Don't make jokes about peoples names

September 27th, 2012
Jokes get old. Hear one repeatedly and it stops being funny. Most of the time if you come up with a joke, if you haven't heard it before then the people around you probably haven't either. When you think of a joke to tell someone based on their name, however, there's a good chance you're not the first. If a name just seems to suggest puns, you should probably ignore the suggestions.
Referenced in: You Asked?

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

I have a baby

I am pleased to announce the existence of the newest and smallest effective altruist, Seretse Benjamin Brennan.

via Thing of Things November 2, 2026

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)