Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

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Friday Night Open Thread

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Hope yours is more exciting than mine.

nogame

I actually ask Siri questions all the time when I am bored and driving because it is hands free. I’m kind of curious how many thousands of hours they’ve spent programming this thing, and I also secretly hope that every “Hey Siri” request is stored somewhere and analyzed so they can decide what else to ask, and somewhere, I am giving some tech dude a laugh.

Reader Interactions

50Comments

  4. 4.

    Peale

    Watching the First Super Bowl. Big Fail for the nfl network and Nfl films. In studio commentators will not shut up.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    Totally reminiscent of the old computer game Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

    Maybe used that as a template for responses?

  9. 9.

    Hal

    Today in the hospital I work in I overheard an older white couple talking to one of the clerks checking them in. Her insurance premiums went up, and of course, it was all Obama’s fault. Btw, did you know Obama spent 70 million on his vacations to Hawaii!? What irritated me the most is the woman was staring at me when she was saying this, and I’m just staring at my computer screen reminding myself I’m at work. Ironically this couple’s copay went down 5 bucks, but there was no thanking Obama for that extra money.

  11. 11.

    Corner Stone

    I can guarantee you that you will never, ever, come close to the volume of things a 10 year old asks Siri. Nor the unrelenting assault they are capable of. They freaking crowd source that shit. It’s like a non-ending flash mob attack on Siri. What the hell the programmers used to deflect that kind of brutality is almost unthinkable. Unless you’re a 10 year old.

  19. 19.

    RSA

    In one of the classes I teach, on human-computer interaction, I use Siri for live examples of limitations in “smart” information retrieval systems.

    Yesterday afternoon I asked, “Where’s the best sushi restaurant?” Siri named two restaurants not too far from campus, and there was a fair amount of laughter at the first entry, because that restaurant closed last weekend due to a fire. Most of my students seemed to know this; I guess it had been in the news.

    So I asked, “Where’s the best sushi restaurant in the world?” Not surprisingly, Siri gave me the exact same two entries. Sorry, kids! Apparently the best sushi restaurant in the world just burned down.

  28. 28.

    Felonius Monk

    @Baud:

    This day kicked my ass. Exhausted.

    Presidents can’t afford to have their asses kicked by this day or any day. Stay strong, Baud. The world needs you.

  29. 29.

    beltane

    The new R2R ad tells me that Bush is a better choice than Chris Christie because he led his state through more hurricanes. Really? A dick swinging contest over hurricanes? In New Hampshire? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen money spent in such a futile manner than I’m seeing with Bush’s billionaire backers. They would have been better off just burning their Unlimited Corporate Cash in a bonfire, maybe adding an effigy of Donald Trump for good measure.

  31. 31.

    Irony Abounds

    I asked Siri “Do you have a boyfriend” and she answered: “Why? So we can get ice cream together, and listen to music, and travel across galaxies, only to have it end in slammed doors, heartbreak and loneliness? Sure, where do I sign up?”

    Apparently I have a very cynical, embittered Siri inside my phone.

  37. 37.

    ThresherK (GPad)

    Saw Buster Keaton’s The Navigator with live virtuoso organ accompaniment. That is what it takes for me to step into a church.

  38. 38.

    dmsilev

    @Punchy: I just tried something similar (“who are you voting for?”) and got back “I’m sorry, but my voting precinct is several million light years away.” I guess that means ‘independent’.

  40. 40.

    NotoriousJRT

    I liked my Amazon Echo’s answer to “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” But it is too long for me to repeat from memory.

  42. 42.

    Garbo

    Was cooking. Trying to remember the ratio of fruit to sugar. Asked Siri: how d you macerate strawberries?

    That wasn’t what Siri heard. Suffice it to say, people are nasty. And now that’s in MY search history FOREVER.

  43. 43.

    Anoniminous

    @RSA:

    E. F. Codd put the kabosh on Siri when he noted in a 1970 paper “the network model [of large data banks] has spawned a number of confusions, not the least of which is mistaking the derivation of connections for the derivation of relations.” One of the big reasons for the acceptable of the Relational Data Model was its vast superiority to the competition, one of which was the Network Data Model.

  45. 45.

    Steeplejack

    @Anoniminous:

    E.F. Codd! Wow, that name takes me back. I spent many hours poring over The Relational Model for Database Management. Also some work he did with Christopher (?) Date. I think I did the autodidact version of a master’s degree in computer science by prowling the Georgia Tech student bookstore and buying the texts for classes that applied to my microcomputer work projects. “My salad days, when I was green in judgment . . .”

  48. 48.

    Morfydd

    I managed to insult Siri. I have her speaking German so I can work on the language. At the end of a session I said, “Guten Nacht ” and she said something about her cheeks being so red. I frantically googled what she thought I’d said and it translated to “fat bitch”. So then I spent the next five minutes apologizing to my iPad…

  49. 49.

    qwerty42

    @Sad_Dem: @David Hunt: “Siri, where did you bury my former business partner?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?

  50. 50.

    J R in WV

    @Anoniminous: Codd and Date – Still have their book on relational databases from my data structures class in grad school.. The book didn’t relate (sic, haha!) to any specific implementation of RDBMS but covered relational calculus, which can show any relationship between one datum and the data related to it.

    Maybe where I started to understand systems analysis. I hope the folks working on My SQL and PostGres RDB are familiar with Codd and Date.

    Don’t expect MS developers know Codd and Date. At all.

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