely good.

What I’m asking is, what’s a task that’s virtually impossible both with programming and with machine learning?

“Mission critical” tasks which require very high and provable reliability, such as autonomous driving cars, technically fit this question but I think it’s ignoring the point of the question.

And if you were going to mention counterexamples where specially crafted images get mislabeled by AI: this is akin to attacking vulnerabilities in traditional software, which have always existed. If you’re making a low-stakes app or a game, this doesn’t matter.

It’s more logical than Linux’s version numbering system:

Does the major version number (4.x vs 5.x) mean anything?

No. The major version number is incremented when the number after the dot starts looking “too big.” There is literally no other reason.

https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

What would be a “nearly impossible” task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can’t think of anything.

It’s an expression that basically means “oh dear”, or “oh no”. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oy_vey

It would have been a play if it was named in the 1960’s.

IMO that’s a stretch, they aren’t even close to homophones.

The “-holic” suffix is regularly used to mean addict. For example, workaholic. Yes, it originated from “alcoholic”, but it’s commonly used now. So the boat’s name just means “water addict”, there’s nothing punny about it.

They’re all great except the last one. The “Cirrhosis” one went over my head but I looked it up, it’s excellent. The last one, “aqua holic”, isn’t a dad joke unless I’m missing something.

Your sacrifice is greatly appreciated! Also, what the hell, since when can tweets be novels?

I want to see the rest of that quoted tweet. There aren’t a lot of ways to finish that sentence that would make sense.

To be even more pedantic, I don’t think “up for debate” applies here when the only possible point of disagreement is the very definition of “wet”. Any specific definition would either mean water is wet or water isn’t wet, so there isn’t any debate.

Oh, I do that too, of course. But then after a month I give up and use the brush. Then a day later a new stain appears and the cycle continues.

I just wanted to comment that factoid about the toilet brush. Hoping someone would chime in and admit they’ve never owned one!

Oh, of course!

It turns out that in some parts of the world, people have not heard of toilet brushes.

Where does that put Judaism? Just a bare Linux kernel without the rest of the OS?

This is fantastic. Thanks for posting the reddit link, which has now been edited further:

EDIT 2: Apparently I also owe an apology to the small (but vocal) contingent who really wanted this to be minotaur smut. I’m doing my part. Now get typing.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

And the linked thread is basically a writing competition that the author is hosting with a $100 prize. The title is “Announcing the 2026 Beefhammer Prize For Excellence in Minotaur Erotica”. Lovely!

Possibly. If you have the option to use DisplayPort instead of HDMI, that should also resolve it today.

I think it also depends on what distro you’re using. On Linux Mint Cinnamon, which still uses X11 by default, I haven’t been able to use the highest refresh rate of my monitor. But the experimental Wayland support did it without issue.