This Sunday at a time which is normally scheduled for Hollyoaks watching I got up and visited The NTK/Mute Festival of Inapproriate Technology. I didn't really know what to expect. Well, retro gaming for sure. Oh, and bumping into people I know. Oh, and Dyson Spheres. Due to the wonderful web you can read lots of reports about the main event. So I'm going to ignore the main event (apart from saying that the acoustics there were really crap and that Freeman Dyson rocks) and instead concentrate on a side event, Take It Outside, a series of discussions held in the pub opposite XCOM2002.
An aside: one thing that has been worrying me a great deal is the number of weblogs and webloggers around. Some people spend way too much time blogging things. Of course, use.perl.org is really a blog too, although often with a technological slant. Some people complain when I don't include any Perl content. Sorry.
The most interesting talk for me was Chatbot++: Bot to the Future. Two of the panelists were London.pm-ers and a lot of us were there too - because bots are very important to #london.pm. We have many bots: slavorg (an op bot), dipsy (an infobot), scribot (a blog bot) and various other bots visit from time to time. Space posted an interesting email on human-bot interaction to the london.pm bots list, where she covers many of the points on why bots are interesting.
The discussion ranged quite a bit: instant messager bots, indexing blogs, group memory, bots as art, blog bots, "Desktop Dipsy" - your own personal infobot, whether bots were ever going to get sentient or should we just keep on adding more and more lowlevel hacks to make it seem so, natural language parsing, a bot which represented you online and people could interact with, whether mail filtering was a bot, verbose bots, messaging bots via SMS, big bots that know everything versus small specific bots, networks of cooperating bots (exchanging factoids? code?), complex interfaces versus simple versus English and all sorts of infobot next gen goodness. Hopefully more bots will be out here soon and someone won't send a robot back from the future to kill us all.
This evening I'm off to a Ruby London Usergroup Social, where they will buy me beer and I will answer Parrot questions...
Can one subscribe to that list?
Re:Botlist
acme on 2002-06-11T13:07:23
Of course.
