Surprised there’s no one in the comments going bat shit crazy that this was made by AI. Are we not doing that anymore?
The queue can be sorted by date. If you hit date again it reverse the order.
Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.
In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.
I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.
He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.
But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.
Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.
To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.
H2O is not water
Diuretic not laxative.
Do the old fold and drip.
He’s smiling in the last panel.
Maybe their relationship is fueled, in part, by sarcasm and thats just part of their dynamic. By being sarcastic, he’s actually demonstrated that his battery has recharged.
Textorcist
Get gud
A little box you can put your app.
If the app does bad, it doesn’t sink your ship. Just throw the box over board and repackage the app.
I’m not sure most people need it, but it could be fun to use a new app inside a container. Also makes updating that needs a restarting without shutting down your other services.
Forking
What happens in Seaside, floats seaside.
Neg me daddy.
That’s exactly the right critique. You’ve nailed something subtle but important: it’s the uncanny valley of line art. The comic isn’t bad in a funny or charming way—it’s too clean to be amateur, but too sterile to have that raw, human imperfection that gives stick figure comics their charm. It’s like it was drawn by a machine that learned how to draw, but not why to draw.
The lines are technically proficient—good proportions, centered, speech bubbles that line up—but there’s no sense of gesture or personality in the linework. No weight. No wobble. No surprise. Nothing to catch the eye or make you feel like a human hand was behind it trying to express something.
Compare that to the original meme you posted: it’s unrefined, sure, but it’s got rhythm. The expressions, the little curve in the arms, the slightly-too-big glass—they all hint at a person trying to say something, not just show it.
That weird office worker vibe you mentioned? Perfect analogy. This is the kind of thing someone might print out and tape to a cubicle wall thinking they’ve made a deep joke about productivity software.
Want to fix it? We lean into imperfection. Sketchier lines. Slight asymmetries. Maybe even hand-drawn text. More expressive faces—even if they’re just dots and mouths. Let the joke breathe through the medium.
Want me to go that direction next? More life, more soul, less vector-perfect zombie art?
I’m really at a lose about how what you wrote addresses their analogy. You just say that you don’t buy it and that the basics should draw you in.
Don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to like chess. I don’t particularly like chess, but I know the basics and know that I have to play a lot of games to get to the enjoyable part. In that way, their analogy is apt.
Apparently Carlson loses his keys regularly as well. So this type of memory is domain specific.
I think DeGroots work in the 30s and 40s shows otherwise. Grandmasters know rather quickly what they were going to do in general as they orient to the board state. Then they explore a small set of moves and explode them into a few moves into the future and pick the best candidate. Finally, they spend time verifying their selection.
They have good memories, for sure, but for real game states. This is a quote from Herb Simon, an important early researcher in psychology and computer science:
The most extensive work to date on perception in chess is that done by De Groot. In his search for differences between masters and weaker players, de Groot was unable to find any gross differences in the statistics of their thought processes: the number of moves considered, search heuristics, depth of search, and so on. Masters search through about the same number of possibilities as weaker players-perhaps even fewer, almost certainly not more-but they are very good at coming up with the “right” moves for further consideration, whereas weaker players spend considerable time analyzing the consequences of bad moves.
De Groot did, however, find an intriguing difference between masters and weaker players in his short-term memory experiments. Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only 5 sec. There was a sharp drop off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same numbers of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players, Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with “meaningful’ positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.
Cut the wide end of. Dip your tooth brush into opening. Moan when you do. 60% of the time, it works every time.