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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#51

Post by liotier »

adrianhon wrote: post #44

A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.

> A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies")

Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale.

But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#52

Post by n4r9 »

nabla9 wrote: post #32
trenchgun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.

The concept predates von Neuman. First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher. He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning). Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Exp…

That kind of niche knowledge is what I come to HN for!

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#53

Post by gcr »

Simon321 wrote: post #20

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#54

Post by TimSchumann »

jl6 wrote: post #8

Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission . A true name in sci-fi.

I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again.

Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book.

Agree about the expert omission part.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#55

Post by mnsc »

gcr wrote: post #53
Simon321 wrote: post #20

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#56

Post by rsynnott »

rakejake wrote: post #33
jonathanleane wrote: post #9

This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwh…

> If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.

I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#57

Post by ptero »

His larger works are getting a lot of praise (justifiably, I read "A fire upon the deep" on a friend recommendation, then everything else Vinge wrote), some of his short stories strongly resonated with me, too.

The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#58

Post by boffinAudio »

bsenftner wrote: post #47
boffinAudio wrote: post #30

I once worked with a guy who was a close personal friend of Vernor, and I remember with much joy the enormous collection of science fiction he (the friend) had at his place .. literally every wall was covered in paperback shelves, and to my eyes it was a wonderland. I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Ha…

Science Fiction - the literature - is so different from all other media forms of SciFi there needs to be a formal separate of Science Fiction Literature from SciFi films, live action and animated series, games, and comic books. These other forms, SciFi, are the cartoon abbreviated to something else that is fun, adventure but is not Science Fiction (Literature) and the existential examination of how Science Changes Re…

Absolutely, in the same way that there are tabloid forms of journalism, citizen, and authoritative forms, also.

For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of great utility to the original developers of satellites to have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds.

However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of course, we end up getting these things because some kid read a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of the worlds feeling about it ..

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#59

Post by [deleted] »

mnsc wrote: post #55
gcr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

[deleted]

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#60

Post by geden »

turing_complete wrote: post #43

If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?

A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD.

Across Real Time is also great and shorter.

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