The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
Vernor Vinge has died
151–160 of 334 posts
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#152Please 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.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#153The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really love some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes 10,000 teraflops AFAICT, both are guesses. The low-end estimate I've seen for human brains are ~ 162 GFLOPS[0] to 10^28 FLOPS[1]; even just the model size for GPT-4 isn't confirmed, merely a combination of human inference of public information with a rumour widely described as a "leak", likewise the compute requirements. [0] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyl…
They're not guesses. We know they use A100s and we know how fast an A100 goes. You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflop…
> I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me.
That assumes that you can represent all of the useful parts of the decision about whether to fire or not to fire in the equivalent of one floating point operation, which seems to be an optimistic assumption. It also assumes there's no useful information encoded into e.g. phase of firing.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#155Earlier 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?
Not zombies, but loving slaves. People able to apply all of their creativity and problem–solving skills to any task given to them, but without much capacity for reflection or any kind of personal ambitions or desires.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#156A 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.
I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world" is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where little robots would prance around trying to entice him into interacting with them (which would incur a fee).
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know Brin at all, my first thought was "Sergey?!" - will check out his books and appreciate the recommendation.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years. Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings. Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong. One problem is that conver…
This book
https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0...
tells (among other things) a harrowing tale of a common mistake in technology development that blindsides people every time: the project that reaches an asymptote instead of completion that can get you to keep spending resources and spending resources because you think you have only 5% to go except the approach you've chosen means you'll never get the last 4%. It's a seductive situation that tends to turn the team away from Cassandras who have a clear view.
Happens a lot in machine learning projects where you don’t have the right features. (Right now I am chewing on the problem of “what kind of shoes is the person in this picture wearing?” and how many image classification models would not at all get that they are supposed to look at a small part of the image and how easy it would be to conclude that “this person is on a basketball court so they are wearing sneakers” or “this is a dude so they aren’t wearing heels” or “this lady has a fancy updo and fancy makeup so she must be wearing fancy shoes”. Trouble is all those biases make the model perform better up to a point but to get past that point you really need to segment out the person’s feet.)
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#159Oh 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.
not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.
Re: Vernor Vinge has died
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open mind then you may find that there’s actually an interesting philosophical point to be examined and a decent story built around it.
Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed.
Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud.
My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the major subplots: glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology, localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is also very clearly building to a confrontation that will happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more noticeable