271–280 of 334 posts
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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.
I once worked with a guy who was a close personal friend of Vernor, and I remember with much joy the enormous collection of science fiction he (the friend) had at his place .. literally every wall was covered in paperback shelves, and to my eyes it was a wonderland. I casually browsed every shelf, enamoured with the collection of scifi .. until I got to what I can only describe as a Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Ha…
Science Fiction - the literature - is so different from all other media forms of SciFi there needs to be a formal separate of Science Fiction Literature from SciFi films, live action and animated series, games, and comic books. These other forms, SciFi, are the cartoon abbreviated to something else that is fun, adventure but is not Science Fiction (Literature) and the existential examination of how Science Changes Re…
A few examples: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, Moon, much of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Prospect, etc.
And for that matter there is plenty of SciFi in print as well, and it isn't all novelizations of movies and TV shows.
There is certainly more room for exposition in a novel (a fact which plenty of authors have abused over the decades, and plenty of directors have abdicated responsibility for by tacking on lengthy voiceover or on-screen text introductions), which often allows for more complete worldbuilding to explore whatever contrafactual premise the story is built around, but it is possible on-screen as well, as long as you don't rely solely on the dialog to convey it. For that matter, books shouldn't rely solely on the dialog for that purpose either.
Of course, on-screen dramatic works aren't the only ones that face the problem of conveying a setting in few words. Novellas, novelettes, and short stories have similar constraints to various degrees.
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You didn't read him correctly; he's not saying Blackwell is AGI. I believe that he's saying that perhaps Blackwell could be computationally sufficient for AGI if "used correctly." I don't know where that "computationally sufficient" line is. It'll always be fuzzy (because you could have a very slow, but smart entity). And before we have a working AGI, thinking about how much computation we need always comes down to b…
I don't use the A word, because it's one of those words that popular culture has poisoned with fear, anger, and magical thinking. I can at least respect Kurzweil though and he says the human brain has 10 petaflops. Blackwell has 20 petaflops. That would seem to make it capable of superhuman intelligence to me. Especially if we consider that it can focus purely on thinking and doesn't have to regulate a body. Imagine…
If a human brain does its magic with 10 petaflops, and you have 1 petaflop, you should be able to make an equivalent to the human brain that runs at 1/10th of the speed but never sleeps. In other words, once you've reached the same order of magnitude it doesn't matter.
On the other hand, Kurzweil's math really comes down to an argument that the brain is using about 10 petaflops for inference, but it also is changing weights and doing a lot more math and optimization for training (which we don't completely understand). It may (or may not) take considerably more than 10 petaflops to train at the rate humans learn. And remember, humans take years to do anything useful.
Further, 10 petaflops may be enough math, but it doesn't mean you can store enough information or flow enough state between the different parts "of the model."
These are the big questions. If we knew the answers, IMO, we would already have really slow AGI.
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The key insight always was hexapodia.
IIRC from the annotations (it's been a while), Vinge did not intend that Twirlip was right about everything; Twirlip was merely meant to a representation of the weird things you used to get on Usenet. But it worked out fairly well. (On the one hand, this might technically be a spoiler, but on the other, I think in practice even knowing this tidbit won't actually give anything away.) (I'm glad someone linked to this.…
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VV is up there with Stephenson and Gibson as the top 3. I don't put Asimov, etc in there since Asimov was hard sci-fi to the max and couldn't write a character to save his life, much like later Stephenson. I wish I could find something else like VV's work that's sort of under-the-radar. I do have to mention that things like The Three Body Problem get hype, but are several tiers below VVs work.
not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.
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.
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There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...
Thank you - I love HN for things like this! A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books/series. RIP
This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
R.I.P. dear friend, you will be missed and remembered.
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Book spoilers. IIRC wasn't it the chamber/ship of someone he worked with, that he tolerated? Read it like six or seven years ago, so the details are fuzzy. The impression I kept was that he did a lot of evil stuff not because he relished the suffering he created in others, but because he didn't mind it.
It's both. On one hand, he is aware that one of his valued subordinates "needs" to regularly murder people, and doesn't consider it an issue so long as that subordinate remains productive and is kept in check to avoid "wasting resources". But there's also a record of him personally torturing and raping one of the captives for the sake of it - which he keeps around, presumably to rewatch every now and then.
Anyway I think the point remains - after that point, the reader is meant to understand that the emergents self-serving justifications are just that.
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.