Grog wakes up one night to find them trying to steal his weapon, and the twerp can’t even lift the handle off the ground. He picks up the hammer by the head and spins around to dislodge the kid - which works, insofar as the child flies off toward the mountains, holding some kind of sword. Grog wonders where he got that, and goes back to bed.

Sometimes an engineer has an idea and gets offended that it doesn’t exist.

We’re like wizards. The miracles you want are practical, mundane, boring. The miracles we want are whimsical bullshit. Guess which ones get done sooner.

I have no idea why you’d do this.

But bravo.

Thought that layout looked familiar. I’ve eaten there this year.

Why the fuck would they need to replicate free software? It’s open. Anyone can start doing their own thing with it, independent of external influence.

they should force WhatsApp/Apple/Signal/Telegram to scan all our private messages

Average person: “Fuck right off.”

for suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

Average person: “OH WELL I GUESS IT’S OKAY THEN.”

Never give Nintendo money.

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.

You do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes.

The idea we’ll never recreate it through deliberate effort is absurd.

What you mean is, LLMs probably aren’t how we get there. Which is fair. “Spicy autocorrect” is a limited approach with occasionally spooky results. It does a bunch of stuff people insisted would never happen without AGI - but that’s how this always goes. The products of human intelligence have always shown some hard-to-define qualities which humans can eventually distinguish from our efforts to make a machine produce anything similar.

Just remember the distinction got narrower.

I’m pretty sure Prestidigitation already covers that, especially if you convince the DM not to check.

Binary search

On that note: heap sort and total order.

One rich asshole called Lauden Ebon.

Same idea as “the cloud.” You’d draw a diagram and the arrows would eventually go to a squiggly representation of someone else’s problem.

Avatar and icon were similarly stolen from mysticism.

unit tests

You have the bard’s attention.

The instructions are helpfully printed on the scroll.

Trapped wizard: “… how the fuck do I pronounce :q!?”

• Knapsack problem
• Pushdown automata
• Zero-knowledge proof
• Late binding
• Borrow checker
• Channel coding
• Tail recursion
• Camel case
• Double float
• Red-black trees
• Quaternions

Lossy compression feels like cheating:

• Block prediction
• Motion compensation
• Chroma subsampling
• Frequency space
• Time domain

SCP-2718: What Happens After.

The absence of player input makes this Candyland for drunken adults.

A purpose served shockingly well by Candyland itself.