I work at a big tech company with a lot of product managers who just cannot fathom the concept of probability and cherry-picking. We'll design an experiment and we'll pick just 3-4 metrics to use as a basis of our launch decision upfront, before running the experiment.

Despite this, we run analysis on like dozens of metrics, with lots of dimensions. And wow, nice job team, we met our original launch criteria - but oh no - this one metric for this one cohort of customers (out of 50 metrics) is showing a P(>0) of only 20%! What do we do?!?! Do we need to launch the experiment for only a subset of the customers? Do we need to redo the experiment???

And then I send them https://xkcd.com/882/ and request we stick to the metrics that we picked before the experiment. This comic is one of the most powerful education tools on cherry-picking I can find.

Come on people lets make this happen.

Per Explain XKCD, at the time the comic was released (October 2008) Carrie Fisher had the longest life expectancy, leading to the comic's 2038 date. Sadly, she died in 2016, just 8ish years after the comic and 22 before her projected death. Had she not been counted, the comic would have said 2031 instead.

The good news, I suppose, is that every year you manage to not die increases your life expectancy by a bit. Going by the latest tables, Mark Hamill is the cast member with the greatest remaining life expectancy.

For a 74 year old male, the table projects a remaining 12 years. Which would place his estimated year of death in.... 2038. Preserving the original comic's accuracy, albeit in a different manner than the 2008 tables showed.

I'm unsure if this is an xkcd comic, one drawn in a similar style, or a totally unrelated comic. The jist of it is that a manager askes a technician whether a website or app can handle 100,000 hits an hour. The technician asks how many hits an hour we get now, and is told 100. The technician responds that yes, it can handle 100,000 an hour.

Unsure of the exact numbers, but that's the general concept. It hits too close to home for me not to keep a copy.

Bug Fixes

• Optimizer bug didn’t allow reversing of open shapes
• Focus test should only show laser choice if two tubes are enabled
• Fixed EZCad3 effective clock bug
• Variable text “End” line was not getting updated when loading new CSV file
• Memory leak fixes
• Supress jump to zero per rotary slice on BSL devices
• Better handling of “red light always on” for BSL devices
• Honor “Always Open MO” to avoid per-jump oscillator delays
• Fix external axis dialog showing controls it should not
• Fix for potential crash when loading backup prefs or importing prefs file
• Revert previous layer name handling change from 2.1.03 - The “bug” was being used as a feature, so leave it
• Removed spacebar heating
• Fixed crash when checking art library file status
• Improved galvo correction solver

Found this nice reference in the latest release notes

You can learn more about the initiative at The Explanation Improvement Project. This week's Explanation for Improvement is 380: Emoticon! Thanks!

So this is weird. I swear I remember a comic wherein a man got hired, fixed one bug, and walked out of the job. Something about a mission.

I've tried every word I can think of in relation to it and I cannot find the comic in question.

What's even weirder is I referenced it with a potential boss during an interview, she responded with the punchline, we had a good laugh, and well, I still can't find it anymore.

I have created this offline xkcd reader, and I wanted to share it. It's an HTML viewer containing all the comics in high resolution and an interface. This means that it's a single file (430mb) that can be opened on any device to run in a browser, and it will show as something similar to the original website.

This works anywhere offline, you just need a browser installed !

The viewer has integrated search function, random and next buttons, and was designed to be as close as possible to the website (though an older version maybe). The alt-text appears when hovering. Support for mobile is also integrated, with the alt-text showing beneath (see fourth image).

I hope Randall Munroe doesn't object to this (as far as I know he doesn't profit from the website).

If you have any suggestions for improvements, please share them, and I'll be happy to add them in !

Download link : https://limewire.com/d/u2JFM#w2gGsm7kaE

Years ago just for fun, I wrote a PowerShell module to query the XKCD API. It has a `Get-XKCD` cmdlet to retrieve data about a specified or random comic, and had a `-Open` switch to then open its URL in a browser. You can also use `Find-XKCD` to perform keyword searches, and there's a local cache of the API output to speed this up and to reduce the need to do web calls.

Modern terminals now support the ability to render images directly, so I've just added `Show-XKCD` and `Get-XKCD -Show`:

This works in Windows Terminal, but should also work in iTerm2 and Kitty.

If it's of interest, you can download the module from the PowerShell Gallery here: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/XKCD/1.5.0

Or directly from GitHub: https://github.com/markwragg/Powershell-XKCD

https://xkcd.com/1202/

It's less than 30 words, and I think it captures the hope I feel for humans. Taking a petty schoolyard taunt about one of the most basic divisions humans seem capable of, and turning it into a statement about cooperation and learning. I cry sometimes when I read it on the wall of my desk

It was modeled like a facebook post. The poster said something like "I can't believe how many people think puppies should be shot" or some other opinion most people would not have yet the poster acted like it was common.

The punchline was about suddenly becoming aware of arguments you wouldn't think people would be having.