"With enough eyes, all bugs become shallow."

You know, I've never really believed that. Many bugs are revealed and solved, but not all bugs are shallow. It's kind of like the old adage (the exact phrasing of which currently escapes me) "if you believe in a good cause strongly enough and fight injustice whenever you see it, how long can evil prevail?" -- for which the real answer is "forever, since you'll probably cause evil in your attempts to stamp it out".

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Ah, but it's precisely the kind of sweeping statement you want to make. Is your bug not shallow? Well, you don't have enough eyes.

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Hypercube! AUGH!

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My first wish would be for a million more wishes...

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But perhaps each of those wishes are only a millionth as powerful as the original...

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Each wish assumes you get one. If you get multiple wishes, as has been already established, you auto-win.

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this reminds me...

once there was a role playing game where a demon was summoned and bound and given *excrutiatingly* planned orders. One of the players was a *lawyer*. There were no loop holes. Except...

the didn't bind it properly.

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of course then you get binary output on paper, words written onto CDs, or perhaps encoded into formats that are not readable entirely.

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... in the format appropriate for the communication media I have chosen, in a manner that I can access with the appropriate device for accessing that media.

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"So what are you in jail for?"

"Well, you see, I had this genie, and I wished that I could have any movie, music, book, or any other media produced for me just by writing the name of it down on a label. So, of course, I did it for all my favourite books and movies and songs, etc."

"And you got thrown in jail for that?"

"Copyright laws are a bitch, my friend."

The lesson of the story: wish for an appropriately licensed copy of the work such that you will face no liability, either criminal or civil, at any point in eternity.

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For wishes that affect the self - I think most of the ones you list on the forum are valid examples of this - what would tacking on "with no negative consequences arriving against myself or others, nor resultant death as a cause of my wish" do?

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"with no negative consequences arriving against myself or others, nor resultant death as a cause of my wish"

negative consequences arriving against yourself AND others are perfectly acceptable...

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Genies love XOR.

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The problem is that many of the wishes involve some negative impact, and thus the wish shorts out or creates ridiculous consequences. It could be done, but the results would be so erratic that you couldn't guarantee that it would be what you want.

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...One can't actually account for all of the possible ways in which the genie could screw you over if he, in fact, really wanted to do so. You do realize this, right? :)

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And this is why Descartes dismissed the Evil Genie out of hand...

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I assume you meant to write

As Eric S. Raymond famously said (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html), "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow" (Hey! I used that in my HotS strip today! Go read it!)

...but your fingers slipped.

The way it's written here, it's not clear that Seth is quoting ESR. (The strip at least properly puts the phrase in quotes.) Proper attribution, y'know.

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Nope. It's famous enough that I don't feel the urge to credit it every time. I know where it came from, and anyone who's big on open-source stuff will, too. Otherwise, they won't care who said it.

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Penn and Teller (admitted nerds, themselves) addressed this same topic in their book How to Play in Traffic.

Their solution?

A carefully worded first wish that would require the genie himself to give you the proper way of how to word your remaining wishes such that they were infallible and could not be warped from your original intent.

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Combine that with the old trick of wishing for more wishes, and you're golden.

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I wish to have a happy, long, and economically substainable career as a professional theatre director and dramaturg in the United States and World, working on new and old plays that I enjoy and admire.

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My freind always had the best wish.


I would like a plain white dinner plate. On this plate will be a steak that is wholesome nad cooked medium rare. Next to it will be a baked potato the size of my fist. There will also be a tankard of good and wholesome mead to go with it, set beside the plate. These items will appear in good order upon the floor next to me or on a table that I indicate. allt he items on the plate will be the appropriate temprature for newly cooked food, adn teh mead will be appropriatly chilled.

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HOMER: I'll make a wish that can't backfire. I wish for a turkey sandwich, on rye bread, with lettuce and mustard, and, I don't want any zombie turkeys, I don't want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don't want any other weird surprises. You got it?

[the monkey's paw closes its finger in understanding]

[a turkey sandwich materializes]

[Homer takes it] Hey! [digs in]

Not bad. Nice, hot mustard. Good bread. The turkey's a little dry.

[in realization] The turkey's a little dry!

Oh, foe, the cursed teeth! What demon from the depths of hell created thee?

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What a clever way to not only remind us to read Home on the Strange, but to also entice us to register and post at the forum.
Well done!

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I think you broke your site. homeonthestrange.com is not responding...

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It's been glitchy all day.

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I find it strange that you're running an open source project.


I am man enough to admit that not only do I have my three wishes planned for when the genie eventually shows up, but I have contingency two-wish and one-wish scenarios. And no, I'm not sharing them; if you get a couple of wishes and you drop by my house for advice, the cost for a thoroughly-worded wish is gonna be one of your wishes.


http://theferrett.livejournal.com/2005/11/20/

Have you changed your mind and decided to share?

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He refers to the wishes on the fora as version 1.0, and says "I purposely left the initial wishes a little ragged, since unlike normal programming, the fun is in finding the bugs."

I assume these are not the wishes he has planned.

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First wish: I wish you were not going to maliciously, nastily, unkindly, or otherwise negatively going to twist and/or misinterpret my remaining wishes so as to make them bite me in the butt or otherwise cause me regret for having wished them.

[Short version: I wish you were a nice genie.]

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That assumes, of course, you get more than one wish.

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You know you are tired when you read your small collection of daily webcomics and THEN read your livejournal and you read your post and say "how cool is that, Ferrett is referrencing a webcomic I read!"

Yeah. I know. Shaddap.

Going to bed now.

(love the comic btw)

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