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.
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)
Can you recommend a non-Dune Herbert book? I recall seeing Dosadi when I was a kid in the sci fi section of the library and just never picked it up. I generally like hard sci-fi and my main issue with Dune was that it went off into the weeds too many times.
I like the Dosadi books, Whipping Star, the short stories in Eye, Eyes of Heisenberg, Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier (which my wife hates), Under Pressure and Hellstrom's Hive. If I had to pick just one it might be Whipping Star but maybe Under Pressure is the hardest sci-fi.
After reading this and all the comments on this thread I think I will pick up some of his books. Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and pessimistic. I don’t have a problem with any individuals writing stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written nowad…
Yes, do! I've only read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep but they were absolute joys, despite their intimidating page count. Just mind-bendingly inventive and continually interesting. I won't ruin anything for you, but as a reader you make assumptions which then turn out not to be true via progressive revelation as the books go on. Brilliant stuff.
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…
You are looking at things like the failure of full self driving due to massive long tail complexity, and extrapolating that to LLMs. The difference is that full self driving isn't viable unless it's near perfect, whereas LLMs and text to image models are very useful even when imperfect. In any field there is a sigmoidal progress curve where things seem to move slowly at first when getting set up, accelerate quickly once a framework is in place, then start to run out of low hanging fruit and have to start working hard for incremental progress, until the field is basically mined out. Given the rate that we're seeing new stuff come out related to LLMs and image/video models, I think it's safe to say we're still in the low hanging fruit stage. We might not achieve better than human performance or AGI across a variety of fields right away, but we'll build a lot of very powerful tools that will accelerate our technological progress in the near term, and those goals are closer than many would like to admit.
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.
Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.
In real medical cryogenics, e.g., embryo preservation, vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which, of course, it is. Only cryonics advocates claim that vitrification isn't a kind of freezing.
If the topic is tissue damage from sharp ice crystals, it's pretty handy to draw the distinction between cooling methods that cause that and ones that don't.
you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the view contents link beside it
Yes, I did that. I see in there the vinge novel but NOT the version with annotations.
The annotations are there in the RTF files, but there is something quirky about the format of those RTF files - perhaps they predate standardization or something. If you open one of the RTFs in a straight text editor like emacs or vi, you'll see them. There was a bit of discussion around this here, a few years ago, when this version was re-released [1]
Yes, I did that. I see in there the vinge novel but NOT the version with annotations.
The annotations are there in the RTF files, but there is something quirky about the format of those RTF files - perhaps they predate standardization or something. If you open one of the RTFs in a straight text editor like emacs or vi, you'll see them. There was a bit of discussion around this here, a few years ago, when this version was re-released [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236