Notices by Chris Armstrong (rhodium103@mastodon.social)

Copilot is an amazing bit of technology. If I want to sum a column in Excel, instead of going through the rigamarole of typing "=SUM(C1:C10)" I simply ask "Add all the cells from C1 to C10" and once I've waited 30 seconds for it to do C1+C10, I ask "Add all the cells from cell C1 to cell C10, include all cells between. Do not ignore any cells. Put the answer in cell C11", and 30 seconds later it'll reply "Sure! Use the function =SUM(C1:C10). This will sum up all values between C1 and C10,".

Here is my rebuttal to Russell Brand's 'magic amulet' using a quantum mechanics textbook. 👍

The student approached the Master and said "He wants to put a million people on Mars by 2040! That's so amazing!"

The Master replied. "I have a better plan. I will put a million people on Antarctica by 2040."

"But that sounds fucking insane. Why would you want to do something that stupid? It's a barren wasteland that's difficult to populate and would provide us with absolutely nothing!"

At that moment, the student was enlightened.

Olay, Duo. What, exactly, are you expecting me to do in Scandinavia? And is this before or after I need to ask for my lawyer?

Right, now to draw another 11 face cards and somehow then con the University into paying for printing.

Pretty much everyone under 50 right now: Hey, maybe killing a six year old by riddling a car with bullets then killing the paramedics trying to rescue them is a bad thing, and we should oppose it?

Alastair Campbell: Young people should get off their high horse about this.

@markarayner I have a version of this saved somewhere that I illustrated with recent front page headlines from The Daily 'Hurrah For The Blackshirts' Mail.

The part about enemies being simultaneously weak and strong, whichever fits the narrative, could absolutely be about how the UK media has described the EU in the last decade or so.

"Error: Your password must contain at least two characters who talk to each other about something other than a man."

@pikesley @CloudyMrs @NAB
We were founded a thousand years ago by a man named "The Conqueror". Our 'top' universities are almost as old and haven't changed much since. One of the flags has a dragon on it. The king is canonically descended from a Norse god and must touch a magical object to be crowned. We are continually at war with The North.

We are not a real country, we are a cut-price low-fantasy novel.

@cstross
Also feels like The Expanse on screen vs the books, as the adaption has fairly typical sci-fi sets, and the book is like "It was the largest office he had seen in space, 2 metres wide..."

The #Chemistree is done and coloured using universal indicator.

The Void is experiencing extremely high call volumes right now. Please hold. Your screaming is very important to us.

...and all else I had to go on was a handwritten note, hastily scribbled in red biro in the margin of the script at 2 AM from a coked-up Charlie Brooker himself, which simply said "punchable"...

...and I saw this face in a catalogue of potential actors, I wouldn't even bother to hold auditions.

...and I needed to cast someone who looked unnervingly believable in the role as a man who was outwardly cheery but a hollow dead husk inside, yet ultimately bore no resemblance to an actual real person who you could imagine meeting in our reality as it exists...

Look, all I'm saying that if I was the casting director for a Black Mirror episode that required an ersatz influencer as a secondary character who accidentally achieves fame and then gets horrifyingly but hilariously manipulated into ending the world via corporate puppeteers...

@thomasfuchs
I especially love how I can read this statement and have absolutely no idea which country you're referring to.

Was going to restrict it to "majority English speaking" then reconsidered when I remembered a few more utter catastrofucks out there.

I have seem some tomfuckery in my time, but this one is absolutely baffling.

#Excel

@panegyr @andrewt Forwarding IT's own messages to their phishing inbox will never not be hilarious.

It's always "you need to build up a tolerance to crop failures" and never "billionaires should build up a tolerance to not having yachts".