191–200 of 334 posts
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.
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From what I’ve read, cryonics seems like a massive scam pulled on rich people. The tissue damage in these frozen corpses is extensive and irreparable.
Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.
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I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence. I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension. For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure. The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness,…
I think I've said "catastrophes" before rather than "disasters" and I think that's a better word, but I stand by it. It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm. Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her she's about to tear apart a kingd…
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Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire .
Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993
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Is this annotated version on the archive.org CD? I couldn't find it in https://archive.org/download/hugo_nebula_1993
you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the view contents link beside it
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> 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've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.
There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.
My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.
* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.
The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>
(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)
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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 essay is written by a political scientist. His arguments aren't very persuasive. Even if they were, he doesn't actually cite the person he's writing about, so I have no way to check the primary materials. It's not like this is uncommon either. Everyone who's smart since 1760 has extrapolated the industrial revolution and imagined something similar to the singularity. Malthus would be a bad example and Nietzsche…
And this was not some obscure author, but leading figure in the French Enlightenment. Thomas Malthus wrote his essay on population as counterargument.
I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb
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IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.
Yep. I like it better than Fire Upon the Deep but I do like both of them. I didn’t like A Deepness in the Sky as it was feeling kinda grindy like Dune . (I wish we could just erase Dune so people could enjoy all of Frank Herbert’s other novels of which I love even the bad ones)
On a second read, when I knew where the story was going and didn't need the frisson of resolution, I enjoyed it much more. It's good B & C plot, and it all does tie in. But arguably the pacing is off.