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“Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

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Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#31

Post by ggm »

Analemma_ wrote: post #28
ggm wrote: post #12

Watch them ruin it.

Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Snow Crash, but let's be honest with ourselves: it's basically a dopey Schwazenegger-esque action movie for the IQ 115 crowd, in book form. We're not talking about something with ton of depth or philosophical complexity. I think HBO can manage.

Philosophy-lite is the last two chapters of bibliomania isn't it?

Every Neal Stephenson book rehearses the same ethos. He's consistently asking "but what is consciousness, anyway" in the end.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#33

Post by User23 »

jscheel wrote: post #8
ascavalcante80 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling... We shouldn't be surprised if, after that, we see a Neuromancer series on Netflix or Amazon Prime (not Disney, pls God!).

Don't play with my emotions that way. There's been talk of adapting Neuromancer to screen for waaaay to long.

Neuromancer got adapted to real life instead.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#34

Post by munk-a »

unreal37 wrote: post #24
Pfhreak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix has Altered Carbon and Black Mirror .

"3%" fits that definition too.

3% is a solid dystopian show - it's clearly got a lower budget for CG but it tends to use practical effects when possible and the CG doesn't terribly detract. It's also nice to see a Brazilian show get an international audience.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#35

Post by bcgraham »

slg wrote: post #27
Pfhreak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book is a lot of fun, but it's also not a sacred text. It's a story about a pizza delivery driver who will be murdered if he delivers pizza too late and is also a hacker getting bound up in a story of Sumerian brain programmers run amok. (And somehow these brain programmers also can infect someone's blood?) For all of its foresight, the book is goofy and dated as hell. If it's going to come to screen there's no w…

Any book that names is hero/protagonist Hiro Protagonist doesn't take itself too seriously. I think both the producers of this adaptation and the fans would be well served to do the same.

Eh, Stephenson likes puns. He did the same thing for Anathem, and I’d say that takes itself at least somewhat seriously.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#36

Post by joejerryronnie »

aidenn0 wrote: post #32

I wonder how well this will work. While the book exists on several levels, it worked really well in the 90s as the logical, but absurd, conclusion to cyberpunk. The cyberpunk aesthetic feels very dated today though.

Uh oh, don't tell CD Projekt Red

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#37

Post by User23 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #6

Nearly thirty years on, any adaptation will have to lose some of the book’s charming elements that made sense at the time, such as an America dealing with the fallout of specifically the Reagan administration, or a conspicuous amount of immigrants from early post-Soviet Tajikistan. Still, the theme of everything being privatized has held up well. The one downside of bringing Snow Crash back into the public consciousn…

Jaynes' ideas are facially wacky it's true, but they're still extremely interesting. I recommend anyone who is curious about the human condition to read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I'm not saying he gets everything (or even anything) right, but it's indisputably a really fascinating thesis.

And let's bear in mind that plenty of other obviously absurd theories actually hold up really well, relativity and quantum electrodynamics being two of the obvious big ones. Obviously the science of human consciousness is much more intractable, but even so.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#38

Post by wizardforhire »

jacquesm wrote: post #10
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #2

This book featured adversarial inputs to the human neural network long before deep learning was cool.

Epileptic seizures can be triggered, that's the only actual adversarial attack on the human neural network that I'm aware of that actually works, and is more common than you might think: https://www.epilepsysociety.org.uk/photosensitive-epilepsy

Idk, human neural networks seem to be susceptible to all sorts of adversarial attacks.

Snow-crash is the first example I know of, of the attack being condensed to a bitmap and experienced solely through the optic nerve and subsequently and substantially condensed in the time domain.

Typically the sort of results of an adversarial attack against a human neural network similar to one described in snowcrash is more indicative of long term and repeated exposure to adversarial stimulus that usually starts at birth and last through sometimes as late as adulthood. Snowcrash condenses this effect and that’s whats striking and interesting.

To elaborate, the sort of adversarial attack’s I’m thinking of, are: indoctrination; gaslighting; cycles of abuse (a very nasty one that can go on for generations!); just about anything in the cia psy-ops manual, oh and I shouldn’t leave off entrapment (that’s a fun one).

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#39

Post by munk-a »

mbrubeck wrote: post #18

I'm curious if they'll remember that Hiro Protagonist is multiracial (Black and Asian) and that this plays a role in the plot.

As played by Scarlett Johansson[1]?

1. Please do recall the casting in the live action GitS movie.

Re: “Snowcrash” to be HBO series, compete with actual early Metaverses for viewers

#40

Post by jacquesm »

schoen wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epileptic seizures can be triggered, that's the only actual adversarial attack on the human neural network that I'm aware of that actually works, and is more common than you might think: https://www.epilepsysociety.org.uk/photosensitive-epilepsy

You could say that all perceptual illusions are adversarial inputs for the human senses. They're just not damaging ones. In a lot of adversarial input stuff for AI, you're trying to get the AI to misclassify something, not necessarily to damage the AI or even change its learning at all. In Snow Crash the perceptions were definitely damaging to the perceivers, but I don't think you have to go nearly that far to have a…

True, but it was just the Snow Crash like ones that I had in mind. There are also adversarial attacks possible on all the other senses once you understand how they work at a physical or pre-processing level. You can make something cold feel hot, trigger speech patterns to go off by pre-setting them with auditory patterns, cause people to hear sounds that aren't there and so on. Given how many of these pathways are buggy it is quite impressive how well the brain can make sense of its surroundings. Mimicry in the animal kingdom is another 'adversarial input' that has potentially damaging effects on the perceivers (hunger!) but it is very much a defensive mechanism so that probably should not count either.
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