1838

Oh look, a dusty old banality repackaged as insightful commentary by extremely with-it observer of technological progress Randall Munroe. This was an old joke before xkcd even existed:

"To paraphrase provocatively, 'machine learning is statistics minus any checking of models and assumptions'."
-Brian D. Ripley, 2004

Anybody who knows enough about machine learning (anything at all about machine learning) to get this joke ("joke") has already made the same comment.

1839

Yet another comic about how people are different from machines. The third panel here is especially stupid, because Randall was too lazy to bother writing that sentence in a way that is not factually incorrect. The "high-pressure fluids and intricate parts" don't really "kill you" when they stop working; that doesn't even make sense. It would be more accurate to say that the patient is riddled with single points of failure, which would have the added advantage of allowing Randall to pretend he still thinks like an engineer. This one might be a little less grindingly intolerable if the patient pointed out to the doctor that she, too, was basically made from dissolved bread, but that would mean having a male stick-figure correcting a female stick-figure, which is not permitted.