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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#241

Post by samatman »

topynate wrote: post #226
davidgerard wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's the relevant distinction in fact. Cryonics are the former, not the latter. Multicellular cryonic suspension is an unsolved problem after roughly the blastocyst stage.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#242

Post by microtherion »

mnsc wrote: post #55
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.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

That may happen more easily than you're suggesting. LLMs are masters at generating plausible sounding ideas with no regard to their factual underpinnings. So some of those computational bong hits might come up with dozens of plausible looking suggestions (maybe featuring made up literature references as well).

It would be left to human researchers to investigate them and find out if any work. If they succeed, the LLM will get all the credit for the idea, if they fail, it's them who will have wasted their time.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#244

Post by jart »

hock_ads_ad_hoc wrote: post #217
jart wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, Jensen Huang just unveiled a chip yesterday that goes 20 petaflops. Intel's latest raptorlake cpu goes 800 gigaflops. Can you really explain 25000x progress by the 2x larger die size? I'm sure reactionary America wanted Moore's law to run out of steam but the Taiwanese betrayal made up for all the lost Moore's law progress and then some.

Taiwanese betrayal? I’m not sure I understand the reference.

There's no reference. It's just a bad joke. What they did was actually very good.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#245

Post by topynate »

samatman wrote: post #241
topynate wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's the relevant distinction in fact. Cryonics are the former, not the latter. Multicellular cryonic suspension is an unsolved problem after roughly the blastocyst stage.

As of last year we're up to doing rat kidneys. They're "heavily" damaged but they recover within a few weeks. To be sure, there's a long way from that to near-perfectly preserving a human brain, let alone a whole body.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/21/cryogenic-organ-preserva...

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#246

Post by gildandstain »

Such a loss! He fused good-hearted optimism and mindbending data-architecture (and mind-architecture) into ripping plots.

And +1 for Marooned in Realtime. The awesome scale reminds me of Greg Egan, but it highlights Vinge's particular genius for imagining side-effects of the technological premise.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#247

Post by Hortinstein »

nl wrote: post #70

One of the true greats. True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote. Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer ). RIP

Came here to post almost this exact sentiment. I am not sure why but in college I checked out the Peace War and I largely credit that book and a few others for getting me back into reading. A couple years ago I decided to order a first edition and it's sitting on my shelf. The deepness books were great as well. "Software archaeologists" was a fantastic concept, I felt like that today digger through excel VBA

Additionally I think he was the first sci Fi author I found who was a computer science practitioner/professor. This led me to discover other great authors like Greg Egan.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#249

Post by justinclift »

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.

This seems to do the trick:

    wget -mkx -e robots=off https://3e.org/vvannot/

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#250

Post by kanzure »

kanzure wrote: post #203
PaulHoule wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses…

from http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.3Q97/4356.html The bobble is a speculative technology that originated in Vernor Vinge's science fiction. It allows spherical volumes to be enclosed in complete stasis for controllable periods of time. It was used in _The Peace War_ as a weapon, and in _Marooned in Realtime_ as a way for humans to tunnel through the Singularity unchanged. As far as I know, the bobble is phy…

A few people have pointed out that Sandor at the Zoo was more likely a reference to someone else, of course: ""The Zoo" etc. was a reference to Henry Spencer, who was known on Usenet for his especially clear posts. He posted from utzoo (University of Toronto Zoology.)"
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