Category: Uncategorized

April Fool’s pranks written by neural network

lewisandquark:

On April 1, people play pranks on one another, and a well-designed hilarious-but-harmless prank is a true work of art. There are lists of pranks online for inspiration, but there are only so many of these, and what do you do if your target has already read the same lists?

I train algorithms called neural networks to write humor – usually inadvertent, as they try to name paint colors or invent pies or design candy heart messages. Once I tried to train a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, to mixed success.

I wanted to find out if I could get a neural network to invent new April Fool’s pranks. I collected pranks from internet lists until I got tired of it – but because each list only had a few, I gave up after I had collected only 132 entries. This is a pitifully small dataset, especially for sentences. I set up a special-purpose neural net for this, with lots of smarts but a very short memory. As I hoped, it learned individual words and phrasing from the dataset, but rearranged them into new combinations.

The result: pranks that they will never expect, and will never understand.

Place a pair of pants and shoes in your ice dispenser.

Put marbles in the refrigerator.

A meat and mashed potato sundae makes for quite the hand soap dispenser.

Put a glow stick in a toilet paper into the toe of your kid’s shoes.

Conference call two people then, when, when your kid asks what it is, say “Dinner.”

Try using old clothes to pee.

Glue all the eggs in the hubcaps of someone’s computer.

Put marbles in the hand soap dispenser.

Put food coloring in the mailbox.

Take the door knob off your kid’s shoes.

Hide an alarm clock in someone’s keyboard who isn’t a very good typist.

Hide all of the entrance to your office building if it only has one entrance.

Putting googly eyes on someone’s computer mouse so that it won’t work.

If you rip up a toilet paper roll, then leave them a ransom note.

Serve up a glass of juice in the fridge!

Place a pair of pants and shoes in Easter egg foils.

Rearrange somebody while pretending to pee.

Fill in this form, and I’ll email you more rejected April Fool’s pranks that make even less sense.

genomalkns:

I feel so sorry for my followers because when I’m not online my blog is DEAD no queue no nothing but when I’m online you’d better be ready for an avalanche of posts within .5 seconds of each other POST POST POST POST POST POST

solluxisms:

Hats off to Guild Wars 2 for having the most hilarious patch notes I’ve seen in a long while.

03/27/2018 – Late Notes

Living World—Seat of Power

Since the day we began work on Guild Wars 2, we had a single dream guiding us: to allow the player to jump over small fences. But if we had to pick a close second, it was to add chairs and maybe let players sit in them. In that distant past, the technology wasn’t ready for our vision—when GW2 released, the land of Tyria had chairs, and it had sitting, but players were unable to gracefully combine the two. Over time, stopgaps were implemented, like sitting as a chair and riding mounts (referred to in the engine code as “nonstationary chairs”), but the dream of a complete chair experience remained in the realm of speculative science fiction.

Until now!

We’re overjoyed to announce that, for the second time in Guild Wars history, players can sit in chairs across the continent. That raid throne is more like one chair in multiple places, though, which is awesome, but now we’re talking about **over 1,400 chairs ** spread across 6 cities, 5 home instances and 1 raid lobby. Plus, some of those chairs are benches, which are like two chairs for the price of one!

The future of chair sitting is bright—we’re working hard to investigate chair sittability for other zones, figure out the bar booths built entirely out of nonchair objects, and support more chair models. Get in the game and see the future happening now! You paid for the whole seat—today you can finally use it.

Furniture Polish

  • Lion’s Arch: Added sittability to 188 chairs. This is the site of the First Sittable Chair, from which all others derive—the King of Chairs. It’s a secret which one it is.
  • Rata Sum: Added sittability to 28 chairs. Realistically, the asura could already sit on most objects comfortably; it’s one of their many racial advantages.
  • Applied Development Lab: Added sittability to 7 chairs, for when you need a break from lab work harvesting resources.
  • Black Citadel: Added sittability to 153 chairs. Not only are there a lot of quality chairs here, many of them include miniaturized Iron Legion coal furnaces for heating. A truly first-class chair experience for the discriminating legionnaire.
  • Hero’s Canton: Added sittability to 106 chairs. We wrote “added sittability to 106 charrs” five times before we got it right, but that would be pretty cool too.
  • Divinity’s Reach: Added sittability to 292 chairs, and 90% of them are hidden inside random buildings. We spent countless hellish hours finding new chairs hidden away in third-story corners of secluded houses. We opened someone’s house up to passing tourists as well because it has a lot of nice chairs.
  • Salma District: Added sittability to 79 chairs. You can finally sit at the bar! We’ve been anticipating this since launch day.
  • Hoelbrak: The undisputed capital of sittable furniture clocks in with a record-shattering 547 chairs. Legends say that one day, a mighty Norn will sit in every chair in Hoelbrak and then lead their people to victory against Jormag.
  • Hunter’s Hearth: Added sittability to 10 chairs. But listen, if you’re looking for some chair time after a long hunt, just step out the doors and into chair central of Tyria.
  • The Grove: Added sittability to 43 chairs. It might seem kind of sad after that Hoelbrak number, but perhaps the sylvari simply prefer sitting on the ground—it’s good enough for the Pale Tree, after all.
  • Dreamer’s Terrace: Added sittability to 5 chairs. OK, now it’s actually sad.
  • Lion’s Arch Aerodrome: Added sittability to 1 chair. We don’t expect that all players will be able to sit in this highly exclusive, challenging non-group chair content, but that is the price of prestige.
  • Added an incredible new collection quest achievement spanning the world of Tyria to sit in every currently available chair type. Finally, a reason to visit Hoelbrak.

  • You can do more than sit in chairs—you can gesture while sitting in chairs! You can’t /sit while you sit, but a carefully curated handful of the game’s emotes are available while sitting in a chair.

    • Currently available emotes: Wave, Cheer, Shrug, Crossarms, Laugh, and Thanks (you’re welcome)

  • But wait, there’s more chairs! Your Guild Hall chairs are also receiving the seating treatment, with the following chairs now sittable:

    • Basic Chair, Fancy Chair, Highback Chair, Guild Chair, Fancy Armchair, Plush Armchair, Elonian Wood Chair, Throne, Pew, Guild Bench, Plush Sofa, Haunted Loveseat
    • ArenaNet is not liable for injury, death, entombment in solid rock, or similar gruesome fates that may result from unsafely placed chairs.

  • Fixed a bug that caused “sittability” to not be a real word according to the spell checker. If you complain about it now, you’re incorrect, sorry.

  • While we’re at it, we don’t want to hear anyone griping about the exact chair counts per map. If we see posts tomorrow like “I counted every chair in Hoelbrak and ArenaNet was off by one, gg,” it’s going to send us into a deep depression.