Comic entropy
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It's in the air, apparently — there are two entropy jokes in current webcomics with four-character titles.
Today's xkcd:
Mouseover title: "Later I'm going to get a head start on the heat bath."
And today's SMBC:
Mouseover title: "I'd like to give a word of thanks to both of you who enjoyed this comic."
You're welcome!
Mark Meckes said,
June 5, 2020 @ 10:17 am
It's fitting that this xkcd/SMBC post immediately follows Victor Mair's post titled Cvrk.
PeterL said,
June 5, 2020 @ 12:11 pm
If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventual_consistency , you'll see that there's yet another terrible Computer Science pun: normal databases have ACID guarantees (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability); but eventual consistency databases have BASE semantics (Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency).
(For the non-technical — "eventual consistency" databases are used where there are multiple copies of the data (often in multiple data centers around the world) for higher performance; when one replica is updated, there may be some (unspecified) amount of time before the other replicas get updated. For example, if you update your address and then look at the value, you might see the old value if you happen to get connected to different replica that hasn't yet processed the update. That's why you wouldn't want "eventual consistency" for your bank account; but would tolerate it for Google search results.)
번하드 said,
June 11, 2020 @ 4:50 pm
He must be reading here?
Today: https://xkcd.com/2318/
Andrew Usher said,
June 12, 2020 @ 7:29 pm
PeterL said:
… you wouldn't want "eventual consistency" for your bank account; but would tolerate it for Google search results.
That's an interesting approach. I would say on the other hand 'eventual consistency' could be tolerated for a bank account if banking practices changed suitably, but would always be a bug in a search engine (if you mean that people might get different results for the same search at the same time).
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