Hey all if you haven't been following along with Dave Ackley's quest to make artificial life, he's finally done it! The project is incredible. His goal is to construct an entirely new computational stack that is: • robust-first • indefinitely-scalable • non-deterministic • programmed with spatial-programming The whole thing is a massive inspiration to me and I would have never got into the world of computing without it! Maybe it'll inspire you too. And this week, he finally produced a self-replicating 'cell'. I found it oddly emotional to see the project get to this milestone! Anyway, happy new year!

(Tangent — I actually scheduled an interview with Dave, but this was in the pandemic turmoil period where I ended up putting the podcast on hiatus because doing interviews was too stressful. So now the show is back in a much more manageable format thanks to @Jimmy Miller, but having guests on the show still presents all the same downsides as before, so it remains to be seen what we'll do. It's something I'd like to do once in a while, and Dave would be fantastic, I agree!)