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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#301

Post by saalweachter »

dekhn wrote: post #175
rcarmo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.

I really wish he had wrapped everything up.

Eh, I have mixed feelings on that.

There are cliff-hanger endings, or clearly unfinished works, but I don't mind a bit of uncertainty at the edge of the story.

Compare The Wheel of Time to The Lord of the Rings.

At the end of LotR, it is over. Not only is the Dark Lord defeated forever, the elves, the wizards, all magic, and our two protagonists leave the world for the Undying Lands. We're told of the lives and deaths of all the other main characters. The world is finished. There are no stories left to tell.

At the end of WoT, it's just an ending. We're told of a great cycle to the universe, but half of it remains a mystery. Our protagonists are barely into their twenties, and the world has just been turned upside down. What will happen next? Anything, everything.

I don't mind the Zones of Thought universe being left open-ended, even if I would have preferred a little more. It's the sort of universe that shouldn't be wrapped up completely.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#302

Post by justin66 »

mithras wrote: post #277
Casteil wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except for the weird dogs. "A deepness in the sky" is the epitome for me.

I quit that book at the dogs. I understand that it's a great book and I ought to pick it up again, but goddamn those chapters were bad. And to be honest, the glaring similarity between early internet and nntp and Vinge's far future networking was distracting. Perhaps I'm misremembering that part...

True Names was pretty great.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#303

Post by thfuran »

tim333 wrote: post #251
PaulHoule wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, they do manage to get by on about 20 W.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#304

Post by AlwaysRock »

adrianhon wrote: post #44

A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.

The ARG in Rainbows end seems more realistic and somehow even enjoyable than anything ive ever heard pitched by a real company.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#306

Post by thfuran »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #292
blauditore wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

AGI (human level intelligence) is not an really an end goal but a point that will be surpassed. So, by looking at it as something asymptotically approaching an ideal 100% is fundamentally wrong. That 100% mark is going to be in the rear view mirror at some point. And it's a bit of an arbitrary mark as well. Of course it doesn't help that people are a bit hand wavy about what that mark exactly is to begin with. We're…

>But at some point it becomes a simple matter of throwing more hardware at the problem.

Insofar as it's simple to throw like six orders of magnitude more hardware at something that has already had a lot of hardware thrown at it.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#307

Post by pontifier »

Cryogenator wrote: post #255
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.

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 peo…

Well said! If anything, I'd say the money spent on traditional funerals is more of a scam but nobody seems to talk about that.

Expensive coffins, elaborate headstones, burial plot sales, etc.

As soon as somebody tries to spend their money in a way that might actually benefit them, people get defensive or try to justify death as noble or natural.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#308

Post by pontifier »

samatman wrote: post #261
topynate wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, that is a living rat-sized kidney. Not a dead human-sized brain. And on a pass-fail grade, I'm giving that experiment a fail. Promising, yes. Cryopreservation of corpses is a scam designed to fleece rich people with an extraordinary fear of death. Some justify it to themselves as supporting research which might lead to effective corpsicles, but to support such research they could simply donate to it. Not waste t…

By that logic, computers are a dead end because Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1 never really worked properly... Or that space travel is impossible because a lot of early rockets blew up on the pad.

I don't understand this kind of pessimism at all.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#309

Post by [deleted] »

tim333 wrote: post #251
PaulHoule wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#310

Post by nessus42 »

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.

A Fire Upon the Deep is one of the all-time great science fiction novels.
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