m_‮f

u/m_f@discuss.online
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Over in !exo@discuss.online I post the author comment, which may or may not be related to the comic itself. I don't think it detracts from the post even if it's not really related. Here's an example

Author comment:

Hey guys, I’m playing Pandemic Legacy and I was the first to eradicate the red virus so now I get to name it! Let me know if you have any good exocomics-related names :D

If you don’t know what Pandemic Legacy is then shhh don’t worry.

on 2026-08-18 #2 · c/thefarside · 1 pts · 20h

I think the joke is that the humanoid robot might milk them a little bit too enthusiastically

on Penguin Enemy (2004-03-24) · c/pbf · 2 pts · 21h

It's a pun on "breaks the ice". The one penguin breaks the ice by pointing out an awkward spelling mistake. That lets the "enimy" in through the now-broken ice

on 2026-08-19 #1 · c/thefarside · 21 pts · 1d

You think they're talking about a person named Bob, but then you realize they released some creature onto the dance floor that was previously in the jar labelled "Bob"

on Freebird (2026-08-16) · c/oglaf · 4 pts · 2d

I found it just by poking around in the source. The alt text isn't easy to find normally, you'd only see it if the image wasn't loading. Here's what the HTML looks like for this strip:

You can get at it with dev tools, right click on the image and "Inspect"

on 2026-08-16 #0 · c/thefarside · 5 pts · 4d

Some context on this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

He's a lazy, insensitive slob that doesn't give a hoot about my needs or anyone else's and never even tries to open up or communicate whatsoever!

I yam what I yam

on 1981-08-11 · c/garfield · 6 pts · 8d

The canonical answer is that Jon is reacting to Garfield and Odie's actions, not their thoughts: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/222029

Jim: I wanted to ride that real fine line between wanting to understand what the cat says, I think people honestly feel that cats think in English, that cats understand everything as they do but obviously they don't talk so I wanted to ride that line between here's what your cat is really thinking to give pet owners insight into what their pets are really thinking without giving it away, to have him really talk and Jon understand him, would have made it more of a fantasy. I always wanted to create a strip that could have cats, if they had opposable thumbs, would drink coffee if they could. Apparently Heathcliff, a cat in a comic strip panel, would fly planes and drive cars and be on a desert island and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to create a very real world and then go out to the fantasy from there. And, you'll notice that when Jon understands what Garfield is saying, it's something Garfield does with an action, not a word that communicates it.

Found someone that removed the thought bubbles from a few comics as an example:

https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/76445444351/i-know-garfield-minus-garfield-was-the-one-that

On the other hand, there's strips like this one that seem to have Jon hearing Garfield's thoughts, though that can be chalked up to Jon making up dialogue for his pets to amuse himself:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Garfield,_January_1992_comic_strips?file=1992-01-21.gif

Here's another one:

https://garfield.fandom.com/wiki/Garfield,_May_1986_comic_strips?file=1986-05-20.gif

The trick is to define "think". Nobody has a good definition that isn't circular, because we don't really know enough about how the brain works to come up with an objective, testable definition. It all loops around endlessly, "think" to maybe "conceive" or "ponder" or "know" or "aware" or "conscious" or "sentient", so on and so on. I think LLMs think in the same way that planes and bees both "fly", even if it's very different mechanisms 🤷

I agree that the models aren't geniuses, and we should critically evaluate them, especially whenever OpenAI or other such companies make claims, and all that. I just don't really care for arguing about "is it truly thinking", but maybe that's just the engineer side of me:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1879

on 1952-08-10 · c/peanuts · 3 pts · 9d

You just made me look back at it again and realize that the coloring is wrong in the bottom left panel. That's clearly a hedge, not a path. It should be green in front of him, not gray.

not that a human couldn’t solve it, but that they didn’t bother

I'd agree, but with the caveat that that's still impressive and useful. There's kind of an LLM of the gaps thing going on, where LLMs obviously can't produce novel mathematical results, right up until they can. There's limitations and caveats, and one shouldn't trust most anything tech ceos say, but the models continue to progress in capabilities. This is the stuff of science fiction a few years ago.

One day a real AGI is going to be created.

IMO this is real AGI. It's just not ASI. It's a general intelligence because it's capable of handling a huge variety of tasks fairly well without needing to be trained specifically for each one. It's clearly not as smart as humans, and thus isn't an ASI. The specific terms I'm not really attached to, moreso the point is that we need more specific ways of talking about intelligence.