I've also heard people use it who weren't lying, they were simply incorrect, and conflating those two concepts.

So what is the mass of a byte of ‘pure’ information? And how do you derive it?

That's all in the linked wikipedia article, but since you asked:

At room temperature, the Landauer limit represents an energy of approximately 0.018 eV (2.9×10^−21^ J).

That's 1 bit, so 1 byte is eight times that, which you can plug into E=mc^2^ to get its absurdly small equivalent mass.

It's important(?) to note that Landauer's Principle is not settled science and has yet to be rigorously proven, unless there's some recent development which the comic is referencing. I haven't checked.

I'd argue that Li should be red and Hg should be yellow.

Elemental mercury in liquid form is fairly safe. It needs to get into your blood in order to be a problem, and even if some does stick to your tongue and get swallowed the digestive absorption is extremely low.

Except you missed a bug in the "check if it's sorted" code and it ends up destroying every universe.

As in the opposite of a "disarming smile", which is a common expression.

There's no reason it wouldn't be. The point is that it's impossible to prove that it is. There is no conceivable experiment that can be performed to prove the two-way speed of light is symmetric.

When I heard that BIOS updates were going out automatically via Windows update I had just assumed the devices in question must be using an A/B update scheme to prevent the risk of accidentally bricking the system, because obviously they should.

Absolutely insane that's not the case.

Or a giant company where customer tantrums are just background noise that is easily ignored.

That description presumes our temporal dimension is their fourth spatial dimension though. It also makes meaningful interaction basically impossible.

If it works more like Flatland and we have a shared temporal dimension then they're simply able to perceive us, inside and out, from what we would consider every direction simultaneously. In much the same way that we can see the inside and full circumference of a two dimensional circle.

If you're in a trench in wartime and fist sized object comes flying in from the direction of the enemy forces you're going to dive away from it and take cover. But then the thrown object turns out to be a can of food, not an explosive.

So how do you respond to the next thrown item? Do you still dive for cover?

The rational answer is "yes." The starving soldier desperate for a break from the fighting answer was not.

In contrast to the other user folders, the desktop is filled with program links that won’t even work anywhere else.

As someone who used to work in IT I wish that was the case. The desktop is a catch-all for basically anything that might momentarily enter a user's field of vision.

Application shortcuts, URL shortcuts, broken application and URL shortcuts, PDFs, images, a copy of their child's baby album, a folder that's just called "stuff" where all their actual work is saved, seven different copies of the same recipe for homemade pasta sauce, six empty files named "New Text Document", and a recycle bin full of things too important to delete.

But you can't put anything anywhere else, because they "have a system."

I like both, fite me.