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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

Don't confuse with "clUnker", an old car/machine.

nor with "clackers", and insanely dangerous early 70s toy consisting of two glass balls you smash together at accelerated speeds right in front of your face. I guess they were trying to make us feel better that they were taking our jarts away.

Thanks for the reminder of that! This girl who sat behind me in second grade was great with clackers. Also, my memory is a bit foggy, but I don't think the jart ban was until eigth grade. So no causality there. Pop Rocks causing internal explosions and spider eggs in Bubble Yum occured somewhere between Clackers and Jarts. :-)

nor with clappers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJBAnr1lgPg https://www.curiousmindsbusybags.com/products/new-large-hand...

nor with the Clacks, the telegraph system of Discworld.

nice to know!

LOL, what I did just read? I did not understand the concrete nouns in your comment, except for "girl". The "spider eggs" you mention do not seem to be the ones I thought.

Without searching on the internet, I wouldn't even know the context on the level of which decade or country. Fascinating!

The original form of clackers had a popularity in Indonesia and Philippines where it's named latto-latto.

There was also a safer revival of clackers in North America in the 90s, where the balls are attached to a handle.

I thought clunker and figured it must be about car reliability.

Even now I've figured it's about AI, I still don't really get it. Is it supposed to be funny?

Re funny, I think the Onion does better https://theonion.com/ai-chatbot-obviously-trying-to-wind-dow...

Probably from the same onomatopoeia, though. A car-sized machine makes more of a clunk, while a person-sized machine makes more of a clank, when you smash either with that old monkey wrench and extreme prejudice

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