The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.
However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).
It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.
These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").
This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.
The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."
In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."
By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.
The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.
In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."
This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!
In the theory of the psychology of creativity, there are phenomena which constitute distortions of the motivational setting for creative problem-solving which are referred to as 'extrinsic rewards'. Management theory bumped into this kind of phenomenon with the advent of the introduction of the first appearance of 'gamification' as a motivational toolkit, where 'scores' and 'badges' were awarded to participants in online activities. The psychological community reacted to this by pointing out that earlier research had shown that whilst extrinsics can indeed (at least initially) boost participation by introducing notions of competitiveness, it turned out that they were ultimately poor substitutes for the far more sustainable and productive intrinsic motivational factors, like curiosity, if it could be stimulated effectively (something which itself inevitably required more creativity on the part of the designer of the motivational resources). It seems that the motivational analogue in inference engines is an extrinsic reward process.
I think that the nature of the thing that was needing to be implanted would determine whether it was easier and safer to use a traditional incision. Hip replacements for instance use a titanium joint. However, seeing as the bone that it is replacing was not made of titanium, somehow nature has found a way to make bone strong enough to do the job. There is an important sense in which nature 'builds things using 3D printing' and does it without needing incisions, so even if we do manage to master doing 3D printing under the skin the way we do it now to an extent where we can replace things that currently need materials that are not suited to under skin 3D printing...
Even as just a meme, no-hole surgery and the technology that makes it possible may have sufficient potential to perform a valid service to medical research simply by sparking the imagination of students: reduced invasiveness is a time-honoured aim in surgical procedures, so taking it to the next (or ultimate) level does look like it's worth encouraging: a key question to some extent becomes one of language: do we still call it surgery when nothing constituting an incision is involved? Yes, we make a (very small) hole when we inject the 'ink', but injections are never referred to as being surgery. So if no-hole surgery is not a type of surgery, then what the heck kind of thing should we call it?
I've seen what appear to me to be far less deserving papers get the same kind of perhaps excessively exuberant hype, but in this case, it's not looking quite that far off the mark, IMO
Maybe the answer to how to implement controls is for the AI to spit out content in more 'modular' form?
So for instance an AI 'text to game' engine outputs the setting, gameplay, NPCs, etc, all in separate 'elements' that can then be 'Bret-Victor-ised' in terms of sliders, knobs and dials?
Ok, here is my post-hoc disclaimer: an LLM was indeed used as part of the process of putting this together, but I was heavily involved both before and after editing the text. I personally am not a bot. Would you like me to put some spelling mistakes in?
The point is this: renewables are getting cheaper faster. Batteries are getting even cheaper even faster. Batteries can support the grid. The demand for batteries to support the grid is going up exponentially whether the renewables market growth speeds up or slows down, because the grid is always short of storage, because energy generation investment always leads energy storage investment, irrespective of energy source. But because storage production can now grow even faster than generation production (this has never been the case before, it was always too expensive) storage can tap into pent-up demand that has been building up over decades. You are absolutely correct that batteries were not scalable before: they are only just crossing the scalability curve.
Thought and language are intertwined in ways we don’t fully grasp. The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language—it just means we might not yet understand how it does. Thought could employ other forms of linguistic-like processes that Fedorenko's experiments, or even current brain-imaging techniques, fail to capture.
There could be functional redundancies or alternative systems at play that we haven't identified, systems that allow thought to access linguistic capabilities even when the specialized language areas are offline or unnecessary. The question of what "language in thought" looks like remains open, particularly in tasks requiring comprehension. This underscores the need for further exploration into how thought operates and what role, if any, latent or alternative linguistic functionalities play when conventional language regions aren't active.
In short, we may have a good understanding of language in isolation, but not necessarily in its broader role within the cognitive architecture that governs thought, comprehension, and meaning-making.
A way of thinking about what's inside any of the top LLMs right now: even if they never learn another single fact, even if they get ridiculously out of date as a result, even if they are even more riddled with errors and prone to biases than we know them to be, even if they are as prone to hallucinations as we know they they are and they never develop the capacity to cure themselves of this, they are more knowledgeable and capable of more reasoned response, despite their capacity for error, to more questions than any single human being that has ever lived.
The word originally entered English as an adaptation of the Portuguese albricoque or Spanish albaricoque.
However, it was subsequently changed to match the related French word abricot (where the 't' is silent).
It is also useful to compare this to the Italian albercocca or albicocca and the Old Spanish albarcoque.
These all stem from the Spanish-Arabic al-borcoque, which itself comes from the Arabic al-burqūq (literally "the" + "birqūq").
This Arabic term was adapted from Greek, appearing in the writings of Dioscorides around the year 100 AD.
The Greek word was probably adapted from the Latin præcoquum, a variant of præcox (plural præcocia), which translates to "early-ripe" or "ripe in summer."
In earlier Roman times, the fruit was actually called the "Armenian plum" or "Armenian apple."
By around the year 350, the writer Palladius was using both terms, referring to them as "Armenian or early-ripe" fruits.
The reason we use a "p" in English (apricot) instead of a "b" (abricot) is likely due to a mistake in etymology.
In 1617, the scholar Minsheu explained the name as if it meant in aprico coctus, or "cooked in a sunny place."
This "sunny" explanation stuck, even though it was technically incorrect!