[HN Gopher] Vernor Vinge has died
___________________________________________________________________
Vernor Vinge has died
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 886 points
Date : 2024-03-21 06:08 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (file770.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (file770.com)
| demaga wrote:
| Haven't read his fiction works yet, but his singularity piece is
| very interesting:
| https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
| nabla9 wrote:
| "Rainbows End" is his singularity book.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about
| Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out
| that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was
| asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both
| Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on.
|
| You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of
| doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the
| slush pile at the end of the Watchmen comic book.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Vinge's technological singularity is explosion of things
| changing, not "rapture of nerds".
| Vetch wrote:
| I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as
| primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about
| an accelerating technological pace and its relation with
| intelligence.
|
| I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in
| Realtime was Ascension.
|
| For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful
| countermeasure.
|
| The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me.
| Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst.
| I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The
| weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I think I've said "catastrophes" before rather than
| "disasters" and I think that's a better word, but I stand
| by it.
|
| It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm.
| Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying
| to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first
| she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless
| teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her
| she's about to tear apart a kingdom to fraudulently seize
| power, and as collateral she's (without telling them)
| ensured everybody she knew previously will die if she
| fails. By the end Tatja has started a war in order to
| seize control of a means to signal off world. Only two
| other people on her world even realises what "signalling
| off world" would even mean, but she's potentially going
| to kill huge numbers of people to achieve it anyway.
| She's a catastrophe even though that wasn't her intent.
| She does apologise, for whatever it's worth, right at the
| very end, to people who were close to her and from whom
| she belatedly realises she is now so distant.
|
| Rabbit is indeed just playing. When the library nearly
| falls over and kills a _lot_ of university staff and
| students, that 's just a small taste of what happens when
| playful Rabbit forgets for a moment that this isn't
| really just a game. Consider just how powerful Rabbit is
| remembering that's a _distraction_. The whole fight,
| which causes massive disruption to the city and easily
| could have led to enormous loss of life, isn 't what
| Rabbit was really doing, it was just to distract Bob's
| team so that they don't focus on the labs for a few
| hours. And remember that Rabbit's goal here is clearly to
| secure the weapon for itself, not to deny it to the
| antagonist.
| underlipton wrote:
| This is a compelling argument, but I think it's overly
| pessimistic. Back on the human side, the ending sees
| Robert adapting to his situation; he loses his left arm
| (his "sinister"), and it looks like he's lost his wife
| for good, but he's managed to find some amount of synergy
| with the new world and technology he's surrounded by.
| Combined with Rabbit's temporary "defeat" (an experience
| that, if he's truly a super-intelligence capable of true
| learning and growth, should lead him to different means
| and even ends in the future, if nothing else), the
| implicit conclusion seems to be a future with an
| imperfect but livable melding of humanity and technology.
| Not too different from what's come before. Putting all of
| human history onto a single drive likewise might seem
| like a diminishing of its significance, but the fact is
| that it's still there to dive into, should one desire.
| That's arguably a step up from the past.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The Rabbit had a sense of morality. I do not think it
| intended to enslave or destroy humanity, or any other
| monstrous end. It kept bargains that it could have cheated,
| when cheating those bargains cost it nothing. This is at
| least a hint of a sense of justice. The Rabbit was likely
| the adversary of some other entity, perhaps something very
| Blight-like.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I'm half-convinced that the Rabbit was an ancient trickster
| god, and not an AI. Is AI even the correct term? If the
| Rabbit was a technological non-human intelligence, then
| surely it was never created (even by accident), and
| emerged/grew from the computosphere. No governments seemed to
| be aware of any other government having created it, and two
| of the nearly-main characters were special operatives tasked
| with knowing about shit like that and shutting it down before
| it could result in doomsday scenarios.
|
| I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two,
| it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for
| a very long time before even the first transistor.
| hinkley wrote:
| Marooned in Space Time is about people who missed the
| singularity.
| progbits wrote:
| I knew "Fire upon the deep" would be a good book just few pages
| in, where in acknowledgements Vinge thanks "the organizers of the
| Arctic '88 distributed systems course at the University of
| Tromso".
| growt wrote:
| Doesn't he deserve the black bar on top of HN?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Yes. I assume the admin is sleeping. @dang
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't think "@dang" is doing anything. You need to email
| hn@ycombinator.com.
| dbuxton wrote:
| +1
| sdeer wrote:
| +1
| _0ffh wrote:
| agreed!
| ompogUe wrote:
| +1
| arethuza wrote:
| _" So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know."_
| re wrote:
| If you haven't read A Fire Upon The Deep (or even if you already
| have), you can read the prologue and first few chapters here:
| https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De...
| jl6 wrote:
| Oh man, this makes me sad.
|
| I remember reading _A Fire Upon the Deep_ based on a Usenet
| recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything
| else he wrote. _A Deepness in the Sky_ is a worthy sequel.
|
| He wasn't prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a
| Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy
| exposition, but by expert _omission_.
|
| A true name in sci-fi.
| emmelaich wrote:
| 'true name'?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
|
| THE cyberpunk book.
|
| Also, his later books are great but the "Across Realtime"
| trilogy has a special place in my heart.
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/167844
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Yudkowsky read true names and it's what
| caused him to focus his life on the alignment problem.
|
| That novella is basically an illustrated warning of
| misaligned super intelligence (it's also really good!)
| hinkley wrote:
| I still want augmented Chess to be a sport. You get a
| computer not weighing more than X pounds.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it
| up again.
|
| Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5
| chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about
| from the previous book.
|
| Agree about the expert omission part.
| komaromy wrote:
| _Deepness_ was well worth it.
|
| Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up
| on right around the same point as you.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I think WoT is worth pushing through, you got stuck in the
| same spot a number of people do. There is definitely a lull
| there.
|
| Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books
| for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would
| be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the
| parts in my re-reads of the series.
|
| I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it
| will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have
| to get past the way women are written in the series (and I
| understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy
| to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill
| set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the
| last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I
| assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).
| hinkley wrote:
| Book eight may have been about when I gave up and sold the
| set. The dull bit in the middle of each book is when I would
| practice my speed reading.
|
| About once a season I contemplate the idea of approaching
| either Sanderson or the Jordan estate and ask that they
| consider an abridged edition edited by Sanderson. You could
| easily knock 1500 pages out of this series and not change a
| single thing.
|
| Meanwhile Rosamund Pike is doing new audio books for the
| series and the samples sound much better than the old one.
| But the first one is about forty hours. As much as I might
| like to claim that I would listen to her read a phone book, I
| don't think I can listen to 600 hours of audiobooks for one
| series.
| angiosperm wrote:
| Let us not neglect _The Peace War_ and _Across Realtime_. The
| former introduced memorable tragic figures, besides its
| singular vision.
| moomin wrote:
| Bizarrely, there's a second sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, but
| it's never been digitised.
| SECProto wrote:
| _Children Of The Sky_ is certainly available digitally.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any
| regard.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| It's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the
| first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for
| something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep
| tier finale.
| stormking wrote:
| People wanted to read how Pham Nuwen defeated the
| Emergents, learn more about the Zones of Thought or see
| the Blight finally destroyed once and for all.
|
| No one wanted more Game of Dogs.
| db48x wrote:
| Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in
| the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then
| you'll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open
| mind then you may find that there's actually an
| interesting philosophical point to be examined and a
| decent story built around it.
| bkcooper wrote:
| _Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in
| the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then
| you'll be disappointed._
|
| Except half of _Fire Upon the Deep_ was characters on the
| same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books
| are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the
| third one was a dud.
|
| My main gripe is that these three books all share the
| same trope that underpins one of the major subplots:
| glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In
| the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the
| Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology,
| localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really
| think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is
| also very clearly building to a confrontation that will
| happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more
| noticeable
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't
| put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the
| max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like
| later Stephenson.
|
| I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort
| of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The
| Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs
| work.
| bosquefrio wrote:
| Vinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I
| would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his
| best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I don't know Brin at all, my first thought was "Sergey?!" -
| will check out his books and appreciate the recommendation.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Brin has a post on his FB wall mourning Vinge.
| bosquefrio wrote:
| I believe they were friends. Brin mentioned that he hung
| out with Vinge a few weeks ago.
| FromOmelas wrote:
| not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along
| with Vernor Vinge.
| jonathanleane wrote:
| This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the
| sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even
| better than Fire upon the deep imo.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake
| of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
| atemerev wrote:
| Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is
| reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is
| how Putin operates.
|
| Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of
| evil", if you ask me.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Yeah, discovering Nau's chamber of horrors is meant to
| strip any illusions about his motivations.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Book spoilers.
|
| IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked
| with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years
| ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was
| that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished
| the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't
| mind it.
| vvillena wrote:
| Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one
| because he kept a pet in the open.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's both. On one hand, he is aware that one of his
| valued subordinates "needs" to regularly murder people,
| and doesn't consider it an issue so long as that
| subordinate remains productive and is kept in check to
| avoid "wasting resources".
|
| But there's _also_ a record of him personally torturing
| and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which
| he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and
| then.
| rakejake wrote:
| I think Greg Egan in one of his novels has a line that goes
| like "Humans cannot be universe conquerors if they don't
| overcome their bug like tendencies to invade and destroy".
| Nah, it is this very tendency that makes them universe
| conquerors. Nothing to beat good old fashioned greed and
| discontent.
| natechols wrote:
| > Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned
| decisions with terrible prices
|
| The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil,
| and there's never any indication given that they actually
| care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for
| long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language
| that regimes like these use, but I didn't find his intent at
| all ambiguous.
|
| The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is
| [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral
| implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the
| not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's
| Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in
| all of his books, the most fully realized and believable
| protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place
| going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third
| to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All
| of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels
| that just react to the plot.
| rakejake wrote:
| A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel
| I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept
| of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring.
|
| While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness
| in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi
| novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the
| reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed
| within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly
| entertaining and interesting.
|
| I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book,
| Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider
| language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could
| do what they do today.
|
| A huge loss indeed.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the
| novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't
| anticipate that computers could do what they do today.
|
| I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in
| decoding unknown languages, have they?
| rakejake wrote:
| No idea, though being next-token predictors, it can't hurt
| to use LLMs?
| jerf wrote:
| All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might
| decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of
| data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't
| necessarily be able to overcome that.
|
| In the book the characters had access to effectively
| unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating
| the data, plus they had reference to at least some video,
| and... something else that would be very useful for
| decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-
| grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant
| difference.
|
| Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it
| was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are
| basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of
| language acquisition.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, yeah; I'm just not convinced there's any particular
| reason to think that LLMs would be useful for decoding
| languages.
|
| (That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a
| little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which
| hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so
| you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| LLMs are.. not bad at finding some semantic relationships
| between some arbitrary data. Sure, if you dump an unknown
| language into LLM then you can only receive a
| semantically correct sentences of unknown meaning, but as
| you start to decode the language itself it would be way
| easier to find the relationships there, if not just
| outright replacing the terms with a translated ones.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the
| Spider language.
|
| Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read
| the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive
| problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative
| models or LLMs.
|
| Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for
| translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they
| rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data
| which would not include any existing translations by
| definition.
| rakejake wrote:
| I do not recall the exact details but I remember that some
| of the focused individuals were kept in a grid or matrix of
| some sort. The aim of these grids were to translate the
| spider-talk and achieve some form of conversation with the
| spiders on the planet. It is also mentioned that the
| focused individuals have their own invented language with
| which they communicate to other focused individuals, which
| is faster and more efficient than human languages.
|
| I may be misremembering certain details, but the similarity
| to neural networks and their use in machine translation was
| quite apparent.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The zipheads were crippled with a weaponized virus that
| turned them all into autistic savants. The virus was
| somewhat magnetic, and using MRI like technologies, they
| could target specific parts of the brain to be affected
| to lesser or greater degrees. It's been awhile since I've
| re-read it, but "focused" was the propaganda label for it
| from the monstrous tyrannical regime that used it to turn
| people into zombies, no?
| rakejake wrote:
| Yes, they could target specific portions of the brain.
| Have to re-read the book!
| db48x wrote:
| Not zombies, but loving slaves. People able to apply all
| of their creativity and problem-solving skills to any
| task given to them, but without much capacity for
| reflection or any kind of personal ambitions or desires.
| rkachowski wrote:
| > We spanned a pretty wide spectrum - politically! Yet, we KBs
| [Killer B's] (Vernor was a full member ... )
|
| Does this mean something other than a wu tang fan?
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| I think that was later ... In the 1980s there was a surfeit of
| B-initial SF writers (as in the article's picture).
|
| Also there was some media noise about killer bees, and they
| became part of the standard dungeon zoo, I think. Plus,
| possibly just "the Bees" would prompt "What, the Bee Gees?", a
| terrible risk.
| zem wrote:
| the "killer B's" originally referred to Greg Bear, Gregory
| Benford, and David Brin
| Voultapher wrote:
| :(
|
| Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat
| forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent
| and well thought out worlds.
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Oh man, that's sad to hear. I really loved his books, especially
| the ones that looked into the future from a modern day engineer
| point of view. "Rainbows End" comes to my mind quite often when
| as I read the tech news, it paints a picture of a future that
| seems to get closer day by day - a sci-fi that you can one
| realistically believe to live in one day.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were
| around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank
| Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be
| several orders of magnitude higher.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Le Guin and Niven being the only ones of your list who were
| born there; all the rest explicitly chose to be there.
| zabzonk wrote:
| you could probably say the same about the east coast, and NY in
| particular - pohl, bester et al.
| sph wrote:
| They always had the best LSD. Not necessary, but won't hurt to
| explore and experience the depth of your creativity.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Scotland's per capita big name sci-fi writer contribution must
| be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher still.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Interview from ReasonTV -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alxyAeCPits (2011)
|
| I love the cyberpunk vibe of "Prisoners of Gravity" (1992) but it
| only discusses "Marooned in Realtime"-
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERRA8qXvuyU&t=87s
| steve1977 wrote:
| He wrote some of my favorite sci-fi books. I was aware he wasn't
| in good health for a while already, it's still sad to hear about
| his passing of course. Thank you for the worlds you showed me.
| Simon321 wrote:
| He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines
| becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all
| the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I
| wonder what he thought about it all.
|
| >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by
| Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once
| humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be
| a technological and social transition similar in some sense to
| "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and
| later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological
| Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end
| of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to
| upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an
| incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it
| occurred before 2005 or after 2030.
|
| Looks like he was spot on.
| trenchgun wrote:
| He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was
| by von Neumann.
| nabla9 wrote:
| The concept predates von Neuman.
|
| First known person to present the idea was mathematician and
| philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not
| surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values
| of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing
| philosopher.
|
| He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as
| boosting in machine learning).
|
| Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion
| Hypothesis
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855
| n4r9 wrote:
| That kind of niche knowledge is what I come to HN for!
| protomolecule wrote:
| Also "Darwin among the Machines"[0] written by Samuel
| Butler in 1863, that's 4 years after Darwin's "On the
| Origin of Species".
|
| Butlerian jihad[1] is the war against machines in the
| Dune universe.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines
|
| [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
| jhbadger wrote:
| Butler also expanded this idea in his 1872 novel Erewhon,
| where he described a seemingly primitive island
| civilization that turned out to once had greater
| technology than the West, including mechanical AI, but
| they abandoned it when they began to fear its
| consequences. A lot of 20th century SF tropes in the
| Victorian period.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon
| jart wrote:
| That essay is written by a political scientist. His
| arguments aren't very persuasive. Even if they were, he
| doesn't actually cite the person he's writing about, so I
| have no way to check the primary materials. It's not like
| this is uncommon either. Everyone who's smart since 1760
| has extrapolated the industrial revolution and imagined
| something similar to the singularity. Malthus would be a
| bad example and Nietzsche would be a good example. But John
| von Neumann was a million times smarter than all of them,
| he named it the singularity, and that's why he gets the
| credit.
| tim333 wrote:
| There are some quotes but they guy seems to be talking
| about improving humans rather than anything AI like:
|
| "...natural [human] faculties themselves and this [human
| body] organisation could also be improved?"
| nabla9 wrote:
| Check out _" Sketch for a Historical Picture of the
| Progress of the Human Mind"_, by Marquis de Condorcet,
| 1794. The last chapter, The Tenth epoch/The future
| progress of the human mind. There he lays out unlimited
| advance of knowledge, unlimited lifespan for humans,
| improvement of physical faculties, and then finally
| improvement of the intellectual and moral faculties.
|
| And this was not some obscure author, but leading figure
| in the French Enlightenment. Thomas Malthus wrote his
| essay on population as counterargument.
| gcr wrote:
| with respect, we don't know if he was spot on. Companies
| shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry
| from the transformative societal change he describes will
| happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the
| scale he describes, and might not happen without more
| fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.
| mnsc wrote:
| Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself
| that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.
| dsr_ wrote:
| OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through
| code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more
| code from the corpus that is statistically likely to
| follow.
|
| And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking
| a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light
| airbrush.
|
| Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud.
|
| LLMs are not going to generate improvements.
| ben_w wrote:
| Saying they definitely won't or they definitely will are
| equally over-broad and premature.
|
| I currently expect we'll need another architectural
| breakthrough; but also, back in 2009 I expected no-
| steering-wheel-included self driving cars no later than
| 2018, and that the LLM output we actually saw in 2023
| would be the final problem to be solved in the path to
| AGI.
|
| Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
| jart wrote:
| GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes
| 10,000 teraflops. NVIDIA just unveiled their latest
| Blackwell chip yesterday which goes 20,000 teraflops. If
| you buy an NVL72 rack of the things, it goes 1,400,000
| teraflops. That's what Jensen Huang's GPT runs on I bet.
| ben_w wrote:
| > GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes
| 10,000 teraflops
|
| AFAICT, both are guesses. The low-end estimate I've seen
| for human brains are ~ 162 GFLOPS[0] to 10^28 FLOPS[1];
| even just the model size for GPT-4 isn't confirmed,
| merely a combination of human inference of public
| information with a rumour widely described as a "leak",
| likewise the compute requirements.
|
| [0] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/
| 17/brai...
|
| [1] https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/
| jart wrote:
| They're not guesses. We know they use A100s and we know
| how fast an A100 goes. You can cut a brain open and see
| how many neurons it has and how often they fire.
| Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons *
| 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me
| honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a
| neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the
| human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me. That
| would explain why GPT is so much smarter and faster than
| people. The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring
| different things.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron
| only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human
| brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me.
|
| That assumes that you can represent all of the useful
| parts of the decision about whether to fire or not to
| fire in the equivalent of one floating point operation,
| which seems to be an optimistic assumption. It also
| assumes there's no useful information encoded into e.g.
| phase of firing.
| jart wrote:
| Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron
| that decides when it needs to do work. Those computers
| are an implementation detail of the flops being provided
| by neurons, and would not increase the overall flop
| count, since that'd be counting them twice. For example,
| how would you measure the speed of a game boy emulator?
| Would you take into consideration all the instructions
| the emulator itself needs to run in order to simulate the
| game boy instructions?
| mlyle wrote:
| Already considered in my comment.
|
| > Imagine that there's a little computer inside each
| neuron that decides when it needs to do work
|
| Yah, there's -bajillions- of floating point operation
| equivalents happening in a neuron deciding what to do.
| They're probably not all functional.
|
| BUT, that's why I said the "useful parts" of the
| decision:
|
| It may take more than the equivalent of one floating
| point operation to decide whether to fire. For instance,
| if you are weighting multiple inputs to the neuron
| differently to decide whether to fire now, that would
| require multiple multiplications of those inputs. If you
| consider whether you have fired recently, that's more
| work too.
|
| Neurons do all of these things, and more, and these
| things are known to be functional-- not mere
| implementation details. A computer cannot make an
| equivalent choice in one floating point operation.
|
| Of course, this doesn't mean that the brain is _optimal_
| -- perhaps you can do far less work. But if we're going
| to use it as a model to estimate scale, we have to
| consider what actual equivalent work is.
| jart wrote:
| I see. Do you think this is what Kurzweil was accounting
| for when he multiplied by 1000 connections?
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, but it probably doesn't tell the whole story.
|
| There's basically a few axes you can view this on:
|
| - Number of connections and complexity of connection
| structure: how much information is encoded about how to
| do the calculations.
|
| - Mutability of those connections: these things are
| growing and changing -while doing the math on whether to
| fire-.
|
| - How much calculation is really needed to do the
| computation encoded in the connection structure.
|
| Basically, brains are doing a whole lot of math and
| working on a dense structure of information, but not very
| precisely because they're made out of meat. There's
| almost certainly different tradeoffs in how you'd build
| the system based on the precision, speed, energy, and
| storage that you have to work with.
| queuebert wrote:
| Synapses might be akin to transistor count, which is only
| roughly correlated with FLOPs on modern architectures.
|
| I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve
| carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we
| imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla
| walking through the people passing around a basketball,
| then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain.
| This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and
| parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in
| theory be fairly low bandwidth.
|
| There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the
| brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It
| is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.
|
| My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly
| specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs
| running an LLM.
| ben_w wrote:
| > They're not guesses. We know they use A100s and we know
| how fast an A100 goes.
|
| And we _don 't_ know how many GPT-4 instances run on any
| single A100, or if it's the other way around and how many
| A100s are needed to run a single GPT-4 instance. We also
| don't know how many tokens/second any given instance
| produces, so multiple users may be (my guess is they are)
| queued on any given instance. We have a rough idea how
| many machines they have, but not how intensively they're
| being used.
|
| > You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it
| has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for
| the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200
| calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't
| think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires
| 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5
| to 5 teraflops it seems to me.
|
| You're double-counting. "If a neuron only fires 5-50
| times a second" = maximum synapse firing rate * fraction
| of cells active at any given moment, and the 200 is what
| you get from assuming it _could_ go at 1000 /second (they
| can) but only 20% are active at any given moment (a bit
| on the high side, but not by much).
|
| Total = neurons * synapses/neuron * maximum synapse
| firing rate * fraction of cells active at any given
| moment * operations per synapse firing
|
| 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e3 Hz * 10% (of your brain in use at any
| given moment, where the similarly phrased misconception
| comes from) * 1 floating point operation = 1e16/second =
| 10 PFLOP
|
| It currently looks like we need more than 1 floating
| point operation to simulate a synapse firing.
|
| > The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring different
| things.
|
| Things which may turn out to be important for e.g.
| Hebbian learning. We don't know what we don't know. Our
| brains are much more sample-efficient than our ANNs.
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| That's is based on old assumption of neuron function.
|
| Firstly, Kurzweil underestimates the number connections
| by order of magnitude.
|
| Secondly, dentritic computation changes things.
| Individual dentrites and the dendritic tree as a whole
| can do multiple individual computations. logical
| operations low-pass filtering, coincidence detection, ...
| One neuronal activation is potentially thousands of
| operations per neuron.
|
| Single human neuron can be equivalent of thousands of
| ANN's.
| mechagodzilla wrote:
| They _might_ generate improvements, but I'm not sure why
| people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think
| of it like improvements to jet engines or internal
| combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by
| decades of very tiny improvements. We've gone from 32-bit
| LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and
| then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that.
| Moore's is running on fumes for process improvements, so
| each new generation of chips that's twice as fast manages
| to get there by nearly doubling the silicon area and
| nearly doubling the power consumption. There's a lot of
| active research into pruning models down now, but mostly
| better models == bigger models, which is also hitting all
| kinds of practical limits. Really good engineering might
| get to the same endpoint a little faster than mediocre
| engineering, but they'll both probably wind up at the
| same point eventually. A super smart LLM isn't going to
| make sub-atomic transistors, or sub-bit weights, or
| eliminate power and cooling constraints, or eliminate any
| of the dozen other things that eventually limit you.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Saying that AI hardware is near a dead end because
| Moore's law is running out of steam is silly. Even GPUs
| are very general purpose, we can make a lot of progress
| in the hardware space via extreme specialization,
| approximate computing and analog computing.
| jart wrote:
| Bro, Jensen Huang just unveiled a chip yesterday that
| goes 20 petaflops. Intel's latest raptorlake cpu goes 800
| gigaflops. Can you really explain 25000x progress by the
| 2x larger die size? I'm sure reactionary America wanted
| Moore's law to run out of steam but the Taiwanese
| betrayal made up for all the lost Moore's law progress
| and then some.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Pro tip: If you want to know who is the king of AI chips,
| compare FLOPS (or TOPS) per chip area, not FLOPS/chip.
|
| As long as the bottleneck is the fab capacity as wafers
| per hous, the number of operations per second per chip
| area determines who will produce more compute with best
| price. It's a good measure even between different
| technology nodes and superchips.
|
| Nvidia is leader for a reason.
|
| If manufacturing capacity increases to match the demand
| in the future, FLOPS or TOPS per Watt may become
| relevant, but now it's fab capacity.
| hock_ads_ad_hoc wrote:
| Taiwanese betrayal? I'm not sure I understand the
| reference.
| jart wrote:
| There's no reference. It's just a bad joke. What they did
| was actually very good.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| LLMs are so much more than you are assuming... text,
| images, code are merely abstractions to represent
| reality. Accurate prediction requires no less than
| usefully generalizable models and deep understanding of
| the actual processes in the world that produced those
| representations.
|
| I know they can provide creative new solutions to totally
| novel problems from firsthand experience... instead of
| assuming what they should be able to do, I experimented
| to see what they can actually do.
|
| Focusing on the simple mechanics of training and
| prediction is to miss the forest for the trees. It's as
| absurd as saying how can living things have any
| intelligence? They're just bags of chemicals oxidizing
| carbon. True but irrelevant- it misses the deeper fact
| that solving almost any problem deeply requires
| understanding and modeling all of the connected problems,
| and so on, until you've pretty much encompassed
| everything.
|
| Ultimately it doesn't even matter what problem you're
| training for- all predictive systems will converge on
| general intelligence as you keep improving predictive
| accuracy.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, eventually one gets a series of software improvements
| which eventually result in the best possible performance on
| currently available hardware --- if one can consistently
| get an LLM to suggest improvements to itself.
|
| Until we get to a point where an AI has the wherewithal to
| create a fab to make its own chips and then do assembly w/o
| human intervention (something along the lines of Steve Jobs
| vision of a computer factory where sand goes in at one end
| and finished product rolls out the other) it doesn't seem
| likely to amount to much.
| jerf wrote:
| LLM != AI.
|
| An LLM is not going to suggest a reasonable improvement to
| itself, except by sheerest luck.
|
| But then next generation, where the LLM is just the
| language comprehension and generation model that feeds into
| something else yet to be invented, I have no guarantees
| about whether that will be able to improve itself. Depends
| on what it is.
| microtherion wrote:
| That may happen more easily than you're suggesting. LLMs
| are masters at generating plausible sounding ideas with no
| regard to their factual underpinnings. So some of those
| computational bong hits might come up with dozens of
| plausible looking suggestions (maybe featuring made up
| literature references as well).
|
| It would be left to human researchers to investigate them
| and find out if any work. If they succeed, the LLM will get
| all the credit for the idea, if they fail, it's them who
| will have wasted their time.
| angiosperm wrote:
| It has, anyway, already had a profound effect on the IT job
| market.
| jart wrote:
| > Within thirty years, we will have the technological means
| to create superhuman intelligence.
|
| Blackwell.
|
| > o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the
| graphic generation capability of modern machines and the
| esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an
| enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for
| artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we
| explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we
| explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is
| possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this
| direction.
|
| Stable Diffusion.
|
| > o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access
| without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting
| in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so
| well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is
| already being spent on it.)
|
| iPhone and Android.
|
| > o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A
| popular research/product area in recent years has been
| decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be
| too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the
| program giving the user information, there must be the idea
| of the user giving the program guidance.
|
| Cicero.
|
| > Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas
| themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most
| radical will quickly become commonplace.
|
| Trump.
|
| > o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work
| (ie, are more effective than their component members). This
| is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular
| commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to
| regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one
| sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of
| inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations.
| For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained
| than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human
| members could be isolated from ego issues such that the
| contribution of different members is focussed on the team
| project. And of course shared data bases could be used much
| more conveniently than in conventional committee operations.
| (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather
| than political meetings. In a political setting, the
| automation described above would simply enforce the power of
| the persons making the rules!)
|
| Ingress.
|
| > o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination
| human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in
| this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the
| Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of
| even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For
| instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would
| break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't
| for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system
| administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the
| worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As
| connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer
| speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn
| Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor
| recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with
| millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).
|
| Twitter.
|
| > o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial
| applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13].
| This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct
| communcation.
|
| Atom Limbs.
|
| > o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the
| bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual
| brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected.
| Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke
| victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven
| interfaces.
|
| Neuralink.
|
| ---
|
| https://justine.lol/dox/singularity.txt
| dingnuts wrote:
| >> > Within thirty years, we will have the technological
| means to create superhuman intelligence.
|
| > Blackwell.
|
| I'm fucking sorry but there is no LLM or "AI" platform that
| is even real intelligence, today, easily demonstrated by
| the fact that an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM.
| Go on, ask ChatGPT to output a novel model that performs
| better than any other model. Oh, it doesn't work? That's
| because IT'S NOT INTELLIGENT. And it's DEFINITELY not
| "superhuman intelligence." Not even close.
|
| Sometimes accurately regurgitating facts is NOT
| intelligence. God it's so depressing to see commenters on
| this hell-site listing current-day tech as ANYTHING
| approaching AGI.
| mlyle wrote:
| You didn't read him correctly; he's not saying Blackwell
| is AGI. I believe that he's saying that perhaps Blackwell
| could be _computationally sufficient_ for AGI if "used
| correctly."
|
| I don't know where that "computationally sufficient" line
| is. It'll always be fuzzy (because you could have a very
| slow, but smart entity). And before we have a working
| AGI, thinking about how much computation we need always
| comes down to back of the envelope estimations with
| radically different assumptions of how much computational
| work brains do.
|
| But I can't rule out the idea that current architectures
| have enough processing to do it.
| jart wrote:
| I don't use the A word, because it's one of those words
| that popular culture has poisoned with fear, anger, and
| magical thinking. I can at least respect Kurzweil though
| and he says the human brain has 10 petaflops. Blackwell
| has 20 petaflops. That would seem to make it capable of
| superhuman intelligence to me. Especially if we consider
| that it can focus purely on thinking and doesn't have to
| regulate a body. Imagine having your own video card that
| does ChatGPT but 40x smarter.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What we're seeing right now with LLMs is like music in the
| late 30s after the invention of the electric guitar. At that
| point people still have no idea how to use it so, so they
| were treating it like an amplified acoustic guitar. It took
| almost 40 years for people to come up with the idea of
| harnessing feedback and distortion to use the guitar to
| create otherworldly soundscapes, and another 30 beyond that
| before people even approached the limit of guitar's range
| with pedals and such.
|
| LLMs are a game changer that are going to enable a new
| programming paradigm as models get faster and better at
| producing structured output. There are entire classes of app
| that couldn't exist before because there there was a non-
| trivial "fuzzy" language problem in the loop. Furthermore I
| don't think people have a conception of how good these models
| are going to get within 5-10 years.
| blauditore wrote:
| > Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how
| good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.
|
| Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're
| implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual
| intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings.
| Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step
| to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong.
|
| One problem is that converging to an ideal is obviously
| non-linear, so getting the first 90% right is relatively
| easy, and closer to 100% it gets exponentially harder.
| Another problem is that LLMs are not really designed in a
| way to contain actual intelligence in the way humans would
| expect them to, so any apparent reasoning is very
| superficial as it's just language-based and statistical.
|
| In a similar spirit, science fiction stories playing in the
| near future often tend to have spectacular technology, like
| flying personal cars, in-eye displays, beam travel, or mind
| reading devices. In the 1960s it was predicted for the 80s,
| in the 80s it was predicted for the 2000s etc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This book
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-
| Livingston/dp/0...
|
| tells (among other things) a harrowing tale of a common
| mistake in technology development that blindsides people
| every time: the project that reaches an asymptote instead
| of completion that can get you to keep spending resources
| and spending resources because you think you have only 5%
| to go except the approach you've chosen means you'll
| never get the last 4%. It's a seductive situation that
| tends to turn the team away from Cassandras who have a
| clear view.
|
| Happens a lot in machine learning projects where you
| don't have the right features. (Right now I am chewing on
| the problem of "what kind of shoes is the person in this
| picture wearing?" and how many image classification
| models would not at all get that they are supposed to
| look at a small part of the image and how easy it would
| be to conclude that "this person is on a basketball court
| so they are wearing sneakers" or "this is a dude so they
| aren't wearing heels" or "this lady has a fancy updo and
| fancy makeup so she must be wearing fancy shoes". Trouble
| is all those biases make the model perform better up to a
| point but to get past that point you really need to
| segment out the person's feet.)
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You are looking at things like the failure of full self
| driving due to massive long tail complexity, and
| extrapolating that to LLMs. The difference is that full
| self driving isn't viable unless it's near perfect,
| whereas LLMs and text to image models are very useful
| even when imperfect. In any field there is a sigmoidal
| progress curve where things seem to move slowly at first
| when getting set up, accelerate quickly once a framework
| is in place, then start to run out of low hanging fruit
| and have to start working hard for incremental progress,
| until the field is basically mined out. Given the rate
| that we're seeing new stuff come out related to LLMs and
| image/video models, I think it's safe to say we're still
| in the low hanging fruit stage. We might not achieve
| better than human performance or AGI across a variety of
| fields right away, but we'll build a lot of very powerful
| tools that will accelerate our technological progress in
| the near term, and those goals are closer than many would
| like to admit.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means.
| It's just that communication is improving and the number of
| people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top,
| let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything
| now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:
| o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
| may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
| o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the
| natural human intellect.
|
| https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
| jimbokun wrote:
| Still has 6 years to be proven correct.
| beambot wrote:
| Probably just a question of time constant / zoom on your time
| axis. When zoomed in up close, an exponential looks a lot
| like a bunch of piecewise linear components, where big
| breakthroughs just are a discontinuous changes in slope...
| gumby wrote:
| Just to clarify, the "singularity" conjectures a slightly
| different and more interesting phenomenon, one _driven_ by
| technological advances, true, but its definition was not those
| advances.
|
| It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies
| and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster
| change until the curve bent essentially vertical...asymptotimg
| to a mathematical singularity.
|
| An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity,
| someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a
| profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.
|
| And because you can't see the shape of the curve on the other
| side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of
| it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.
|
| Ray Lafferty's 1965 story "Slow Tuesday Night" explored this
| phenomenon years before Toffler wrote "Future Shock"
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Here's a link to the full text of _Slow Tuesday Night_: https
| ://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/sci...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime
|
| where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a
| stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity
| is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled
| humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even
| 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is
| one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left
| wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The
| Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a
| religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)
|
| I've long been fascinated by this differential equation
| dx -- = x^2 dt
|
| which has solutions that look like x =
| 1/(t0-t)
|
| which notably blows up at time t0. It's a model of an
| "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up
| the rate of technological process but the very low growth
| when t [?] t0 could also be a model for why it is hard to
| bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc.
| About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological
| accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource
| depletion and related problems and did a literature search
| for people developing models like this further and was pretty
| disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a
| footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even
| papers like
|
| https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-
| content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si...
|
| seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't
| picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)
|
| ---
|
| Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because
| what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each
| generation of chips is getting much more difficult and
| expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are
| shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the
| state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024)
| burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers
| would have continued to invest in a new generation if
| governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers"
| competition... That is, already we might be past the point of
| economic returns.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but
| compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential
| way long before Moore's law and will probably continue
| after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking
| transistors.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Even though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work
| and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the
| last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite
| likely there is a better way to do it.
|
| For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda
| insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes
| no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a
| sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a
| continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.
| dekhn wrote:
| IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides
| being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the
| implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours
| of technology development near the singularity can be
| extreme.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yep. I like it better than _Fire Upon the Deep_ but I do
| like both of them. I didn't like _A Deepness in the Sky_
| as it was feeling kinda grindy like _Dune_. (I wish we
| could just erase _Dune_ so people could enjoy all of
| Frank Herbert's other novels of which I love even the bad
| ones)
| jerf wrote:
| The first time I read _A Deepness In The Sky_ , I was a
| bit annoyed, because I was excited for the A plot to
| progress, and it felt like we were spending an awful lot
| of time on B & C.
|
| On a second read, when I knew where the story was going
| and didn't need the frisson of resolution, I enjoyed it
| much more. It's good B & C plot, and it all does tie in.
| But arguably the pacing is off.
| dekhn wrote:
| Can you recommend a non-Dune Herbert book? I recall
| seeing Dosadi when I was a kid in the sci fi section of
| the library and just never picked it up. I generally like
| hard sci-fi and my main issue with Dune was that it went
| off into the weeds too many times.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I like the Dosadi books, _Whipping Star_ , the short
| stories in _Eye_ , _Eyes of Heisenberg_ , _Destination:
| Void_ , _The Santaroga Barrier_ (which my wife hates),
| _Under Pressure_ and _Hellstrom 's Hive_. If I had to
| pick just one it might be _Whipping Star_ but maybe
| _Under Pressure_ is the hardest sci-fi.
| kanzure wrote:
| from http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4356.html
|
| The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in
| Vernor Vinge's science fiction. It allows spherical volumes
| to be enclosed in complete stasis for controllable periods
| of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as a weapon, and in
| _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel
| through the Singularity unchanged.
|
| As far as I know, the bobble is physically impossible.
| However it may be possible to simulate its effects with
| other technologies. Here I am especially interested in the
| possibility of tunneling through the Singularity.
|
| Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Some people may
| have long term goals that might be disrupted by the
| Singularity, for example maintaining Danny Hillis's clock
| or keeping a record of humanity. Others may want to do it
| if the Singularity is approaching in an unacceptable manner
| and they are powerless to stop or alter it. For example an
| anarchist may want to escape a Singularity that is
| dominated by a single consciousness. A pacifist may want to
| escape a Singularity that is highly adversarial. Perhaps
| just the possibility of tunneling through the Singularity
| can ease people's fears about advanced technology in
| general.
|
| Singularity tunneling seems to require a technology that
| can defend its comparatively powerless users against
| extremely, perhaps even unimaginably, powerful adversaries.
| The bobble of course is one such technology, but it is not
| practical. The only realistic technology that I am aware of
| that is even close to meeting this requirement is
| cryptography. In particular, given some complexity
| theoretic assumptions it is possible to achieve exponential
| security in certain restricted security models.
| Unfortunately these security models are not suitable for my
| purpose. While adversaries are allowed to have
| computational power that is exponential in the amount of
| computational power of the users, they can only interact
| with the users in very restricted ways, such as reading or
| modifying the messages they send to each other. It is
| unclear how to use cryptography to protect the users
| themselves instead of just their messages. Perhaps some
| sort of encrypted computation can hide their thought
| processes and internal states from passive monitors. But
| how does one protect against active physical attacks?
|
| The reason I bring up cryptography, however, is to show
| that it IS possible to defend against adversaries with
| enormous resources at comparatively little cost, at least
| in certain situations. The Singularity tunneling problem
| should not be dismissed out of hand as being unsolvable,
| but rather deserves to be studied seriously. There is a
| very realistic chance that the Singularity may turn out to
| be undesirable to many of us. Perhaps it will be unstable
| and destroy all closely-coupled intelligence. Or maybe the
| only entity that emerges from it will have the
| "personality" of the Blight. It is important to be able to
| try again if the first Singularity turns out badly.
|
| and: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jgz/aalwa_ask_any_lesswronger_
| anythi...
|
| "I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a
| real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration
| Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire
| Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently
| writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net.
| And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to
| an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim
| May who besides inspiring me with his vision of
| cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early
| retirement from the tech industry and working on his own
| interests/causes."
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| > He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before
| 2005 or after 2030.
|
| Being surprised is also an exciting outcome. Was he thinking
| about that too?
| pontifier wrote:
| Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there
| was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was
| him.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| From what I've read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled
| on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is
| extensive and irreparable.
| gamblerrr wrote:
| > irreparable
|
| That's the gamble. I think you're right though, it's far
| lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The alternative of cremation is still lower odds.
| niplav wrote:
| What evidence do you base those beliefs on?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which
| involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such
| tissue damage.
| davidgerard wrote:
| In real medical cryogenics, e.g., embryo preservation,
| vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which, of
| course, it is. Only cryonics advocates claim that
| vitrification isn't a kind of freezing.
| topynate wrote:
| If the topic is tissue damage from sharp ice crystals,
| it's pretty handy to draw the distinction between cooling
| methods that cause that and ones that don't.
| samatman wrote:
| Yes, that's the relevant distinction in fact. Cryonics
| are the former, not the latter. Multicellular cryonic
| suspension is an unsolved problem after roughly the
| blastocyst stage.
| topynate wrote:
| As of last year we're up to doing rat kidneys. They're
| "heavily" damaged but they recover within a few weeks. To
| be sure, there's a long way from that to near-perfectly
| preserving a human brain, let alone a whole body.
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-
| preserva...
| niplav wrote:
| Checking Alcor1 and the Cryonics Institute2 suggests no :-/
|
| 1: https://www.alcor.org/news/ 2: https://cryonics.org/case-
| reports/
| Patrick_Devine wrote:
| I just finished reading Children of the Sky and re-reading A
| Deepness in the Sky. I've been finding with Vinge's work, along
| with Iain Bank's works, a lot of it is better the second time
| around. There's just so much to take in.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| I once worked with a guy who was a close personal friend of
| Vernor, and I remember with much joy the enormous collection of
| science fiction he (the friend) had at his place .. literally
| every wall was covered in paperback shelves, and to my eyes it
| was a wonderland.
|
| I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of
| scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book
| Shrine Ensconced in Halo of Respect - a carefully maintained,
| diligently laid out bookshelf containing every single thing
| Vernor Vinge had written. Everything, the friend said, including
| stuff that Vernor had shared with him that would never see the
| light of day until after he passed away. I wonder about that guy
| now.
|
| It wasn't my first intro to Mr. Vinge, but it was my first intro
| to the fanaticism and devotion of his fan base - that in itself,
| was a unique phenomenon to observe. Almost religious.
|
| Which, given Mr. Vinge's works, is awe-inspiring, ironic and
| tragic at the same time.
|
| For me, it was a singular experience, realizing that science
| fiction literature as a genre was far more vital and important to
| our culture than it was granted in the mainstream. (This was the
| mid-90's)
|
| Science Fiction authors are capable of inculcating much
| inspiration and wonder in their fans yet "scifi" is often used in
| a derogatory way among the literature cognescenti. Alas, this
| myopia occludes a great value to society, and I thank Mr. Vinge -
| and his fanboix - for bringing me to a place where I understood
| it was okay to value science fiction as a motivational form. That
| Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo was itself a gateway to much
| wonder and awe.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Science Fiction - the literature - is so different from all
| other media forms of SciFi there needs to be a formal separate
| of Science Fiction Literature from SciFi films, live action and
| animated series, games, and comic books. These other forms,
| SciFi, are the cartoon abbreviated to something else that is
| fun, adventure but is not Science Fiction (Literature) and the
| existential examination of how Science Changes Reality.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Absolutely, in the same way that there are tabloid forms of
| journalism, citizen, and authoritative forms, also.
|
| For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If
| you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but
| fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject
| becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of
| great utility to the original developers of satellites to
| have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds.
|
| However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of
| teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of
| course, we end up getting these things because some kid read
| a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of
| the worlds feeling about it ..
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Having read rainbows end just a few years before COVID was
| interesting.
| turing_complete wrote:
| Just a couple years before the singularity. Sad.
| turing_complete wrote:
| If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the
| Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?
| geden wrote:
| A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky
| (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD.
|
| Across Real Time is also great and shorter.
| db48x wrote:
| I disagree with the notion that A Deepness in the Sky
| requires having read A Fire Upon the Deep. In fact, I would
| go so far as to say that each ends with an open question that
| is answered by the other, so that no matter which one you
| read first you will discover the answer in the second.
| cwillu wrote:
| A Fire Upon the Deep, without question.
| angiosperm wrote:
| _The Peace War_ is closer to home than _Fire_. Read both.
| stormking wrote:
| The Peace War is a mediocre adventure story followed by a
| brilliant sequel, Marooned in Realtime.
| loudmax wrote:
| Agreed about _A Fire Upon The Deep_ , optionally followed by _A
| Deepness In The Sky_. Those are classically styled hard science
| fiction novels with spaceships and aliens. But much more
| thoughtful than you might expect from a typical spaceships and
| aliens scifi novel.
|
| If you're looking for something more germane to present
| concerns, _Rainbows End_ is about a near future where people 's
| interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality and
| various forces are fighting over access to information.
|
| And since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, _Marooned In
| Realtime_ is also really good.
|
| But if you're looking for a single book, then you won't go
| wrong with _A Fire Upon The Deep_.
| rdl wrote:
| True Names, particularly because it is short.
| natechols wrote:
| Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed
| later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central
| part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than
| he had time to fully explain.
| adrianhon wrote:
| A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news
| via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky
| (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light
| interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is
| perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two
| decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and
| ARGs might do to the world.
| liotier wrote:
| > A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a
| thousand lies")
|
| Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which
| date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns -
| although not at FaceTwitTok scale.
|
| But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across
| time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features
| the profession of programmer-archaeologist and I'm here for
| that !
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at
| which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such
| patterns
|
| I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic
| network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I
| used heavily at the time), especially how it was low
| bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it
| had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the
| galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll
| be sadly missed.
| db48x wrote:
| Skrodes have six wheels, so...
| floren wrote:
| I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world"
| is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision
| of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of
| microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks
| through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where
| little robots would prance around trying to entice him into
| interacting with them (which would incur a fee).
| natechols wrote:
| I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the
| onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how
| disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The
| fundamental problem with that book, for me, is that the main
| protagonist is (deliberately) an utterly loathsome individual,
| who somehow ends up as a good guy but doesn't seem to do very
| much learning or self-reflection.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I found a text/plain copy of A Fire Upon The Deep, and read it in
| a single sitting. I later found a paperback edition in a second-
| hand bookshop, and bought it. I've since re-read it at least
| twice.
|
| I'm sorry he's died.
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| What a great mind - the concept of computer archeology from "A
| Deepness in the Sky" is something I often think about looking at
| legacy code and maybe something our children will think about
| even more often.
| ois_ultra wrote:
| Considering his novel Rainbows End is about a very sick author in
| his 70s getting brought back to the world by modern technological
| breakthroughs in the mid 2020s, I feel like we've let him down in
| some way. Maybe he knew he was already sick, even back then,
| maybe not. Your meticulous and inspiring level of detail will be
| missed.
| ptero wrote:
| His larger works are getting a lot of praise (justifiably, I read
| "A fire upon the deep" on a friend recommendation, then
| everything else Vinge wrote), some of his short stories strongly
| resonated with me, too.
|
| The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Thank you for recommending this! I hadn't read it, and it was
| delightful. It's online: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-
| book/Vernor%20Vinge%20-...
| ompogUe wrote:
| Oh No! So Saddened! Found The Peace War at an airport book rack
| in the late '80's. Then, found True Names at a library sale in
| the early '90's and fell in love.
|
| "Zones of Thought" was a really smart idea once you got it. I put
| him as 2nd generation genius like "Hendrix -> Van Halen": "Asimov
| -> Vinge". Also (only real nitpick ever), like Asimov, was a
| little weak in dialogue and the poetry of words (comparing to
| Tolkein and Heinlein), but they were literally both STEM
| "Dr.s/PhD's".
|
| Rainbow's End seemed to be the FAANG playbook for many years:
| drones, AR (google glass on), haptics, autonomous automobiles,
| and on and on. Was thinking literally yesterday about how the
| biotech and architecture/earthquake ideas hadn't made it to today
| (which is around when the story takes place), but the latency
| issues seem to have been licked well before now.
|
| Requiescat in Pace
| nl wrote:
| One of the true greats.
|
| _True Names_ is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or
| Neal Stephenson wrote.
|
| Everyone mentions _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _A Deepness in the
| Sky_ which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think
| _The Peace War_ is way underrate too (although it was nominated
| for a Hugo award which it lost to _Neuromancer_ ).
|
| RIP
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I
| think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm
| remembering correctly.
|
| Rainbow's End was very good!
| phrotoma wrote:
| The shift of the use of bobbles from Peace War to Marooned in
| Realtime is _wild_. Fantastic stories, wildly creative,
| delightfully different.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I think there was more than one story in that world
|
| Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in
| Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed
| them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more
| emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had
| happened to the victim.
|
| There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main
| character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in
| 'Marooned...'.
|
| Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a
| near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible
| stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker'
| types to launch an insurrection against the state.
| 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world,
| where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further
| into the future, where the few remaining humans try to
| reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of
| humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also
| has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective
| (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow
| murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far
| future, relative to him).
| tetris11 wrote:
| _The Cookie Monster_ was one of the best short novella 's I
| ever read, and its influence can be seen everywhere from Greg
| Egan's _Permutation City_ to episodes of _Black Mirror_.
|
| Edit: I got it backwards, Egan's book came out first.
| jordanpg wrote:
| _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and _A Deepness in the Sky_ are the
| books that opened my eyes to the utter incomprehensibility and
| weirdness of what intelligent alien life would really be like
| if it 's out there.
|
| I also credit the Transcend as being the first plausible,
| secular explanation for "gods" that I ever came across back in
| my militant atheist days.
|
| These stories will be with me until I am gone, too. Thank you,
| Vernor. RIP.
| acdha wrote:
| I'll echo everyone else saying you should read his books (and not
| just Fire/Deepness) but wanted to note that while I never met him
| in person, I know a few people who have and literally everyone
| has started by describing him as one of the nicest people they
| met. That seems like an accomplishment of its own.
| hyperific wrote:
| My introduction to Vinge was Rainbow's End. As a fellow San
| Diegan raised in East County I found it hilarious that he
| represented El Cajon as a wasteland.
| salojoo wrote:
| Vinge introduced me to space opera with zones of thought. Such
| amazing books I've read multiple times.
| masto wrote:
| Vernor Vinge has an outstanding catalog of invention and
| accomplishments. One of that's threaded through many of his
| stories and has become even more relevant lately is ubiquitous
| computing and networking, and in particular augmented reality.
|
| To truly understand the transformative potential of something
| like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and
| omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality
| as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of
| mind-blowing.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| Rest In Peace, old man.
|
| I loved A Fire Upon the Deep. It gave me many hours of pleasure
| and many things to think about.
| nanolith wrote:
| His Zones of Thought series, especially, A Deepness in the Sky,
| remain some of my favorite science fiction. This one hits hard.
| griffey wrote:
| I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and
| continued to have interactions with him on and off in the
| intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably
| kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity
| to speak with him again.
| ca98am79 wrote:
| I emailed him out of the blue and asked him to write more
| stories about Pham Nuwen. He replied and was really nice and we
| corresponded over a couple of emails.
| fl7305 wrote:
| I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he
| was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books
| and was hooked.
|
| He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in
| 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come
| up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast
| depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.
|
| Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| A true visionary, he will be missed. His fiction was
| entertaining, but also filled with important lessons that will
| help us prepare for the future in a better and more humane way.
| Thank you Vernor Vinge.
| vhodges wrote:
| Ah, sad news indeed. I just finished re-reading The Peace War RIP
| remram wrote:
| @dang Can't this thread be titled "Vernor Vinge has died"? I feel
| like this is the usual title for those. With this title it's not
| obvious that the news is he died yesterday.
| abraxas wrote:
| This merits the black ribbon atop the HN banner, I think.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| After reading this and all the comments on this thread I think I
| will pick up some of his books.
|
| Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and
| pessimistic. I don't have a problem with any individuals writing
| stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the
| freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like
| there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written
| nowadays.
|
| So seeing that Vernor Vinge wrote stores that portray science and
| humanity in positive hopeful and optimistic ways makes me very
| interested in reading his work.
| djaychela wrote:
| Yes, do! I've only read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon
| The Deep but they were absolute joys, despite their
| intimidating page count. Just mind-bendingly inventive and
| continually interesting. I won't ruin anything for you, but as
| a reader you make assumptions which then turn out not to be
| true via progressive revelation as the books go on. Brilliant
| stuff.
| dmd wrote:
| Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this:
| https://3e.org/vvannot
|
| This is Vinge's _annotated_ copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has
| all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers.
| It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing
| process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure
| everything made sense.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The key insight always was hexapodia.
| jerf wrote:
| IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not
| _intend_ that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was
| merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used
| to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one
| hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other,
| I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won 't actually
| give anything away.)
|
| (I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the
| annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the
| Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite
| finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for
| myself about grabbing it.)
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD
| for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to
| find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone
| had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the
| time spent if you're a fan of _Fire_.
| dmd wrote:
| Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't
| find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the _view contents_
| link beside it
| dmd wrote:
| Yes, I did that. I see in there the vinge novel but NOT
| the version with annotations.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| The annotations are there in the RTF files, but there is
| something quirky about the format of those RTF files -
| perhaps they predate standardization or something. If you
| open one of the RTFs in a straight text editor like emacs
| or vi, you'll see them. There was a bit of discussion
| around this here, a few years ago, when this version was
| re-released [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236
| dmd wrote:
| Oh wow thanks!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://3e.org/vvannot
| rcarmo wrote:
| I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then
| went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.
| dekhn wrote:
| I really wish he had wrapped everything up.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Yes, I've been hoping for this; one amongst many reasons to
| be sad that Vinge didn't live longer.
| joshstrange wrote:
| That's interesting but I found it it incredibly difficult to
| read/parse through. I've read A Fire Upon the Deep many times
| (the whole trilogy) but the comment syntax is not easy for me
| to follow at all. There are snippets that make a little sense
| but I don't think I could read this as-is.
| e40 wrote:
| I got this on CD-ROM back in the 90's. It was really fun
| looking through stuff.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yes, the Hugo-Nebula 1993 CD-ROM. That included some of the
| earliest (some say _the_ earliest) examples of ebooks based
| on current fiction (rather than on out-of-copyright classic
| books). I have it myself still somewhere.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a
| screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-
| Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link).
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes...
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...
| Casteil wrote:
| Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the
| Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP
| jrussino wrote:
| Wow! This is the internet find of the week for me. How long
| until this appears as its own post on the HN front page? Thanks
| for mirroring.
| dooglius wrote:
| The read-first file says
|
| > In this form, it is possible to read the story without being
| bothered by the comments -- yet be able to see the comments on
| demand. (Because of production deadlines I have not seen the
| exact user interface for the Clarinet edition, and so some of
| this discussion may be slightly inconsistent with details of
| the final product.)
|
| Did the final product not hold up, or is the page not
| presenting it right?
| mercutio2 wrote:
| My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I
| wish he'd seen another 20.
|
| I would've loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow's End
| is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like,
| from 30 years ahead.
|
| I wish we'd gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.
| Eliezer wrote:
| Ow.
| sl-1 wrote:
| RIP. His work is excellent and deep
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge
| r00fus wrote:
| The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of
| all time. I really some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal
| constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
| r00fus wrote:
| The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of
| all time. I really love some of the concepts introduced (ie,
| universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I've read a lot of SciFi but there was something special about
| Vernor Vinge IMHO. Something about the way he wrote and what he
| wrote about that "unlocked" various concepts for me. I'd have to
| sit down and think about them to list it all out but I can trace
| my interests in a number of concepts back to his books.
| 725686 wrote:
| Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!
| fl7305 wrote:
| He got his last name from his Norwegian ancestors.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Do yourself a favor and check out any of the books in this
| thread, if that's your jam. I woke up to sad news, but if
| someone can be introduced to his work by his passing, then it
| wouldn't be all bad news.
| schoen wrote:
| On Vernor Vinge's connection to free software:
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/310463/
| fl7305 wrote:
| He was no slouch when it came to programming.
|
| He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly
| to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt
| service routine (copy the saved registers from the running
| thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on
| the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch
| to).
| epivosism wrote:
| +1 on the recs for his main work. I also wanted to mention that I
| loved his book Tatja Grimm's world, too. It's great, alternate
| world fantasy, but with Vingean depth of thought about what it
| all might mean... Looking it up now, I see this is a rework of
| what must have been a very early novel for him, based on a work
| that came out in 1969!
|
| Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a
| professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition,
| he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think
| this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing
| useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I
| hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something
| creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame
| of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!
| nodesocket wrote:
| I went to San Diego State and majored in CompSCi in 2006. Vernor
| was a bit before my time but heard legendary stories. Rest in
| peace.
| fl7305 wrote:
| I had a CS class with him in the 90s, the stories were true :)
| nodesocket wrote:
| Nice, let's go Aztecs in the tournament!
| fl7305 wrote:
| Saw Marshall Faulk attempt a critical two point conversion
| at Jack Murphy stadium :)
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was
| looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and
| Deepness In The Sky universe.
| supportengineer wrote:
| RIP to author of one of my favorite books.
|
| If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then
| nobody does.
| TMWNN wrote:
| No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest
| insights besides the Singularity:
|
| * _A Deepness in the Sky_ depicts a human interstellar
| civilization thousands of years in the future, in which
| superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers
| use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel
| between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays,
| often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great
| changes in each visit.
|
| The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms
| of nanomachines) are developed, governments _inevitably_ use them
| for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal
| collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
|
| * In said future human society pretty much all software has
| already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So
| programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on
| emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed.
| <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
|
| (Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has
| been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than
| two decades ago.)
| underlipton wrote:
| Aw, man. This is a bummer, considering how deep into "replicating
| Rainbows End" we are (despite everyone and their mother's
| insistence that we try for a "Ready Player One" future). I find
| it funny that it seems to be one of his least-liked novels,
| because the concepts and characters it plays with have always
| been more approachable and relatable - and less terrifying - than
| in much of his other work (insofar as I can tell, being wary of
| reading them).
|
| I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads
| out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I like to think history is like the greatest book ever written.
| When we are born we get to open it somewhere in the middle, spend
| a while figuring out what's going on, then have to close it and
| never know the end. But vinge clearly peaked ahead a few
| chapters.
| _0ffh wrote:
| Amazing, I came up with the same thing. There's probably more
| of us out there!
|
| > then have to close it and never know the end
|
| That bit has irked me to no end since I was young!
| nxobject wrote:
| I wonder whether, as a sci-fi writer from the golden age, it
| would've been a blessing or a curse to have lived this far into
| the 21st century.
| pigeons wrote:
| That's a black bar event.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| An exceptional author, _A Fire Upon the Deep_ was his very best
| IMHO, and chapter 4 _its_ best:
| https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/0812515285___4.htm
|
| A sensational adventure story, with the particular science-
| fiction skill of communicating strangeness, effortlessly.
| gildandstain wrote:
| Such a loss! He fused good-hearted optimism and mindbending data-
| architecture (and mind-architecture) into ripping plots.
|
| And +1 for Marooned in Realtime. The awesome scale reminds me of
| Greg Egan, but it highlights Vinge's particular genius for
| imagining side-effects of the technological premise.
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