But I guess the robot companies are making money.

But in reality, the universe is full of patterns. The laws of physics are not random. Water behaves in very specific ways. Our planet revolves around the Sun in 365 day intervals. The planet rotates every 24 hours. Even out of these two interlocking patterns, you can see how energy delivery to the surface of the planet could result in mechanical and chemical cycles that may result in non-random mineral formation, concentration gradients, and thermal dynamics.

Scientists argue that abiogenesis is a result of inherently chaotic but non-random processes, not a hypothetical probabilistic scenario like monkeys with typewriters.

Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.

If you're familiar with the taste of amaretto or marzipan, try thinking of those next time you drink a Dr. Pepper. That will unlock the flavor discrimination for you.

Buy the compiler, get somebody who could build you a nuclear reactor, drug discovery simulator and a GPU architecture. Deal of the century.

The recent video about the T3 stack just lists off names of libraries that we're all forced to use. I get that it's relatable but there's a difference between funny and relatable.

The "random" fluctuations of gravity in Oppenheim's theory could be intuitively explained by the cumulative gravitational effects from all other mass in the universe, which of course is always in constant motion. This isn't explicitly stated anywhere in his work as far as I can tell, but it seems to be implied.

An explanation of how this application might work (haven't verified from the source or letting it run long enough): let's say it chooses a subset of notes ("scale degrees") from a minor key, probably chosen at random. A subset of 5 or fewer notes from a scale (a pentatonic scale) will constrain the possible space of melodies so that most configurations will sound good. Even fewer and you get a more predictably pleasant (but perhaps less interesting) result. For instance, the notes that comprise the root chord will always sound good when played in any order. Acid lines typically suggest some kind of minor chord by playing an arpeggio (usually a repetitive melody consisting entirely of notes from a particular chord).

Also, a subset of notes from one scale are always going to be present in another scale. You can transition (modulate) from one scale to another by having a section use a shared subset of notes, then switching to the new one. In this manner, you can have a single piece of music traverse all possible scales (in acid techno, almost entirely minor scales).

And millions of people are fooled into thinking GPT is a real person every day, with spam and robocalls and social media bots. Maybe it won't fool everyone all the time, but it can fool some people a lot of the time. And it's only going to get more sophisticated. The only ones concerned about the Turing test are 70 year old GOFAI professors -- everyone else is dealing with the practical realities of computers suddenly having language capabilities.

As many have commented, ChatGPT is a pretty bad name too -- people get the order of the letters wrong all the time -- but at least it starts with "Chat", which explains what you're supposed to do with it.

Without a match expression and first-class exhaustiveness checking, discriminated unions are far less useful. Of course, this is because they don't want the TypeScript compiler to actually generate code, so they can't add runtime features. While TypeScript is better than no TypeScript, it seems like a massive waste to build a compiler and then shy away from making people's lives easier when possible.

People vaguely predicted the smartphone, but not really. It is not from Star Trek or Gibson. This technology may have been inevitable, but its design, terminology, and effects were not predicted in detail by mainstream sci-fi, and it really did turn out differently.

On the other hand, the Humane AI Pin is absolutely a Star Trek: TNG communicator badge. There's no denying it. VR and the Metaverse are lifted directly from Neuromancer and Snow Crash. They didn't have to end up that way, but they did, because we had those examples in fiction to steer our thinking.

It's true that predicting things isn't as impressive or as important as making them. But many people predict things that don't happen, and most people don't accurately predict anything. The sci-fi authors are a lot more like the people who make the things than the people who don't make anything and don't predict anything.