[HN Gopher] Julia
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Julia
Author : ashergill
Score : 160 points
Date : 2026-02-02 22:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (borretti.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (borretti.me)
| NuclearPM wrote:
| Needs a twist or a reason to care about the characters.
| khafra wrote:
| They're the last living humans, and the last human-derived
| mind?
|
| I like Cordwainer Smith and Peter Watts; so I really liked this
| blend of their styles and subjects.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| I adore Peter Watts, so I'll be checking out Smith then!
|
| Watts is like brain candy, keeps my mind buzzing from all the
| ideas for weeks. Charles Stross can have the same effect, a
| sort of future shock.
| jrave wrote:
| this completely sucked me in after skimming half a paragraph
| while unsure what to expect. very golden age, thanks for the
| link!
| slwvx wrote:
| I assume this is a sort of poem about the programming language
| Julia...
|
| ;-)
| frizlab wrote:
| More about the Julia set [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
| groovy2shoes wrote:
| i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.
| canjobear wrote:
| I read a good way down thinking this was some kind of highly
| metaphorical blog post about the programming language Julia
| cwnyth wrote:
| I clicked on it _because_ I thought it was about the
| programming language Julia. I 'm still not fully sure what
| Julia here actually is.
| sevensor wrote:
| Julia Set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
| cwnyth wrote:
| Thank you!
| n4r9 wrote:
| Funny how that page spends so much of the introduction
| comparing Julia to Fatou, but the page for Fatou only
| mentions Julia in passing.
| bananaflag wrote:
| There should only be one article for what is essentially
| one concept.
| leodavi wrote:
| The narrative style reminds me of the novel-game Caves of Qud.
| Very well done.
| sevensor wrote:
| I have a recording of _le temps des cerises_ by Charles Trenet,
| which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack.
| Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void,
| echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little
| sweet. Pairs will with fractals.
| yolkedgeek wrote:
| Am I too dumb? I literally understand none of this.
| Edd314159 wrote:
| Right there with you. Everyone else on HN is a genius so will
| love it, but for me this is just incoherent words.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| What parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can
| be confusing if you haven't read a lot of it, because part of
| its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as
| possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out
| from their context or by reference (like "laminate" and
| "squarely" -- yes, I had to look it up), and some are the
| puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is
| Julia? What do they want?)
|
| It's ok if it's not your thing. It's like an emotional
| crossword puzzle.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| I'm not a genius at all, and didn't realize this story was
| about "Julia sets" until I finished reading it and came back
| here for the comments. I was pretty sure that Julia was
| something like the 4D space bubble found in the Three Body
| Problem series.
|
| I just enjoyed the prose in the story. Those incoherent words
| were the interesting bits of worldbuilding that drew me in.
| fxwin wrote:
| Despite the name, I wouldn't say it is "about" Julia sets,
| at least not any more than it is about any other kind of
| fractal
| dominicrose wrote:
| One does not simply read a study Bible (2 million words) but if
| you do then this work of fiction will be easier to understand
| in comparison.
|
| I'm not promoting or demoting any religion by saying this, I'm
| talking about the Bible as an old work of fiction, although to
| be fair, a study bible can be recent and even copyrighted.
| gwd wrote:
| It's meant to be using "modern" jargon, set in the time of the
| story, that hasn't actually been invented yet. It also refers
| to a bunch of Classical mythology / works that I'm not familiar
| with. And also a bunch of obsolete CS ideas; e.g,. a "Chomsky
| organ", which would presumably be something that generates
| language based on Chomsky's ideas about grammar -- probably
| something like a Markov chain -- rather than neural networks,
| which is how LLMs currently "speak".
|
| At any rate, it's written from the perspective of an AI which
| controls a ship. The AI may have once been a human on earth,
| and had its cognitive patterns transferred to the ship. It can
| do a certain amount towards modifying the ship, but they've
| apparently turned off its ability to speak. The ship at the
| beginning of the story has only 2 humans on it, down from
| hundreds. The ship is stationed at some place near the solar
| system (?) to look at a weird phenomenon, called 'Julia',
| presumably because it resembles a Julia set fractal, which
| defies all known physics. While the ship has been stationed
| there, the Earth has basically died.
|
| That may give you enough clues to help you orient yourself, so
| that you can figure out what happens.
| pvillano wrote:
| My [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore,
| and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats,
| eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order
| from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal
| vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order
| from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is
| sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own
| proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a
| jumbled mess.
|
| Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But
| it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity
| of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is
| absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more
| prey.
| cess11 wrote:
| This is a rather neat paper on the Julia set:
|
| https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/~scott/Papers/India/Fatou-Ju...
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Very well written. Poetic.
|
| I love the way that nothing is explained.
| meisel wrote:
| > Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum
|
| Haven't heard of this feature in Julia lang, must be new in
| v1.12.4
| mfro wrote:
| Incredible
| mynegation wrote:
| Purple prose about something unknown and unknowable and fractal-
| like. As if Nabokov wrote sci-fi.
| trenchgun wrote:
| Baroque
| arh68 wrote:
| FYI Don't miss out on the <!-- HTML comments --> .
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