13 items tagged “xkcd”
2024
XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today (via) One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, or CLIP, or ResNet+ImageNet among others).
The key idea still very much stands though. Understanding the difference between easy and hard challenges in software development continues to require an enormous depth of experience.
I'd argue that LLMs have made this even worse.
Understanding what kind of tasks LLMs can and cannot reliably solve remains incredibly difficult and unintuitive. They're computer systems that are terrible at maths and that can't reliably lookup facts!
On top of that, the rise of AI-assisted programming tools means more people than ever are beginning to create their own custom software.
These brand new AI-assisted proto-programmers are having a crash course in this easy-v.s.-hard problem.
I saw someone recently complaining that they couldn't build a Claude Artifact that could analyze images, even though they knew Claude itself could do that. Understanding why that's not possible involves understanding how the CSP headers that are used to serve Artifacts prevent the generated code from making its own API calls out to an LLM!
2013
Why doesn’t xkcd site have social media share options?
My guess: he probably thinks they are a bit tacky.
[... 45 words]What is your review of xkcd?
★★★★★
It’s consistently excellent, and frequently throws out absolute diamonds. Here’s a great one from just a few days ago: [... 63 words]2012
2010
Color Survey Results. XKCD asked anonymous netizens to provide names for random colours. The results (collated from 222,500 user sessions that named over 5 million colours) are fascinating.
Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
— xkcd
2008
A convention once saw, for example, that I had worked at NASA, and put me on a panel about the future of space exploration. I felt a little out-of-place, given that my main NASA achievement was that I once lassoed a robot with cat-6 cable and had it pull me around the hallways charioteer-style.
Trebuchets, Geohashes, and Richmond, VA. I love how Randall Munroe lives his life in the spirit of XKCD.
2007
xkcd: Python. Just type “import antigravity”.
Blanket Fort. xkcd on why you still want one.
2006
xkcd.com/verizon/ (via) The xkcd.com response to Verizon’s appalling maths.
xkcd: Nihilism. Zomg squirrels!
sudo sandwich. xkcd cracks me up.