That’s actually pretty good for a modern Garfield. There have been some with literally no change other than the speech bubbles.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Figure this one out: When I originally drew and submitted this cartoon, the ants were carrying an older man. That’s it, everything else was identical. The cartoon came back to me, unused, with the words “no thanks” written across i from my editor.

I waited a few weeks, and then resubmitted the cartoon―only this time with a baby substituted for the man. And then they accepted it! I’m still scratching my head about that one.

Also, pretty sure those are supposed to be lips, not teeth. Think the colorist misinterpreted that.

For anyone else unfamiliar with the author:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Payson_Terhune

Albert Payson Terhune was an American writer, dog breeder, and journalist. He was popular for his novels relating the adventures of his beloved collies and as a breeder of collies at his Sunnybank Kennels, the lines of which still exist in today’s Rough Collies.

Whoops, just realized I accidentally double-posted one image and missed this one, which might have been a bit confusing:

Makes sense, thanks for the background! Interesting to hear about Arne Beurling, not something you hear about nearly as much as Turing / Enigma machine

Yeah, that’s my understanding

Yeah, I automatically include the trivia from the Peanuts wiki, but it’s sometimes rather useless trivia

Seems like a good idea to have a pretend murder with a detective skulking around hoping for something exciting to bust.

Good catch, I’ll fix that. It’s because the original is poor quality and the ImageMagick command I use to rearrange the panels choked on it, thinking that it was just noise or something.

All of the neon gives it very strong proto-cyberpunk vibes.

Were there ever really any repercussions for working with the Nazis, or was it just kind of quietly forgotten?

That’s actually what “DEATH GAS” means in their alien language, weird coincidence

Posted previously, from his Patreon:

https://discuss.online/post/34645293

Looks like he worked on it some more and posted it to the site today

She liked women:

Jansson had several male lovers, including the political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, and briefly became engaged to him. He was the inspiration for the Moomin character Snufkin. However, she eventually “went over to the spook side” as she is said to have put it —a coded expression for homosexuality—and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler. In 1956 Jansson met her lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, known as “Tooti”. In Helsinki they lived apart but nearby, so they could meet unnoticed, but this did not resolve the problem that Jansson’s mother often came to stay. They found a partial solution by building a house on a small island in the Gulf of Finland, and staying there for the summer. Jansson’s and Pietilä’s travels and summers spent together on the Klovharu island in Pellinki have been captured on several hours of film, shot by Pietilä.

Hard to say if she was a lesbian or bi or what exactly since it wasn’t great to be gay back then, but this is probably commentary to the effect of “Why does it matter if you like men or women?”

He talks about that in the commentary for another comic:

Transcript:

The goal in any cartoon is to create that perfect marriage between the drawing and the caption (if there is one). And this cartoon, I feel, is a good example of when that goal is reached.

Visually, I wanted to capture the look and feel of a scene from an old Bogart film. (I would have preferred the elephant to be a little more hidden in the shadows under the staircase, but it’s difficult to pull off those subtleties in newsprint.)

But the caption had to accomplish the same dramatic touch. In general, it’s risky to write long captions that contain two or more sentences, because it tends to break continuity with the static image. I think this one works, however, because there’s no exaggerated action in the drawing. The elephant is speaking under his breath, and Mr. Schneider has turned around and frozen in his tracks. Even if this little scene were animated, we wouldn’t see much more movement than what’s captured in this cartoon.

Some background on this comic:

This cartoon has always bothered my because of a basic error: The birds’ wings are raised before the question is even asked. I think it would have been better in this case to have just left the wings down.

Welcome! Yeah, this is a good place to ask questions. There’s an explainer post in the community here that might have some good info for you too:

https://discuss.online/post/646

It hasn’t been updated in a while, but feel free to ask about anything confusing!

Welcome! This is a good community for non-political US questions, and for more general questions there’s [email protected], and maybe others depending on the nature of your questions

I don’t think it’ll be LLMs (which is what a lot of people jump to when you mention “AI”), they have much higher latencies than microseconds. It will be AI of some sort, but probably won’t be considered AI due to the AI effect:

The AI effect is the discounting of the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not “real” intelligence.

The author Pamela McCorduck writes: “It’s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, ‘that’s not thinking’.”

Researcher Rodney Brooks stated: “Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, ‘Oh, that’s just a computation.’”

LLMs might be useful for researchers diving down a particular research/experiment rabbit hole.

I don’t have any useful speculation to contribute, but here’s a classic chart showing various funding levels towards that goal:

Coming from a slashdot thread from 2012 where some fusion researchers did an AMA type thing:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions

Here’s also a recent HN thread about achieving more energy than we put in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33971377

The crucial bit is this

Their total power draw from the grid was 300 megajoules and they got back about 3 megajoules, so don’t start celebrating yet

The critical ELI5 message that should have been presented is that they used a laser to create some tiny amount of fusion. But we have been able to do that for a while now. The important thing is that they were then able to use the heat and pressure of the laser generated fusion to create even more fusion. A tiny amount of fusion creates even more fusion, a positive feedback loop. The secondary fusion is still small, but it is more than the tiny amount of laser generated fusion. The gain is greater than one. That’s the important message. And for the future, the important takeaway is that the next step is to take the tiny amount of laser fusion to create a small amount of fusion, and that small amount of fusion to create a medium amount of fusion. And eventually scale it up enough that you have a large amount of fusion, but controlled, and not a gigantic amount of fusion that you have in thermonuclear weapons, or the ginormous fusion of the sun.

So it’s still really encouraging, but just a warning that headlines don’t capture the full picture. Bonus fun fact from that thread:

Theoretical models of the Sun’s interior indicate a maximum power density, or energy production, of approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core, which is about the same power density inside a compost pile.

Looks like SMBC beat XKCD to the punch on this joke:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/641:_Free