@cube_drone wrote:
Airing of Grievances



Raspberry PI units are cheap, incredibly powerful little computers. $50CDN each, although the full kit required to get one up-and-running wanders into the $100CDN territory - but that is for an entire computer, one capable of running basically anything that the world of computing came up with before 2005, including Asterisk, the powerful, open-source telephony suite.
Although, if you’re going to buy a Pi, obviously the first thing you should build is a RetroPie.
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Melissa: Each one of these Raspberry Pi units is running Asterisk and some autodialer code that I wrote, and I’ve been sneaking them on to unattended phone lines around the city.
Lain: What do they do?
Melissa: They call every nine minutes and play a sound that is my best approximation of Gilbert Gottfried making tender yet passionate love to a set of off-key bagpipes.
Lain: Dang, Mel, who could possibly deserve that?
Melissa: Let’s see… Trump hotels, landlords who’ve kept my security deposit, CANIPRE, Patent Trolls, Steve, Oracle, people who use single character variable names, teenager with luxury sports cars, and anybody who’s ever used the term “alpha” unironically to describe themselves.
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@cube_drone wrote:
Razzle Dazzle



This art project is pretty neat.
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Lain: And with a few minor modifications to my hair and make-up, I render myself invisible to face detection algorithms like openCV.
Lain has a brightly colored hair poof and has arranged blue lines of make-up on her face.
Lain: Oh, I see you’re already on board the privacy train.
Milo is wearing a giant orange-and-red striped collar and he has an orange-and-teal lightning bolt painted on his face.
Milo: Hm?
Milo: David Bowie died one year ago today. January 10 is a dark day for music.
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@cube_drone wrote:
Many-Factor Authentication



I used these same guys to demonstrate Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development some time ago.
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Introducing our exciting new nine-factor auth!
To log in, you need:
- something you know
- something you have
- something old
- something new
- something borrowed
- something blue
- somebody that you used to know
- but you didn’t have to cut me off
- make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
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@cube_drone wrote:
Social Media Math

So, there is this stupid Social Media Math Horse Algebra thing going around, where hundreds of people all fail at a very simple math problem, because the problem contains not one but three different sneaky tricks - one trick that requires knowledge of correct order of operations, and two tricks that involve varying the number of symbols (horseshoe-horseshoe presumably being double the value of simply horseshoe and boot-boot being double the value of just boot).
What’s interesting is not the math puzzle. What’s interesting is the virality of it.
The social media trick at play is that each person who looks at the puzzle figures out one of the tricks, or maybe two of the tricks, and then notices how many people got a different answer from theirs (everyone else, presumably), and wants to post, crowing about their superiority, to the channel. Hilariously, this has led to over 500,000 comments, the bulk of which are “you are all idiots”, and the bulk of which are wrong. It’s viral in the same way as those people who repeatedly post “everybody stop hitting reply-all” to an overcrowded mailing list.
My puzzle is much simpler and a lot less viral. The solution is a PUN, obviously.
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@cube_drone wrote:
How it Feels to Learn Cookery in 10,000 BCE






You might consider this a rebuttal to a previous comic I did, although it’s also about an article which makes fun of Javascript and references an earlier article that made fun of Docker.
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Og: Og want to eat meat. Just put in mouth, right?
Uk: No! Use fire! Cook meat!
Og: Fire hot! How I not burn hands?
Uk: Use pointy stick! Or use hot rock! Or keep fire in box!
Og: Too many choices! How I pick?
Uk: Dunno
Og: Ok, meat on fire! Now eat, right?
Uk: No! Wait! Let cook! Then add salt rock and flavor leaf!
Og: So in order to eat meat, I need fire and stick and wait and rock and leaf? I just eat meat raw, stupid. Mmmf!
An Og-Like Man, 12016 years later: And that’s why I think that modern Javascript is too complicated.
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@cube_drone wrote:
HTTP Status Codes



I’m really looking to corner the market on HTTP status code based humor, but I’m not the only game in town.
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200 OK
271 Great!
2.99 Hot Dog w/ Relish
301 Moved permanently
302 See 303
303 See 301
307 Moved temporarily
309 Relocated to San Jose
311 Moved emotionally
304 Cached
344 The real HTTP response was friendship all along
348 Hidden, but badly enough to find easily
350 Purchased by Google in 2012. Purpose unknown.
372 Purchased by Yahoo in 2003. Mismanaged into obscurity.
400 You dun’ fucked up.
401 Credentials missing
403 No, dammit
404 Not found
405 Method not allowed
406 Unacceptable!
410 Just went out for a bit to buy smokes - back any day now
418 Teapot (self-explanatory)
429 Cool your jets
431 Your request is too damn big!
451 Your government has deemed this resource a threat to security.
458 Request too sexy
500 Something bad and unexpected happened.
501 Didn’t finish building this bit.
502 NGINX broke
503 Servers currently very on fire
504 Not sure if 502 or 503
505+ Programmers broken
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@cube_drone wrote:
Master/Slave
Free the slaves! Hey, you, get away from our production servers.
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Cube Drone: Look, Master-Slave is still a shitty naming scheme for distributed systems that makes light of some very real horrors.
Miloslav: That is the way it has always been. Why make waves?
Cube Drone: Let’s imagine that instead of a garbage collector, we had a process called “brutal dictator” and it rounded up all of your program’s unfit memory to be shot. Would that be okay?
Miloslav: In this situation it is best to keep your mouth shut, convert your hryvnia into rubles, and flee the country.
Cube Drone: We are still talking about programming!
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@cube_drone wrote:
Cryptamory



This would be a good time to bring up James Mickens’ hilarious article on security.
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Miloslav: You can use public and private keys for more than just Git and SSH, you know. If you have someone’s public key, you can send them a message that only they can read.
Sparky: But then how do you know which public keys you can trust? Any key could be anybody!
Miloslav: I went to a key-signing party, once. I came with a cryptographic key and left with somebody’s wife. She didn’t want to do GPG stuff at all.
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