I'm in the UK and I've never heard of that definition of it (being to do with churches), maybe thats a very ancient definiton
14,659 karma · joined July 25, 2012
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.
I did a search for my postcode and got given results for a different area and council miles away
Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their _______
Pets?
Hairstyles?
Yes thats what I meant, the doubling of frequency. It might seem trivial but the fact that doubling frequency sounds "right" to humans is actually quite interesting. Why does it sound "right"?