My first "job" in computing, where someone else paid me for code, was in a research context where we were modeling radio propagation. Nothing about that was removing human labor. It in face eventually called for a bunch of humans to interact with each other. See: https://www.hamsci.org/basic-project/2017-total-solar-eclips...
I don't think it is fair to claim computers are about putting people out of jobs.
I think it is. Before computers you would have had to write all that down on paper logs. By using code, you saved yourself time. If it wasn't less labor, you wouldn't have done it that way.
Computer used to mean "human who does math". Before machine computers, we had human computers. Machine computers replaced all of these human computers.
And without software, what then, make a bunch of books and mail it to all these people? On this site of all sites, it's blowing my mind that this kind of thing isn't obvious to everyone. I guess maybe it isn't if you were born before the internet, but man, I'm really surprised by some of these comments.
You can still easily buy it here, but the over-the-counter pills are always mixed with other ingredients to make it more difficult to convert them into amphetamines.
E.g. Contac 600 Plus can be found in basically all drug stores and it has 120mg of Pseudoephedrine, 100mg Caffeine, 8mg Chlorpheniramine, and 0.4mg of Belladonna Extract. It sounds like it'll actually be illegal to import into Japan, since 120/(120 + 100 + 8 + 0.4) is over 10%, but I've previously just walked into a drug store and bought a packet.
Not for the ones you buy in Japan, since those are legal.
But, it's not unheard of to get randomly stopped by the police and searched, especially in touristy areas like train stations. Unless you're a Japanese citizen, you have to show ID, and although the searches are optional, most people agree to them.
For customs, usually a few people from each plane are searched.
Anecdotally, if you're a tourist, they're usually looking for medicine that was legal outside of Japan, but illegal within Japan, with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post). And if they decide to prosecute you, you'd probably get a suspended sentence (so no prison time), but you'd get deported and a temporary ban from coming back to Japan.
> with small amounts leading to being detained for 23 days (like in this blog post)
This seems ultimately like a very bad sales pitch for the tourism industry in Japan. I had thought I wanted to go to Japan but if I can accidentally, without malice, be thrown in a prison for 20 days that seems like a bad system.
I can't imagine the international relations of the ruling classes of various countries to the UAE would be trending in a positive direction if they arrested and punished people for walking off a plane with airplane bottles of alcohol.
Probably the same thing you do in the states if you have high blood pressure: make do with lesser medications, pain killers, lots of liquids, and push through it.
Warning: This is not medical advice, I am a nerd on the internet not a doctor
For what it is worth different countries have vastly different recommendations for HBP and these drugs. I recommend discussing with the pharmacists in your country.
In the US I have been told it's a strict "never", in Ireland I was told that it wouldn't have a measurable effect on blood pressure. I've also measured my personal blood pressure (pre-hypertension to stage 1) and have not been able to measure a difference in blood pressure.
One would be scope. There's a big difference between a security camera next to a secure facility (bank, police evidence facility, school) and a 1 mi radius circle around that facility. Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Another would be incentives. There's no reason to collect cell location data for everyone if you aren't able to use it for anything. I think just the fact that we are all monitored constantly is its own violation of our rights. We should have laws banning these practices.
Here's the text of the fourth amendment. Could you explain how "scope" and "incentives" are relevant distinguishing factors under that?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
As relevant here, there's two pieces. The threshold requirement is some sort of ownership. The right exists with respect to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Assuming digital data constitutes "papers," the accused has to show that it's "their" papers. The hypothetical you're responding to compares the bank's camera footage with the cell phone company's location information. Those seem indistinguishable for that prong.
You have a reasonable argument that "scope" and "incentives" are relevant to the second prong of what's "unreasonable." But you don't get there if you don't get past the first prong, right?
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.
No, of course we don't believe they would have written it that way today. But neither you nor me nor anyone else gets to make up what we think they'd have said. They didn't say it. They're dead. They can't change what the law says. But, guess what? We can.
The law as written provides the rules of the game. Nobody should get to cheat, not the government, not a citizen, not a business, just because someone can plausibly argue that if the law were rewritten today it'd be written differently.
If the claim is true that the law would be and should be written differently today, then: Rewrite. The. Law.
If you don't have enough public support for that, then you have no business imposing your view on your fellow citizens. If you do have enough public support, but Congress is being dysfunctional (this is usually the case today), then communicate with your congresspeople and/or try vote them out, and persuade your fellow citizens to do the same. Don't cheat at the game. Play it.
Now, to be fair, those polls aren't asking people about location data specifically. I'm open to seeing specific polling on this issue. But based on the lack of any political will to do anything about TSA, my suspicion is that "regular citizens" are okay with the police using location data to catch bank robbers.
So maybe your "the game is rigged" point cuts the other way. It's rigging the game when fancy lawyers make complicated arguments about what James Madison would have thought about geofencing, in an effort to impose shackles on the police "regular citizens" never voted for.
IMO it is tangibly different. Having yourself, your things, or your house searched in the 1700s is a much bigger inconvenience and invasion of privacy than a cellular provider noting your phone was in the general vicinity of an area. I don't think the spirit or intent of the amendment would apply in cases where there is no tangible impact to the individual being searched.
If we don't want the government to be able to do that, we should pass laws to that effect.
A third party giving an indication as to where my phone might be is not comparable to having my house searched by soldiers.
Though again, making no judgment as to whether or not it should be allowed. I just think it should be a law, and not casting modern values on the 1700s era founders' words.
Oh, absolutely. But the general idea here is that just because it can be done without inconveniencing you should not really make a difference: there were no such things as databases and remote monitoring in those days unless you want to equate some written record in the physical possession of the authorities as a 'search of your person', which it clearly would not be. So this tech angle opens up all kinds of cans of worms (scale, speed, scope to name a few) and the founders whose words are holy had absolutely no way to anticipate this. If they had I'm fairly sure they would have had something reasonable to be said about it, those were pretty smart guys and they seem to have had the right intent on safeguarding the country for as far as they could look ahead.
I'm also pretty sure they would be 100% horrified by what it has become.
So yes, it should be law. The US supreme court however does not make laws (or at least, they shouldn't be), they interpret the constitution. And the US constitution is well overdue for a more tech aware version, it's just that with the lawmakers apparently in the pockets of the tech billionaires I think that the chances of such an overhaul approach zero.
> Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them.
I suspect you're right--a bunch of high-IQ libertarian men who had just overthrown their government would write the 4th amendment differently if confronted with universal digital surveillance. But is that how we decide the legal effect of the constitution? We're stuck not only with what the founders actually wrote, but what they would have written if confronted with modern facts?
What are the parameters of this analysis? Do we assume the same James Madison--we have transported him into present day with his knowledge and thought processes intact and are simply presenting him with additional facts? Or do we assume a modern James Madison--the same kind of person today that James Madison was back then. And who decides what reincarnated James Madison would or would not have done--and why do we trust that this medium is correct?
I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used. But we won't go so far as to speculate about what the founders would have written if confronted with modern facts. We have people who can decide what to do about modern facts: they're called voters.
The fact they allowed for ammendments tells me they acknowledge that things would change in the future. Nobody can predict the future, but allowing for a "living" document to be updated with the times suggests that's their allowing some flex. Here's where we are starting, but if we get 2/3 of both chambers to agree, then update the original.
> I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used.
This is a bit of a specious argument, though, since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant. You even point this out above: what is ownership, and what is unreasonable? Does entrusting your effects to a third party for safe keeping make them less your effects, etc.
> since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant.
Sure. But what "they necessarily meant by the words they said" is different from "what they would have said if confronted with different facts."
The ownership issue is a good example. Does the word "their ... papers and effects" include third-party data about someone? Third-party data existed in 1789. British people love record-keeping, and the founders were sophisticated people with lawyers, accountants, merchant accounts, etc. If the fourth amendment meant to include third-party information about someone, the founders wouldn't have used the ownership language that they used.
So the real argument is that, if the founders saw how important and sensitive third-party information is today, they would have included it. They wouldn't have used the ownership language they used. That's quite a different argument! It's not just trying to understand what people meant by the words they used. It's trying to reanimate them and ask them questions to scenarios they never contemplated.
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
> If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.
Yes, but the only way to do that is to say that the dead hand of the founders overrules current Virginia law. The plaintiffs want James Madison from his grave to impose restrictions on the police that voters in Virginia in 2026 have declined to impose.
Not according to the comment I was responding to: "Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws."
Things can change in a way that's covered by the Constitution. Say, technology that makes Fourth Amendment violations easier to do; still potentially covered!
Things can change in a way that's not covered by the Constitution. Now you need an amendment.
The Fourth Amendment is quite broad and can thus handle all sorts of change.
You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:
> Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."
No, it doesn't. The person I'm responding to is using semantics to claim the 4th amendment didn't mention scope and therefore privacy against search is irrelevant. My point is that acting as though the constitution of the us is some infallible holy text leads society down a path with learned priests interpreting arcane texts (you are here). Instead of acting as a rational society and addressing a need for citizens to have privacy in a changing technological world.
Debating who the "we" is is losing the forest for the trees--we're wading into a conversation debating the power of a state or local municipality instead of looking at the actual issue where the federal government isn't protecting is citizens because "technically the slaveowners didn't say cell phone in their document".
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.
I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.
>Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Given the ubiquity of security cameras they can just canvas local businesses and ask them to give it up. Given that warrants are involved, they can't even refuse.
A business can refuse a warrant, but it takes a legal response in court. Their attorneys need to convince a judge the warrant isn’t necessary - that it causes a bigger burden on them than the benefit to the public. Most businesses will just comply because it’s not in their interests to spend time and money on it.
Sometimes a business will challenge a court order if it’s about their own customers, employees, owners, or business dealings. The information requested should be relevant to the investigation, minimal to be helpful, and create as little burden on the business as is practical.
Also, if you’re not the subject of the investigation it’s often a subpoena rather than a warrant. There are major differences between these types of order in the US. A subpoena is an order to produce the evidence. A warrant is an order that allows law enforcement to seize it, using force if needed. As someone who has dealt with law enforcement requests for business data about customers quite a bit in the past, it’s often a simple request first and a subpoena otherwise.
Yes! That would be fantastic! They would need to approach many people, each having the ability to question the motivation! Or, they would need to convince a judge and obtain a warrant.
This is the disaggregation of power of surveillance.
The side effects of spending funds on these mega projects is also something to consider. NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies.
Maybe if we'll get rack-sized fusion reactors out of it, I will consider the AI/Datacenter spending craze in the same light as NASA projects. Until then, they are rich kids' vanity projects and nothing more.
> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day
We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).
If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet.
Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get.
We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically different.
Again, all of this is obvious if you spend 1k hours with the current crop, this isn’t making any capability gain forecasts.
Just for a dumb example, there is a great ChatGPT agent for Instacart, you can share a photo of your handwritten shopping list and it will add everything to your cart. Just following through the obvious product conclusions of this capability for every grocery vendor’s app, integrating with your fridge, learning your personal preferences for brands, recipe recommendation systems, logistics integrations with your forecasted/scheduled demand, etc is I contend going to be equivalent engineering effort and impact to the move from brick and mortar to online stores.
You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right?
AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end".
No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it's at least possible, right?
> then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting
I believe that some of my made up examples won’t end up getting built, but my point is that there is _so much_ low hanging fruit like this.
Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.
In my forecast the possible worlds where progress stops and then the existing models don’t end up making anything interesting are almost exclusively scenarios like “Taiwan was invaded, TSMC fabs were destroyed, and somehow we deleted existing datacenters’ installed capacity too” or “neo-Luddites take over globally and ban GPUs”, all of this gives sub-1% likelihood.
You can imagine 5-10% likelihood worlds where the growth rate of new chips dramatically decreases for a decade due to a single black-swan event like Taiwan getting glassed, but that’s a temporary setback not a permanent blocker.
Again, I’m just looking at all the things that can obviously be built now, and just haven’t made it to the top of the list yet. I’m extremely confident that this todo list is already long enough that “this all fizzles to nothing” is basically excluded.
I think if model progress stops then everyone investing in ASI takes a big haircut, but the long-term stock market progression will look a lot like the internet after the dot com boom, ie the bloodbath ends up looking like a small blip in the rear view mirror.
I guess, a question for you - how do you think about coding agents? Don’t they already show AI is going to do more than “end up uninteresting”?
Coding agents are interesting, but in my opinion also many worlds away from what they're being sold as. They can be helpful and a moderate efficiency gain, if you know where to use them and you're careful to not fall into one of their many traps where they end up being a massive cost and efficiency loss down the line. They're helpful tools, but they're slow, expensive, and unreliable -- in order of decreasing likelihood that that's going to change in a big way.
I find it interesting that you chose the shopping list and fridge examples, because my view on the whole LLM hype is that 99% of it is a solution looking for a problem, and shopping and the fridge are historically such a commonly advertised area for technologies desparately looking for an actual use case. I don't think fridge content management and shopping plans are actual pain points in most people's lives. It's not something people would see a benefit in if they didn't have to do it manually. And it's an area with a very low tolerance for the systemic unreliability. The guy needed eggs to bake his cake, but the AI got him eggos instead -- et voilà, another person who thinks this whole "smart" technology is shit and won't deal with it anymore.
And so it goes with most AI use cases I've seen so far. In my view the only thing they're good at is fuzzy search. Coding agents are helpful, but in the end, their secret sauce it just that: fuzzy search.
Can fuzzy search be helpful? Yes, even very helpful! "Bigger than the Internet" helpful? I think not.
> Of course, anything is _possible_, but let’s talk likelihood.
The problem with talking likelihood is that it's an interpretation game. I understand you think it's wholly unlikely that it all fizzles out, I could read that from your first post. I hope it's also clear that I do think it's likely.
That's the point where we have to just agree to disagree. We have no rapport. I have no reason to trust your judgment, and neither do you mine.
However I do feel a lot of this comes down to facts about the world now, eg whether Claude Opus is doing anything interesting, which are in principle places where you could provide some evidence or ideas, along the lines of the detail that I gave you.
My read so far is you are just saying “maybe it fizzles out” which is not going to persuade anyone who disagrees. Sure, “maybe”, especially if you don’t put probabilities on anything; that statement is not falsifiable.
> The problem with talking likelihood is that it's an interpretation game
I am open to updating my model in response to a causal argument, if you care to give more detail. I view likelihoods as the only way to make these sorts of conversations concrete enough that anyone could hope to update each other’s model.
i feel a lot of people in tech have this incuriously deterministic attitude about llms right now… previous <expensive capital project> revolutionized the world, therefore llms will! despite there really nothing to show for it so far other than writing rote code is a bit easier and still requires active baby sitting by someone who knows what they are doing
They’re already far more useful than that, and I suspect harness engineering alone could add another OOM of productivity, without any underlying change in the models available today.
Even if chatbot LLM's stop at their current capability, There's a whole ecosystem of scientific language models(in drug discovery, chemistry, materials design, etc), and engineering language models(software, chip design, etc) that are very valuable in their fields.
And even if chatbot LLM's seem to be a dead end, them and other machine learning algo's will be happy to use the data centers to create/discover a lot of stuff.
AI progress may fizzle out, but everything it produced so far would still be there. Models are just big bags of floats - once trained, they're around forever (well, at least until someone deletes them), same is true about harnesses they run in (it's just programs).
But AI proliferation is not stopping soon, because we've not picked up even the low hanging fruits just yet. Again, even if no new SOTA models were to be trained after today, there's years if not decades of R&D work into how to best use the ones we have - how to harness the big ones, where to embed the small ones, and of course, more fundamental exploration of the latent spaces and how they formed, to inform information sciences, cognitive sciences, and perhaps even philosophy.
And if that runs out or there is an Anti AI Revolution, we can still run those weather models and route planners on the chips once occupied by LLMs - just don't tell the proles that those too are AI, or it's guillotine o'clock again.
> there's years if not decades of R&D work into how to best use the ones we have - how to harness the big ones, where to embed the small ones, and of course, more fundamental exploration of the latent spaces and how they formed, to inform information sciences, cognitive sciences, and perhaps even philosophy.
I think my sense of "dead end" would entail none of those directions panning out into anything interesting. You would "explore the latent spaces" only to find nothing of value. Embedding the LLM models wouldn't end up doing anything useful for whatever reason, and philosophy would continue on without any change.
What will happen is that new buzzwords will be invented, and a new fad will take its place. And we will be stuck with the short end of the stick again. You can hope, but shit doesn't really get cheaper for us common folk, ever. :/
I think there is little chance it is a "dead end", it's here to stay but at least LLMs seem to have hit the diminishing returns curve already, despise what investors might think, and so far none of the big providers actually makes money for all that investment
I think for many, if LLMs and AI only improves marginally in the next 5-10 years it is effectively a dead end. The capital expenditure necessitates AI does something exponentially more valuable than what it does now.
I think we are saying the same thing.i just think the pull back on AI will be dramatic unless something amazing happens very soon.
I just don’t see it. Both professionally and personally I’m producing so much more now. Back burner projects that weren’t worth months of my time are easily worth a few hours and $20 or whatever.
You’re probably already experienced at your job and using AI to enhance that, or at least using that experience to keep the AI results clean. That’s something you or a company would want to pay for but it has to be a lot more than today’s prices to make it profitable. Companies want to get more out of you, or get a better price/performance ratio (an AI that delivers cheaper than the equivalent human).
But current gen AIs are like eternal juniors, never quite ready to operate independently, never learning to become the expert that you are, they are practically frozen in time to the capabilities gained during training. Yet these LLMs replaced the first few rungs of the ladder so human juniors have a canyon to jump if they want the same progression you had. I’m seeing inexperienced people just using AI like a magic 8 ball. “The AI said whatever”. [0] LLMs are smart and cheap enough to undercut human juniors, especially in the hands of a senior. But they’re too dumb to ever become a senior. Where’s the big money in that? What company wants to pay for the “eternal juniors” workforce and whatever they save on payroll goes to procuring external seniors which they’re no longer producing internally?
So I’m not too sure a generation of people who have to compete against the LLMs from day 1 will really be producing “so much more” of value later on. Maybe a select few will. Without a big jump in model quality we might see “always junior” LLMs without seniors to enhance. This is not sustainable.
And you enhancing your carpentry skills for your free time isn’t what pays for the datacenters and some CEO’s fat paycheck.
[0] I hire trainees/interns every year, and pore through hundreds of CVs and interviews for this. The quality of a significant portion of them has gone way down in the past years, coinciding with LLMs gaining popularity.
This is thoroughly debunked at this point. The frontier labs are profitable on the tokens they serve. They are negative when you bake in the training costs for the next generation.
So what. Fluctuations over a year or two are meaningless. Do you really believe that the constant-dollar price of an LLM token will be higher in 20 years?
I can see a world where energy costs rise at a rate faster than overall inflation, or are a leading indicator. In that scenario then yes I could see LLM token costs going up.
Lol are people like you going to be enough to support the large revenues? Nope.
A firm that see's rising operating expenses but no not enough increase in revenue will start to cut back on spending on LLMs and become very frugal (e.g. rationing).
I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas?
There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book.
Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.
Disagree for dungeon crawler carl & any of the Bobiverse - while they're fine books, wouldn't class it in the category of interesting ideas, it's just pop fiction.
I'd look at the following:
Hyperion Book One (For the book style + ideas throughout the short stories - you only need to read book one)
Solaris, Lem (What would an alien intelligence truly look like, especially in planet size scales, really interesting theories)
House Of Leaves (Classic for exploration of horror - not sci-fi, but within the wheelhouse)
Maxwell's Demon (Hated the ending, but the first half of the book explores some interesting ideas)
Children of Time (Good sci-fi based book exploring morality + intelligence)
Annihilation (Sci-fi, no spoilers but great book)
Venemous Lumpsucker (near future sci-fi, fantastic as a set of vignettes within the story)
Closest to Antimemetics divison personally would be Maxwell's Demon + House of Leaves.
My hard disagree on the Bobiverse as well. Feels like the typical book I ought to like based on my interests and the other things I like, but the ideas somehow fall way, way short of qntm's writing.
And +1 on "Annihilation" – I started reading that to another recommendation for "books similar to TINAD" here and basically couldn't put it down. The similarity is purely based on mood, though – don't expect an actually similar novel in terms of ideas and presentation.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not science fiction. At least I would not recommend it to someone looking for science fiction with “interesting ideas.” It’s a comedy about an RPG with magic.
But if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s pretty good
Probably the most novel part of DCC is that it's kind of an implicit response to a whole class of 'what if the world worked like an RPG' fiction, examinining the premises those works as a genre leave glossed over. Which is neat in a meta-textual kind of way, but yeah, definitely not science fiction.
That was a good mindbender indeed. I'd add "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Steven Baxter. Beware of spoilers high up the wikipedia page [0]. Tells a good tale of unexpected externalities of disruptive technology introduction.
Very personal counterpoint: I find Stross writing extremely bland, contrived, and badly paced.
I really really disliked Accelerando in particular, finding it completely vacuous, the sciencey namedrops is self-aggrandising and sound like attempts at reader flattery, the entire plot is telegraphed, characters are generic and perfectly forgettable.
It was several friends recommendation and I only got reading through the whole ordeal because whenever I asked "well I'm about there and it doesn't click" they answered "no spoiler, just a dozen pages and you'll see!"
Not a critic, again this is my personal experience of it. If people enjoyed it, more power to them.
+1 for Stross, Egan and the Bobiverse - I haven't read the others so will have a look, just wanted to add Stand on Zanzibar by Brunner, if the Bobiverse is there then MurderBot should be to.
I love all these. I'd add Blightsight by Peter Watts to the list. It has the creepy, psychological bent of Annihilation combined with the hard science elements common to qntm's, Neal Stephenson's and Greg Egan's books.
Would love to find more books like Blindsight, something about the way it described agency without consciousness was both creepy and extremely memorable.
Blindsight was great. I had such high hopes for their follow up novel Echopraxia, but sadly it felt rushed and under-edited, but the ideas were spectacular.
I wanted to like this, as the premise was fascinating and the word-smithing was pretty good. But something about it left me feeling a little disappointed at the end. More so the end of the entire trilogy, than Annihilation by itself though, IIRC.
I'll second your feeling on Annihilation trilogy. To me, the whole message boiled down to "my life kinda sucked, and now it sucks even more". The phenomenon ostensibly at the center of everything seems to take back seat to protagonists being bummed about it existing / their lives in general.
His book is great, but to be clear I feel like he writes exactly one book. I've read it in many forms and it's an amazing book. But don't be surprised when you realize that every book is just him trying to find a new way to look at the same object over and over again.
Very enjoyable but his short stories are great because they force him to focus on one idea instead of how his whole world view fits together.
If you want the druggy, high-concept, ersatz-reality version go with Philip K. Dick - namely The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS.
If you want the intellectual take go with A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), Oryx and Crake (Atwood) or Solaris (Lem).
If you want the 60s hard-science rooted societal outlook from an ex-Naval Engineer with strong views on gender roles, it's all about Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers etc..
If you want something to share with the young adults in your life, or simply some of the finest writing in the contemporary British YA canon, then Philip Pulman's magnificent homage to 'Paradise Lost' - the 'His Dark Materials trilogy' - cannot come more highly recommended. Usually categorised as 'fantasy', and heavily indebted to Milton and Blake, this represents a master-class in parallel-universe world building with its own take on a Steampunk Oxford and a number of other science fiction tropes.
Blindsight by Peter Watts explores interesting ideas about conscience and intelligence, but these ideas are wrapped in a mediocre action movie plot that becomes nonsensical by the end.
You really start wondering when they are introduced and it all kind of clicks at the end, when we realize we had the rug pulled from under our feet when the book started, and we only know it by the point we land on our faces.
> "science fiction books that explore interesting ideas?"
I think that's a big part of being in the Sci-Fi genre and I don't really get people whinging about writing style - this isn't Chaucer, it's fun geeky ideas. I second basically any Greg Egan and Charles Stross and Arthur C. Clarke stories, and:
Vernor Vinge's trilogy: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, Across Realtime. Ideas from "World War II on an alien planet around a variable star where the whole planet freezes every few years" to timewarp bubbles, galactic zones of thought, cyborg enhancements, semi-sentient plants.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - what if we use genetic engineering to forcibly evolve monkeys towards human intelligence? Whoops our virus infected spiders instead.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - much lighter Hollywood popcorn-action sci-fi, a potential world-ending threat and a cool alien encounter.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - What if a guy's dreams could change reality, he sees a therapist who has a dream-influencing machine and wants to take over the world.
Peter F. Hamilton trilogies, much more fantasy mixed with sci-fi but has future Space Opera ideas - genetically engineered, cyborg enhanced, mind uploaded, human factions, several varieties of aliens, various future-techs.
I really like Ray Nayler’s work, who intersects his real experience in international politics with science fiction technology. His Tusks of Extinction uses the sci-fi notion of brain transfer and bringing back mammoths to explore the economical pressures behind poaching. His “Where the axe is buried” explores surveillance state technology with political bodies that feel like real modern nations.
The second and third times through get easier, once you can appreciate the patterns and links that seem extraneous and confusing at first. Totally different kind of book, but I’d put it up with Infinite Jest as far as being convoluted but incredibly rewarding. And of course more SD / tech focused.
In terms of ideas, Chiang and qntm are a tie for absolute favorite for me. I've probably thought about each individual short story more than about some entire series or multi-season TV shows in combination.
On the note of memory consuming entities and coming with spectacular worldbuilding and an outstanding prose: Leech by Hiron Ennes. Ennes latest book The Works of Vermin is even better.
Exploring "interesting ideas" is kinda broad, but I find Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Iain [M.] Banks all packed full of stuff that gets the noodle baking.
What I am saying is if your system lets me pay $x/token and open router lets me pay $y/token if x<y then someone could make money just by providing those tokens through the open router API. That would either drive up demand for your systems increasing costs or drive up supply on open router decreasing costs. Eventually the costs would converge, no?
I really can't think of a better way to respond to this situation. It is clear to me that over the next decade the amount of people who will have been hot-headed kids on the internet who grow up to fully-fledged adults who have said they no longer agree with things in ways that are not kind is going to be a lot higher. I've no doubt said things that I no longer agreed with that made sense in the context of when they were posted.
Thank you for being a good role model and setting the example that saying "that was bad, here is the context, but I don't like that I said that."
Maybe a better way to accomplish this is a free yearly physical with a doctor? The doctor can then be required to share any changes in disability with the government. Missing x years of appointments also stops your benefits. If you can't come to the doctor maybe they could do a house call?
This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:
1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)
2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)
3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments
I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.
Sorry, my comment was not clearly phrased looking back. #1 is an example of an elected official who can hire/fire. #2/#3 are not. These are all from recent litigation (in the court room and within public discourse) during the Trump presidency.
I don't think it is fair to claim computers are about putting people out of jobs.
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