I think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery.
In fact the comics - especially the older ones are incredibly clever and funny and insightful and there’s long running threads and connections and strong characters.
Peanuts the tshirt/hat/poster/cup is crass.
Peanuts the comic is genius.
It exactly the same with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The commercially exploited imagery is crass and dumb. The comics written by Karl Barks were genius and often really entertaining adventure stories.
I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.
It's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers.
They have (as I understand it) challenged and stopped some folks from doing things, but something like the Calvin sticker was pretty ubiquitous. Even then, some later ones were particularly bad Calvins.
I had a vinyl sticker of Spaceman Spiff on the back of my motorcycle helmet. I bought it at a motorcycle race back in the 90s.
Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.
Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.
I have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time.
I've had more comments on the snoopy dial, and my casio terrorist watch, than any high-end piece in my rotation/collection. I struggle to think of other snoopy merchandise which is common-place, outside watches.
(I asked my eight year old son a while back if he knew the names of some characters from Peanuts, while showing him a couple of the cartoon strips, the only one he knew was Snoopy. I was sad to learn he didn't know the name of either Charlie Brown or Woodstock.)
Wikipedia is a bit coy and trying to be neutral. But even just from there you can see that the author decided to make strips about cats, because Snoopy had already cornered the dog market.
The entire thesis of once in 300 years or once in 1000 years or once in 100 years weather event really has to be let go by the media. The fact is these things are happening or more and more often and are a direct result of climate change and then not once in 300 years, they’re happening all the time
It's also a bad statistical method because if there are 300 cities/regions in the world and a storm hits a random one of them most severely each time, on average you will expect to have one city/region every year seeing a 300-year storm even in a static climate.
Not that I think the climate isn't changing, but because if the headlines are obviously p-hacking all the time you get all climate change reporting eventually called fake news even when it isn't.
I think these terms state how likely some event is for some climate, which is useful for people who don't live in that climate. It isn't so much used for real statistic.
The article says it's the heaviest rainfall recorded in Hat Yai over the last 300 years. So that's the actual meaning, and interpreting it in the probabilistic sense seems to have been the initiative of the headline writer.
This is a severity scale primed with how much likely it was in the past. We might adjust that scale in a century, but the events severity don't change and it would be useless to continuously adjust a scale, while trying to use it, that would make it meaningless.
I mean, we’re still working on convincing people that climate change is actually happening, so if they want to keep reporting the 100yr storms that happen every year now, that’s fine by me.
There is a huge difference between "once per location per 100yr" and "once per 100yr".
Every year there is at least one hurricane Katrina equivalent storm in the world. Having one in New Orleans is once in hundreds of years. Anywhere on the gulf coast is once in, IDK, a dozen.
So you can pretty easily lie and mislead (accidentally or not the results are the same) by not being super careful about scope.
Then there was that thing where RAF bombers pretended to bomb US cities... which had to be hushed up as it made it clear that US air defence systems weren't nearly as good as the public had been told.
Or if you have a meeting to practise talking about nuking people, the people who you are talking about nuking might think you are actually going to nuke them and nuke you before you nuke them.
I agree with you. Cats outdoors are a nightmare to local species. This super predator kills everything and is already responsible for the disappearance of so many species of birds lizards and other mice. I do love cats too but they have not their place outdoors, it’s like releasing an atomic bomb on local ecosystems. Their only place outdoors should be where they originated from where food is scarce
What’s the message here? I read and read a lot of words but nothing clear came through. Maybe he sort of seems to be saying that Ruby is special in modern programming with LLMs? That doesn’t ring true for me - seems that languages are less special and less differentiated than ever with LLMs, which is to say that languages just tend to be less important now and that’s a good thing. Who cares about language, just build the thing.
Is he saying that Ruby is better for LLM programming? That’s hard to imagine because strong typing has to be a big help for automated programming tools and Ruby is behind all the other modern languages on typing.
Not really Ruby per se, but Extreme Programming, TDD, and all of the mid-2000s OO-hipster methodology stuff that accompanied Ruby/Rails back in the day. His thesis is that if you just adopt XP, like you're supposed to, that translates smoothly to programming with LLMs because you can have the LLMs fearlessly take incremental steps, supported by extensive testing, and directly oversee the work exactly the same way you would do pair-programming with a human junior programmer.
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
I like this analogy. At a Walmart I'm more likely to find a good deal, and will encounter people who I wouldn't at home/work/friends, yet I prefer the idea of a farmers' market.
As it stands, when I want more tech news I go to lobsters and there is the same stuff.
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