Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Robots in restaurants? No thanks.

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These two articles appeared right next to each other in my RSS feed this morning:

From the New York post:

McDonald’s experimenting with robot employees that look like humans — and even dress in uniform
By Zoe Hussain. Published March 22, 2026, Updated March 23, 2026, 1:34 p.m. ET

Videos posted on social media captured the myriad of lifelike robots at a McDonald’s in Shanghai performing routine tasks typically completed by human workers, such as greeting customers and delivering food.

Diners were seen interacting with the robots dressed in the fast-food joint’s iconic red-and-yellow uniforms behind counters, while children chased more of the moving machinery disguised as cute animals.

And then from Breitbart:

Robot Goes Berserk in California Restaurant Until Restrained by Staff
by Lucas Nolan.

Staff members at a restaurant in Cupertino, California, were forced to physically restrain a humanoid robot after it began wildly flailing its arms and smashing dishware during a performance.

TechCrunch reports that a humanoid robot performing at a hot pot restaurant in Cupertino, California, created a chaotic scene when it began moving erratically, breaking plates and scattering chopsticks across the dining area. The incident required at least three employees to physically restrain the machine as it continued to swing its arms unpredictably.

Just sayin'....

Tuesday, October 08, 2024

My sports ignorance rears its ugly head

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Today, I read the following article on my RSS feed:

WATCH: Vanderbilt Hit with $100K Fine After Fans Rush Field, Tear Down Goal Posts
by Warner Todd Huston

The SEC has fined Vanderbilt University $100,000 after fans rushed the field and tore down the goal posts following the team’s win against Alabama on Saturday.

But me, in my complete ignorance of sports, especially at the college level, read this headline and thought "why would the US Securities & Exchange Commission care about a football riot?"

Thursday, October 26, 2023

Loony Tunes: "(Blooper) Bunny" (1991)

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While looking for something completely unrelated, I ran across this great cartoon that I had never before seen. Enjoy:

Read more about this cartoon on Wikipedia.

Friday, May 27, 2022

Linkiest: 5 Classic Songs That were Ment to Be Jokes

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5 Classic Songs That were Ment to Be Jokes
By Don McMullen

Certain songs over the years were written to be joke but not exactly a novelty either. However too many people can’t see the jokes or the satire in those songs either because the audience eats it up and is into what the artists are mocking or even getting back at someone else or mocking a certain product or whatever. Regardless here a short list of classic songs that were meant to be jokes but were taken seriously enough to be hits in their own right.

A fun read. And you'll never hear these songs in the same way again.

h/t The Bongino Report

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Don't believe the news

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Mallard Fillmore comic: March 23, 2022

Transcript (in case the image goes off-line in the future):

Mallard is watching TV, which is saying:

Coming up... We'll consult our panel of experts who've been proven dead wrong about every international conflict for the past two decades but are definitely NOT wrong about this one.

Friday, February 25, 2022

Comic and a bit of philosophy

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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for Friday, February 25, 2022
  • How do you stop being jealous of other people?
  • The key is to always do what is true to you. Find your highest ideal and pursue it.
    Then, when other people have more success, you can recast your failure as a heroic struggle for purity or beauty or whatever.

This comic, which portrays a very cynical view of the world (a common feature of comics by its author), calls to mind a very famous quote from the Talmud (Pirkei Avot, aka "Ethics of the Fathers", Chapter 4, mishna 1):

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

SMBC: Love Modeling

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I'm a regular reader of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a very strange comic that has a lot of geek-appeal.

Today's comic is particularly amusing. I won't embed the image here, because of copyright, but please click through and read it.

The interesting part is that this has been demonstrated. Back in the 60's, researchers at MIT created ELIZA, a program that can (among other things) simulate a psychotherapy session. It mostly works by parroting back whatever the human user says, with occasional non-specific questions and statements. It is nothing close to AI, but it is nevertheless convincing to quite a lot of people, including many who understand software enough to know better.

Tuesday, August 03, 2021

Homestar Runner rises again!

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If you have no idea what this subject line is talking about, then you missed out on what used to be one of the coolest parts of the Internet.

Homestar Runner is/was a web site full of silly animations and games, written almost entirely in Flash. Unfortunately, with the demise of Adobe Flash, most of the site ended up a giant mess of broken links. And for those of us who got rid of Flash before Adobe shut it down, the site stopped working a long time ago.

Fortunately, it appears that some enterprising engineers develpped Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator that can be embedded in web sites, and the Homestar Runner people have been busy converting their site over to it.

As its disclaimer says, "Not every cartoon and game works perfectly just yet so be patient and expect some jankiness here and there while we keep a-workin!", but it is pretty good. And I can once again enjoy all of the StrongBad Emails, not just the ones that have been converted to YouTube videos.

And since this post wouldn't be complete without them, here are a few of my all-time favorite StrongBad e-mail videos:

Friday, May 10, 2019

Gee, this feels familiar...

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The Register:
Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet
By Team Register. 10 May 2019 at 07:03

5-minute job? We've heard that old chestnut before

Have you got that Friday feeling? El Reg does, mainly because we're bringing you the latest instalment of On Call.

Every week, we trawl through emails recounting the times readers have been faced with a particularly tricky call-out, searching for the best one to take you into the weekend.

This time, we meet "Wayne", who got rather more exercise than he'd bargained for when asked to do a "five-minute" extra job after finishing an upgrade to a pair of network routers. ...

You definitely need to click through the article's link and read the whole story.

And remember it the next time I say I'm coming home late from work because I needed to fix "one last bug before leaving the office".

Monday, July 17, 2017

MIT: Tinfoil hats make it easier for the government to scan your brain

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Study on the effect of tinfoil hats on blocking mind control satellites

In February 2005, some CSAIL graduate students "Published" a paper on the effect of tinfoil hats on blocking mind control satellites. They measured the attenuation of radio signals as a function of frequency and determined that certain frequencies which are reserved for government use are actually amplified by the tinfoil hats. Clearly the government must have started the tinfoil hat craze so it could more effectively spy on its citizens.

A full account of this experiment can be found here

Yes, this is a joke.

The interesting (and not necessarily funny) part is that one of the bands that are amplified (2.6GHz) is used by cell phones. If you are worried about cell phone radiation causing brain tumors, then you should probably avoid wearing any aluminum foil headgear.

Friday, July 14, 2017

War on "Medicad"?

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h/t Washington Free Beacon.

Apparently one of the "cost-effective ways for us to continue access to health care" is to slash by 50% spending on use of the letter "i" in promotional materials.

Thursday, May 04, 2017

May The Fourth Be With You

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Yeah, it's May 4th again. I'm not doing anything special, but GoComic put together a page full of comics related to Star Wars.

Enjoy

Monday, October 26, 2015

Friday, September 18, 2015

xkcd: Tech Loops

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I know the feeling. Every now and then, I think about what I actually use computers for (outside of my job, of course,) and it's not a whole lot:

  • Spreadsheets - household budgets and a few related things
  • Database - simple databases to track all the books, music and videos I own
  • E-mail
  • Web browser - mostly for reading web-comics, buying stuff off of Amazon and logging in to my bank account
  • iTunes - mostly for ripping CDs and loading my iPods. And for making backups of what's on my phone
  • Family photos - seems like this is a write-only repository. I rarely look at any of them, but I want to keep them organized here. I would probably be better off printing the pictures and making albums, like I did before I started using digital cameras.

It's very sobering to realize that for most of what I do, my old Apple II with 128K RAM and two floppy drives would be sufficient. And that old system might even be faster, since it won't have the massively bloated overhead of every modern operating system. Maybe I should consider switching back. I just need to figure out how to print to my laser printer and where to buy a box of blank floppy disks.

More seriously, any computer from the 90's would be more than adequate for everything here, except for iTunes. And that's only because I need it to support my iPhone. 20 years of massive improvements in hardware just to do what we've always done at the same speed we've always done it. So much for progress.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Hanzi Smatter: Bing Mi! restaurant

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Bing Mi! restaurant

劍兵 (sword soldier) on the sign is not associated with the delicious wrap in terms of context, rather it is the homophone of 煎餅 (Chinese pancake wrap).

Click through to the full article.

I don't personally have a problem with a Chinese restaurant that is not owned and operated by a Chinese person, but their (or their marketing consultant's) decision to generate a Chinese logo using the wrong text is just unforgivable. Google Translate is not a suitable source for things like this, and nobody who actually reads/writes Chinese would make a mistake like this.