Its interesting to contrast that with OpenAI chatgpt 3.5 which was launched and then immediately available to pretty much anyone and everyone. Would OpenAI have launched it that way if they werent (as they were at that time) trying to be open? (I get they arent really open but they were at least trying to be then). I guess I'm saying if the first chatgpt 3.5 level LLM had been built by someone less open like facebook or MS would the whole thing have gone in a different direction? Chatgpt being available to everyone seemed to set the pattern for everything since. Was this inevitable? Was it the only way these LLMs could have progressed?

I had an Archimedes A305 which launched with Arthur, when I upgraded to Risc OS (which arrived on ROMs, if I remember correctly, you ordered the ROMs and then your local dealer would fit them onto the motherboard) it wasn't really _that_ different, everything I'd written continued to work, etc. Like it was a major upgrade but fundamentally the same "thing".

Just drop it into Minecraft

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