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Vernor Vinge has died

Simon321
40 replies
9h48m

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all.

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8] and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.

Looks like he was spot on.

gcr
23 replies
7h19m

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

mnsc
16 replies
7h13m

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

dsr_
13 replies
6h40m

OK. I'm imagining a correlation engine that looks through code as a series of prompts that are used to generate more code from the corpus that is statistically likely to follow.

And now I'm transforming that through the concept of taking a photograph and applying the clone tool via a light airbrush.

Repeat enough times, and you get uncompilable mud.

LLMs are not going to generate improvements.

ben_w
8 replies
6h22m

Saying they definitely won't or they definitely will are equally over-broad and premature.

I currently expect we'll need another architectural breakthrough; but also, back in 2009 I expected no-steering-wheel-included self driving cars no later than 2018, and that the LLM output we actually saw in 2023 would be the final problem to be solved in the path to AGI.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

jart
7 replies
5h0m

GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes 10,000 teraflops. NVIDIA just unveiled their latest Blackwell chip yesterday which goes 20,000 teraflops. If you buy an NVL72 rack of the things, it goes 1,400,000 teraflops. That's what Jensen Huang's GPT runs on I bet.

ben_w
6 replies
4h34m

GPT4 does inference at 560 teraflops. Human brain goes 10,000 teraflops

AFAICT, both are guesses. The low-end estimate I've seen for human brains are ~ 162 GFLOPS[0] to 10^28 FLOPS[1]; even just the model size for GPT-4 isn't confirmed, merely a combination of human inference of public information with a rumour widely described as a "leak", likewise the compute requirements.

[0] https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2022/02/17/brai...

[1] https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/

jart
5 replies
2h36m

They're not guesses. We know they use A100s and we know how fast an A100 goes. You can cut a brain open and see how many neurons it has and how often they fire. Kurzweil's 10 petaflops for the brain (100e9 neurons * 1000 connections * 200 calculations) is a bit high for me honestly. I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me. That would explain why GPT is so much smarter and faster than people. The other estimates like 1e28 are measuring different things.

mlyle
3 replies
2h24m

I don't think connections count as flops. If a neuron only fires 5-50 times a second then that'd put the human brain at .5 to 5 teraflops it seems to me.

That assumes that you can represent all of the useful parts of the decision about whether to fire or not to fire in the equivalent of one floating point operation, which seems to be an optimistic assumption. It also assumes there's no useful information encoded into e.g. phase of firing.

jart
2 replies
1h59m

Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work. Those computers are an implementation detail of the flops being provided by neurons, and would not increase the overall flop count, since that'd be counting them twice. For example, how would you measure the speed of a game boy emulator? Would you take into consideration all the instructions the emulator itself needs to run in order to simulate the game boy instructions?

mlyle
1 replies
1h13m

Already considered in my comment.

Imagine that there's a little computer inside each neuron that decides when it needs to do work

Yah, there's -bajillions- of floating point operation equivalents happening in a neuron deciding what to do. They're probably not all functional.

BUT, that's why I said the "useful parts" of the decision:

It may take more than the equivalent of one floating point operation to decide whether to fire. For instance, if you are weighting multiple inputs to the neuron differently to decide whether to fire now, that would require multiple multiplications of those inputs. If you consider whether you have fired recently, that's more work too.

Neurons do all of these things, and more, and these things are known to be functional-- not mere implementation details. A computer cannot make an equivalent choice in one floating point operation.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the brain is optimal-- perhaps you can do far less work. But if we're going to use it as a model to estimate scale, we have to consider what actual equivalent work is.

jart
0 replies
45m

I see. Do you think this is what Kurzweil was accounting for when he multiplied by 1000 connections?

queuebert
0 replies
12m

Synapses might be akin to transistor count, which is only roughly correlated with FLOPs on modern architectures.

I've also heard in a recent talk that the optic nerve carries about 20 Mbps of visual information. If we imagine a saturated task such as the famous gorilla walking through the people passing around a basketball, then we can arrive at some limits on the conscious brain. This does not count the autonomic, sympathetic, and parasympathetic processes, of course, but those could in theory be fairly low bandwidth.

There is also the matter of the "slow" computation in the brain that happens through neurotransmitter release. It is analog and complex, but with a slow clock speed.

My hunch is that the brain is fairly low FLOPs but highly specialized, closer to an FPGA than a million GPUs running an LLM.

mechagodzilla
2 replies
6h15m

They might generate improvements, but I’m not sure why people think those improvements would be unbounded. Think of it like improvements to jet engines or internal combustion engines - rapid improvements followed by decades of very tiny improvements. We’ve gone from 32-bit LLM weights down to 16, then 8, then 4 bit weights, and then a lot of messy diminishing returns below that. Moore’s is running on fumes for process improvements, so each new generation of chips that’s twice as fast manages to get there by nearly doubling the silicon area and nearly doubling the power consumption. There’s a lot of active research into pruning models down now, but mostly better models == bigger models, which is also hitting all kinds of practical limits. Really good engineering might get to the same endpoint a little faster than mediocre engineering, but they’ll both probably wind up at the same point eventually. A super smart LLM isn’t going to make sub-atomic transistors, or sub-bit weights, or eliminate power and cooling constraints, or eliminate any of the dozen other things that eventually limit you.

jart
0 replies
4h54m

Bro, Jensen Huang just unveiled a chip yesterday that goes 20 petaflops. Intel's latest raptorlake cpu goes 800 gigaflops. Can you really explain 25000x progress by the 2x larger die size? I'm sure reactionary America wanted Moore's law to run out of steam but the Taiwanese betrayal made up for all the lost Moore's law progress and then some.

CuriouslyC
0 replies
5h26m

Saying that AI hardware is near a dead end because Moore's law is running out of steam is silly. Even GPUs are very general purpose, we can make a lot of progress in the hardware space via extreme specialization, approximate computing and analog computing.

UniverseHacker
0 replies
4h47m

LLMs are so much more than you are assuming… text, images, code are merely abstractions to represent reality. Accurate prediction requires no less than usefully generalizable models and deep understanding of the actual processes in the world that produced those representations.

I know they can provide creative new solutions to totally novel problems from firsthand experience… instead of assuming what they should be able to do, I experimented to see what they can actually do.

Focusing on the simple mechanics of training and prediction is to miss the forest for the trees. It’s as absurd as saying how can living things have any intelligence? They’re just bags of chemicals oxidizing carbon. True but irrelevant- it misses the deeper fact that solving almost any problem deeply requires understanding and modeling all of the connected problems, and so on, until you’ve pretty much encompassed everything.

Ultimately it doesn’t even matter what problem you’re training for- all predictive systems will converge on general intelligence as you keep improving predictive accuracy.

jerf
0 replies
3h27m

LLM != AI.

An LLM is not going to suggest a reasonable improvement to itself, except by sheerest luck.

But then next generation, where the LLM is just the language comprehension and generation model that feeds into something else yet to be invented, I have no guarantees about whether that will be able to improve itself. Depends on what it is.

WillAdams
0 replies
5h59m

Yes, eventually one gets a series of software improvements which eventually result in the best possible performance on currently available hardware --- if one can consistently get an LLM to suggest improvements to itself.

Until we get to a point where an AI has the wherewithal to create a fab to make its own chips and then do assembly w/o human intervention (something along the lines of Steve Jobs vision of a computer factory where sand goes in at one end and finished product rolls out the other) it doesn't seem likely to amount to much.

CuriouslyC
2 replies
5h30m

What we're seeing right now with LLMs is like music in the late 30s after the invention of the electric guitar. At that point people still have no idea how to use it so, so they were treating it like an amplified acoustic guitar. It took almost 40 years for people to come up with the idea of harnessing feedback and distortion to use the guitar to create otherworldly soundscapes, and another 30 beyond that before people even approached the limit of guitar's range with pedals and such.

LLMs are a game changer that are going to enable a new programming paradigm as models get faster and better at producing structured output. There are entire classes of app that couldn't exist before because there there was a non-trivial "fuzzy" language problem in the loop. Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.

blauditore
1 replies
2h41m

Furthermore I don't think people have a conception of how good these models are going to get within 5-10 years.

Pretty sure it's quite the opposite of what you're implying: People see those LLMs who closely resemble actual intelligence on the surface, but have some shortcomings. Now they extrapolate this and think it's just a small step to perfection and/or AGI, which is completely wrong.

One problem is that converging to an ideal is obviously non-linear, so getting the first 90% right is relatively easy, and closer to 100% it gets exponentially harder. Another problem is that LLMs are not really designed in a way to contain actual intelligence in the way humans would expect them to, so any apparent reasoning is very superficial as it's just language-based and statistical.

In a similar spirit, science fiction stories playing in the near future often tend to have spectacular technology, like flying personal cars, in-eye displays, beam travel, or mind reading devices. In the 1960s it was predicted for the 80s, in the 80s it was predicted for the 2000s etc.

PaulHoule
0 replies
2h18m

This book

https://www.amazon.com/Friends-High-Places-W-Livingston/dp/0...

tells (among other things) a harrowing tale of a common mistake in technology development that blindsides people every time: the project that reaches an asymptote instead of completion that can get you to keep spending resources and spending resources because you think you have only 5% to go except the approach you've chosen means you'll never get the last 4%. It's a seductive situation that tends to turn the team away from Cassandras who have a clear view.

Happens a lot in machine learning projects where you don’t have the right features. (Right now I am chewing on the problem of “what kind of shoes is the person in this picture wearing?” and how many image classification models would not at all get that they are supposed to look at a small part of the image and how easy it would be to conclude that “this person is on a basketball court so they are wearing sneakers” or “this is a dude so they aren’t wearing heels” or “this lady has a fancy updo and fancy makeup so she must be wearing fancy shoes”. Trouble is all those biases make the model perform better up to a point but to get past that point you really need to segment out the person’s feet.)

throw1234651234
0 replies
3h33m

Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:

            o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
              may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
            o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
              human intellect.
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

jart
0 replies
5h30m

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Blackwell.

o Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I'm suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [22] has done wonderful work in this direction.

Stable Diffusion.

o Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)

iPhone and Android.

o Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focussed on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.

Cicero.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.

Trump.

o Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of "groupware", already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a "Rules of Order" for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focussed on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)

Ingress.

o Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren't for the edge that the USENET "group mind" gives the system administration and support people!) The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis' [14] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

Twitter.

o Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [13]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communcation.

Atom Limbs.

o Similar direct links into brains may be feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.

Neuralink.

---

https://justine.lol/dox/singularity.txt

angiosperm
0 replies
6h58m

It has, anyway, already had a profound effect on the IT job market.

trenchgun
7 replies
9h2m

He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.

nabla9
6 replies
8h48m

The concept predates von Neuman.

First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher.

He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning).

Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855

n4r9
2 replies
7h24m

That kind of niche knowledge is what I come to HN for!

jhbadger
0 replies
2h59m

Butler also expanded this idea in his 1872 novel Erewhon, where he described a seemingly primitive island civilization that turned out to once had greater technology than the West, including mechanical AI, but they abandoned it when they began to fear its consequences. A lot of 20th century SF tropes in the Victorian period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

jart
2 replies
3h36m

That essay is written by a political scientist. His arguments aren't very persuasive. Even if they were, he doesn't actually cite the person he's writing about, so I have no way to check the primary materials. It's not like this is uncommon either. Everyone who's smart since 1760 has extrapolated the industrial revolution and imagined something similar to the singularity. Malthus would be a bad example and Nietzsche would be a good example. But John von Neumann was a million times smarter than all of them, he named it the singularity, and that's why he gets the credit.

tim333
0 replies
1h4m

There are some quotes but they guy seems to be talking about improving humans rather than anything AI like:

"...natural [human] faculties themselves and this [human body] organisation could also be improved?"

nabla9
0 replies
8m

Check out "Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind", by Marquis de Condorcet, 1794. The last chapter, The Tenth epoch/The future progress of the human mind. There he lays out unlimited advance of knowledge, unlimited lifespan for humans, improvement of physical faculties, and then finally improvement of the intellectual and moral faculties.

And this was not some obscure author, but leading figure in the French Enlightenment. Thomas Malthus wrote his essay on population as counterargument.

gumby
6 replies
4h3m

Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances.

It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.

An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.

And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.

Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”

PaulHoule
4 replies
2h28m

Note that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime

where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.)

I've long been fascinated by this differential equation

  dx
  -- = x^2
  dt
which has solutions that look like

  x = 1/(t₀-t)
which notably blows up at time t₀. It's a model of an "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up the rate of technological process but the very low growth when t ≪ t₀ could also be a model for why it is hard to bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc. About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource depletion and related problems and did a literature search for people developing models like this further and was pretty disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even papers like

https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si...

seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined)

---

Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.

tim333
1 replies
1h34m

I'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential way long before Moore's law and will probably continue after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking transistors.

PaulHoule
0 replies
1h14m

Even though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite likely there is a better way to do it.

For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.

dekhn
1 replies
1h5m

IMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.

PaulHoule
0 replies
1h3m

Yep. I like it better than Fire Upon the Deep but I do like both of them. I didn’t like A Deepness in the Sky as it was feeling kinda grindy like Dune. (I wish we could just erase Dune so people could enjoy all of Frank Herbert’s other novels of which I love even the bad ones)

0xdeadbeefbabe
0 replies
1h15m

He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.

Being surprised is also an exciting outcome. Was he thinking about that too?

jonathanleane
18 replies
10h44m

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.

rakejake
10 replies
8h45m

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring.

While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting.

I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.

A huge loss indeed.

rsynnott
4 replies
7h12m

If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.

I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?

jerf
2 replies
3h22m

All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that.

In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference.

Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.

rsynnott
1 replies
3h8m

Oh, yeah; I'm just not convinced there's any particular reason to think that LLMs would be useful for decoding languages.

(That said it would be an interesting _experiment_, if a little hard to set up; you'd need a live language which hadn't made it into the LLM's training set at all, so you'd probably need to purpose-train an LLM...)

justsomehnguy
0 replies
2h41m

LLMs are.. not bad at finding some semantic relationships between some arbitrary data. Sure, if you dump an unknown language into LLM then you can only receive a semantically correct sentences of unknown meaning, but as you start to decode the language itself it would be way easier to find the relationships there, if not just outright replacing the terms with a translated ones.

rakejake
0 replies
6h53m

No idea, though being next-token predictors, it can't hurt to use LLMs?

n4r9
4 replies
5h14m

Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language.

Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations harvested from training data which would not include any existing translations by definition.

rakejake
3 replies
4h59m

I do not recall the exact details but I remember that some of the focused individuals were kept in a grid or matrix of some sort. The aim of these grids were to translate the spider-talk and achieve some form of conversation with the spiders on the planet. It is also mentioned that the focused individuals have their own invented language with which they communicate to other focused individuals, which is faster and more efficient than human languages.

I may be misremembering certain details, but the similarity to neural networks and their use in machine translation was quite apparent.

NoMoreNicksLeft
2 replies
3h19m

The zipheads were crippled with a weaponized virus that turned them all into autistic savants. The virus was somewhat magnetic, and using MRI like technologies, they could target specific parts of the brain to be affected to lesser or greater degrees. It's been awhile since I've re-read it, but "focused" was the propaganda label for it from the monstrous tyrannical regime that used it to turn people into zombies, no?

rakejake
0 replies
3h9m

Yes, they could target specific portions of the brain. Have to re-read the book!

db48x
0 replies
2h23m

Not zombies, but loving slaves. People able to apply all of their creativity and problem–solving skills to any task given to them, but without much capacity for reflection or any kind of personal ambitions or desires.

Voultapher
6 replies
10h32m

Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.

atemerev
3 replies
9h40m

Reasoned decisions (if you think that empire building is reasonable) without morality and empathy _are_ evil. This is how Putin operates.

Also, raping and torturing are very "evil for the sake of evil", if you ask me.

smogcutter
2 replies
6h22m

Yeah, discovering Nau’s chamber of horrors is meant to strip any illusions about his motivations.

Voultapher
1 replies
5h55m

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.

vvillena
0 replies
4h51m

Yes, it was not his chamber, but Nau never wanted one because he kept a pet in the open.

rakejake
0 replies
8h33m

I think Greg Egan in one of his novels has a line that goes like "Humans cannot be universe conquerors if they don't overcome their bug like tendencies to invade and destroy". Nah, it is this very tendency that makes them universe conquerors. Nothing to beat good old fashioned greed and discontent.

natechols
0 replies
47m

Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices

The Emergents and their system are pretty clearly just evil, and there's never any indication given that they actually care about those terrible prices, or even reflect on them for long. Vinge is very good at channeling the Orwellian language that regimes like these use, but I didn't find is intent at all ambiguous.

The really compelling and ambiguous character in that book is [redacted spoiler], who really does grapple with the moral implications of his decisions, but ultimately chooses the not-evil path. Personally I think this also highlight's Vinge's biggest flaw as an author for me, which is that in all of his books, the most fully realized and believable protagonist is a scheming megalomaniac, with second place going to the abusive misanthrope of Rainbows End, and third to the prickly settlement leader in Marooned in Realtime. All of the more sympathetic characters feel like empty vessels that just react to the plot.

jl6
16 replies
10h44m

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.

moomin
5 replies
6h51m

Bizarrely, there's a second sequel to A Fire Upon The Deep, but it's never been digitised.

SECProto
4 replies
5h39m

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

throw1234651234
3 replies
3h51m

It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.

db48x
1 replies
2h31m

Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed. If you go in with a more open mind then you may find that there’s actually an interesting philosophical point to be examined and a decent story built around it.

bkcooper
0 replies
2h5m

Well, the characters are stuck on a primitive planet in the Slow Zone so if you go in expecting Space Opera then you’ll be disappointed.

Except half of Fire Upon the Deep was characters on the same planet but it was actually cool. The first two books are definitely among my favorite sci-fi of all time, the third one was a dud.

My main gripe is that these three books all share the same trope that underpins one of the major subplots: glib, charming politician type is scheming, eeeeevil. In the first two books, there's enough novelty (how the Tines and Spiders work, programming as archaeology, localizer mania) to make up for that. But I don't really think the third book adds much in the same way, and it is also very clearly building to a confrontation that will happen in a future book. So the staleness is much more noticeable

NoMoreNicksLeft
0 replies
3h25m

It's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep tier finale.

throw1234651234
3 replies
3h51m

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.

bosquefrio
1 replies
3h0m

Vinge is certainly one of the greats but so is David Brin. I would not consider him under the radar though. Some of his best are Earth, The Heart of The Comet, Glory Season.

throw1234651234
0 replies
2h19m

I don't know Brin at all, my first thought was "Sergey?!" - will check out his books and appreciate the recommendation.

FromOmelas
0 replies
2h12m

not quite the same, but Iain M. Banks is in my top 5, along with Vernor Vinge.

TimSchumann
2 replies
7h15m

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.

komaromy
0 replies
6h32m

Deepness was well worth it.

Wheel of Time, on the other hand, I was very glad to give up on right around the same point as you.

joshstrange
0 replies
1h51m

I think WoT is worth pushing through, you got stuck in the same spot a number of people do. There is definitely a lull there.

Many times I've considered re-cutting the books/audio-books for WoT to remove what I find to a be drudgery but it would be a massive task that I'm not up to. I just skip over the parts in my re-reads of the series.

I'll be the first to say that WoT has /many/ flaws but it will forever hold a special place in my heart. You just have to get past the way women are written in the series (and I understand if you can't). That's something else I'd be happy to prune out or ideally fix but that's well beyond my skill set. Elaine and Egwene especially are horribly written in the last few books (and it's not all Brandon Sanderson's fault I assume, they aren't great in the prior books either).

fossuser
0 replies
8h8m

I’m pretty sure Yudkowsky read true names and it’s what caused him to focus his life on the alignment problem.

That novella is basically an illustrated warning of misaligned super intelligence (it’s also really good!)

angiosperm
0 replies
6h56m

Let us not neglect The Peace War and Across Realtime. The former introduced memorable tragic figures, besides its singular vision.

dmd
11 replies
3h57m

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.

thrtythreeforty
3 replies
3h19m

Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire.

EdwardCoffin
1 replies
18m

you have to open hugo.zip, or click on the view contents link beside it

dmd
0 replies
13m

Yes, I did that. I see in there the vinge novel but NOT the version with annotations.

rcarmo
1 replies
2h0m

I actually read a Fire Upon The Deep over Christmas, and then went on with the rest. The entire trilogy is pretty amazing.

dekhn
0 replies
1h7m

I really wish he had wrapped everything up.

NoMoreNicksLeft
1 replies
3h37m

The key insight always was hexapodia.

jerf
0 replies
3h15m

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. I actually bought the annotated edition a while back and was reading it back in the Palm Pilot era, I think, but I've lost it and never quite finished it. So I'm happy to see it and have no qualms for myself about grabbing it.)

joshstrange
0 replies
1h56m

That's interesting but I found it it incredibly difficult to read/parse through. I've read A Fire Upon the Deep many times (the whole trilogy) but the comment syntax is not easy for me to follow at all. There are snippets that make a little sense but I don't think I could read this as-is.

e40
0 replies
32m

I got this on CD-ROM back in the 90's. It was really fun looking through stuff.

nabla9
7 replies
9h56m

"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.

tialaramex
5 replies
9h30m

I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on.

You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pile at the end of the Watchmen comic book.

Vetch
2 replies
6h15m

I disagree with your characterization of Vinge's works as primarily about disasters but I agree they were all about an accelerating technological pace and its relation with intelligence.

I'm fairly certain the mysterious event in Marooned in Realtime was Ascension.

For Fire Upon Deep, it was sealed and there was a powerful countermeasure.

The rabbit of Rainbows End felt like a trickster to me. Child-like playfulness, fey-like chaotic neutral at worst. I do not interpret Rabbit's survival as hints of doom. The weapon was plain old human abuse of power for control.

tialaramex
1 replies
4h26m

I think I've said "catastrophes" before rather than "disasters" and I think that's a better word, but I stand by it.

It doesn't matter that Rabbit doesn't intend harm. Neither does Tatja, at least to those who aren't trying to harm her. But well, look at what she does, at first she almost gets a few dozen people killed, reckless teenager but hardly extraordinary, next time we see her she's about to tear apart a kingdom to fraudulently seize power, and as collateral she's (without telling them) ensured everybody she knew previously will die if she fails. By the end Tatja has started a war in order to seize control of a means to signal off world. Only two other people on her world even realises what "signalling off world" would even mean, but she's potentially going to kill huge numbers of people to achieve it anyway. She's a catastrophe even though that wasn't her intent. She does apologise, for whatever it's worth, right at the very end, to people who were close to her and from whom she belatedly realises she is now so distant.

Rabbit is indeed just playing. When the library nearly falls over and kills a lot of university staff and students, that's just a small taste of what happens when playful Rabbit forgets for a moment that this isn't really just a game. Consider just how powerful Rabbit is remembering that's a distraction. The whole fight, which causes massive disruption to the city and easily could have led to enormous loss of life, isn't what Rabbit was really doing, it was just to distract Bob's team so that they don't focus on the labs for a few hours. And remember that Rabbit's goal here is clearly to secure the weapon for itself, not to deny it to the antagonist.

underlipton
0 replies
21m

This is a compelling argument, but I think it's overly pessimistic. Back on the human side, the ending sees Robert adapting to his situation; he loses his left arm (his "sinister"), and it looks like he's lost his wife for good, but he's managed to find some amount of synergy with the new world and technology he's surrounded by. Combined with Rabbit's temporary "defeat" (an experience that, if he's truly a super-intelligence capable of true learning and growth, should lead him to different means and even ends in the future, if nothing else), the implicit conclusion seems to be a future with an imperfect but livable melding of humanity and technology. Not too different from what's come before. Putting all of human history onto a single drive likewise might seem like a diminishing of its significance, but the fact is that it's still there to dive into, should one desire. That's arguably a step up from the past.

nabla9
0 replies
8h18m

Vinge's technological singularity is explosion of things changing, not "rapture of nerds".

NoMoreNicksLeft
0 replies
3h12m

The Rabbit had a sense of morality. I do not think it intended to enslave or destroy humanity, or any other monstrous end. It kept bargains that it could have cheated, when cheating those bargains cost it nothing. This is at least a hint of a sense of justice. The Rabbit was likely the adversary of some other entity, perhaps something very Blight-like.

NoMoreNicksLeft
0 replies
3h15m

I'm half-convinced that the Rabbit was an ancient trickster god, and not an AI. Is AI even the correct term? If the Rabbit was a technological non-human intelligence, then surely it was never created (even by accident), and emerged/grew from the computosphere. No governments seemed to be aware of any other government having created it, and two of the nearly-main characters were special operatives tasked with knowing about shit like that and shutting it down before it could result in doomsday scenarios.

I suspect very strongly that had we gotten a followup or two, it would have turned out that the Rabbit had been around for a very long time before even the first transistor.

turing_complete
7 replies
8h1m

If you never read Vernor Vinge (except for his essay on the Technological Singularity), what would be the best book to start?

rdl
1 replies
3h54m

True Names, particularly because it is short.

natechols
0 replies
40m

Seconded, and it touches on the key themes he developed later. I love how a throwaway plot element became a central part of an unrelated novel later, like he had more ideas than he had time to fully explain.

geden
1 replies
7h2m

A Fire Upon The Deep, shortly followed by A Deepness In The Sky (which is even more page turny but kinda requires AFUTD.

Across Real Time is also great and shorter.

db48x
0 replies
2h47m

I disagree with the notion that A Deepness in the Sky requires having read A Fire Upon the Deep. In fact, I would go so far as to say that each ends with an open question that is answered by the other, so that no matter which one you read first you will discover the answer in the second.

loudmax
0 replies
6h12m

Agreed about A Fire Upon The Deep, optionally followed by A Deepness In The Sky. Those are classically styled hard science fiction novels with spaceships and aliens. But much more thoughtful than you might expect from a typical spaceships and aliens scifi novel.

If you're looking for something more germane to present concerns, Rainbows End is about a near future where people's interaction with the world is mediated by augmented reality and various forces are fighting over access to information.

And since I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, Marooned In Realtime is also really good.

But if you're looking for a single book, then you won't go wrong with A Fire Upon The Deep.

cwillu
0 replies
6h52m

A Fire Upon the Deep, without question.

angiosperm
0 replies
6h52m

The Peace War is closer to home than Fire. Read both.

pontifier
6 replies
9h26m

Oh man, I sincerely hope he was signed up for cryonics. If there was someone who deserved to see what the future holds, it was him.

unnamed76ri
4 replies
7h39m

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.

adastra22
1 replies
2h43m

Then you obviously haven't read much about cryonics, which involves vitrification rather than freezing to avoid such tissue damage.

davidgerard
0 replies
26m

In real medical cryogenics, e.g., embryo preservation, vitrification is spoken of as a kind of freezing, which, of course, it is. Only cryonics advocates claim that vitrification isn't a kind of freezing.

niplav
0 replies
4h18m

What evidence do you base those beliefs on?

gamblerrr
0 replies
6h59m

irreparable

That’s the gamble. I think you’re right though, it’s far lower odds than the snake oil salesmen present.

growt
6 replies
10h53m

Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?

ilaksh
1 replies
10h48m

Yes. I assume the admin is sleeping. @dang

layer8
0 replies
8h25m

I don't think "@dang" is doing anything. You need to email hn@ycombinator.com.

sdeer
0 replies
10h29m

+1

ompogUe
0 replies
6h56m

+1

dbuxton
0 replies
10h36m

+1

_0ffh
0 replies
8h9m

agreed!

nl
5 replies
6h46m

One of the true greats.

True Names is a better cyberpunk story than anything Gibson or Neal Stephenson wrote.

Everyone mentions A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky which are some of the best sci fi ever written, but I think The Peace War is way underrate too (although it was nominated for a Hugo award which it lost to Neuromancer).

RIP

adamgordonbell
2 replies
6h41m

The Bobbler was a strange idea. It made for a fun concept. I think there was more than one story in that world, if I'm remembering correctly.

Rainbow's End was very good!

phrotoma
0 replies
6h26m

The shift of the use of bobbles from Peace War to Marooned in Realtime is _wild_. Fantastic stories, wildly creative, delightfully different.

KineticLensman
0 replies
6h4m

I think there was more than one story in that world

Two separate novels: 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Realtime', sold collectively as 'Across Realtime'. Enjoyed them both a lot, but for me 'Marooned...' had a more emotional punch, especially as it becomes clearer what had happened to the victim.

There is also a short story 'The Ungoverned' whose main character is Wil W. Brierson, the protagonist in 'Marooned...'.

Overviews without plot spoilers: 'The Peace War' describes a near-future in which bobbles (apparently indestructible stasis fields where time stands still) are used by 'hacker' types to launch an insurrection against the state. 'Marooned...' is set in the far future of the same world, where bobbles are used to support one-way time travel further into the future, where the few remaining humans try to reconnect following the mysterious disappearance of 99.9% of humanity. Both are high-concept SF, but 'Marooned...' also has elements of police procedural where a low-tech detective (Brierson) shanghaied into his future has to solve the slow murder of a high-tech individual (someone from the far future, relative to him).

tetris11
0 replies
5h57m

The Cookie Monster was one of the best short novella's I ever read, and its influence can be seen everywhere from Greg Egan's Permutation City to episodes of Black Mirror.

Edit: I got it backwards, Egan's book came out first.

jordanpg
0 replies
4h23m

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are the books that opened my eyes to the utter incomprehensibility and weirdness of what intelligent alien life would really be like if it's out there.

I also credit the Transcend as being the first plausible, secular explanation for "gods" that I ever came across back in my militant atheist days.

These stories will be with me until I am gone, too. Thank you, Vernor. RIP.

adrianhon
5 replies
7h53m

A lot of love here for A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies") and A Deepness in the Sky (great depiction of cognitive enhancement, slower-than-light interstellar trade), but less so for Rainbows End, which is perhaps a less successful story but remains, after almost two decades, the best description of what augmented reality games and ARGs might do to the world.

liotier
2 replies
7h24m

A Fire Upon the Deep (predicted fake news via "the net of a thousand lies")

Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns - although not at FaceTwitTok scale.

But still, I love Vinge's take on information entropy across time, space and social networks. A Deepness in the Sky features the profession of programmer–archaeologist and I'm here for that !

KineticLensman
1 replies
5h57m

Predicted ? A Fire Upon the Deep published in 1993, at which date Usenet was already mature and suffering such patterns

I still remember the moment when I realised that the galactic network in 'Fire...' was in fact based on Usenet (which I used heavily at the time), especially how it was low bandwidth text (given the interstellar distances) and how it had a fair number of nutters posting nonsense across the galaxy ('the key insight is hexapodia'). Great author, who'll be sadly missed.

db48x
0 replies
4h23m

Skrodes have six wheels, so…

natechols
0 replies
42m

I think it's also one of the best descriptions of living at the onset of massive, disruptive technological changes, and how disorienting (and occasionally terrifying) this would feel. The fundamental problem with that book, for me, is that the main protagonist is (deliberately) an utterly loathsome individual, who somehow ends up as a good guy but doesn't seem to do very much learning or self-reflection.

floren
0 replies
2h21m

I recently re-read Rainbows End, and I think "do to the world" is an appropriate phrasing. It's a strikingly unpleasant vision of a world in which every space is 24/7 running dozens of microtransaction AR games... I found the part where Juan walks through the "amusement park" particularly effective, where little robots would prance around trying to entice him into interacting with them (which would incur a fee).

reducesuffering
4 replies
10h7m

It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.

zabzonk
0 replies
8h55m

you could probably say the same about the east coast, and NY in particular - pohl, bester et al.

sph
0 replies
8h40m

They always had the best LSD. Not necessary, but won't hurt to explore and experience the depth of your creativity.

nabla9
0 replies
7h38m

Scotland's per capita big name sci-fi writer contribution must be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher still.

082349872349872
0 replies
9h35m

Le Guin and Niven being the only ones of your list who were born there; all the rest explicitly chose to be there.

rkachowski
2 replies
10h44m

We spanned a pretty wide spectrum – politically! Yet, we KBs [Killer B’s] (Vernor was a full member ... )

Does this mean something other than a wu tang fan?

zem
0 replies
9h34m

the "killer B's" originally referred to Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin

B1FF_PSUVM
0 replies
9h39m

I think that was later ... In the 1980s there was a surfeit of B-initial SF writers (as in the article's picture).

Also there was some media noise about killer bees, and they became part of the standard dungeon zoo, I think. Plus, possibly just "the Bees" would prompt "What, the Bee Gees?", a terrible risk.

nodesocket
2 replies
1h28m

I went to San Diego State and majored in CompSCi in 2006. Vernor was a bit before my time but heard legendary stories. Rest in peace.

fl7305
1 replies
47m

I had a CS class with him in the 90s, the stories were true :)

nodesocket
0 replies
39m

Nice, let’s go Aztecs in the tournament!

griffey
2 replies
4h55m

I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.

fl7305
0 replies
3h39m

I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books and was hooked.

He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.

Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.

ca98am79
0 replies
4h9m

I emailed him out of the blue and asked him to write more stories about Pham Nuwen. He replied and was really nice and we corresponded over a couple of emails.

boffinAudio
2 replies
9h0m

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 Halo of Respect - a carefully maintained, diligently laid out bookshelf containing every single thing Vernor Vinge had written. Everything, the friend said, including stuff that Vernor had shared with him that would never see the light of day until after he passed away. I wonder about that guy now.

It wasn't my first intro to Mr. Vinge, but it was my first intro to the fanaticism and devotion of his fan base - that in itself, was a unique phenomenon to observe. Almost religious.

Which, given Mr. Vinge's works, is awe-inspiring, ironic and tragic at the same time.

For me, it was a singular experience, realizing that science fiction literature as a genre was far more vital and important to our culture than it was granted in the mainstream. (This was the mid-90's)

Science Fiction authors are capable of inculcating much inspiration and wonder in their fans yet "scifi" is often used in a derogatory way among the literature cognescenti. Alas, this myopia occludes a great value to society, and I thank Mr. Vinge - and his fanboix - for bringing me to a place where I understood it was okay to value science fiction as a motivational form. That Golden Book Shrine Ensconced in Halo was itself a gateway to much wonder and awe.

bsenftner
1 replies
7h51m

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 Reality.

boffinAudio
0 replies
7h5m

Absolutely, in the same way that there are tabloid forms of journalism, citizen, and authoritative forms, also.

For me the distinction is in the nature of speculation. If you speculate about some facet, and it seems feasible but fantastic, this is the event horizon at which the subject becomes useful as well as entertaining. It was no doubt of great utility to the original developers of satellites to have had Arthur C. Clarkes' models in their minds.

However, its hardly viable to speculate about regular use of teleportation or faster than light travel .. unless, of course, we end up getting these things because some kid read a story and decided it could be done, in spite of the rest of the worlds feeling about it ..

725686
2 replies
1h38m

Don't know who Vernor Vinge was, but his name rocks!

r2_pilot
0 replies
46m

Do yourself a favor and check out any of the books in this thread, if that's your jam. I woke up to sad news, but if someone can be introduced to his work by his passing, then it wouldn't be all bad news.

fl7305
0 replies
48m

He got his last name from his Norwegian ancestors.

fl7305
0 replies
49m

He was no slouch when it came to programming.

He taught classes that going through the actual 68000 assembly to perform the context switch between threads in an interrupt service routine (copy the saved registers from the running thread on the stack to a separate area, and overwrite them on the stack with the registers from the thread you want to switch to).

vhodges
0 replies
4h40m

Ah, sad news indeed. I just finished re-reading The Peace War RIP

underlipton
0 replies
3m

Aw, man. This is a bummer, considering how deep into "replicating Rainbows End" we are (despite everyone and their mother's insistence that we try for a "Ready Player One" future). I find it funny that it seems to be one of his least-liked novels, because the concepts and characters it plays with have always been more approachable and relatable - and less terrifying - than in much of his other work (insofar as I can tell, being wary of reading them).

I still maintain that Miyazaki needs to adapt RE before he heads out himself: https://imgur.com/a/8PeXHlb

turing_complete
0 replies
8h4m

Just a couple years before the singularity. Sad.

supportengineer
0 replies
48m

RIP to author of one of my favorite books.

If Vernor Vinge doesn't deserve the black banner atop HN, then nobody does.

steve1977
0 replies
10h2m

He wrote some of my favorite sci-fi books. I was aware he wasn't in good health for a while already, it's still sad to hear about his passing of course. Thank you for the worlds you showed me.

sl-1
0 replies
3h7m

RIP. His work is excellent and deep

salojoo
0 replies
6h7m

Vinge introduced me to space opera with zones of thought. Such amazing books I've read multiple times.

remram
0 replies
4h29m

@dang Can't this thread be titled "Vernor Vinge has died"? I feel like this is the usual title for those. With this title it's not obvious that the news is he died yesterday.

r00fus
0 replies
2h24m

The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.

r00fus
0 replies
2h24m

The first chapter of Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorites of all time. I really love some of the concepts introduced (ie, universal constants aren't universal) to resolve Fermi paradox.

ptero
0 replies
7h6m

His larger works are getting a lot of praise (justifiably, I read "A fire upon the deep" on a friend recommendation, then everything else Vinge wrote), some of his short stories strongly resonated with me, too.

The cookie monster is, IMO, a thought-provoking marvel.

progbits
0 replies
10h55m

I knew "Fire upon the deep" would be a good book just few pages in, where in acknowledgements Vinge thanks "the organizers of the Arctic ’88 distributed systems course at the University of Tromsø".

ompogUe
0 replies
6h58m

Oh No! So Saddened! Found The Peace War at an airport book rack in the late '80's. Then, found True Names at a library sale in the early '90's and fell in love.

"Zones of Thought" was a really smart idea once you got it. I put him as 2nd generation genius like "Hendrix -> Van Halen": "Asimov -> Vinge". Also (only real nitpick ever), like Asimov, was a little weak in dialogue and the poetry of words (comparing to Tolkein and Heinlein), but they were literally both STEM "Dr.s/PhD's".

Rainbow's End seemed to be the FAANG playbook for many years: drones, AR (google glass on), haptics, autonomous automobiles, and on and on. Was thinking literally yesterday about how the biotech and architecture/earthquake ideas hadn't made it to today (which is around when the story takes place), but the latency issues seem to have been licked well before now.

Requiescat in Pace

ois_ultra
0 replies
7h46m

Considering his novel Rainbows End is about a very sick author in his 70s getting brought back to the world by modern technological breakthroughs in the mid 2020s, I feel like we’ve let him down in some way. Maybe he knew he was already sick, even back then, maybe not. Your meticulous and inspiring level of detail will be missed.

nanolith
0 replies
5h6m

His Zones of Thought series, especially, A Deepness in the Sky, remain some of my favorite science fiction. This one hits hard.

mercutio2
0 replies
3h17m

My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I wish he’d seen another 20.

I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead.

I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.

masto
0 replies
5h58m

Vernor Vinge has an outstanding catalog of invention and accomplishments. One of that's threaded through many of his stories and has become even more relevant lately is ubiquitous computing and networking, and in particular augmented reality.

To truly understand the transformative potential of something like a VR headset if technology allowed it to be unobtrusive and omnipresent, one must read Vinge. The idea of consensual reality as portrayed in, e.g., Fast Times at Fairmont High, is kind of mind-blowing.

lycopodiopsida
0 replies
7h52m

What a great mind - the concept of computer archeology from "A Deepness in the Sky" is something I often think about looking at legacy code and maybe something our children will think about even more often.

joshstrange
0 replies
1h48m

I've read a lot of SciFi but there was something special about Vernor Vinge IMHO. Something about the way he wrote and what he wrote about that "unlocked" various concepts for me. I'd have to sit down and think about them to list it all out but I can trace my interests in a number of concepts back to his books.

hyperific
0 replies
6h13m

My introduction to Vinge was Rainbow's End. As a fellow San Diegan raised in East County I found it hilarious that he represented El Cajon as a wasteland.

gitfan86
0 replies
8h29m

Having read rainbows end just a few years before COVID was interesting.

epivosism
0 replies
1h29m

+1 on the recs for his main work. I also wanted to mention that I loved his book Tatja Grimm's world, too. It's great, alternate world fantasy, but with Vingean depth of thought about what it all might mean... Looking it up now, I see this is a rework of what must have been a very early novel for him, based on a work that came out in 1969!

Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition, he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!

denton-scratch
0 replies
7h52m

I found a text/plain copy of A Fire Upon The Deep, and read it in a single sitting. I later found a paperback edition in a second-hand bookshop, and bought it. I've since re-read it at least twice.

I'm sorry he's died.

arethuza
0 replies
10h48m

"So High, So Low, So Many Things to Know."

acdha
0 replies
6h19m

I’ll echo everyone else saying you should read his books (and not just Fire/Deepness) but wanted to note that while I never met him in person, I know a few people who have and literally everyone has started by describing him as one of the nicest people they met. That seems like an accomplishment of its own.

abraxas
0 replies
4h25m

This merits the black ribbon atop the HN banner, I think.

Voultapher
0 replies
10h33m

:(

Currently reading The children of the sky. And wow I had somewhat forgotten how good sci-fi can be. So much depth, such coherent and well thought out worlds.

ViktorRay
0 replies
3h58m

After reading this and all the comments on this thread I think I will pick up some of his books.

Too much science fiction nowadays is dystopian, cynical and pessimistic. I don’t have a problem with any individuals writing stuff like that if they really want to. People should have the freedom to write whatever they want. I just personally feel like there is too much of the cynical pessimistic stuff being written nowadays.

So seeing that Vernor Vinge wrote stores that portray science and humanity in positive hopeful and optimistic ways makes me very interested in reading his work.

UniverseHacker
0 replies
4h55m

A true visionary, he will be missed. His fiction was entertaining, but also filled with important lessons that will help us prepare for the future in a better and more humane way. Thank you Vernor Vinge.

TheMagicHorsey
0 replies
1h7m

This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky universe.

TMWNN
0 replies
10m

No one else has mentioned what I think are his two greatest insights besides the Singularity:

* A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between systems. Merchants, including the ones the book portrays, often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit.

The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>

* In said future human society pretty much all software has already been written; it's just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. <https://garethrees.org/2013/06/12/archaeology/>

(Heck, recently I migrated a VM to its third hypervisor. It has been a VM for 15 years, and began as a physical machine more than two decades ago.)

RecycledEle
0 replies
5h42m

Rest In Peace, old man.

I loved A Fire Upon the Deep. It gave me many hours of pleasure and many things to think about.

Patrick_Devine
0 replies
9h2m

I just finished reading Children of the Sky and re-reading A Deepness in the Sky. I've been finding with Vinge's work, along with Iain Bank's works, a lot of it is better the second time around. There's just so much to take in.

Klaster_1
0 replies
10h19m

Oh man, that's sad to hear. I really loved his books, especially the ones that looked into the future from a modern day engineer point of view. "Rainbows End" comes to my mind quite often when as I read the tech news, it paints a picture of a future that seems to get closer day by day - a sci-fi that you can one realistically believe to live in one day.

Eliezer
0 replies
3h8m

Ow.