[DataDive]

I find it depressing that every time Stephen Wolfram wants to explain something, he slowly gravitates towards these simplistic cellular automata and tries to explain everything through them.

It feels like a religious talk.

The presentation consists of chunks of hard-to-digest, profound-sounding text followed by a supposedly informative picture with lots of blobs, then the whole pattern is repeated over and over.

But it never gets to the point. There is never an outcome, never a summary. It is always some sort of patterns and blobs that are supposedly explaining everything ... except nothing useful is ever communicated. You are supposed to "see" how the blobs are "everything..." a new kind of Science.

He cannot predict anything; he can not forecast anything; all he does is use Mathematica to generate multiplots of symmetric little blobs and then suggests that those blobs somehow explain something that currently exists

I find these Wolfram blogs a massive waste of time.

They are boring to the extreme.

[benlivengood]

I think that unless Wolfram is directly contradicting the Church-Turing thesis it is ok to skip over the finite automata sections.

It is a given from Church-Turing that some automata will be equivalent to some turing machines, and while it is a profound result the specific details of the equivalence isn't super important unless, perhaps, it becomes super fast and efficient to run the automata instead of Von Neumann architecture.

[ActionHank]

Got me feeling self conscious here.

I often explain boring things with diagrams consisting of boxes and arrows, some times with different colours.