this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

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Posts and discussion about the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Hugo Award-winning author Zach Weinersmith (and related works)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/

https://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith

@[email protected]

New comics posted whenever they get posted on the site, and old comics posted every day until we catch up in a decade or so

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http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/special-4

Alt textIf Roger Penrose is right, we should be doing this YESTERDAY.

Bonus panelBonus panel

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Engineer: "We can't explain how it works."

Human: "So that means you won't be using it for anything?"

Engineer: "Oh no no no. We'll just put a black box over it, slap a delta symbol on the box, exploit the hell out of the input/output, and hope for the best."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I like how engineers are a distinct species

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The cluster is human brains all hooked up to each other. So the robots don't understand why human brains are so good at solving problems, but they still can exploit that utility in a way that makes us humans feel very not-special.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

This was the original plot of The Matrix (the Machines were using human brains for parallel computing), but producers thought the movie-going was too dumb to understand it so they forced the Wachowskis to change it to generating power.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Man I miss when this comic wasn't half jargon. It's still funny but sometimes it's like... Ok I don't get it sorry I didn't major in computer science

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The human is happy that they're special, but then find out that they're simply used as a tool because of that. There's an extra sting because humans aren't being used for something cool and exciting, they're just brains in a vat calculating waste management routing.