Post Amthpl8b1vi6ZQGLMO by schizobovine@social.vivaldi.net
(DIR) More posts by schizobovine@social.vivaldi.net
(DIR) Post #AmtVskqLNlB54mO3Yu by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T10:49:56Z
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Reading "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. It's pretty good, but is a little over excited about the magical power of markets and trade. (He gets a little preachy on this point and it's tiresome, without ever being so wrong that I felt the need to put it down.)Like Asimov, Vinge seems to subscribe to the notion that a science like psychohistory ought to be possible. He shows us humans thousands of years in the future with choices informed by thousands of years of human history.
(DIR) Post #AmtWDNS7XklEc1tGsK by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T10:53:39Z
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In his book a culture of star-faring traders are pitted against a stratified fascist culture with castes. He examines the blind spots of each culture but sends a clear message that trades have a kind of moral high ground.He doesn't explicitly examine or seem to understand WHY. Traders must be ... tolerant. At some deeper level they want the pie to expand. They want to make money not tell you how to live. They can't derive any profit or pleasure from simple control or domination.
(DIR) Post #AmtWR7qMNGOSFvmewa by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T10:56:08Z
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Why is a big city with lots of open markets connecting people around the world a good bet for a safe place to live for your controversial artist, religious minority, or anyone who cares about personal freedom?Because keeping the system working requires negotiation and compromise. The more people you can live with, and make peace with the bigger the market. The market itself can be full of perversion and horrors. It's the imperative to cooperate that's valuable.
(DIR) Post #AmtWcJal2CH9sVozya by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T10:58:09Z
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I love the parts of the books where he grapples with what computer systems might be like in thousands of years. He seems to imagine what we have now just MORE. So there are so many layers of systems no one can understand them all. Yet at the same time you get the impression that "coding" is still typing little list of commands... and that seems a bit unimaginative to me. He also examines exploiting humans as computers. So, maybe there will be a conflict in that. I'm not done with this book.
(DIR) Post #AmtX5Enruv8HQOkHqK by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T11:03:18Z
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@Uraael For me the biggest struggle is the way he's excited about "innovators" and "trade" ... in this very uncritical way that isn't informed by some of the things we have learned about people popularly seen as "innovators" in recent years. I expect Vinge would say "well I didn't mean someone like Elon I meant the REAL inventors and innovators"Which only begs the question: do such *singular* people exist without the myth-making we shower them with?
(DIR) Post #AmtX8a4LJAJ2FR2rlA by trachelipus@masto.ai
2024-10-11T11:03:59Z
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@futurebird Vinge's aliens are where he shines. An entire culture that goes into hibernation periodically. A hive mind based on sound, so radios can be civilization changing. (That's the sequel to this book.)
(DIR) Post #AmtXFRxfqm5r87CYVc by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T11:05:14Z
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@Uraael Personally I do not think "genius" such as it is, is all that rare. We don't just need good ideas, or people devoted to solving problems we need things like...... they system of peer review-- ways to cooperate and filter the work of individuals... these processes, traditions, at their best can create innovation. At their best.
(DIR) Post #AmtXLc9arubcThiT7g by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T11:06:19Z
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@modulux That's good to know. My joy in reading it was starting to flag a little since it has been feeling a little like Ayn Rand for smart people with souls.
(DIR) Post #AmtXTUAWRNJG1tu6K0 by powersoffour@mastodon.social
2024-10-11T11:07:44Z
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@futurebird did you read Fire Upon the Deep? I confess to having read that, but not yet Deepness in the Sky. I rather enjoyed it but may just not have picked up on the lionization of trade etc.
(DIR) Post #AmtXkrdqQDhPkiuE3E by th@social.v.st
2024-10-11T11:10:51Z
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@futurebird if you want to read "A Deepness in the Sky" along with the author's notes, I've converted the 1993 CD-ROM into a website: https://deepness.trmm.net/
(DIR) Post #AmtXp9dhRtdUjIsrku by temporal_spider@masto.ai
2024-10-11T11:11:37Z
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@futurebirdI never made it through Deepness, it seemed interminable and I read it has some rapes in it? But, Vinge has written some excellent books. Marooned in Realtime is one of the rare SF books from that decade to hold up beautifully. And the sequel to Deepness is A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of my favorite books ever. Both of these I mentioned are technically sequels, but hold up fine on their own.
(DIR) Post #AmtY28feMSVrUSzI3c by mansr@society.oftrolls.com
2024-10-11T11:14:01Z
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@futurebird @Uraael I'd say very rarely, if at all. Occasionally an individual will have some brilliant insight, but it always takes the work of many to make anything useful out of it. Also, these people have often been but one of many exploring similar ideas and were simply lucky enough to publish first. For example, if the Wright brothers hadn't succeeded in building their aeroplane, someone else most likely would have done it within a few years.
(DIR) Post #AmtYY5QDyYFWgI0RXs by monkeyborg@triangletoot.party
2024-10-11T11:19:47Z
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@futurebird A Fire Upon the Deep is a much better book with much more interesting ideas. He wasn’t as obsessed with pushing free markets at that point in his career.
(DIR) Post #AmtZcBp4Dh55e399DE by flancian@social.coop
2024-10-11T11:31:43Z
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@futurebird ha, I saw just this post pass by in my timeline and I thought: this is about 'Vinge', right away.I agree, on the one hand showing some of the quirks of systems with centuries' worth of abstraction layers made sense and was thought provoking; on the other 'galactic usenet' felt retro even shortly after the time of writing.Overall I loved both ADITS and AFUTD though.For a different take on futuristic UX, have you read Diaspora by Greg Egan? :)
(DIR) Post #AmtaTKx90KNDJHGclM by yonder@spacey.space
2024-10-11T11:41:20Z
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@futurebird @Uraael I really enjoyed this book, but I got the opposite sense from the story, which seems to be highly critical of innovators and the influence of trade. The villains are tech bros taken to the max (the 'pods' and such which seem explicitly satirical of agile development and all that.) The trade aspect felt very desperate... just people trying to find a role in an uncaring universe. The engaging aspects of the story were people going beyond all this to make a 'human' connection
(DIR) Post #AmtczNJzvum9paMTTM by futurebird@sauropods.win
2024-10-11T12:09:27Z
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@flancian If course! And Egan is so cool he hangs right here on the fedi … mostly driving everyone nuts with his math puzzles. (exercise caution they are catchy and annoying)
(DIR) Post #AmtdSGBlX1N66hHgnI by Sevoris@mastodon.social
2024-10-11T12:14:45Z
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@futurebird …I‘m throwing this idea back and forth in my head, what coding in the future might also be like that isn‘t working with little lists of commands. Maybe computers are better. On the other hand, the imperative and tool nature of computers doesn‘t go away, so why should this fundamental way of instructing them? Or is that precisely the hangup of expecting a fundamental nature to be exposed, where it isn‘t fundamental?
(DIR) Post #Amte6DqVf4kkQMOhhA by Seruko@mstdn.social
2024-10-11T12:21:59Z
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@futurebird I really like his short fiction, and I wanted to like a deepenes in the sky, but I found his obsession with human misery and degradation off putting
(DIR) Post #Amte8PDuKcgSI1NnPM by robotistry@sciencemastodon.com
2024-10-11T12:22:24Z
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@futurebird @Uraael I was once invited to attend an event being held because someone had received funding to "support innovation".They could have put 10 experts from 5 domains in a room for a week with no other responsibilities and given them a problem to solve and resources/info on request, and gotten innovation out. Many times.Instead they held a series of mini conferences in the most predictable format imaginable, focused on "encouraging innovation".🤦♀️
(DIR) Post #Amteapmv9rdmmrJdbs by flancian@social.coop
2024-10-11T12:27:30Z
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@futurebird "Greg Egan is smarter than you", I read once in a review of a book of his, and it proved truthful in my case (and enjoyable)
(DIR) Post #AmtgPzTgzV2nYwHLhg by schizobovine@social.vivaldi.net
2024-10-11T12:47:48Z
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@futurebird loving this thread – the point about cooperation is a light bulb moment for me. THAT is what makes free markets work. And in part it’s because the participants are relatively equal. Any bad actors can be shunned because no one HAS to do business with them.I feel like the horrors come when participants aren’t equal–monopolies, but also stuff like racism and misogyny. Cooperation breaks down when some people don’t have to care about other’s future welfare.
(DIR) Post #AmtgwrDWj13bUyODS4 by schizobovine@social.vivaldi.net
2024-10-11T12:53:08Z
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@futurebird It’s been a decade since I read the book, but pretty sure the people-as-computers thing definitely becomes a major plot point.(Though I definitely have mixed feelings about it now having been diagnosed with ADHD in the interim. The focusing stuff feels like a thinly veiled critique of ADD and its treatment.)
(DIR) Post #Amthpl8b1vi6ZQGLMO by schizobovine@social.vivaldi.net
2024-10-11T13:03:47Z
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@futurebird @Uraael I think Vinge would have thought people like Elon and Jobs as posers. They are only good at marketing themselves and taking credit for other people’s work. Actual innovators rarely get the same level of fame. Everyone knows about Jobs and Apple, but how many know about Wozniak?Also, modern innovation requires a network of people, with knowledge and skills across many domains. The easy stuff one person could do has already been done.
(DIR) Post #Amthr9qAfffLTTJMDg by DrorBedrack@mastodon.social
2024-10-11T13:04:04Z
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@futurebird we were so optimistic about trade and free markets in the early 90s... the Clinton years. The end of the cold war. The world seemed so open and good. Maybe because I was young?
(DIR) Post #AmtlSlabaGxd7yeglM by michael_w_busch@mastodon.online
2024-10-11T13:44:28Z
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@futurebird For a contrasting narrative; there is Joan D. Vinge's "Heaven Chronicles", which are supposed to take place in the same setting.She critiques both unrestrained capitalism and totalitarian social controls.And also does some of the better descriptions of asteroids as a setting in literature (although she was limited by 1970s - 1980s science).
(DIR) Post #AmtlXEAzF03awjndmy by faassen@fosstodon.org
2024-10-11T13:45:18Z
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@futurebirdVinge is one of my favorite authors. But he is very sympathetic to anarcho capitalism. It doesn't come through as heavily in his later works (thankfully) but see his novella the Ungoverned.
(DIR) Post #Amtlpk8t88V3IfeAtt by faassen@fosstodon.org
2024-10-11T13:48:38Z
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@futurebirdThis novel is set in the Zones of Thought universe at the Bottom, where there are inherent limitations on technology that don't exist in the Beyond. In Fire Upon the Deep a kid has to go use a keyboard for mail as the ship in the low Beyond lost the ability to do better UIs.
(DIR) Post #Amts2fvGjIMhhcpI6S by danmcd@hostux.social
2024-10-11T14:58:12Z
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@futurebird Don't know if you've finished yet, but will be intererested to see what you say when you do.I'm sure someone has mentioned written-before-but-takes-place-after "A Fire Upon the Deep". (Someone mentioned "Galactic USENET", but that's where it comes from.)When I read Deepness initially, one of my reactions was, "Oh cool, everyone went with 64-bit time_t and future people are arguing over the origin of (time_t)0."
(DIR) Post #AmuQzADLf2bot6LNqq by Orc@chaosfem.tw
2024-10-11T21:29:45Z
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@futurebird He was always a bit of libertarian; his Bobble arc was suuuper weird in that way.
(DIR) Post #Amudu5LncDgnl9Cndw by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
2024-10-11T23:54:28Z
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@futurebird I think it's more about making people autistic than exploring them as computers?
(DIR) Post #AmufiERYBOdmOSN4QS by IngaLovinde@embracing.space
2024-10-12T00:14:45Z
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@futurebird I think there is also another reason in the context of the book specifically. Basically Emergents want to colonize and exploit. While the core idea of Qeng Ho is to share and exchange not physical resources (this would be impractical) or money (this would make no sense, money just don't work across these times and space distances), but knowledge. The only things Qeng Ho can give you are ideas and maybe some helping hand; the only thing you can give them in return are your ideas (if you don't have any now, then maybe in a thousand years or so?)Markets can be full of perversion and horrors; but markets spanning hundreds of light years cannot, because things causing perversion and horrors are just inapplicable at this scale (as we can see with how Emergents change in a span of just a single human life away from their metropole).For me, the message of the book was not simply that markets are better than fascists, but that this specific market-based approach is the only possible way for civilization to work at such scale, without falling apart and turning into many small isolated civilizations in their own isolated solar systems. Empires like Emergents might reach tens of light years away for a couple of centuries, but only Qeng Ho approach works across hundred light years and thousands of years. And without Qeng Ho, we wouldn't even be able to talk about "humanity", because it's Qeng Ho that connects all these distant separate parts.
(DIR) Post #AmyCHkcynfHbCxFm3E by cstross@wandering.shop
2024-10-13T17:03:50Z
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@futurebird Vernor was a libertarian (small-l) circa 1960-2008. (I strongly doubt this survived the mass libertarian conversion to Nazi-adjacent Trumpism after 2016—Vernor was not sympathetic to fascism—but we weren't in touch at that point.) He was also a CS prof, so pencil him in as flying parallel to but gradually diverging from the modern silicon valley techbros' grandparents.
(DIR) Post #AmyJfo24UaXiOePJQm by TerryHancock@realsocial.life
2024-10-13T18:26:40Z
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@futurebird Yeah, I got the feeling that Vinge didn't really believe in market-failure -- or that it was always due to human error and could be rectified with big enough computers.(Also in "Fire Upon the Deep" and "Rainbow's End").Of this I am personally skeptical. I've seen too much market failure in action.Both capitalist and communist theorists seem to suffer a lot from the belief that you can plan for everything. But combinatorial explosion is a real problem with that (IMHO).