I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but quite often on as I’m reading through pages, I’ll get some sort of strange message where it refuses to load the page, and I’ll have to refresh the page several times for it to work. I have never seen this message before on any other website, and it persists on your website no matter how many different browsers I try.
It doesn’t bother me–just was hoping you knew, in case this was something you wanted to correct!

PS: Had a webcomic in highschool…back in 2003. Reading yours really brings me back. I am so sucked in to your story line!

Don’t worry too much about it. There’s plenty of techies, even Unix techies, who grew up on GUIs and think “copy” first and “end program” second.

Writing for a hypothetical future audience that doesn’t understand any of your cultural references would make for pretty shitty writing. Two-thirds of the book would be footnotes. Most people today don’t know what a slide rule is, but nobody’s tried to edit a description into all of Robert Heinlein’s old science-hero stories. Science fiction ought to make you think and wonder and look stuff up.

Besides which, I doubt Control-C will be vanishing any time soon. Gestural and voice interfaces will continue to gain dominance in casual, day-to-day use, but there’s nothing on the horizon that could replace the keyboard for high-speed precision data entry, so it’ll still be required in a lot of technical fields at least. And as long as the keyboard remains, so will the common shortcuts, because why would we change them? Control-C to copy has been around for at least 25 years; the QWERTY layout is 130.

A sigmoid curve — looks kind of like an elongated S — is a pretty common neuron function, and is what we used to implement our neural net the semester I took the MIT undergrad AI course.

Reading this on a Unix box, I didn’t get the point until I read the comments – to me, Ctrl-C terminates, Alt-W copies.

In a print edition, maybe you should write a footnote that in many computers in 2012, this was the method for making a copy of selected items using the keyboard. The future will likely move away from key combinations to gestures (like are used in Android and IOs), so this reference will become incomprehensible.

I think about the big ideas (artificial intelligence and its outcomes) a lot, and brush up my knowledge of the more technical stuff with research. Every now and then, though, like this update, my audience will clue me in to something I hadn’t known or thought about, which is okay! It makes the story more interesting.

This is the part where I stop pretending like I’m a smarty-pants and admit I did not know that. :O Very interesting!