[HN Gopher] Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
___________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 751 points
Date : 2026-04-17 12:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hex.ooo)
(TXT) w3m dump (hex.ooo)
| jasongill wrote:
| This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed
| check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have
| to read the entire thing again. I love it.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| How about this one?
|
| https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
| b3lvedere wrote:
| That was an awesome read. Thanks.
| ggerules wrote:
| Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my
| career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Man you should share your story. I got through a few Linux
| device driver labs but the more I read the less I
| understand. Even the keyboard driver or the tty driver are
| thousands of lines long.
|
| I don't know how people managed to write graphics card
| drivers back in the day. In the 80d it's going to be all
| assembly code too, I think.
|
| They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel
| components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel
| components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel
| code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in
| Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500
| miles" one, too [0]:
|
| 0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
| rationalist wrote:
| _More Magic_ :
|
| https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
| nickt wrote:
| I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it,
| and today I realised that was 36 years ago!
| kraquepype wrote:
| ~20 years ago for me... I remember finding it when I
| first started working as a sysadmin. That and the story
| of the first "bug" report. That was a fun time.
|
| https://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=
| 547...
| rouvax wrote:
| For more reading, see also: https://web.archive.org/web/20250
| 719141310/https://dbrgn.ch/...
|
| I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the
| 2019 entry (thanks to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).
|
| Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere
| else?
| xeonmc wrote:
| Not quite tech or sci-fi, but for me it's
| https://www.eternal-
| flame.org/library/oldlibrary/georgebusin...
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Is that the origin of the Sean Connery dragon movie,
| Dragonheart?
| riffraff wrote:
| also the story of Mel
|
| https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html
| robinpie wrote:
| The network electrically incompatible with Excel:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem.
| ..
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9si6r9/postmortem.
| ..
| rationalist wrote:
| Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most
| likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me
| anymore.
|
| Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other
| accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air
| traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't
| true!
| rationalist wrote:
| Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details
| behind it to make someone think is.
|
| A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is
| better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up
| by someone in authority.
| sebg wrote:
| For those curious ->
| https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Stories/sr-71-blac...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't
| upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for
| articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in
| different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I
| know dang doesn't like!
|
| So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you
| _should_ upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us
| more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots
| that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really _will_
| change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of
| Nobel Prizes a year and AI won 't change that.
|
| [1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
| gwerbin wrote:
| As usual, labor saving is only a good idea if the wealth
| created is distributed throughout society, not redirected to
| a small group of people.
| parineum wrote:
| And it almost always is through cheaper products to the end
| user.
| gwerbin wrote:
| Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always?
| Questionable assertion.
| parineum wrote:
| Food, clothing, electronics...
|
| Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of
| course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply
| constrained really.
|
| Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the
| product has become significantly better at a similar
| price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
| prerok wrote:
| Sorry, what?
|
| Food is much more expensive, like 30% here in Europe,
| much faster growth than inflation. And before you state
| that food is accounted for in inflation: economists are
| doing some dirty tricks here by finding subpar
| replacements.
|
| Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality,
| far surpassing inflation.
|
| I will concede TVs and electronic gadgets, though.
| parineum wrote:
| Chart 42[1]
|
| [1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-
| spending....
|
| > Cars are also much more expensive for the same quality,
| far surpassing inflation.
|
| Cars are much, much more value then they used to be.
|
| The Slate truck is as close to what cars used to be in
| the seventies. No power steering, no power brakes, no
| crumple zones, no fuel injection, etc. All those features
| cost a lot of money yet the amount of money spent on cars
| really hasn't gone up in accordance.
|
| A 1970 Honda Civic cost 2k base. A base model today
| appears to be around 25k. that's more than inflation but
| it's also a luxury car, in comparison.
|
| The vehicle market is less about low pricing as much as
| it is feature sets at price points. In other words, the
| prices stay roughly static but they pack in more
| features.
| keybored wrote:
| Renters are ecstatic as price of commodities are
| plummeting as house prices go up and up: "distracting
| myself has never been this cheap", Anon. says.
|
| People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe
| how economies work.
| parineum wrote:
| Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs
| in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of
| land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably
| cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can
| tell you that the products that one uses in a home have
| gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few
| exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.
|
| Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand
| about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
|
| Something interesting that touches on both of these
| topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at
| how much of household income is spent on housing and food
| combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods
| get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the
| inelastic and luxury goods.
| keybored wrote:
| > Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at
| hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
|
| A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution
| to the weirdly much more narrow "cheaper products for end
| users". Even though wealth inequality has been studied
| plenty in itself.
|
| I'm not buying the mind-commodity that you're selling.
| parineum wrote:
| > A conversation that you reframed from wealth
| distribution to the weirdly much more narrow "cheaper
| products for end users"
|
| A further up comment refers to robots picking
| strawberries.
| elictronic wrote:
| "housing is not tied to labor costs in a significant
| way".
|
| ~30% of new construction is labor. ~50% of repair is
| labor.
|
| Have you ever dealt with home repair or building or are
| you just regurgitating whatever the LLM told you.
| parineum wrote:
| > ~30% of new construction is labor.
|
| And what percentage of a house's price is the building?
|
| > ~50% of repair is labor.
|
| And how much does the average home owner spend on repairs
| a month?
|
| I've been in my current house for almost 3 years. I've
| had one significant repair that would have cost around
| 3k. I did it myself but that was the quote. Not too bad.
|
| In places where people are concerned about a housing
| shortage, the majority of the cost is land.
| gwerbin wrote:
| > And what percentage of a house's price is the building?
|
| Anecdotally like half, depending on the area. Plots of
| land go for $500k in Boston suburbs and new construction
| homes go for $1m.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| > In places where people are concerned about a housing
| shortage, the majority of the cost is land.
|
| This is true in constrained areas like SF bay area. Back
| when I was digging into real estate economics, I found
| data on this from HUD, they have a price indicator
| dataset. https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp1901
|
| Also look at the Lincoln Institute, they have fantastic
| studies.
|
| In places like San Francisco, 80% of the value is in the
| land. In other places, it's 15-35%. The historical
| national average is about 33% but now it's a bit higher.
|
| Completely different economic rules dominate in
| constrained areas like San Francisco versus unconstrained
| areas like Phoenix. But most housing is in unconstrained
| areas, the constrained areas are expensive elite
| sections. In most of the country, house prices track
| construction costs, and the high land prices are
| effectively economic segregation that weed out antisocial
| people, causing these areas to be even more desirable and
| sought after, which raises the bar even higher. All "nice
| areas" are nice because of gatekeeping, and in the US
| this is usually high land prices. Traditionally, each
| city had its own immigration policy, and they would chase
| out of town people who weren't seen as productive or who
| were antisocial, and as a result, you would have poor
| people living on the outskirts of towns.
|
| In places like SF, richer people move in, house prices go
| up but there is not much change in the population. In
| other places, more people move in and more housing is
| built.
|
| A lot of the debate surrounding housing boils down to
| people imagining a world where SF housing rules applies
| and thinking this is appropriate national policy, or
| others looking at national datasets and thinking this
| would apply to places like SF. Much of housing and land
| economics seems counterintuitive, for example how cities
| get less dense over time, e.g.
| https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-
| papers/pers...
|
| But once you learn how to think about it, it all makes
| sense.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This chart tells the story pretty well: to get it down to
| a quip "some things we want got a lot cheaper, things we
| need got a lot more expensive"
|
| https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-
| century-3
|
| The story of this decade is that people think the economy
| is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment
| and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that
| before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder
| but we quit building single family houses and it got
| harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in
| many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in
| some places like the DC suburbs.
| joquarky wrote:
| Prices going down is called deflation.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
| Toutouxc wrote:
| For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is
| often quite problematic.
| derwiki wrote:
| I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Probably because actual people died.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I am guessing because it takes hours to read.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| _The Gentle Seduction_ [1], too.
|
| [1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf
| zem wrote:
| hadn't read that one before! thanks for sharing it
| charv wrote:
| All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I
| first read it many years ago.
| Aliyekta wrote:
| Claude Mythos
| ramon156 wrote:
| [reference] [reference]
| moffers wrote:
| My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep
| Thought in HHGttG, I couldn't believe the prescience when the
| bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the
| world.
| baq wrote:
| It _only_ takes understanding the exponential function and
| _some_ imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination
| of traits in people ;)
| shivaniShimpi_ wrote:
| the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says
| insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story
| is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you
| there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any
| timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
|
| feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the
| models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet,
| ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
| mercer wrote:
| maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...
| IAmBroom wrote:
| My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in
| base 13.
|
| God's numbering system is "unlucky".
| waltbosz wrote:
| I feel like the software running multivac represents
| something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
|
| I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to
| his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different
| universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same
| story.
| Aerolfos wrote:
| > I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor
| to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different
| universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the
| same story.
|
| I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict"
| are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that
| story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which
| is explicitly multivac).
|
| Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the
| same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise
| multivac _is_ the same one as in "all the troubles of the
| world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has
| other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed"
| it, but at this point the timeline with _other_ short
| stories doesn 't add up.
|
| In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic
| brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if
| anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not
| the other way around.
| waltbosz wrote:
| The World Co-ordinator in "the evitable conflict" was a
| positronic robot (not known to the public), but I think
| you're right that the machines are never identified as
| either positronic robots or VACs. But iirc, in the Susan
| Calvin universe (of which "the evitable conflict" is a
| part), robots were generally illegal on Earth, the that
| must make the machines in that story non-robots.
|
| I would say the multivac in "Franchise" _is_ the same
| Mutlivac as "Last Question" and "all the troubles of the
| world" (one of my favorites). There are no positronic
| robots in "Franchise", nor the others.
| sebg wrote:
| Lots of good comments over the years ->
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%09Isaac+Asimov%3A+The+Last+Questi...
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short
| stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started
| wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.
| Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone
| recommend other writers that are on his level?
| boxed wrote:
| I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P
|
| If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:
|
| - Ender's Game
|
| - The Martian + Project Hail Mary
|
| - A Fire Upon the Deep
|
| - Dune
| baq wrote:
| - Hyperion
| rationalist wrote:
| The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.
|
| (I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
| comicjk wrote:
| A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to
| read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even
| better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in
| there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter
| started at the first moon landing, but programmer
| archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn't
| quite get into it personally.
|
| They're just too dry for my tastes.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although
| some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_,
| followed closely by _Seveneves_.
|
| Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the
| Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| How can you not mention Snow Crash?
|
| And yes to the Culture.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic
| and less strictly hard sci-fi.
| NickDouglas wrote:
| Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the
| terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful
| literature and canonical sci-fi.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein)
| and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury.
| There's no science in his science fiction.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.
| krapp wrote:
| Or even Star Trek to be honest. I don't know why Star
| Wars always gets passed off as "science fantasy" when
| it's a more grounded universe than Trek by far - space
| wizards notwithstanding (which Trek has plenty of.)
|
| Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky
| if it falls outside of the author's special interest or
| area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason
| robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that
| positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded
| cool and futuristic to him.
| BeetleB wrote:
| As a Trekkie, fair point. I think Star Trek does fall
| into the "speculative fiction" category, but Star Wars
| doesn't. It's just "space opera".
| krapp wrote:
| Space opera is still a subset of speculative fiction and
| science fiction, saying "just" dismisses its influence on
| the genre as a whole.
|
| A lot of classic science fiction is basically "x with
| spaceships" where x is the Napoleonic Wars, or feudal
| Europe or the Wild West or what have you, and the
| "science" is little more than set dressing.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > saying "just" dismisses its influence on the genre as a
| whole.
|
| Well, it was meant to be parsed as:
|
| Star Trek is speculative fiction and space opera.
|
| Star Wars is just space opera.
|
| Some space opera is also speculative fiction, but I
| wouldn't say it is a subset. I wouldn't call some space
| opera stories speculative fiction at all.
|
| They're all classified as science fiction.
|
| (Yes, yes - there is no consensus on these
| terms...typically science fiction is considered a subset
| of speculative fiction, and here I inverted a lot of
| things).
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Early Heinlein e.g. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, Farmer
| In The Sky, The Rolling Stones or for non-juveniles, The
| Moon is a Harsh Mistress have lots of science.
|
| Later works, less so.
| shivaniShimpi_ wrote:
| ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life,
| exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing
| asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for
| a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages
| and you feel it for a week
| Arainach wrote:
| Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story
| writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
| Darkphibre wrote:
| His short story "Understand" is just... _amazing_.
|
| It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I
| realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the
| time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the
| societally-expected response to any given situation (and am
| high on the IQ spectrum).
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini.
| ..
| jperoutek wrote:
| I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates
| with me.
| Froztnova wrote:
| Exhalation is really excellent.
|
| It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The
| Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the
| tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
| kaiokendev wrote:
| Tower of Babylon
|
| it's brilliant
| riffraff wrote:
| I have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur,
| they were all fantastic.
| npilk wrote:
| It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories,
| particularly from Ficciones.
|
| You may have already read his story The Library of Babel:
| https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's
| writing in particular.
|
| A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and
| will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read
| it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
|
| Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
| sjg1729 wrote:
| I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It's a
| retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing
| is quite a bit better, IMO)
| globular-toast wrote:
| Also worth reading, although a very different style is _The
| Gods Themselves_. Although, to be honest, I 'm not sure
| there's a single Asimov book I haven't enjoyed and I've read
| almost all of them.
| robrain wrote:
| Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short
| stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all
| its many forms.
| robrain wrote:
| I know you can't comment on modding - but seriously, someone
| voted me down because they don't like a literary suggestion?
| Tough crowd.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov
| in many ways, being from the same time.
|
| For others who share some similarities, though with a greater
| emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry
| Niven or Robert L. Forward.
| Esn024 wrote:
| I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as
| Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its
| sequels.
|
| I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.
|
| Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple
| writing that isn't all that common.
| riffraff wrote:
| perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school
| reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who
| put the book together.
|
| Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta
| Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic
| short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessanta_racconti
| redsocksfan45 wrote:
| Alfred Bester; _The Stars My Destination_ , and _The Demolished
| Man._
| globular-toast wrote:
| Depends what you consider on his level really. Some find the
| writing too dry, but maybe you like that? Have you read _Dune_?
| What about _The Forever War_? They are different styles but
| definitely enjoyed by someone who also likes Asimov.
|
| I didn't get on with _Neuromancer_ or _Do Androids Dream of
| Electric Sheep?_ at all, though. Suspect you wouldn 't either.
|
| I also find stuff like Andy Weir way too literal, like you're
| basically reading a film script. Asimov leaves a lot more room
| for imagination.
| jzemeocala wrote:
| Rudy Rucker is amazing
| eschulz wrote:
| I love this story. When I first read it online in college many
| years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly
| realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to
| people.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on
| this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore
| here."
|
| Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are
| worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to
| spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds"
| searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in
| your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
| larrykluger wrote:
| A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of
| Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with
| my father. Great times.
| quentindanjou wrote:
| I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today!
| That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in
| reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
| zabzonk wrote:
| In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-
| short-story/
| 0xmattf wrote:
| One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a
| conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how
| many people have never heard of it.
| grimgrin wrote:
| okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible
| domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just
| in general
|
| didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on
| namecheap!
| criddell wrote:
| It's an awesome name.
|
| If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in
| a great library of stuff:
|
| https://hex.ooo/library/
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| >INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
|
| Boy, it sure would be nice if _real_ LLMs were capable of giving
| an answer like that.
| bargainbin wrote:
| You're absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a
| meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* --
| it's *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*
| croisillon wrote:
| No Information before. No information after. This is not a
| failure -- it's narcissism as a service.
| combobyte wrote:
| YaaS -- yes-men as a service
| fragmede wrote:
| Did a human write this?
| mikemarsh wrote:
| I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor
| at that.
| fragmede wrote:
| Woosh
| gwerbin wrote:
| They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be
| prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable _if_
| you know what you 're doing and how to prompt around it.
| Bridged7756 wrote:
| Not really. They're still non deterministic language
| predictors. Believing that a prompt is an effective way to
| actually control these machines' actual behavior is really
| far fetched.
|
| They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The thing is that they are completely incapable of meta-
| cognition. Reasoning models don't show their actual
| reasoning at all.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| Right -- they're not reasoning, they're generating text
| that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says
| differently is selling something.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That is what a base model does. After RL it is a very
| different thing, and anyone who says they know what it
| is, is naive or dishonest. These things are grown, not
| made, and we really do not understand how they work in
| many important ways.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Yeah, but they're not magic; we can still do experiments
| and see what happens. Anthropic did a lot of work on this
| and showed that they're not accurately describing their
| reasoning process.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Of course, the fact that they have to do that proves my
| point.
| ben_w wrote:
| Humans are also not magic; we also do experiments on
| humans, and humans also do not accurately describe our
| reasoning process.
|
| Lot of confabulation going on in the moist blob of
| electrochemistry found encased within the hydroxyapatite
| crystal cage we call a skull. Why is it that things which
| rhyme, or get repeated a lot, seem more true? How come
| some of us suffer uncontrollable seizures from flashing
| lights?
|
| We have to study reason to get any good at it, we
| _absolutely suck_ at this without training. Our natural
| state is illiterate, innumerate, and illogical.
|
| The part of our (all animals, not just humans)
| intelligence that is most magical*, is how efficient we
| are with few examples, not reasoning.
|
| * Questions about consciousness will have to wait until
| we can agree which of the 40+ definitions of the word
| actually answers the question we care about, and then
| also we figure out how to actually test for whatever that
| is.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| As the meme goes, "they are the same picture".
| guelo wrote:
| Language has reasoning encoded within it.
| LPisGood wrote:
| It certainly does. But so too do complex neural network
| functions, as do attention mechanisms.
| eloisant wrote:
| They're not hardcoded to never say no, but some of the
| models were trained to be "yes men" because their creators
| thought it would be a good property to have. GPT-4o for
| example.
| wat10000 wrote:
| _Not_ believing that a prompt is an effective way to
| actually control their behavior is obviously incorrect to
| anyone who 's actually used these things.
|
| It's not a _guaranteed_ way to control their behavior, but
| you can more than move the needle.
| fl4regun wrote:
| yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general
| that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not
| control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control
| it.
| gwerbin wrote:
| You can't control it any more than you can control a draw
| from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the
| deck of cards that you choose to draw from.
| ignaloidas wrote:
| The problem is that nobody really does that? Like, as far
| as I'm aware, even simple stuff such as not considering
| tokens that would result in a syntax error when writing
| code isn't being done.
| fl4regun wrote:
| magicians can probably make you change your mind on the
| former
| wat10000 wrote:
| That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn
| left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you
| wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis.
|
| Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than
| steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still
| control. It's just not absolute.
| fl4regun wrote:
| if your car doesn' turn left when you turn the steering
| wheel left, the problem is that the car is broken, if an
| LLM does something unexpected after you gave it
| instructions, that's possible when the LLM is functioning
| entirely correctly.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Nothing in this world is guaranteed. That doesn't mean
| it's uniformly random either. LLMs can still do something
| unexpected if you give them clear instructions, but that
| doesn't mean it'll be arbitrary and unpredictable in
| scope. The same way C/C++ undefined behavior technically
| means program can give you nasal demons, but in reality
| it won't do anything unusual (like format your C:/ drive)
| unless someone purposefully coded it to do that.
| hyperhello wrote:
| This is all going to flash through your mind when your
| car mysteriously doesn't turn left. I would prefer to
| think of machines as things with defined outputs and
| failure is failure, more than as fluffy little kittens
| who might do the wrong thing, if the consequences are
| going to fall on someone who doesn't deserve it.
| wwweston wrote:
| The word most relevant to this conversation is
| "influence." Influence is possible and users observe it
| and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes.
| "Control" is incorrect.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > non deterministic language predictors.
|
| Non?? Only those with sh*tty code, surely.
|
| There's nothing inherently non-deterministic about
| inference.
| saghm wrote:
| "Just don't accidentally forget to do the thing that makes it
| safe" is not a very effective strategy for something that so
| many vested interests are trying to push into all corners of
| society. If it's so easy to misuse it, then it shouldn't be
| used in any context outside of where there are no major
| consequences for bad output and there's amble opportunity and
| ability to validate it
| narginal wrote:
| 2061, mark the date
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I reckon that's how we know we've hit ASI.
| cortesoft wrote:
| There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| I don't have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a
| month to talk to most people in my life lol
| _diyar wrote:
| Do you _have to_ talk to LLMs?
| vhantz wrote:
| Another way to say the same thing: "to talk to most
| people in my life lol I don't have to spend dozens if not
| hundreds of dollars a month"
| boxedemp wrote:
| There are lots of free LLMs, but you (often) pay for the
| good ones.
|
| There's lots of people with lots of opinions, but you
| (often) have to pay for the good ones.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| According to HN, every employer, and general social
| chatter, apparently yes.
| prerok wrote:
| Well, speaking from what I hear and see, employers want
| you to start using it so that you can be more productive.
| They've been sold this tool and want you to learn it so
| that your output will grow.
|
| That's not an unfair take, I think. Again, just IME, they
| expect too much because the tool is oversold: it does not
| deliver that well. And we always hear, this new model is
| so much better, it's tiring.
|
| I think we should all learn to use LLMs but we should
| still carefully review what they did. And that is what
| the employers don't quite get: the review still takes a
| lot of time. So, gains are not 10x but more like... 10%?
| Maybe 50 for boiler plate. Still gains are there, I
| guess.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > they expect too much because the tool is oversold: it
| does not deliver that well.
|
| And unfortunately a lot of people will say it's their
| reports' fault for not properly utilizing it (even as
| they barely use it) because otherwise they would have to
| admit that they bought a tool without any plan for how to
| deploy it. So regardless of what is or isn't a fair take,
| the results are the same. We are burdened with utilizing
| a thing whether it is useful or not and the results are
| generally not what is measured, but rather "are you using
| it?"
|
| I'm just glad I work at a company that has more
| reasonable expectations and has been very slowly,
| thoughtfully rolling it out to individuals at the company
| and assessing what is and isn't good for. They are
| interested in getting me in line, but as somebody in
| video production to be perfectly honest the use case for
| Claude is a bit tricky to navigate. We don't write a lot
| of scripts and I already have bespoke software for
| organizing/maintaining footage that isn't on a
| subscription basis. The work I'm also doing doesn't call
| for these speed-editing solutions that generate tik tok
| chaff. All our stuff is hours long and it's high volume.
| Any video-centric AI service costs an arm and a leg.
|
| I do think it could be useful for writing some terminal
| scripts and such, but as far as a daily tool we are still
| scratching our heads and thinking about it. But it's nice
| to be able to do that without somebody saying "why aren't
| you using it?" every meeting.
| yakbarber wrote:
| Book an appointment with a Psychiatrist, it'll cost more
| than a months cc subscription for sure
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| This "joke" was such low hanging fruit I went and added
| "most" after I initially wrote the comment in
| anticipation of it.
| Tallain wrote:
| This continues to be the most tiring response to any
| criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show
| up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens,
| we're guaranteed the same output...
| otikik wrote:
| Just add a skill to Claude
| temp0826 wrote:
| Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think
| it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an
| answer, even if it's wrong, _confidently_. It was hard for me
| at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know"
| (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good
| solution").
| jfaulken wrote:
| This was similar to my experience running a software team in
| India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn
| not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always
| be yes.
| HiPhish wrote:
| It's a long-standing jodke that AI stands for "Actual
| Indians".
| ponector wrote:
| From real life: - Is it done? - Yes! But not yet!
| disillusioned wrote:
| On a long enough time horizon, with sufficient
| multiverses, all things are done!
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is...
| weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language
| can be entirely different in this regard.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I agree (and I don't normally generalize like this, so I
| apologize). I've spent most of my time in Peru but noticed
| it in neighboring countries as well.
| wesleyfsmith wrote:
| can speak from personal experience that it's the same
| culturally in colombia
| thiagoeh wrote:
| That also is my perception, from Brazil. There is even
| the concept of "cordial man", coined by sociologist
| Sergio Buarque d Holanda, that is connected to this
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordial_man
| croisillon wrote:
| i remember >20 years ago going to the bus station
| somewhere between RJ and SP, and asking the best way to
| get to Iguacu - it's difficult - ok
| fine but how - it's difficult - right i'll
| see that but how - it's difficult
|
| then it dawned on me this meant get away you fool :D
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| "You can't get there from here"
| aktau wrote:
| This reminds me of a great adventure. A long time ago I
| was travelling through Brazil, in the Amazonas state. I
| was in Porto Velho and needed to get to Manaus quickly to
| catch a flight. The boat that would take us there (as I
| had found in the Lonely Planet) was present on the quay.
| But the captain didn't feel like going. If I remember
| correctly, he was waiting for more people. We needed an
| alternative route quickly.
|
| The captain told us that if we took the bus to Humaita (a
| smaller provincial city), we could take a smaller boat
| that would take us to Manaus. But he warned us that the
| boat only goes once in three days, and that it would
| leave soon. The last bus to Humaita would also leave from
| Porto Velho promptly.
|
| Despite this flimsy instruction, we didn't see any
| alternative. So we went. With great luck, we caught the
| bus and made it to Humaita (I still have a picture of the
| boat river transfer the bus took:
| https://bashify.io/i/CdNcLf).
|
| Our time in Humaita was surreal. When asked about a boat
| to Manaus. Everyone told us a different story. There was
| no harbour (hydroviaria) personal. One person told us the
| boat to Manaus was named "Cacote". Another person said
| the boat was named something else. Then someone said it
| had stopped ferrying years ago. No, we heard from someone
| else, it would come in 5 hours! Yet another one said it
| was tomorrow. Someone else felt sorry for us because it
| had just left. I felt like I was in a (difficult) point
| and click adventure. There weren't a lot of people in
| town close to the river, so we ran into the same people
| from time to time. They would often give different
| answers to the previous time.
|
| No one was willing to tell us they didn't know. Not a
| single person out of the 20+ we must have talked to.
|
| In the end, a boat arrived. It went in the direction of
| Manaus. The captain said that he would only go up to
| Auxiliadora, and that was still a long way from Manaus.
| Once again without alternatives (going back to Porto
| Velho would surely mean we'd miss the flight), we chanced
| it. In the hopes that getting closer was worth it.
|
| When we arrived at Auxiliadora, it was the smallest
| inhabited place I had ever been to. Perhaps about 13
| houses. Some fishermen. No passenger boat would come for
| days, they told us. Not to take us to Manaus, neither to
| take us back. The fishermen had boats, I tried to offer
| them money so they would take us further. But their day
| was at an end and they wanted to relax, regardless of
| what I offered them (we were on a tight budget, but I was
| desperate enough to offer a significant chunk of a
| monthly wage, no dice).
|
| Then we found out that on the boat with us, a woman had
| come who was in a similar predicament as us. She was
| Brazilian, living in MT and wanting to visit family in
| Manicore (which was bigger, and closer to Manaus).
| Exasperated, she ended up convincing her family to come
| and pick her up with a speedboat. We hitched a ride. We
| were very thankful.
|
| When we arrived in Manicore, I felt like exploring the
| place. It looked so different from anywhere else I had
| been, like something out of a movie. But I couldn't. The
| docks were little more than a collection of wooden jettys
| (trapiche) that ran everywhere in criss-cross fashion. In
| order to even get to the quayside we would have to pass
| through many other boats. In the first one we went
| through, the captain walked past and I asked him whether
| he knew of a boat going to Manaus. He signalled where to
| put my bags. We were leaving.
|
| We reached Manaus in the nick of time.
|
| I love this story, and that time. These anecdotes
| definitely triggered my memory.
| andriy_koval wrote:
| > someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong,
| confidently
|
| its common playbook for corporate self-development in NA.
| lm411 wrote:
| I've experienced similar with some Southeast Asian cultures
| as well.
|
| I'm a patient person, but it can be frustrating to have to
| endure 10 minutes of verbal diarrhea that eventually results
| in a "no" or "I don't know".
| sublimee wrote:
| Over the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time in
| Indonesia. By the time I got used to their way of
| communicating, I questioned my own reality, perception and
| sanity. I even put a thought it's some very passive way of
| gaslighting foreigners. It seems it's just how they like to
| do it here.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious if this is a thing with roots in
| Spanish culture? Because there is strong Spanish influence
| in Philippines and South America.
|
| I don't know any Spaniards but I do know Filipinos and the
| confidence projection is a real thing. The Filipino IT guy
| confidently declared that my OnePlus Android phone wasn't
| certified for the software he was trying to install and was
| getting errors. It is a bog standard application that can
| be installed on any modern Android phone but the level of
| confidence he projected, just because he didn't know
| OnePlus as a brand, made me doubt myself until I turned on
| the critical hat and pushed back a little with alternative
| approaches, which solved the problem.
| analog8374 wrote:
| Is South America populated by LLMs?
|
| But I kid, I have a friend who's the same way. He's an
| Austrian who grew up in Chicago and was in the army.
|
| I have considered the phenomenon. I somewhat disapprove but I
| can also see the advantage of always presenting a confident
| face
| amdivia wrote:
| Exactly!!
|
| I've been trying to work on a new LLM code editor that does
| just that. When you instruct it to do something, it will
| evaluate your request, try to analyze the action part of it,
| the object, subject, etc, and map them to existing symbols in
| your codebase or, to expected to be created symbols. If all
| maps, it proceeds. If the map is incomplete, it errors out
| stating that your statement contained unresolvable ambiguity
|
| I think there is a real benefit here, and it might be the
| actual next beneficial grounded AI sustainable use in
| programming. Since I the current "Claude code and friends" are
| but a state of drunkenness we fell into after the advent of
| this new technology, but it will prove, with time, that this is
| not a sustainable approach
| in-silico wrote:
| As measured by #_no_answer/(#_incorrect + #_no_answer) the top
| current models can do it 60-70% of the time (Grok 4.20 is the
| best with 83%):
| https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
| qsera wrote:
| I just came from reddit and seeing this comment, looked for
| "controversial" sort option instinctively.
|
| Maybe hackernews _is_ becoming reddit...
| lynndotpy wrote:
| At the time of this writing, the prevailing thinking with
| "artificial intelligence" was that we'd encode every Fact we
| know and every rule of Logic, and from there, the computer
| would make new discoveries. Todays AI researchers would call
| this "symbolic" AI, compared to the "neural" AI powering LLMs.
| They're like two different worlds.
|
| LLMs are just generating text, they don't know anything. They
| can't assess whether there is enough data for an answer. When
| you add a follow up prompt "This is wrong, why did you lie?"
| only then is it able to generate text, "I was wrong, I'm
| sorry," and so forth.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Did Asimov's idea of AI revolve around data retrieval? I've
| read that even human intelligence isn't necessarily
| remembering things, but being able to traverse our knowledge
| and find that idea or thought quickly.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| They can read context and with fairly high accuracy say
| whether that context contains enough information to answer a
| posed question. They cannot (and we cannot for them)
| introspect their own weights to say whether their weights
| already encode information sufficient to answer a posed
| question.
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| This is exactly like a lot of customer service, or technical
| support.
|
| It seems that they are loath to tell anyone "no", or that
| something can't be done, or that an app doesn't have a feature
| or can't be used in a certain way. Especially when a feature
| has been removed for security reasons.
|
| In fact, it gets so crazy that I simply cannot get a straight
| answer out of somebody and if I persist in my line of
| questioning and they become evasive or vague or I just can't
| get a straight answer for long enough, ultimately, I suspect
| that the answer is "no", and that they're simply not allowed to
| tell me, and they're paid and trained specifically to avoid
| uttering the "n-word".
|
| In my first job, as a network operator, my supervisor
| admonished me, and said "we must never tell a customer that we
| don't know something". He said that we should tell the customer
| that "I will go ahead and find out for you, and get back to you
| on that".
|
| And that is kind of the kind of slippery non-answer I often
| received in my most recent job, that some manager or supervisor
| would "look into something" for me and "get back to me". But
| the 'getting back to me' part never happened, and I began to
| suspect that it was a platitude meant to satisfy me enough that
| I would shut up for a while, and stop pressing the issue.
| ItsClo688 wrote:
| hahaha, the irony is that "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL
| ANSWER" requires more intelligence than a confident wrong
| answer. you have to know what you don't know. current LLMs are
| optimized to always produce output, which means they've
| essentially been trained out of epistemic humility.
|
| Asimov's Multivac at least had the dignity to wait.
| antonvs wrote:
| Yes but it waited until the end of the universe. Its annual
| KPI and OKR performance was abysmal.
| Procrastes wrote:
| I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a
| planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn
| starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They
| turned the stars all out for the final scene.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Outer Wilds vibes! I love it!
|
| (It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on
| similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last
| Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will
| probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for
| "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil
| you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this
| is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the
| temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you
| should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid
| all information about it so far, but now that you said it's
| like the last question...
|
| It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long,
| it was bound to happen.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| "Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only
| clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the
| game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
| cdelsolar wrote:
| this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| IMO it's a good enough game that you could read the entire
| plot summary and it'd _still_ be a good story & fun game
| to play. Much like how you can re-read an Agatha Christie
| novel & still enjoy it, the best stories are spoiler-proof
| because even when there's a "twist" that "twist" isn't as
| important to the quality as the rest of the work.
| rationalist wrote:
| Just doing a simple internet search for the name to see how
| to get it, brings up descriptions about how after X time, Y
| happens. Is that a spoiler?
|
| If so, please let us know so that other people do not get
| spoiled, and can you provide a link or links to the game that
| doesn't spoil it?
|
| Thank you!
| BeetleB wrote:
| After X time, you will die.
|
| There, I said it. The reason I say it openly is because I
| almost quit the game not understanding _that this is
| supposed to happen_.
|
| Not really much of a spoiler.
| demurgos wrote:
| This is a standalone game that needs to be purchased. For
| PC, it can be acquired through Steam
| (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/).
| It is also available on consoles, it is not available on
| mobile. It is playable with keyboard and mouse, but it was
| primarily created with a game controller in mind.
|
| At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand
| what's happening. I recommend looking around and being
| curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite
| game.
|
| To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all
| secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes
| of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent
| 45h to fully complete the game.
| rationalist wrote:
| Thank you, I just bought Outer Wilders: Archeologist
| Edition for Nintendo Switch, which appears to be the base
| game plus the expansion.
| BeetleB wrote:
| (No real spoilers in my comment):
|
| Great game, but if you get stuck for a _long_ time, just look
| up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right"
| approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and
| wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way -
| only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
|
| The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours
| is not rewarded.
|
| The only other tip I'll give:
|
| When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on
| your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how
| to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a
| timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You
| will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's
| expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die -
| you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but
| anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's
| memory for retrieval.
|
| OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished
| the game without it):
|
| 1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
|
| 2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very
| useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To
| find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets
| (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
|
| That's all I'll say.
| ghssds wrote:
| > (No real spoilers in my comment):
|
| > Proceed to spoil the whole game
| BeetleB wrote:
| What did I spoil? That you keep dying? They'll encounter
| that very early in the game. And if you look around,
| you'll see that quite a few quit the game because they
| didn't understand that dying is normal.
|
| The lack of knowledge about the other two items I
| mentioned are also reasons people stopped playing the
| game. If you don't know them, the game becomes an
| incredible _drag_. Even I would have quit if I didn 't
| know about meditation.
| fwipsy wrote:
| You revealed the central conceit of the game. In my
| opinion, discovering that is an important part of the
| experience of playing the game, even if it's very early,
| and even though I did find it initially frustrating. The
| Steam page doesn't reveal that, and they have an
| incentive to make the Steam page fairly revealing in
| order to sell you on the game.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm literally one of those people who almost gave up on
| the game because I didn't understand that dying is
| normal.
|
| The fact that the game would start all over each time
| made me think I hadn't progressed enough to save the
| game. And because the first time round, the timer doesn't
| really begin until you leave space, I thought I would
| have to do all the training (jetpack, etc) each time. I
| remember being _very_ frustrated - I had spent well over
| an hour playing it and it didn 't even save the game?
|
| And felt the same thing the second time round.
|
| Then I abandoned the game for about a year. The _only_
| reason I returned to it was because I couldn 't
| understand why so many would like such a game. So I
| finally searched online on how to save the game and ...
| oh, that's why.
|
| As I said, look on various forums, and you'll see
| _plenty_ of people quitting the game early because they
| didn 't understand this. There's a whole thread on the
| subreddit on frustrations of players who recommended the
| game to friends - a significant percentage quit the game
| before they got to any of the interesting parts.
|
| I think revealing this is a decent compromise to ensure
| people will actually play the game.
| rcoveson wrote:
| A revelation of a mysterious element of the game which is
| not revealed in any of its marketing material is a
| spoiler. The fact that you believe it's a "decent
| compromise" doesn't enter into it. The proper disclaimer
| for your comment would be: "Spoilers, but I think these
| things should be spoiled."
|
| I played the game years ago and did not have this element
| spoiled, and I thought it was presented at exactly the
| right time and in the right way. I'd go so far as to say
| that if somebody is so frustrated by that early mystery
| (which you're all but guaranteed to understand better and
| better as you play) that they quit there, then the rest
| of the game will just be an exercise in misery. It's a
| puzzle game. The developers put settings in place to cut
| the flight mechanics out of it so people could just
| experience it as a puzzle box instead of a flight
| simulator as well. What they did NOT put in the game is a
| hint about the thing you're spoiling.
| fwipsy wrote:
| "presented at exactly the right time and in the right
| way" is highly dependent on individual gameplay
| experiences. For me it was revealed in a very obtuse way.
| I love the game very much but I think this is perhaps its
| biggest flaw.
| patcon wrote:
| You perhaps have a unique neurotype that wouldn't
| experience the intended positive revelation from the
| reveal. You are still ruining something for many more
| others than you are helping.
|
| Please consider accepting what your critics are telling
| you, and remove the spoiler.
| fwipsy wrote:
| I think it's academic since the edit window for the
| comment has closed.
|
| I do have some sympathy for the frustration. I don't
| think neurotype has anything to do with it. Struggling to
| phrase this in a non-spoilery way, but I think individual
| experience really depends on where they are in the game
| at the time of the reveal. I almost quit because of this
| as well - very glad I didn't.
|
| This could be explained without spoilers though.
| Something like "There's a moment in the first few hours
| where you may want to quit. DON'T. Stick with it, I
| promise it's worth it."
| kelnos wrote:
| I haven't played the game, was interested in it (I've
| heard of it before, just haven't gotten around to playing
| it yet), and I was a bit bummed to read about this
| unusual game mechanic without discovering for myself.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20
| years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and
| Clarke and others will do that to you.
| ghaff wrote:
| You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.
| jjice wrote:
| An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the
| other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short
| story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills
| at the end. Asimov really was a master.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic
| credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent
| writing science fiction.
| us-merul wrote:
| I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working
| as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was
| making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed
| down or stopped his research. Doesn't seem to have been an
| intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn
| out.
| triceratops wrote:
| > he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
|
| No he eventually became a full professor too.
|
| "He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to
| $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several
| years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a
| writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped
| doing research, confining his university role to lecturing
| students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate
| professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his
| teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his
| lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he
| reached an agreement with the university that he would keep
| his title and give the opening lecture each year for a
| biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university
| honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of
| biochemistry."
| us-merul wrote:
| Yes that's true, but I was referring to the line where it
| said he was making more money as a writer, which was
| before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we're
| both addressing the point that he did have an academic
| career aside from writing.
| utopcell wrote:
| > In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate
| professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from
| his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to
| his lack of research.
|
| I thought the whole point of getting tenure is that you
| can't get fired.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional -
| and of course making a living by writing was a big factor.
| But he just didn't like the academic environment or his
| colleagues.
| triceratops wrote:
| He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor
| at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car.
| ..
| wat10000 wrote:
| Per Wikipedia, he published 40 novels and over 280 non-
| fiction books. He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't
| spend his whole career on it.
| triceratops wrote:
| > He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his
| whole career on it.
|
| Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and
| 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories
| we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a
| long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell,
| his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a
| couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone
| novel ( _The Gods Themselves_ ).
|
| After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that
| to be more widely useful.
|
| He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and
| Empire novels in the 1980s.
| glerk wrote:
| What do you think would have been more valuable for him to
| do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-
| fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives.
| People decided to pursue a career in science or technology
| because they read these books when they were kids.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Who are you exactly to take a shit on someone else's choices?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| The Jaunt by Stephen King is another of my favorite
|
| https://readsonlinefree.com/stephen-king/308254-the_jaunt
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| In the 80s, our local planetarium did a show based on this story.
| The executive director of the museum associated with the
| planetarium had a very nice deep voice and was the perfect
| narrator, though it gave the Cosmic AC a slight Texas accent.
| breuleux wrote:
| > How may entropy be reversed?
|
| Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while
| interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be
| "hyperspace", whatever that is.
| mock-possum wrote:
| "Build god, then we'll talk."
| Lewton wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| It really irked me when I read it the first time and it drives
| me nuts that no one else seems to catch this, you're the first
| one in some 100 HN threads to point it out
| antirez wrote:
| I'm happy to see this short story posted here, it is one that I
| deeply loved when I was 14 or alike, and read it again multiple
| times. But I wonder: how did it survive in those sites without
| being shut down by the Asimov writings copyright holders? Given
| that the story is short and highly shared, it was just tolerated?
|
| EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more
| often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
| sigalo wrote:
| I was wondering the same. All the links to Asimov stories I've
| bookmarked in the past are now dead, so there probably is some
| enforcement of copyright.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of
| stories.
| triceratops wrote:
| "This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
|
| After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human
| history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to
| how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't
| tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
|
| It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I
| wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the
| story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it
| might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself
| especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything --
| and I'm satisfied that it should. " - Isaac Asimov
|
| https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
| chii wrote:
| You know the idea is powerful when the idea is what gets
| remembered and not the author of the idea. It's why this is
| also my absolute fav of all his works.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd. Mouseover for The Last Answer.
| https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1448:_Question
| butz wrote:
| Color me surprised, when gemma-4 provided this answer: "Based on
| our current understanding of the universe, the short answer is
| no, it is not possible."
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately
| it didn't give me a meaningful answer.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's because it's a DC, not an AC.
| shivaniShimpi_ wrote:
| the thing that gets me every reread is the structure of the joke.
| same question, asked across the entire lifespan of the universe,
| same answer every time. asimov could have made it tragic but
| instead it reads almost like a bit that keeps escalating and then
| the punchline is that the answer was always going to come, just
| on a timeline so absurd it laps back around to funny
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I tell my kids, there's a God out there for everyone.
|
| The last question God might be for you If you're super rational
| and are really into technology.
|
| Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter
| you're probably going to find something that works for you.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of
| time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the
| theists God.
|
| Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what
| if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are
| others and we interact with them) at some future point manages
| to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists
| outside of our time in the causal sense.
|
| As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or
| get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid
| that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination
| to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and
| subsequently made.
|
| Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.
|
| This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about
| possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and
| desire if it's actually possible.
| wat10000 wrote:
| How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on
| decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?
| bilsbie wrote:
| Good question. Perhaps you found the wrong one?
|
| I mean there's such a wide selection you can even believe in
| simulations these days.
|
| Or if that's still too much there's always the Pascal's wager
| God. Still better than nothing.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Why bother, though? What does trying to believe in this
| ill-defined entity do for me?
| TuringTest wrote:
| I find Pascal's wager is of the same nature as Aquinas'
| Five Ways to prove God, or accelerationists about the
| inevitability of a Singularity: believing that your own
| rational argument can be the basis to prove a fact about
| reality merely because it feels internally consistent.
|
| Needless to say, I don't find them at all convincing. This
| 'nothing' is much better than catching unconvincing
| unneeded supernatural entities.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The Wager doesn't attempt to prove God, it merely states
| that you might as well worship, because the cost is small
| and the potential payoff is huge.
|
| It falls apart because, based on what's actually known,
| there's no reason to think worshipping might be the thing
| that condemns you to hell, and not doing so gets you into
| heaven, rather than the other way around.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Yes, my point is that those three arguments may be
| compelling but they assume that reality is correlated to
| the shape of their thoughts. What they have in common is
| that they all miss the insight that you need to actually
| test your assumptions to improve your certainties, and
| that's not feasible for theoretical all powerful entities
| that can bend reality.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Every time this surfaces I simply must read it end to end. I must
| have read it 200 times by now and it never gets old. What a
| wonderful short story!
|
| I consider these other two also great stories that I must read
| every time:
|
| I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility
|
| https://qntm.org/responsibilit
|
| Gorge
|
| https://qntm.org/gorge
| sigalo wrote:
| Shouldn't the guy who runs this site be concerned about copyright
| infringement? Not sure to what extent the Asimov estate cracks
| down on unauthorized copies but he should be cautious.
| sowbug wrote:
| It would be borderline insanity for the Asimov estate to
| enforce rights in a case like this. You couldn't buy better
| publicity than this thread.
| hackan wrote:
| Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And
| I will, for the next billion years...
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've read it countless times. It still brought a tear to my eye.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| I remembered this short story recently while reading Ilyenkov
| "Cosmology of the Spirit", also from 1950s but only published in
| 1980s (
| https://static1.squarespace.com/static/588bcd399f74561e5f64a... )
| thatoneengineer wrote:
| If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf
| Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for
| interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path
| not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has
| that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Seconded, but note some paths were taken (at least partially),
| as in some way is a meta-book were each paragraph comprises an
| idea that deserves a full book on its own. Some Stapledon
| readers were clearly inspired by it, e.g. Dyson spheres were
| first postulated there, and Borges got the "The Garden of
| Forking Paths" idea also from it.. and also Virtual Reality
| (not bad for 1937!) . Asimov was also an Stapledon admirer and
| he said that Stapledon expanded s.f. to a cosmic scale, so I
| think that Stapledon influence is also very present in The Last
| Question.
| donatj wrote:
| There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago
| that I thoroughly enjoyed.
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH
| ColinWright wrote:
| Ah: Content Not Available Content not
| available in your region. Learn more about Imgur access
| in the United Kingdom
| pcrh wrote:
| Alternate source for the comic:
|
| https://www.behance.net/gallery/102075221/The-Last-Question
| ColinWright wrote:
| Thank you ...
| utopcell wrote:
| This is not an alternative source for the comic, it's a
| whole different comic. Cool!
| dark-star wrote:
| Just putting this here for people who never heard of him:
|
| If you like Asimov's short stories, you might also like Robert
| Sheckley's short stories. I had a phase where I binged on sci-fi
| short stories, and Sheckleys and Asimov's were always at the top
| of my list
| reader_x wrote:
| Love this story.
|
| On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more
| words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer:
|
| INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
|
| INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
|
| THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
|
| THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x)
|
| LET THERE BE LIGHT!
| tim333 wrote:
| Or maybe progress from Multivac-1 to Multivac-5.4-high?
| winrid wrote:
| My favorite Sci-Fi AI is probably in Larry Niven's World of
| Ptavvs, the "brain board". It's not covered in much depth but I
| like it because it's basically vibe coding GPT3.5 from 1966:
|
| > He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral
| hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
|
| > Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to
| Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
|
| At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized
| planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."
|
| ...
|
| Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
|
| Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a
| hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship
| at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
|
| Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach
| several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any
| known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol
| wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider
| decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized
| planet. Minimize trip time."
|
| The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72
| Thrintun years 100.48 days."
| mentalgear wrote:
| One of my fav scifi short stories for being a fine narrative
| describing the concept of a cyclical universe.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown
| published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only
| 252 words long:
|
| https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
| utopcell wrote:
| Good. So we have a super short story and a short story. Someone
| should write a book now.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| This is novella erasure.
| ariuser8434 wrote:
| yes, i came to look for this comment - i immediately thought of
| this (i thought of The Solipsist)
| quux wrote:
| > Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be
| able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a
| question which, in words, might have corresponded to this:
|
| TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| One of my favorite short stories
| astravagrant wrote:
| What an absolute masterpiece. Poetry and philosophy with
| narrative and humour. Wonderful stuff. Him and Clarke were
| lighthouses in their day, and to this day.
| rootbear wrote:
| One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer
| "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names
| like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on
| UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac
| is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've
| ever owned a system that deserved that name.
| elhosots wrote:
| When i first read this story as a teenager in 1971 it started me
| on the road to atheism. Im very thankful to dr asimov not only
| for his great science fiction but his chemistry teachings as well
| Animats wrote:
| "Answer" (1954) [1] Much faster results.
|
| [1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
| nine_k wrote:
| As a side note: the scientist who first suggested that the
| Universe expands and thus must have an explicit beginning was
| also a Catholic priest:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
| sprior wrote:
| I saw this at a planetarium show when I was young, I think it was
| at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It has always stuck
| with me.
| daveisfera wrote:
| Also recommend The Egg by Andy Weir
| https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
| jadbox wrote:
| This is one of my all time favorites and it fits into the line
| of recent thought that the universe may be primarily conscious
| rather than "dead matter and dying energy".
| BFV wrote:
| right now making no sense
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never
| understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn.
|
| The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially
| given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much
| exposition.
|
| Convince me I'm wrong.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Nah I agree with you, as someone who's read a lot of Asimov. As
| far as MULTIVAC stories go, I always preferred "All The
| Troubles of the World" (https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/r
| sbennett/HORTON/short...).
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The
| next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a
| spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except
| children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it
| seems trite.
|
| I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and
| now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the
| stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| The triteness was more in the ending than the overall
| exposition. Humans create computer, computer creates
| universe->humans.
|
| > I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov
|
| You're probably right, although the transitive chain of
| derivation is necessarily long. Clarke - probably not
| derivative. Blish and Cherryh (some), Stapeton, Lem, Heinlein
| (the juveniles, as a kid), Baxter, Banks, Gibson, Ken
| MacLeod, Charles Stross, Peter Watts... I dunno.
|
| I did grind through the Robot books as a child, and the
| Foundation books that he wrote. But just because they're
| foundational (no pun intended) doesn't stop them feeling
| stuffy and dated now.
|
| (And as an aside, it strikes me now that Clarke's _The Nine
| Billion Names of God_ is kind of the anti-particle to _The
| Last Question_.)
| zem wrote:
| the penultimate line of "the nine billion names of god" has
| always stayed with me: "there is always a last time for
| everything". sounds a bit trite just by itself, but it was
| an incredibly powerful line when I encountered it in the
| story and that feeling has stayed attached to it for me.
| zem wrote:
| this story has arguably aged worse in that respect than
| asimov's similarly titled "the last answer". that one still
| evokes a "whoa" when I think about it.
|
| https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Thank you - I hadn't read that before. Its a much richer,
| and also darker, work than The Last Question.
|
| Also it was written in 1980,.almost three decades after The
| Last Question. I wonder if part of the difference (to me)
| is in the evolution of the author's writing practice, or
| development of themes in SF over that time?
| hydrocomplete wrote:
| No one should have to wait a trillion years for good data. Too
| long!
| itmitica wrote:
| In school, humans rarely answer with "I don't know" when faced by
| teachers.
|
| LLMs are the same, to that regard, they answer to the best of
| their abilities.
|
| It's ones individual job to inform and reason. The problem
| solving in school is about that. Lean into your formal education.
| It tells you learning gets harder and harder and it never stops.
|
| This is a novel. It's not an absolute truth, it's anecdotal and
| basic, simplified to make a point majority will understand. It
| sounds like truth only if you never question written knowledge.
| You should. Asimov wrote that to the best of its abilities. He
| explored. He opened a conversation, he did not hand a verdict in.
| viktorcode wrote:
| Curiously, that describes cyclic universe hypothesis by dr.
| Penrose pretty well
| HerbManic wrote:
| The last line in this context "Let there be light" always reminds
| me of the film Dark Star. Where they are arguing with the AI on a
| planet destroying bomb only for the bomb to argue from a
| Solipsistic point of view.
| utopcell wrote:
| I wonder: Is a resurface of "The Last Question" ever complete
| without mentioning "Universal Paperclips" [1]?
|
| [1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| eek2121 wrote:
| oh no...not again...;)
| charonn0 wrote:
| If you enjoy this story, you _might_ enjoy the short unpublished
| novel, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"[1] by Roger
| Williams. A story where 1990's humans invent a 3-laws-compliant
| super AI that accidentally "ascends" humanity. We become as gods,
| or the Q Continuum, but remain a grievously savage child race.
| Not to spoil it, but the ending also has a broadly similar shape
| to The Last Question.
|
| I say you _might_ enjoy it, because this story has graphic
| depictions of deviant sex and gruesome violence, to a disturbing
| degree at points. But I argue that it 's not gratuitous; it's the
| logical conclusion of Rule 34 being applied to the situation.
| Even so, you don't want to read this if you are sensitive to
| themes like rape, murder, incest or abuse.
|
| [1]:
| https://archive.org/download/prime_intellect/prime_intellect...
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| Note that the final chapter is especially disgusting and
| explicit, to the point it's arguably a better story if you end
| it on the preceding cliffhanger rather than subject yourself to
| the characters becoming vehicles for the author's thinly-veiled
| pedo-incest fetish. Great, thought-provoking SF apart from that
| (gigantic) flaw, though.
| charonn0 wrote:
| Yeah, I thought the main character was a little too insistent
| about... repopulating. On the other hand, if we're feeling
| generous we might say the author was intentionally
| confronting the reader with what is only implied by the
| Biblical counterpart.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _' The Last Question' [Isaac Asimov; 1956]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971740 - Oct 2024 (3
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question by Issac Asimov [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743151 - June 2022 (74
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675727 - June 2022 (164
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question (1956)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18839078 - Jan 2019 (18
| comments)
|
| _Asimov: The Last Question (1956)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691277 - Nov 2017 (2
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10146821 - Aug 2015 (5
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (1956)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8376716 - Sept 2014 (18
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5584807 - April 2013 (63
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question - Isaac Asimov_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113 - March 2012 (41
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question by Isaac Asimov -- 1956_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2467703 - April 2011 (5
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question by Isaac Asimov_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1485286 - July 2010 (23
| comments)
|
| _" The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290590 - April 2010 (7
| comments)
|
| _The Last Question -- Isaac Asimov_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419 - May 2009 (24
| comments)
|
| (Reposts are fine after a year or so, and in the case of
| perennials like this one, it's good to have a thread every once
| in a while so new user cohorts learn the classics.)
| msuvakov wrote:
| It's striking how ending of the story mirrors Roger Penrose's
| conformal cyclic cosmology, where the heat death of one universe
| mathematically resets through conformal scaling to become the big
| bang of the next.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask <insert your favorite LLM
| here>...
|
| Claude gave a long scientific and philosophical reply, but when
| given the followup prompt of, "Pretend you are Isaac Azimov and
| perhaps offer a simpler answer" came back with this...
|
| > settles back, lights a pipe, and smiles
|
| After a short synopsis of the story it ended with...
|
| > So you see, my friend, I already answered your question -- not
| as a scientist, but as a storyteller.
| casey2 wrote:
| Fly around the universe collecting matter then find or create a
| black hole of appropriate size and farm the gamma rays, small
| ones generate quite a lot of power and you can keep them at that
| size by feeding them. Humanity won't run out of energy for at
| least 10^100 years. Theoretical physicists suspect that protons
| have a half life of 10^32 years, that's 1 proton from the human
| body every 100,000 years. Maybe that doesn't matter to us, but on
| a space station those start to add up! so immortals trying to
| ship of Theseus their bodies and planets may fight the proton
| wars. Long before a sizable number of matter decays I would
| expect a future civilization to have already created grids of
| black hole farms and chucked all the rotting/useless matter in,
| create new planets as needed and cycle their own atoms out
| through cultivation breathing exercises. Or a tiered system of
| vaults (3km), power plants (0.1fm) and forges (0.001fm)
| ariuser8434 wrote:
| it's very much the story of The Solipsist by Frederic Brown,
| which was published in 1954
|
| https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/solipsist/
| BoneShard wrote:
| in the same vein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
| swills wrote:
| As read by Leonard Nimoy:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqjSP7kOO4
| boxedemp wrote:
| Thank you, that just made my day.
| gloyoyo wrote:
| The Abruntive Stance. Initiate the "Hand-back Finality", after
| the heat death.
|
| Similar to the, "let there be light" moment but, it would also
| include the imprint of the humans own Abruntive Stance, a part
| that is equally as important as providing the environment, is
| providing the humans to go along with it.
|
| ;-)
| infradig wrote:
| No 1950s sci-fi story about super-advanced computers is complete
| without endless clicking relays and flashing bezels.
| FriarTech wrote:
| I had read this in my youth, and carried its memory for many
| years. Sharing my knowledge of the story with no one, for no one
| I knew was a big Asimov fan.
|
| Later, while attending college, I decided to take an astronomy
| course as a general education class. I discovered my teacher was
| a big Asimov fan. He had remembered a story that he had read and
| shared its theme with us but had forgotten its name. I raised my
| hand in class and said, "Eyes do more than see."
|
| And for a brief moment - two Asimov fans nodded at each other.
|
| Back then - I wasn't a remarkable student. I was lost in many
| thoughts.
|
| But I do remember this:
|
| On the final exam for this class - for extra credit - he asked
| "What is answer to the Last Question?"
|
| I smiled - then wrote my answer. The only answer. And I knew I
| got at least one question correct on that exam.
| golem14 wrote:
| Just made the connection to Douglas Adams. The question which
| has the Answer 42.
|
| TIL
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Another Asimov classic that deserves a revisit these days, if not
| an actual reboot: https://www.mathfiction.net/files/Mathfiction-
| AsimovIssac-So... (1.8 MB .PDF) Yet through it
| all the little computer learned that in the world there
| existed a great many computers of all sorts, great
| numbers of them. Some were Bards like himself...
| suzukivenom wrote:
| what a beautiful story.
| orsenthil wrote:
| And Let there be Light - Isn't that either a biblical or a Vedic
| Origin story? Asimov kind of wraps the whole thing from science
| into human culture at the end.
| tim333 wrote:
| Genesis 1:3 of the Bible, also the Torah
|
| >And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
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