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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#251

Post by tim333 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #173
tim333 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential way long before Moore's law and will probably continue after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking transistors.

Even though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite likely there is a better way to do it. For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely…

I get the impression human brains process things a lot more efficently so there's probably a way to go there.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#252

Post by EdwardCoffin »

dooglius wrote: post #232
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.

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…

The page is not presenting right, I think. This HN comment from a few years ago [1] points to a script that purports to munge the files into modern HTML, but I have not tried it myself.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876236

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#253

Post by [deleted] »

davidgerard wrote: post #192
adastra22 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#254

Post by Cryogenator »

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.

[dead]

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#255

Post by Cryogenator »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #49
pontifier wrote: post #26

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

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.

Oregon Brain Preservation offers cryopreservation for $5,000 (or less if you can't afford that), Cryonics Germany offers free cryopreservation, and even the most expensive providers (Tomorrow Biostasis, Alcor, and Yinfeng) are affordable through life insurance. Most of us aren't wealthy and some of us are working class. Since 2000, vitrification has replaced freezing, dramatically reducing damage, and even frozen people might be recoverable centuries from now. It's offered on a nonprofit, experimental basis by organizations with public financial statements.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#257

Post by easter726 »

gamblerrr wrote: post #61
unnamed76ri wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> irreparable That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.

So you’re saying there is some chance then. Can we let go of the pseudoscience and quackery quote from the early 90s then?

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#258

Post by frozenseven »

dingnuts wrote: post #214
jart wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Blackwell. > o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a grea…

>> > 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…

> Oh, it doesn't work? That's because IT'S NOT INTELLIGENT.

Ok, let's run this test of "real intelligence" on you. We eagerly await to see your model. Should be a piece of cake.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#259

Post by webmaven »

dekhn wrote: post #213
PaulHoule wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A quirky (but nonetheless good) novel is "The Green Brain". It has some of Dune's ecological sensibility, but is otherwise completely different.
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