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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#131

Post by jerf »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #122
dmd wrote: post #117

Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.

The key insight always was hexapodia.

IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not intend that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other, I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won't actually give anything away.)

(I'm glad someone linked to this. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#132

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

nabla9 wrote: post #19
demaga wrote: post #2

Haven't read his fiction works yet, but his singularity piece is very interesting: https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.

I'm half-convinced that the Rabbit was an ancient trickster god, and not an AI. Is AI even the correct term? If the Rabbit was a technological non-human intelligence, then surely it was never created (even by accident), and emerged/grew from the computosphere. No governments seemed to be aware of any other government having created it, and two of the nearly-main characters were special operatives tasked with knowing about shit like that and shutting it down before it could result in doomsday scenarios.

I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two, it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for a very long time before even the first transistor.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#133

Post by varelse »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #93
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.

What we're seeing right now with LLMs is like music in the late 30s after the invention of the electric guitar. At that point people still have no idea how to use it so, so they were treating it like an amplified acoustic guitar. It took almost 40 years for people to come up with the idea of harnessing feedback and distortion to use the guitar to create otherworldly soundscapes, and another 30 beyond that before peop…

In 5 to 10 years we will have likely moved on to the next big model architecture just like it was all about convolutional networks 5 to 10 years ago despite the pivotal paper being published in 2017.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#134

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

tialaramex wrote: post #25
nabla9 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.

I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on. You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pil…

The Rabbit had a sense of morality. I do not think it intended to enslave or destroy humanity, or any other monstrous end. It kept bargains that it could have cheated, when cheating those bargains cost it nothing. This is at least a hint of a sense of justice. The Rabbit was likely the adversary of some other entity, perhaps something very Blight-like.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#135

Post by rakejake »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #128
rakejake wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not recall the exact details but I remember that some of the focused individuals were kept in a grid or matrix of some sort. The aim of these grids were to translate the spider-talk and achieve some form of conversation with the spiders on the planet. It is also mentioned that the focused individuals have their own invented language with which they communicate to other focused individuals, which is faster and mo…

The zipheads were crippled with a weaponized virus that turned them all into autistic savants. The virus was somewhat magnetic, and using MRI like technologies, they could target specific parts of the brain to be affected to lesser or greater degrees. It's been awhile since I've re-read it, but "focused" was the propaganda label for it from the monstrous tyrannical regime that used it to turn people into zombies, no?

Yes, they could target specific portions of the brain. Have to re-read the book!

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#136

Post by rsynnott »

jerf wrote: post #127
rsynnott wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that. In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very usef…

Oh, yeah; I'm just not convinced there's any particular reason to think that LLMs would be useful for decoding languages.

(That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#140

Post by bosquefrio »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #119
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.

VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson. I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.

Vinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.
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