XKCD: It's more than a comic

#2139: Email Settings

I used to know people like this. Fortunately they seem to be mostly gone, or maybe they just aren't my friends any more.

I especially like the ones toward the bottom. :)

Some of those actually make sense, unless I'm missing a joke.

I also quite like the alt-text.

I like the option to hide important emails. Why is that even possible?

#2140: Reinvent the Wheel

What? I mean, I think I get the joke, but... why? Beret Guy's lolrandom approach to stuff is even more esoteric than normal here.

I'd love to see a vehicle with cheese wheels, though.

It's not far from the situation of automatically pulling in the latest version of third party libraries for software projects.

The site is promoting the comics by email list with "are you still mourning Google Reader?"

I examined my options and imported everything to Feedly within a day of Google announcing that they were sunsetting Reader. A lot better than joining a mailing list.

x4 I think the comic is based on an observation that "reinventing the wheel" is quite literally the most logical thing to do since new kinds of vehicles often need new kinds of wheels to function effectively.

Beret guy is simply taking a refusal to reinvent the wheel to an absurd extreme.

Good point. Reinventing the wheel happens on a regular basis, actually.

I'm pretty sure it's "We dont want to "reinvent the wheel", or, you know, engage in any hard creative work whatsoever, so we just stole someone else's overused idea." I know people like this.

I tend to side with FuzzyBoots' interpretation. In software development, "reinventing the wheel" is when you (usually unnecessarily) do some hard work that's already done, you should just use it. The comic makes fun of the other extreme, when developers indiscriminately pull in libraries without knowing whether it's stable enough and even if it's really what they need. They just pick something from the top of the Google search results. This is especially common among web developers (just see the countless JavaScript libraries found on GitHub). The thing is, sometimes reinventing the wheel is simpler than finding something that's good for you.

Edited by petersohn on Apr 22nd 2019 at 8:53:44 PM

It's definitely about software development. And it's painfully real.

I find it amusing though that it comes across as "esoteric lolrandom" to people not in the field

Edited by Aetol on Apr 23rd 2019 at 1:32:55 PM

#2141: UI vs UX

I have experience with both UI and UX. I have yet to encounter UΩ, at least in software design.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 24th 2019 at 2:59:00 PM

that explains why life has such shitty user interaction, i haven't experienced good uα at all

It's critical not to forget IU: The ways in which the interface is using the user.

#2142: Dangerous Fields

There's not much to say about the punch line to this one, except that it's both obvious and mildly depressing.

I thought for a moment it was about likelihood of being killed by old people. But I guess that would be geriatrics.

I see it as optimistic. If you die of old age it means nothing else managed to kill you. Ideally, all deaths would be from old age.

The probability of being killed by economics is pretty high, but it rarely happens to economists because they tend to be rich.

Also, did the term for volcano research get changed from “vulcanology” to “volcanology” because it was confusing Star Trek fans?

Edited by Galadriel on Apr 26th 2019 at 4:22:10 AM

I think it's just an alternate spelling.

The subject of volcanologists and marine biologists are more likely to kill said scientists than other people, but that's not true for most other fields. On the contrary, law is less likely to kill a lawyer than a non-lawyer.

Why alternative? It is VO Lcano in English, hence VO Lcanologist.

Just going by Wikipedia.

Industrial chemistry is somewhere to the right end of the scale as well.

The "-ology" part isn't English though. It's Greek, so traditionally we try to give it Greek prefixes. Mixing Latin and Greek is also a big no no in scientific ettiquette, of course.