right now making no sense
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
191–200 of 321 posts
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.
Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.
Early Heinlein e.g. Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, Farmer In The Sky, The Rolling Stones or for non-juveniles, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress have lots of science.
Later works, less so.
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P If you want good sci-fi a good list can be: - Ender's Game - The Martian + Project Hail Mary - A Fire Upon the Deep - Dune
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_. Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
How can you not mention Snow Crash?
And yes to the Culture.
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#194I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn.
The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition.
Convince me I'm wrong.
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#195I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn. The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition. Convince me I'm wrong.
Nah I agree with you, as someone who's read a lot of Asimov. As far as MULTIVAC stories go, I always preferred "All The Troubles of the World" (https://schools.ednet.ns.ca/avrsb/070/rsbennett/HORTON/short...).
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#196I'm going to make myself unpopular here, but I've never understood the perennial gushing about this story on hn. The writing is okay, but the ending is kind of trite (especially given the author's humanist beliefs. And there's much too much exposition. Convince me I'm wrong.
Context matters. The first guy to write X is a luminary. The next 50 people to write variations of X start falling along a spectrum, from luminary to hack. After that, everyone except children have been exposed to X, and anyone writing about it seems trite.
I suspect you've read a lot of works derived from Asimov, and now the original seems trite (when you read it after all the stuff derived from it). But the work remains foundational.
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#197No one should have to wait a trillion years for good data. Too long!
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho. feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask a…
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM. I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
> I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
I can't remember if the machines in "the evitable conflict" are ever called VACs, they might be. The themes in that story do for sure overlap with the story "Franchise" (which is explicitly multivac).
Anyway the multivac from last question probably isn't the same as the one in franchise anyway, because the franchise multivac is the same one as in "all the troubles of the world", and spoilers, but that particular multivac has other problems than entropy. It could be that they "fixed" it, but at this point the timeline with other short stories doesn't add up.
In any case, the VACs would be instances of positronic brains the way the machines in evitable conflict are, so if anything the robots are the ancestors of multivac and not the other way around.
Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently . It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").
Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.
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Re: Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.
You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.
The problem is that nobody really does that? Like, as far as I'm aware, even simple stuff such as not considering tokens that would result in a syntax error when writing code isn't being done.