51–60 of 175 posts
What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book.
I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it involves a civilization of spider-like aliens. How is it?
I enjoyed the sci-fi parts of this book. The whole thing about the ship trying to evade the Blight was some of the best hard sci-fi I've come across. What I liked less was the subplot about the children marooned in a medieval-style society of dog-like aliens, which got a bit Game of Thrones-y for my taste, and felt like a completely different book. I considered reading A Deepness in the Sky, but then learned it invol…
I had to google what "ENCRYPTED DAISY download. For print-disabled users" means. " "Print disabled" books are those that have been specially formatted in the DAISY format for users who can not read regular print books. These titles are only accessible on a specialized device to patrons having a key issued by the Library of Congress. " " The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) format is a means of creating d…
While I agree with you that better accessibility is good for all users, your framing of this is a bit offensive[2]. I know you don’t mean to be, but you’re framing a big accessibility win for a community that faces serious everyday challenges as somehow being bad. Maybe don’t do that?
Edit: There is the potential for a big mutual win here. If sighted persons could pay fair value for DTBs, it would incentivize publishers to make more titles available. We would get the format's benefits and the blind community would get access to more titles.
[2] I'm not speaking for others, I'm relaying what I was told.
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
Vinge invented the idea (and name) of the singularity.
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways…
The "focused" remind me of the mentats from the Dune universe, but less general purpose-- more like replicating feedback-based control systems. I have a back-of-the-mind worry that our society will end up with a class of citizens working in "focused" roles powering "intelligent" systems.
For those that aren't familiar, a short teaser: Future archaeologists have traveled to a remote asteroid to investigate an alien artifact found within it, a computing device of some kind. They bring it to life and begin extracting its data and programs for their research. A debate breaks out about the substantial virus risk known to be associated with these "found" computing devices. They decide to cut and run, but n…
This scene in the book is maybe one of the earliest examples of fuzzing being used n fiction :-) ?
(TAoP1 is a much-overlooked example of . . . well, I wouldn't call it cyberpunk, but definitely counter-culture computing. In the IBM world, I think that means you refuse to wear a tie. It's technically dated -- think modems-and-megabytes -- but still kind of fun).
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.
Vinge invented the idea (and name) of the singularity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Technological...
Vinge did "present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace" in True Names in 1981 though.
> True Names is a 1981 science fiction novella by American writer Vernor Vinge, a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.