And that seems a bit high, considering how many rows could be in a production database. Could they be pricing on a log scale or something?

Unless there’s actual hidden value here (possible), it’s more like a joke. Chickens rarely cross the road and they’re not getting paid.

If you’re specialised enough it can be really hard to tell what’s obvious. Like, you don’t want to do “grab the mouse, which is one of your computer peripherals” either. Or at least, I worry about doing something like that, and coming across as a dick.

Relevant XKCD.

In practice, I guess this would be a person with a fixed schedule that just changes a lot.

Never? That’s a long time. How specific a definition of AI are you using?

Only until you’ve figured it out, at which point you’re god. You could make it non-repeatable somehow to avoid that, but magic is depicted as being mainly old, repeated spells most of the time, like in the comic. You could also move to something like Brainfuck or even Malbolge where coding a single new program is hard. As I learned the hard way, though, you’re still going to have no control over what ends up being easy and what’s not.

Actually, it’s more like homeomorphic encryption since you have a system of some bounded complexity instead of a single fixed piece of information. That’s usually harder, but then again you actually want the scheme to be “insecure” in this case.

Interesting. Does this provide any game balance whatsoever?

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to design magic systems when I was a teenager, but they always ended up being either way too powerful or not “rich” enough to be interesting. It’s just really hard to design a simple mechanical system that stays within arbitrary human boundaries.

Hmm, I feel myself getting drawn back in. That’s almost like a zero-knowledge proof, and there’s lots of weird ways to implement cryptographic primitives.

Yep. All the funding they’ve already put into it will stay put. You can’t uncode FOSS.

You can also take an intermediate approach, actually. Usually I can tell from just the developer docs or whitepapers if something has a way of producing the guarantees it claims.

Look, you either check for yourself, or trust people who have. The only other option amounts to building your own parallel reality.

Go look at the code, then.

Even if you’re not using one, you should be instinctively looking for a semicolon the moment you get a syntax error unless you’re a complete beginner.

Just later that day? Clearly, comic man doesn’t have to cojones to fuck up as badly as I have.

Huh, so they do exist then.

Oh shit, I guess that’s true, yeah. Wheelchair bathrooms are there own thing but not every place has them, at least where I live.

Also, as ever, relevant XKCD.

The funny thing is, when I talk to lawyers (of which I am not one) it’s nothing like this, because any human court will understand the intention of the question is arithmetical. It will create legal fictions to paper over affairs, rule the law inapplicable if the sister is dead, and go for lunch.

It seems law is like 90% precisely defined and 10% whatever the courts decide that day. That turns out out to be stable while still fairly immune to edge cases, so it’s stuck for centuries.

You know, I feel like management deciding what is and isn’t in scope on their own is itself asking for trouble.

The pullcord kind used to be pretty common, I think. This is just that with a pedal.

and public washrooms often use the touchless sensor types.

Now. I’m guessing you only have to go back to 2000 for that to be a futuristic new thing, though, while the history of the modern flush toilet goes back to the Victorian era.