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This is the future imagined by A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel. While less focused on the code being generated by ai, it features seemingly endless amounts

This is the future imagined by A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel. While less focused on the code being generated by ai, it features seemingly endless amounts of code and programs that can do almost anything but the difficulty is finding the program that works for you and is safe to use. To some extent... This is already the world we live in. A lot of code is unreadable without a lot of effort or expertise. If all code was open sourced there would almost certainly be code written to do just about anything you'd like it to. The difficulty would be finding that code and customizing it for your use.

Normalcy294812 3y ago
Thanks for the Book Title. It looks like an interesting read.
- scubbo 3y ago
  Caution - lots of people like to talk about this "code archeology" idea as if it's a central driving point of the book, whereas in fact it's mentioned once in passing in the prologue and is never again relevant to the story. Don't get me wrong, it's still a decent book on its own merits - but don't go into it expecting that to be the main point of the book (I did, and disappointed as a result).
  - JackMorgan 3y ago
    As a counterpoint, the main nemesis of the book comes from software that is found in archaeological expedition. While software archeology doesn't show up after the first chapter, the ramifications of what happens in that world due to so much software is pretty central.
    - scubbo 3y ago
      This is certainly true, and doesn't detract from my disappointment not to have actually seen the software archeology in practice.
  - AlwaysRock 3y ago
    I'd argue that while its not a core diving part narrative... It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. It's a decent sized book with a lot of ideas and the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disapoint.
  - AlwaysRock 3y ago
    I'd argue that while its not a core diving part narrative... It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. It's a decent sized book with a lot of ideas and the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disappoint.
    - scubbo 3y ago
      > It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. [..] the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. Can't speak to the sequel as I gave up on the series after that, but it's _really_ not relevant to the plot or ideas of the first book at all. All that matters for the plot is that a hostile, powerful, uncontrollable AI arises. In the book, it _happens_ to be because of a code archeologist "delving too greedily and too deep"; but the plot would not be changed one iota if it had simply arisen (and gone off the rails) as a product of general AI development.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  No problem. I've been a sci fi reader my entire life and was shocked I hadnt stumbled across Vinge earlier. The sequel/prequel to Fire Upon the Deep, called A Deepness in the Sky, is arguably even better and the same idea of tech/code being used and customized far after its written is even more central to the plot. Two of my favorite reads of the last few years, so I highly recommend them. Futher... After some digging it looks like there is an old slashdot discussion on the same topic: https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/04/0622246/no-more-coding-from-scratch https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/04/0622246/no-more-coding-f... Likely some spoilers for the books in there so may be worth holding off until after you've read them if you intend to.
bornAgin 3y ago
[dead]
butlike 3y ago
To piggyback off the sci-fi talk, I imagine in the far future, the programmer will become some sort of literal interface between machines and humans. I imagine some sort of segregation would happen where the "machine cities" would be somewhat removed from the general human populus. This would be to ensure the machines could use whatever information transport system they desired, unencumbered by the needs of the human populous, and vice-versa. At a certain level of compute, I prognosticate that a certain level of logistical optimization would be trivial to advanced intelligences, and could be accomplished with almost-literally no effort using left-over cycles from whatever big calculation they were doing. This would start to define different roles for humanity and machine. With logistics essentially "solved," a programmer would be a human-machine interpreter, sometimes journeying to the machine cities to disceminate needs of the people, or define a good way to introduce new technology to the populous. This could look something like: During a headlining musical act, a "programmer," recently-returned from the machine city, grabs a mic and says "Does anyone want some of this BLUE, GLOWING, NON-RADIOACTIVE SELTZER WATER?" At which point the crowd would go wild. "If you liked that, just wait until you see what's coming next week!" So essentially the programmer role becomes a hype-man for new, emergent technologies.

Normalcy294812 3y ago

Thanks for the Book Title. It looks like an interesting read.

scubbo 3y ago
Caution - lots of people like to talk about this "code archeology" idea as if it's a central driving point of the book, whereas in fact it's mentioned once in passing in the prologue and is never again relevant to the story. Don't get me wrong, it's still a decent book on its own merits - but don't go into it expecting that to be the main point of the book (I did, and disappointed as a result).
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  As a counterpoint, the main nemesis of the book comes from software that is found in archaeological expedition. While software archeology doesn't show up after the first chapter, the ramifications of what happens in that world due to so much software is pretty central.
  - scubbo 3y ago
    This is certainly true, and doesn't detract from my disappointment not to have actually seen the software archeology in practice.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  I'd argue that while its not a core diving part narrative... It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. It's a decent sized book with a lot of ideas and the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disapoint.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  I'd argue that while its not a core diving part narrative... It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. It's a decent sized book with a lot of ideas and the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. But yes, if you want a book that focused only on that... This is going to disappoint.
  - scubbo 3y ago
    > It is central to the idea of the book and its sequel. [..] the idea of code archeology and the repercussions of it are what the book is about as much as any of the other main ideas. Can't speak to the sequel as I gave up on the series after that, but it's _really_ not relevant to the plot or ideas of the first book at all. All that matters for the plot is that a hostile, powerful, uncontrollable AI arises. In the book, it _happens_ to be because of a code archeologist "delving too greedily and too deep"; but the plot would not be changed one iota if it had simply arisen (and gone off the rails) as a product of general AI development.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
No problem. I've been a sci fi reader my entire life and was shocked I hadnt stumbled across Vinge earlier. The sequel/prequel to Fire Upon the Deep, called A Deepness in the Sky, is arguably even better and the same idea of tech/code being used and customized far after its written is even more central to the plot. Two of my favorite reads of the last few years, so I highly recommend them. Futher... After some digging it looks like there is an old slashdot discussion on the same topic: https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/04/0622246/no-more-coding-from-scratch https://slashdot.org/story/06/11/04/0622246/no-more-coding-f... Likely some spoilers for the books in there so may be worth holding off until after you've read them if you intend to.

bornAgin 3y ago

[dead]

butlike 3y ago

To piggyback off the sci-fi talk, I imagine in the far future, the programmer will become some sort of literal interface between machines and humans. I imagine some sort of segregation would happen where the "machine cities" would be somewhat removed from the general human populus. This would be to ensure the machines could use whatever information transport system they desired, unencumbered by the needs of the human populous, and vice-versa. At a certain level of compute, I prognosticate that a certain level of logistical optimization would be trivial to advanced intelligences, and could be accomplished with almost-literally no effort using left-over cycles from whatever big calculation they were doing. This would start to define different roles for humanity and machine. With logistics essentially "solved," a programmer would be a human-machine interpreter, sometimes journeying to the machine cities to disceminate needs of the people, or define a good way to introduce new technology to the populous. This could look something like: During a headlining musical act, a "programmer," recently-returned from the machine city, grabs a mic and says "Does anyone want some of this BLUE, GLOWING, NON-RADIOACTIVE SELTZER WATER?" At which point the crowd would go wild. "If you liked that, just wait until you see what's coming next week!" So essentially the programmer role becomes a hype-man for new, emergent technologies.