And that seems a bit high, considering how many rows could be in a production database. Could they be pricing on a log scale or something?

Unless there’s actual hidden value here (possible), it’s more like a joke. Chickens rarely cross the road and they’re not getting paid.

If you’re specialised enough it can be really hard to tell what’s obvious. Like, you don’t want to do “grab the mouse, which is one of your computer peripherals” either. Or at least, I worry about doing something like that, and coming across as a dick.

Relevant XKCD.

In practice, I guess this would be a person with a fixed schedule that just changes a lot.

Common like water in the sea. People assuming things are simple is pretty much the whole reason why politics is dumb, for example. Even the fascist stuff has a few notes of it.

Hey, I haven’t heard about the fast food order takers lately. Did they start hallucinating new combos or something?

If they actually follow through, there will be a very satisfying level of shit that comes down on their head.

Never? That’s a long time. How specific a definition of AI are you using?

Only until you’ve figured it out, at which point you’re god. You could make it non-repeatable somehow to avoid that, but magic is depicted as being mainly old, repeated spells most of the time, like in the comic. You could also move to something like Brainfuck or even Malbolge where coding a single new program is hard. As I learned the hard way, though, you’re still going to have no control over what ends up being easy and what’s not.

Actually, it’s more like homeomorphic encryption since you have a system of some bounded complexity instead of a single fixed piece of information. That’s usually harder, but then again you actually want the scheme to be “insecure” in this case.

Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not “rich” enough to be interesting. It’s just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.

Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That’s almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there’s lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.

Yep. All the funding they’ve already put into it will stay put. You can’t uncode FOSS.

You can also take an intermediate approach, actually. Usually I can tell from just the developer docs or whitepapers if something has a way of producing the guarantees it claims.

Look, you either check for yourself, or trust people who have. The only other option amounts to building your own parallel reality.

Go look at the code, then.

I mean, they teach sorting algorithms because they illustrate all the basic ideas of complexity theory while being immediately understandable in a way linear programming or primality testing or something aren’t.

Depends on how the format represents the image. My impression is that it’s in a way that’s implicitly limited to smooth (so definitely not fractal) curves.

You’re never going to fit infinite detail in finite information, of course. At best you can loop through the finite information.

Even if you’re not using one, you should be instinctively looking for a semicolon the moment you get a syntax error unless you’re a complete beginner.

Just later that day? Clearly, comic man doesn’t have to cojones to fuck up as badly as I have.

Huh, so they do exist then.

Eh, strict typing makes debugging way, way easier. Saint Grace brought us compilers for a reason. If all you have is assembly, you should start writing one.