If you’re wondering about the term itself, wiktionary has some background:

Not known with certainty. Two long-held hypotheses are as follows: One describes combat soldiers wistfully wishing to go back home, buy a farm, and live peacefully there; later, after they had been killed in combat, their fellow soldiers would say that they had bought the farm (compare the established metaphor pattern of having gone to that big [whatever sort of nice place] in the sky). Another links the phrase to the idea that governments compensate farmers whose land is damaged by a military aircraft crash; a deceased pilot was thus said to have bought the farm, and the term eventually entered wider use.

(idiomatic, US, informal, euphemistic) To die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.

This idiom is most often found in its past tense and past participle form bought the farm.

Listening to #3 from Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Aphex Twin as I scrolled past this post, which I think really fits with this screen

I WANT TO BELIEVE

ENHANCE

Neat, looks like the author got a publishing deal and has a new version of it coming out later this year:

https://qntm.org/antimemetics

Here’s the author’s blurb about it, if it piques anyone else’s interest that hasn’t read it yet:

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

The first sketch vs final version of this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

Primitive humor

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (top left):

“Uh-oh…He’s using the thingy.”

Transcript (top right):

“So! Still won’t talk?..I guess it’s time to use a little device we like to call around there ‘the thingy.’”

Transcript (bottom left):

This cartoon developed as shown, and I was satisfied with the final—except to say I’m always worried some people will try to figure out what exactly it is that the “Mr. Thingy” does. (I’m sure this is a residual paranoia from the “Cow tools” cartoon, see page 156.)

I copy it from the site, and I have no idea where they get it from. I doubt it’s AI though, they all read as outsourced human transcription.

A dog “turning on” someone means that they’ll bite the owner or something like that. Larson instead interprets “turning on” here as the dog testifying against the owner in a courtroom

Probably something like Tensor Processing Unit. That’s a specific Google product, but something along those lines

Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for neural network machine learning, using Google’s own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third-party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.

Compared to a graphics processing unit, TPUs are designed for a high volume of low precision computation (e.g. as little as 8-bit precision)[3] with more input/output operations per joule, without hardware for rasterisation/texture mapping.

Second this 😀

@jgrim@discuss.online has been doing an awesome job of running it, and also created Sublinks as a Lemmy alternative

Snakes are able to fit into tight places, so they’d be able to easily retrieve keys that are e.g. dropped into a sewer grate. Kind of the reverse of what rescue animals tend to do though. Beetles with pencils because the teacher won’t notice them delivering you a pencil? They could also just be a bit of absurdism, but it’s kind of weird that the other ones are themed.

The president can’t pardon state crimes, fortunately.

This is one of his newer comics, he started drawing them digitally and that’s why it looks differently:

https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff

So a few years ago—finally fed up with my once-loyal but now reliably traitorous pen—I decided to try a digital tablet. I knew nothing about these devices but hoped it would just get me through my annual Christmas card ordeal. I got one, fired it up, and lo and behold, something totally unexpected happened: within moments, I was having fun drawing again. I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved. Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman.

Yeah, it’s a moth. I’m sure there’s some other small flying insect attracted to lamps that starts with “M”, but The Far Side was written with your average newspaper reader in mind so generally isn’t that obscure

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (draft):

I work for this scientist… I dig up graves, fetch brains, mop the floor-general stuff… you wanna see the lab?

blah blah blah… and you?

Looks like they updated the comic at some point to make it more clear. Today’s post has a little strip of white that’s not there in the original.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

A few days after this cartoon was published, I started getting a considerable amount of reaction from people who enjoyed it. But I found it interesting that, without exception, they were enjoying it from a different standpoint from the one I had intended. If you look at the enlargement of the two little calves, you’ll see that one of them is doing the old hoof-behind-the-head trick to its sibling. Apparently, it was just too subtle in the original. (In fact, it sort of looks like the one calf is just wearing a ribbon.) I wish now I had developed this into a series of places the Holsteins had visited. (“The Holsteins visit Three Mile Island” would have been interesting.)

The link wasn’t working for me, it seems PieFed doesn’t like capitalization differences in the links? Lemmy ignores capitalization. This works, at any rate:

https://quokk.au/c/sighfi

I don’t see the new post on my instance at https://discuss.online/c/sighfi@quokk.au, you might want to check that it’s federating properly. I’ve heard that recreating communities like that can make things get into a weird state.

Some background on this comic:

Transcript (comic draft):

“Look at that… Man, in our day, Bernie, we could skeletonize a cow in less than two minutes.”

Transcript (commentary):

Just about every time I’ve heard or read anything about piranhas (as you might imagine, I’m drawn to the subject), it’s always mentioned how quickly a school of them can skeletonize a cow. I’m not sure why a cow is always the standard unit of measurement for this sort of thing, but pondering it eventually led to this cartoon.