Steam engine time
o3 and gemini 2.5 pro being a single Elo point apart on LMArena with style control feels very steam-engine time.
There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines.
— William Gibson, via Noah Brier
