@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social
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I remember his last name just being Weiner so I looked it up.
While in California he met Kelly Smith, then a graduate student at U.C. Davis, later an adjunct professor at Rice University. They married, and both took the combined surname Weinersmith.
That’s a nice idea.
We call them “hyphenated”, or more poetically, “double-barrelled” surnames in Britain. It was usually done by the aristocracy to preserve both family names after an auspicious, possibly engineered, union.
(The “double-barrelled” terminology derives from, well, double surnames, but also the fact that the aristocracy are the ones who go game hunting with double-barrelled shotguns. There’s a “shotgun wedding” pun in there as well, though usually, as I implied, these things are usually by choice (thought not necessarily that of those being married) rather than a hasty wedding.)
More interesting things happen when one or both people getting married already have double-barrelled surnames.
It’s how the British royal family ended up with the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, …at least until they changed it to Windsor because being conspicuously German was not a good look in Britain during the early 20th century.
Anyway, as that example suggests, the usual rule is to pick the order that sounds best and put insert hyphens between the surnames. The Weinersmiths haven’t quite followed the same rules, or else they’d spell it “Weiner-Smith”, but it still sounds better than any variant of Smith-Weiner (in my opinion).
It’s how the British royal family ended up with the family name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, …at least until they changed it to Windsor because being conspicuously German was not a good look in Britain during the early 20th century.
It’s even worse than that, specifically. In 1917 during WWI, Germany started bombing London and other civilian centers primarily using bombers manufactured by Gothaer Waggonfabrik AG, popularly known as “Gothas”. Having the name of the thing dropping bombs on your people literally in the name of your royal family is some hilariously bad PR.
Oh, I didn’t know that, that’s so nice! It is so much better than the patriarchal tradition of the wife adopting the husband’s last name, but it still conveys this idea of belonging to the same family.
I agree. I’ll probably end up doing something similar.
I mean… Emotions are just our brain’s reaction to chemicals. Computers could replicate that reaction manually, and technically it would be just as valid.
Emotions being “valid” is a subjective experience (empathy) which requires percieving the other as a person. We do this with many animals because they are fundamentally very similar to us, but with robots it’s quite different. I’d say there is no objective validity here.
Careful, thinking about this kind of stuff turned me vegan.
Do you think it’s possible that a robot could be built that would be indistinguishable from an animal in every way? I think yes because animals (and us) are flesh based robots built through a very long process of trial and error rather than intentional design. Obviously my opinion is not at all valid if you are religious, but I don’t believe in religion.
The chemicals aren’t the important part, it’s the information. Artificial neural networks already have emotions, and while general purpose thinking machines (AKA computers) don’t have emotions, they do have thoughts. Obviously. Because they’re fucking thinking machines.
The robot is thinking about bunnies the whole time so clearly it’s constantly experiencing joy. How could anyone question that??
It didn’t say what was happening to those bunnies.
There’s no message in this comic, the machine is just an asshole lmao
Also, the machine just proves the point of the human. His emotions are very real, just misplaced.
Good ol’ weinersmith
