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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#311

Post by samatman »

pontifier wrote: post #308
samatman wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might work someday, maybe. But it won't work now. The corpsicles which currently exist are just as dead as if they were cremated. I understand, sort of, the psychology of people who lie to themselves about this, but that's all that's happening.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#312

Post by adastra22 »

samatman wrote: post #311
pontifier wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might work someday, maybe. But it won't work now. The corpsicles which currently exist are just as dead as if they were cremated. I understand, sort of, the psychology of people who lie to themselves about this, but that's all that's happening.

You don't know what future technological capability will be. Current Alcor and CI patients are preserved well enough that their bodies and brains could in theory be repaired by technology at the physical limits of possibility. The information is there.

You are saying that existing technology is unable to fix the issues of vitrification. That is correct, but irrelevant.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#313

Post by mechagodzilla »

jart wrote: post #101
mechagodzilla wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might generate improvements, but I’m not sure why people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think of it like improvements to jet engines or internal combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by decades of very tiny improvements. We’ve gone from 32-bit LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that. Moore’s is running on fumes for proces…

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.

That speedup compared to Nvidia's previous generation came nearly entirely from: 1) a small process technology improvement from TSMC, 2) more silicon area, 3) more power consumption, and 4) moving to FP4 from FP8 (halving the precision). They aren't delivering the 'free lunch' between generations that we had for decades in terms of "the same operations faster and using less power." They're delivering increasingly exotic chips for increasingly crazy amounts of money.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#314

Post by mechagodzilla »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #94
mechagodzilla wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might generate improvements, but I’m not sure why people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think of it like improvements to jet engines or internal combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by decades of very tiny improvements. We’ve gone from 32-bit LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that. Moore’s is running on fumes for proces…

Saying that AI hardware is near a dead end because Moore's law is running out of steam is silly. Even GPUs are very general purpose, we can make a lot of progress in the hardware space via extreme specialization, approximate computing and analog computing.

I'm mostly saying that unless a chip-designing AI model is an actual magical wizard, it's not going to have a lot of advantage over teams of even mediocre human engineers. All of the stuff you're talking about is Moore's Law limited after 1-2 generations of wacky architectural improvements.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#315

Post by Cryogenator »

samatman wrote: post #311
pontifier wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might work someday, maybe. But it won't work now. The corpsicles which currently exist are just as dead as if they were cremated. I understand, sort of, the psychology of people who lie to themselves about this, but that's all that's happening.

You don't know that because you don't know the physical limits of reanimation technology. In 2014, a human brain was vitrified with no ice crystallization or fracturing for the first time. Certainly, the first viable preservation will occur (if it has not already occurred) long before the first reanimation, and eventually discovering that we began to preserve people too soon would be much better than discovering that we began not soon enough. Even the primitively frozen might be retrievable centuries from now.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#316

Post by e40 »

jhbadger wrote: post #207
e40 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got this on CD-ROM back in the 90's. It was really fun looking through stuff.

Yes, the Hugo-Nebula 1993 CD-ROM. That included some of the earliest (some say the earliest) examples of ebooks based on current fiction (rather than on out-of-copyright classic books). I have it myself still somewhere.

Yes, that was it! I haven't seen mine for a couple of decades. Too aggressive purging of stuff, so I think I won't see it ever again.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#317

Post by Afton »

PaulHoule wrote: post #222
dekhn wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whipping Star has some amazing alien vs human discourse (at least, that's my memory from ~20 years ago!). It was the first time I found alien dialog that didn't sound like repackaged English.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#318

Post by lll-o-lll »

TimSchumann wrote: post #54
jl6 wrote: post #8

Oh man, this makes me sad. I remember reading A Fire Upon the Deep based on a Usenet recommendation, and then immediately wanting to read everything else he wrote. A Deepness in the Sky is a worthy sequel. He wasn’t prolific, but what he wrote was gold. He had a Tolkienesque ability to build world depth not by lengthy exposition, but by expert omission . A true name in sci-fi.

I'm stuck halfway through Deepness in the Sky, I should pick it up again. Also stuck on book 8 of the Wheel of Time series, I was like 5 chapters in and didn't pick up a single thread I cared about from the previous book. Agree about the expert omission part.

Yes, the self indulgence reached record heights by timing death before completion. Just so we could have infinite fields of boring politics.

In the paperbacks, each chapter with the “bad guys” had a special symbol on it, so I just skipped through the middle books reading only those. Fortunately the Dark One was still trying to progress the plot, and I don’t think I missed much.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#319

Post by lll-o-lll »

db48x wrote: post #155
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The zipheads were crippled with a weaponized virus that turned them all into autistic savants. The virus was somewhat magnetic, and using MRI like technologies, they could target specific parts of the brain to be affected to lesser or greater degrees. It's been awhile since I've re-read it, but "focused" was the propaganda label for it from the monstrous tyrannical regime that used it to turn people into zombies, no?

Not zombies, but loving slaves. People able to apply all of their creativity and problem–solving skills to any task given to them, but without much capacity for reflection or any kind of personal ambitions or desires.

Or ability to remember to feed, clean, or toilet themselves.

It’s that hyper-focus that I suspect many of us have experienced, but without agency and permanent. Worse than slavery.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#320

Post by astrange »

causi wrote: post #296
kristianp wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't buy the audio relaying wolf packs either, but enjoyed the other aspects of his fiction.

It's always a little sad when you can tell the things the author finds the most interesting about their fiction aren't the same things you find the most interesting. I wanted a lot more of the blight and the powers and the zones and a lot less dogs talking to children.

He's intentionally trying to make the superintelligences stay superintelligent by not describing them. I think it's pretty effective. He did the same thing in Across Realtime.

His first book Tatja Grimm's World was also about superintelligent people (or the whole rest of the planet except them was sub-intelligent, or something… it's not clear). That one is, hmm, not nearly as good as his later ones. So I think it's just as well he didn't try.

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