Live data from Hacker News

Vernor Vinge has died

file770.com

231–240 of 334 posts

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#231
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.

Wow! This is the internet find of the week for me. How long until this appears as its own post on the HN front page? Thanks for mirroring.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#232
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 read-first file says

> In this form, it is possible to read the story without being bothered by the comments -- yet be able to see the comments on demand. (Because of production deadlines I have not seen the exact user interface for the Clarinet edition, and so some of this discussion may be slightly inconsistent with details of the final product.)

Did the final product not hold up, or is the page not presenting it right?

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Brin has a post on his FB wall mourning Vinge.

I believe they were friends. Brin mentioned that he hung out with Vinge a few weeks ago.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#235
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.

[deleted]

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#236
post #53

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.

Probably just a question of time constant / zoom on your time axis. When zoomed in up close, an exponential looks a lot like a bunch of piecewise linear components, where big breakthroughs just are a discontinuous changes in slope...

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#237
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.

There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...

Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#238
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> > Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. > Blackwell. I'm fucking sorry but there is no LLM or "AI" platform that is even real intelligence, today, easily demonstrated by the fact that an LLM cannot be used to create a better LLM. Go on, ask ChatGPT to output a novel model that performs better than any other model. Oh, it doesn't work? That's because IT'S NOT I…

You didn't read him correctly; he's not saying Blackwell is AGI. I believe that he's saying that perhaps Blackwell could be computationally sufficient for AGI if "used correctly." I don't know where that "computationally sufficient" line is. It'll always be fuzzy (because you could have a very slow, but smart entity). And before we have a working AGI, thinking about how much computation we need always comes down to b…

I don't use the A word, because it's one of those words that popular culture has poisoned with fear, anger, and magical thinking. I can at least respect Kurzweil though and he says the human brain has 10 petaflops. Blackwell has 20 petaflops. That would seem to make it capable of superhuman intelligence to me. Especially if we consider that it can focus purely on thinking and doesn't have to regulate a body. Imagine having your own video card that does ChatGPT but 40x smarter.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.

It's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep tier finale.

People wanted to read how Pham Nuwen defeated the Emergents, learn more about the Zones of Thought or see the Blight finally destroyed once and for all.

No one wanted more Game of Dogs.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#240

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

The Peace War is closer to home than Fire . Read both.

The Peace War is a mediocre adventure story followed by a brilliant sequel, Marooned in Realtime.
Post reply on HN