Oh, a paper written in chicken. (PLIF was a great comic, incidentally.)
dclayh
Karma: 1,678
Ah, a particularly involved shaggy-dog story.
That joke is like the Aristocrats insofar as it’s an opportunity for improvisation (at as great a length as you can get away with). Also analogously, I’ve usually heard it as the “‘Fuck you, clown’ joke” (or just the “clown joke” if you really care about spoilarz).
And in the versions I’ve heard, the clown calls the guy down to the stage, and asks “Sir, are you a horse’s head?” “No.” “Are you a horse’s leg?” “No.” “Are you a horse’s tail?” “No.” “Well then, it seems to me that you must be a horse’s ass!” which is both funnier (to me) and (importantly) longer.
For Draco, you forgot Knowledge: wizard society and Status: Noble and Most Ancient House.
ETA: And Status: Boy-Who-Lived for Harry, of course.
Ch. 68:
Hermione wears makeup? On a regular basis?! Has this been mentioned before, in MoR or canon? Seems somewhat-to-very out of character to me.
ETA: Eliezer has now removed the reference.
Admittedly the comic seems to assume malevolence rather than the more likely indifference...but it’s still a comic about a self-improving superhuman intelligence that destroys humanity.
Yesterday’s SMBC presents SIAI-style uFAI fears as essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was more interested in Quirrell’s statement about the note. Have we seen evidence before that the lawyer/genie style of not-technically-lying is particularly relevant in the magical world? Veritaserum, perhaps?
Cf. the Peter de Blanc tweet
As soon as you notice a pattern in your work, automate it.
Some of the best writing so far.
On the other hand, it also contains this sentence:
Something precious and irreplaceable inside Harry withered like dry grass and vanished forever.
which appears to mean nothing and serve no purpose except to irritate me by reminding me of terrible BDSM erotica.
Why does he follow his whims to play-duel and then kill Bahry instead of quickly subduing and memory-charming him,
Presumably, as I mentioned below, for the stated reason that “‘It’s been quite a while since I had a serious fight with a serious opponent’” As Quirrel himself said earlier, if you can’t have some fun once in a while, what’s the point?
And it’s a pretty big miscalculation of Quirrell not to anticipate Harry’s intervention at the key moment.
I interpreted it that he was just too caught up in duelling-lust, and momentarily eriregrq gb uvf Qnex Ybeq crefban, forgetting how Harry would react.
ETA: rot-13d some stuff which is apparently supposed to be secret again.
Has anyone dealt with bargaining games where different pure solutions cannot be linearly combined (i.e. a non-convex solution space)?
This is also the approach they take on the TV show Caprica.
You forgot the most optimistic of all:
I could do absolutely nothing, get cremated and the eventual Friendly AI will still be able to reanimate me, via time-travel or equivalent.
And now it’s mentioned Friendly AI directly. Has Jeph Jacques been reading Eliezer?
Ch. 49. The throwaway reference to Tenorman Family Chili is awesome.
Don’t you think that one’s a bit creepy, what with the Nazi-style saluting?
Too many SMBC comics to get all of them in one post, but here are four recent ones:
#1 The Fermi Paradox is resolved with reference to wireheading.
#2 About mind uploading.
#3 A different kind of singularity, and (naive) Fun Theory.
#4 Making fun of aging singularitarians.
Yes, that’s how it should be.