Progress?

 

	As Promised...
	I mentioned yesterday that I had an urge to write a plain, old-fashioned webpage in the simplest and oldest form of HyperText Markup Language, that would be recognisable to the pioneers of this now grossly inflated space we call 'The Internet', or as many would have it 'My internet', as in "My internet's not working...". So here it is. This piece is written in the most basic of HTML possible, and should render legibly in any browser; ancient, old, new, or bleeding edge. There is no CSS styling; no layout, no images, no tables; and certainly no bloody pop-ups: just plain text, structured in a human and machine-readable way. The only navigation possible is either to other parts of the document itself or to other web pages, via Hyperlinks, such as this one to last night's blog post, Where It All Began. The document and it's associated HTML file in the screenshot above is probably as basic as it can get, but given that my usual style of a post consists of essentially a title, a photograph and a body of text - albeit on a styled background with styled text and layout - it really is as simple as that, but without the overhead of hundreds of lines of HTML and CSS [the documents that apply the 'styling' to the pages], or indeed the thousands of lines of Java and Javascript code needed to render this humble little document in a slightly fancier form such as this, rather than that plain, but perfectly readable rendition. Caveat: the Blogger editor kind of forced me to portray this page as normal: the picture above shows the raw HTML to the left, and the true rendering of it to the right: plus ça change, eh..?
	Ready Or Not...
	I've got a shed-load of reading to catch up with - as usual - including three weeks worth of New Statesman articles, this month's Wired magazine, last week's Private Eye, umpteen academic papers I want to condense, and I don't know how many books that I've got started and are still in my 'to read' stack. All a bit daunting, but who gives one? I'd rather die with a million things still to do than having arrived at some notional 'conclusion'. Until we can't, we can, is my motto. One thing that has tickled my philosophical self, is a pull-quote from the cover story of last week's New Statesman. In "Enter God Mode, In the race for AI supremacy, the future of humanity is at stake": 'The real battle is about building a model of reality that can be adopted globally'. Well, there's a statement for you. As if there was a standard form of reality that applies in culture-specific contexts, already. If there's one takeaway from thousands of years of human thought and introspection on the nature of 'reality', it is that 'reality' subsists only in the mind of the individual. So, it might be argued, that basing Large Language Models on such arbitrary concepts as 'culture' is phenomenologically flawed, assuming you agree with phenomenology itself as a philosophical construct: other philosophical constructs are of course  available should you so choose. If we can't agree, after all these millennia, on what reality actually is, and to be frank, we can't, because at the end of the day, it is indescribable, except in generalities, outside of oneself and one's own perception of what 'it is'. It's a thing: how we model that in software boggles the mind, and that's the nub of it all... Caveat: I've had to edit out the bloopers from the text shown above, but that's par for the course, anyway...