14,659 karma · joined July 25, 2012
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
This sounds rather like the plot to Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008)
One thing that I find interesting is that they launched their platform language Apex (a sortof subset of Java) in 2007 when TDD was the hot new thing, so TDD is baked into the platform - your Apex code must have at least 75% test coverage, and the tests must pass, before you are allowed to deploy to prod.
They leverage that test coverage when they are upgrading the platform - they have an internal process called The Hammer where they run all customer-created tests against customers own unique configs on the current platform and then again on the next version of the platform to see if any customer tests are being broken. Look it up, its really interesting.
... And forever to play it in!"
When our vision centres have analysed the incoming signals from the retina and processed it into information about edges, lines, colours, objects - does that then get reassembled somewhere to make the image we see in our heads? Its a very intuitive idea but that can't be possible. Because if your brain is recreating the 'image' inside your head somewhere, something then needs to look at it (and process it and break it down again to information about edges, lines, colours). But you've already done that! You already have the data, no need to make it back into an image and then re-analyse it again (see Dennett, cartesian theatre, inner observer, homunculus etc).
This is a simple concept but its very hard to get a grip on it, it is so against our intuitive feeling for how these things should work.
I have an analogy with computer games - imagine rendering a frame of a 3D game, Doom or something. The game has information about the 3D structure of the room, where the walls are, where the entities are. Then it goes to the rendering pipeline and that data is used to draw on a 2D screen, creating a 2d image. The light from that image then hits your retina and your vision processing centres break the image down into data again - the 3d structure of the room as far as you can see it, where the entities are, colours. That data is then in your head (obviously not exactly the same data that the game had, but some analogous data structure in whatever weird internal format the brain uses). And thats it! That data is you seeing it! (But no, you think, surely that data is used to recreate the image in my head somewhere....)
Things like the necker cube gives us a peep behind the curtain maybe.
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