David Stark / Zarkonnen: humor
- The Nature of Hyperspace
Alarms blared as the Battle-Citadel WRATH OF KORGATH prepared to enter the Void Gate to the Krauthammer system. In the citadel’s barracks, thousands of mankind's finest warriors stood ready, photon lances charged, to bring the fury of mankind to the monstrous, tentacular Z’zgh’ghlkt. The words of the High Legate in the citadel’s Command Apex echoed through the War Halls of the mighty craft, imploring each warrior to hold the line against the alien horror that threatened to engulf them all.
- Captain to the bridge.
You are very, very hungover. An alien admiral urgently wants to talk to you. If only you remembered why.
- "Cheesoid", a rapid-fire illustration of common mistakes in Machine Learning
I recently came across this Mitchell and Webb classic: "Cheesoid", the story of one man attempting to make a robot that can smell things.
Apart from being pretty funny, I think it's a great rapid-fire illustration of a lot of common mistakes in machine learning. That's what Cheesoid is, after all - it's a classifier system for smells.
- Blog posts from The Future!
I've been writing blog posts on the basis of writing prompts from dailypost.wordpress.com, and today's is quite amusing: "Our blogs morph over time, as interests shift and life happens. Write a post for your blog - but three years in the future."
- A grammar for trolley problems
Trolley problems are ethical thought experiments that are IMO a bit too popular and contrived. McSweeney's did a recent post making fun of them and inspired me to create a generator for them.
The generator is based on a context-free grammar, a notation that lets you describe symbols turning into sequences of other symbols. It's on GitHub and I'm enthusiastically accepting pull requests for additional entities that could be imperiled by trolleys.
- Skullcoin: A modest proposal
There's been a lot of talk about alternate currencies recently, with Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Stellar and so on all jostling to be The Future. I would like to suggest an... alternate approach. It may strike you as odd at first, but hear me out: it has some truly fascinating dynamics.
- Six words you can't translate into English!
- Trajatrax
- Du'choo pelumm
- H hh/j jatuxg
- Tlo!qq
- Uxamorsiprenosis
- Üüü
- Cathive Hackathon 2014
We had a little in-house hackathon to work on our personal projects. This is something like what happened:
- Couldn't help myself, sorry
"average person makes 100000 HTTP requests a day" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person makes 1000 HTTP requests a day. Spiders Georg, who lives in a web server & makes 100 million HTTP requests a day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
"average person uses 3 snowclones a day" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person uses 0 snowclones a day. Snowclone Georg, who has deeply annoying habits of speech & uses 10000 snowclones a day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
- ArtCritic.
Last weekend, I participated in my first Global Game Jam, together with @LK_Ink and @xeophin. Together, we built ArtCritic, a simple and snarky game where you visit a series of art openings and try to impress the other visitors despite your total lack of knowledge. Playable unity game within.
- A very non-esoteric languageI was thinking the other day: there are plenty of esoteric programming languages - but how about a really non-esoteric, actively boring one? This is my take on it: an imperative, non-OO, garbage-collected, strongly and statically typed mixture of all the most standard bits of C, Java and Javascript, with as many surprises removed as possible. Note that I'm not advocating that this is a good language design, just a mildly amusing one.
- Multithreading in the kitchenWe have a pretty small kitchen, but we like to do kitchen work together. A frequent scenario occurs where one of us is standing at the sink, washing up, while the other one is tidying and needs to throw something away. Unfortunately, person A is blocking access to the bin, which is below the sink. In other words, they hold a mutual exclusion lock on that bit of the kitchen.
- Gods and Things
The other day I caved in and bought the expansion packs to Civ V. I've been having a fair bit of fun with it, and definitely enjoying the new religion and trade systems. Of course, it didn't take me very long to give my religion a very silly name, and from there a concept was spawned: Gods & Things - a Lovecraftian expansion for Civ V.
- A Very Helpful LanguageI was talking to David about code formatting earlier, and the question suddenly popped into my head: "Are there any programming languages where evaluation order is determined by spacing?
- DWONGWe should...