Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for February 27, 2025

There’s plenty to fuss about right now.

Don’t worry Calvin, you can always use ChatGPT.

Have the computer read the book to you.

Listen, you smug @ss—knowing how to operate a computer “builds character”! ;-)

Nice sweater, Dad!

In 1990, computers were for avoiding work by playing games; not for doing book reports.

Too bad Calvin wasn’t born a little later, Al Gore would have invented the interwebs and he could download a book report from the dark web.

Kids seem to use them primarily to get out of reading the books first. :P

Oh, Calvin.

Calvin’s Dad will get a computer later in the year as there was a Sunday strip which showed Calvin using Dad’s computer as a spaceship panel in one of his Spaceman Spiff fantasies.

Times, they are a-changing.

Now it’s Comic Sans.

(A little ‘Font’ humour, there.)

This didn’t age well.

Calvin’s day has come, AI to the rescue. When kids turn in their AI homework she simply takes a couple of the words out and asks what they mean. Blank looks. The other tactic is since you are now doing such quality work we can step up the level of the classroom.

That sweater looks painful to wear

Or go to a bookstore near your local college campus and find “101 Plot Outlines of Famous Novels”. BOOM! A lifetime supply of instant book reports. Told to The Count by a friend in high school who got an A on the Count’s, The Count means the friend’s, book report on “Jude the Obscure” mostly because the teacher had no idea what it was about. Dilly! Dilly!

Brilliant play of patterns on the sweater and lamp!

Or he could run down to the local magazine store and buy a Classics Illustrated comic book. Cliff’s Notes if he can find them.

Computers: they compute. Read a book and expand your brain.

They just get wrong answers faster.

Back then we would set up a calculation and hit “run”, then go home for the night and come back to see the answer (often wrong) in the morning. Same process now takes a nano second. Results are little better. Ironically, I now work twice as hard (dealing with tech) to produce 1/3 the output as I did 25 years ago. Life is now endless meetings and endless changes compounded by too many people able to chime in with needless complications to justify their existence.

This is the plot of an old young adult/teen book I read long long ago. It was series of books about a group of friends, and in this one the kids used an uncle’s access to a mainframe (I think) to automatize their history homework or some such. The kicker at the end was that while discussing the ethics of their action with said uncle (a professor uncle) he pointed out that in order to program the computer they had to learn the subject matter anyway. Anyone know what it was called?

Well………we used Cliff Notes!!!!

Computers are deliberately obtuse too.

These days, AI will write a book for you and spit out a book report.

I spent 34 years in IT, and I still wonder what is all the fuss about computers.

Whether the computer, or the latest AI, they are made by humans using human intelligence, and based on human though patterns. It’s just ‘GIGO’.

The beauty of the computer is having more than any local library in your own home 24/7. The computer is a tool, it doesn’t think for you. You have to know how to get the information you want from the computer. It just does it faster. We will always have the cheats. Even for those who always try to find a way to cheat, they must know how to find what they need to cheat.

Showing it’s age since, we’re all reading this via a computer.

Oh drat these computers they’re so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." – Marvin The Martian

Point, Dad. Even these days.

Well, you could get the computer to read the book to you. And by the time you’re old enough, it might even actually be able to uniambicpentameterize Shakespeare into intelligible English.