https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tompickerell_this-graph-shoul...

Two thoughts about this:

- popular culture is much more fractured now into lots of small scenes - this is probably a good thing - in the UK we used to all watch 4 TV channels and a few radio channels and hear the same stuff, now everyone can persue their own diverse pathway through the avalanche of music/art being created

- In the 80s and 90s there was this sense that (some) musicians had an important message - I would sit with my friend and analyse Robert Smith's latest lyrics as if some secret of life was hidden in there (to be fair, many would say it was). Looking back I think this was due to the power of music and the lack of other easily accessible (lets call them) 'thinkpieces'. But in the 2020s, if someone has a political or philosophical message that they think is important, are they going to try and write it into songs and be a popular musician? There's much easier ways now to broadcast your thoughts. I guess social media and youtube channels have replaced the idea of musician as Guru, for better or for worse.

I don't know if the exact details of the bug ever got published but it would be interesting to know how it slipped through testing.

Edit: also domestic routers are buggy and unreliable and need to be restarted regularly

No, no it doesnt. I leapt at the chance to get a robot to do it

Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.

What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

I believe this goes against the official specification of XML

PipeDream 3 breaks down the barriers between word processor, spreadsheet and database. You can include numerical tables in your letters and reports, add paragraphs to your spreadsheets, and perform calculations within your databases.

I always wondered how it was supposed to work, and voila 36 years later someone has gone to the trouble of explaining it. Many thanks. And in summary: it sounds like a weird compromise.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/15/why-gym-plac...

Are you sure?

Understood properly, Turings Imitation game aka the turing test, should be adversarial. That is, the player should be asking hard questions to try and discover who is who, not just having an idle chat. No chatbot has been able to consistently pass an adversarial Turing Test until the rise of LLMs

The Imitation Game:

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a...

... But its a longstanding position in philosophy (i.e. not everyone might take this position, but its a well known one) that discussion about consciousness should perhaps only really concern itself with the outputs.

The gist of Dawkins short piece is basically "we always used the turing test as a yardstick for consciousness, it seemed unachievable for a long time. Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts?". And I think thats an interesting point to make. Dawkins maintains that the Turing Test should be enough, by making a point about competence:

Here's dawkins piece:

https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution...

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

.... Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?

Venters idea was that you could do the same with small chunks of DNA, if you approached it as a computational problem and used computers to try/evaluate/reject the millions of ways the pieces could be fit together. So he recruited mathematicians, computer scientists etc and got them to work on the problem. He speeded the project up massively by making the biology bits simpler (smaller pieces of DNA) and shifting the effort to the computational problem.

So he made a big difference. And his insight that it was a computational problem is kindof obvious now but it wasn't obvious 25 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing