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Julia
- NuclearPM 8mo agoNeeds a twist or a reason to care about the characters.
- khafra 8mo agoThey're the last living humans, and the last human-derived mind? I like Cordwainer Smith and Peter Watts; so I really liked this blend of their styles and subjects.
- Tarq0n 8mo agoI adore Peter Watts, so I'll be checking out Smith then! Watts is like brain candy, keeps my mind buzzing from all the ideas for weeks. Charles Stross can have the same effect, a sort of future shock.
- khafra 8mo agoCordwainer Smith's style and subject matter is quite different from Watts; I felt this story was like a combination of the two. So, if you would like this story even if it was less eschatalogically cynical, and had more of a golden age setting, you'll probably like Smith!
- jrave 8mo agothis completely sucked me in after skimming half a paragraph while unsure what to expect. very golden age, thanks for the link!
- slwvx 8mo agoI assume this is a sort of poem about the programming language Julia... ;-)
- frizlab 8mo agoMore about the Julia set [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
- groovy2shoes 8mo agoi liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.
- canjobear 8mo agoI read a good way down thinking this was some kind of highly metaphorical blog post about the programming language Julia
- cwnyth 8mo agoI clicked on it because I thought it was about the programming language Julia. I'm still not fully sure what Julia here actually is.
- sevensor 8mo agoJulia Set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
- cwnyth 8mo agoThank you!
- n4r9 8mo agoFunny how that page spends so much of the introduction comparing Julia to Fatou, but the page for Fatou only mentions Julia in passing.
- bananaflag 8mo agoThere should only be one article for what is essentially one concept.
- leodavi 8mo agoThe narrative style reminds me of the novel-game Caves of Qud. Very well done.
- sevensor 8mo agoI have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little sweet. Pairs will with fractals.
- yolkedgeek 8mo agoAm I too dumb? I literally understand none of this.
- Edd314159 8mo agoRight there with you. Everyone else on HN is a genius so will love it, but for me this is just incoherent words.
- dannyobrien 8mo agoWhat parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can be confusing if you haven’t read a lot of it, because part of its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out from their context or by reference (like “laminate” and “squarely” — yes, I had to look it up), and some are the puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is Julia? What do they want?) It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.
- nozzlegear 8mo agoI'm not a genius at all, and didn't realize this story was about "Julia sets" until I finished reading it and came back here for the comments. I was pretty sure that Julia was something like the 4D space bubble found in the Three Body Problem series. I just enjoyed the prose in the story. Those incoherent words were the interesting bits of worldbuilding that drew me in.
- fxwin 8mo agoDespite the name, I wouldn't say it is "about" Julia sets, at least not any more than it is about any other kind of fractal
- dominicrose 8mo agoOne does not simply read a study Bible (2 million words) but if you do then this work of fiction will be easier to understand in comparison. I'm not promoting or demoting any religion by saying this, I'm talking about the Bible as an old work of fiction, although to be fair, a study bible can be recent and even copyrighted.
- pvillano 8mo agoMy [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore, and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats, eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a jumbled mess. Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more prey.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cess11 8mo agoThis is a rather neat paper on the Julia set: https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/~scott/Papers/India/Fatou-Julia.pdf https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/~scott/Papers/India/Fatou-Ju...
- chairmansteve 8mo agoVery well written. Poetic. I love the way that nothing is explained.
- meisel 8mo ago> Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum Haven’t heard of this feature in Julia lang, must be new in v1.12.4
- mfro 8mo agoIncredible
- mynegation 8mo agoPurple prose about something unknown and unknowable and fractal-like. As if Nabokov wrote sci-fi.
- trenchgun 8mo agoBaroque
- arh68 8mo agoFYI Don't miss out on the <!-- HTML comments --> .
- x4132 8mo agogoddamn, almost missed out such a cool extra layer, thanks for the tip!
- exit 8mo agoi'm reminded of the film Annihilation, especially the entity encountered at the end.