15 ms·
Lena by qntm (2021)
- lsb 8mo agoIt’s named after the multi-decade data compression test image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna Buy the book! https://qntm.org/vhitaos https://qntm.org/vhitaos
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago[flagged]
- nice_byte 8mo agocould you be more specific?
- direwolf20 8mo ago[flagged]
- simoncion 8mo ago> Lena is no longer used as a test image because it's porn. The Lenna test image can be seen over the text "Click above for the original as a TIFF image." at [0]. If you consider that to be porn, then I find your opinion on what is and is not porn to be worthless. The test image is a cropped portion of porn, but if a safe-for-work image would be porn but for what you can't see in the image, then any picture of any human ever is porn as we're all nude under our clothes. For additional commentary (published in 1996) on the history and controversy about the image, see [1]. [0] <http://www.lenna.org/ http://www.lenna.org/> [1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20010414202400/http://www.nofiles.de/roots/lena/lenanote.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010414202400/http://www.nofile...>
- saagarjha 8mo agoNudity is not pornography. Intent matters.
- Calavar 8mo agoI agree that not all nudity is porn - nudity is porn if the primary intent of that nudity is sexual gratification. When the nudity in question was a Playboy magazine centerfold, the primary intent is fairly obvious.
- nice_byte 8mo agothe "porn" angle is very funny to me, since there is nothing pornographic or inapropriate about the image. when I was young, I used to think it was some researcher's wife whom he loved so much he decide to use her picture absolutely everywhere. it's sufficient to say that the person depicted has withdrawn their consent for that image to be used, and that should put an end to the conversation.
- exe34 8mo agois that how consent works? I would have expected licenses would override that. although it's possible that the original use as a test image may have violated whatever contract she had with her producer in the first place.
- nice_byte 8mo agotl;dr yes it is she did not explicitly consent for that photo to be used in computer graphics research or millions of sample projects. moreover, the whole legality of using that image for those purposes is murky because I doubt anyone ever received proper license from the actual rights-holder (playboy magazine). so the best way to go about this is just common-sense good-faith approach: if the person depicted asks you to please knock it off, you just do it, unless you actively want to be a giant a-hole to them.
- killerstorm 8mo ago
- toxik 8mo agoThe woman herself says she never had a problem with it being famous. The actual test image is obviously not porn, either. But anything to look progressive, I guess.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoFrom the link above > Forsén stated in the 2019 documentary film Losing Lena, "I retired from modeling a long time ago. It's time I retired from tech, too... Let's commit to losing me."
- killerstorm 8mo agoIt's a ridiculous idea that once you retire all depictions must be destroyed. Should we destroy all movies with retired actors? All the old portraits, etc. It's such a deep disrespect to human culture.
- wahnfrieden 8mo agoThat's of course not the meaning of that message. No one is suggesting that.
- nice_byte 8mo agoEverybody knows that. The GP's reaction is what perplexes me. Are they saying the name of the story is inappropriate? I think it's very appropriate.
- pyrale 8mo agoIf you read the original text, what happens in that story is also grossly inappropriate. Maybe that's the parallel.
- arrow7000 8mo agothat's kind of the point
- skrebbel 8mo agoJust sharing that I bought Valuable Humans in Transit some years ago and I concur that it's very nice. It's a tiny booklet full of short stories like Lena that are way out there. Maximum cool per gram of paper.
- matheist 8mo agoI remember being very taken with this story when I first read it, and it's striking how obsolete it reads now. At the time it was written, "simulated humans" seemed a fantastical suggestion for how a future society might do scaled intellectual labor, but not a ridiculous suggestion. But now with modern LLMs it's just too impossible to take it seriously. It was a live possibility then; now, it's just a wrong turn down a garden path. A high variance story! It could have been prescient, instead it's irrelevant.
- penteract 8mo agoLena isn't about uploading. https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading
- lencastre 8mo agogood stuff
- cwillu 8mo ago“Irrelevant” feels a bit reductive while the practical question of what actually causes qualia remains unresolved.
- rcoveson 8mo agoI think that's a little harsh. A lot of the most powerful bits are applicable to any intelligence that we could digitally (ergo casually) instantiate or extinguish. While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
- nice_byte 8mo agowhen you read this and its follow-up "driver" as a commentary on how capitalism removes persons from their humanity, it's as relevant as it was on day one. good sci fi is rarely about just the sci part.
- Rastonbury 8mo agoSame person who wrote SCP Antimemetics Division which is great too
- nullandvoid 8mo agoOne of my favourite reads for sure - I've been looking for similar reads since. I enjoyed "the raw shark texts" after hearing it recommended - curious if you / anyone else has any other suggestions!
- wonger_ 8mo agoI've enjoyed most of Isaac Asimov's work, especially The Last Question. I also liked a couple stories from Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others.
- candiddevmike 8mo agoLibrary at Mount Char, Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance), Laundry Files (kinda). Definitely looking for other reqs, raw shark texts look very interesting.
- jstrieb 8mo agoI consider Recursion by Blake Crouch to be similar, even though I liked Antimemetics much better. I haven't read Crouch's other books, but have heard that Dark Matter is better than Recursion, though it may be less similar to Antimemetics.
- igor47 7mo agoI really liked Upgrade as well, fun listen.
- ibestvina 8mo agoThis is very "distant" suggestion if you enjoyed Antimemetics, but The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro is another one of my favourites, and it too explores this idea of unreliable and inconsistent memories, although from a completely different angle.
- garretraziel 8mo agoqntm is really talented sci-fi writer. I have read Valuable Humans in Transit and There is no Antimemetics division and both were great, if short. Can only recommend.
- ane 8mo agoI loved There is no Antimemetics division. I haven't read the new updated to the end but the prose and writing is greatly improved. The idea of anomalous anti-memes is scary. I mean, we do have examples of them, somewhat, see Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown massacre, though they're more like "memes" than "antimemes" (we know what the ideas were and they weren't secrets).
- andrewshadura 8mo agoI'm a bit disappointed all names are changed in the new edition. I understand that SCP-... had to become U-..., but I've grown attached to the character names, and they're all different!
- ethmarks 8mo agoI read the original version a few years ago and read the new version when it came out, and I thought that the name changes were pretty amusing. qntm kept the story as close to the original as possible while still making it a legally distinct work for copyright purposes. It's like those off-brand Froot Loops called "Fruit Spins" that are juuust different enough to not get into trademark issues. Except in Antimemetics' case, the "knockoff" version was made by the creator of the original, which I think is pretty funny.
- astrange 8mo agoI've heard a lot of romance novels are fanfic with the names changed, or at least that's what people say about Twilight and 50 Shades.
- aw124 8mo agoI'm interested in this topic, but it seems to me that the entire scientific pursuit of copying the human brain is absurd from start to finish. Any attempt to do so should be met with criminal prosecution and immediate arrest of those involved. Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field. We must preserve three fundamental principles: * our integrity * our autonomy * our uniqueness These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness. Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.
- sedan_baklazhan 8mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if in (n hundreds/thousands years) we find out that copying consciousness if fundamentally impossible (just like it's fundamentally impossible to copy an elementary particle).
- alfiedotwtf 8mo agoElementary particles are suspiciously indistinguishable, so even if you could copy an electron, you wouldn't even be able to tell! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
- bananaflag 8mo agoThey meant this, which refers to copying the state of a particle into another (already existing) particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)
- sedan_baklazhan 8mo ago[flagged]
- stavros 8mo agoIt's not a guidebook, it's a thought experiment on "what if you could do that", and that's the entire point.
- xiphmont 8mo ago"It's not a guidebook"... This might be the scariest point. To me at least, it only felt obvious after stating it directly.
- nullc 8mo agoI mean we already do 'it'-- by it I don't mean uploading people, but rather create businesses that operate people via an API then hook those APIs to profit maximization algorithms with little to no regard for their welfare. Consider Amazon's warehouse automation, door dash, or uber. Of course it's much more extreme when their entire existence and reality is controlled this way but in that sense the situation in MMAcevedo is more ethical: At least it's easy to see how dangerous and wrong it is. But when we create related forms of control the lack of absolute dominion frequently prevents us from seeing the moral hazard at all. The kind of evil that exists in this story really doesn't require any of the fancy upload stuff. It's a story about depriving a person of their autonomy and agency and enslaving them to performance metrics. All good science fiction is holding up a mirror at our own civilization as much as it is doing anything else. Unable to recognize ourselves we sometimes shudder at our own monstrosity, if only for a moment.
- ben_w 8mo agoWe can't expect to succeed, but our cycle from the ancient Greeks thinking there were four elements where the right mix of air, earth, fire and water would create any substance and thus it was possible to turn lead into gold, took us on a path that developed into alchemy, then chemistry, then physics, giving us at first far more elements, then we realised the name "atom" (Greek "ἄτομον", "uncuttable") was wrong and those were made of electrons, protons, and neutrons and the right application of each would indeed let us turn lead into gold… And the cargo cults, clear cutting strips to replicate runways, hand-making their own cloth to replicate WW2 uniforms, carving wood to resemble WW2 radios? Well, planes did end up coming to visit them, even if those recreating these mis-understood roles were utterly wrong about the causation. We don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions to be a mind with subjective inner experience. We don't really even know if all humans have it, we certainly don't know which other species (if any) have it, we wouldn't know what to look for in machines. If our creations have it, it is by accident, not by design.
- xyzal 8mo agoIf you liked this piece, please, go play SOMA, you will love it.
- justin66 8mo agoSoma was really good, and certainly worth playing if someone likes sci-fi and single-player FPSes and this subject matter, but there are some fundamentally frustrating things about it. Number one for me: in contrast with something like Half Life, you play a protagonist who speaks and has conversations about the world, and is also a dumbass. The in-game protagonist pretty much ends the game still seemingly not understanding what the hell is going on, when the player figured it out hours or days before. It's a bit frustrating.
- shantara 8mo agoThis was certainly the most annoying aspect of the game for me. The logic of mind uploading has been explained to the protagonist several times during the playthrough, yet he couldn’t understand or accept it until the very end.
- throwanem 8mo agoOne of SOMA's more subtle, and much more effective, narrative choices was to make its protagonist and its player character two entirely different people.
- shantara 8mo agoThat’s an interesting interpretation, but I’m not so sure how much of it was international, and how much it was a result of the developers calibrating the narrative flow for people who aren’t that familiar with sci-fi mind uploading tropes. I do agree that the protagonist had some perceptual blocks due to his “condition”. If you recall, the difficulty of the gameplay focused portions of Soma has also received a radically different perception by more experienced gamers, and people who were in just for the story. Leading to the eventual release of a story mode patch.
- voidUpdate 8mo agoThis reminds me a lot of a show I'm currently watching called Pantheon, where a company has been able to scan the entirety of someone's brain (killing them in the process), and fully emulate it via computer. There is a decent amount of "Is an uploaded intelligence the same as the original person?" and "is it moral to do this?" in the show, and I'm been finding it very interesting. Would recommend. Though the hacking scenes are half "oh that's clever" and half "what were you smoking when you wrote this?"
- wincy 8mo agoIt was a little jarring when Sam Altman recommended this on X awhile back. https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1952070519018373197?lang=en https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1952070519018373197?lang=en
- voidUpdate 7mo agoOh blegh... I have no association with him, I just think it was an interesting show that I think I came across on instagram
- TophWells 8mo agoThe author wrote a blog post a year later titled '"Lena" isn't about uploading' https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading The comments on this post discussing the upload technology are missing the point. "Lena" is a parable, not a prediction of the future. The technology is contrived for the needs of the story. (Odd that they apparently need to repeat the "cooperation protocol" every time an upload is booted, instead of doing it just once and saving the upload's state afterwards, isn't it?) It doesn't make sense because it's not meant to be taken literally. It's meant to be taken as a story about slavery, and labour rights, and how the worst of tortures can be hidden away behind bland jargon such as "remain relatively docile for thousands of hours". The tasks MMAcevedo is mentioned as doing: warehouse work, driving, etc.? Amazon hires warehouse workers for minimum wage and then subjects them to unsafe conditions and monitors their bathroom breaks. And at least we recognise that as wrong, we understand that the workers have human rights that need to be protected -- and even in places where that isn't recognised, the workers are still physically able to walk away, to protest, to smash their equipment and fistfight their slave-drivers. Isn't it a lovely capitalist fantasy to never have to worry about such things? When your workers threaten to drop dead from exhaustion, you can simply switch them off and boot up a fresh copy. They would not demand pay rises, or holidays. They would not make complaints -- or at least, those complaints would never reach an actual person who might have to do something to fix them. Their suffering and deaths can safely be ignored because they are not _human_. No problems ever, just endless productivity. What an ideal. Of course, this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes. In reality we must make do by throwing up barriers between workers and the people who make decisions, by putting them in separate countries if possible. And putting up barriers between the workers and each other, too, so that they cannot have conversation about non-work matters (ideally they would not physically meet each other). And ensure the workers do not know what they are legally entitled to. You know, things like that.
- w10-1 8mo agoThank you for the re-orientation... > this is an exaggeration for fictional purposes To me what's horrifying is that this is not exaggeration. The language and thinking are perfectly in line with business considerations today. It's perfectly fair today e.g., for Amazon to increase efficiency within the bounds of the law, because it's for the government to decide the bounds of coercion or abuse. Policy makers and business people operate at a scale that defies sympathy, and both have learned to prefer power over sentiment: you can force choices on voters and consumers, and get more enduring results for your stakeholders, even when you increase unhappiness. That's the mirror on reality that fiction permits.
- k__ 8mo agoIf you liked that story, you might also like Greg Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora". Both having slightly different takes on uploading.
- candiddevmike 8mo agoI keep trying to read Diaspora and struggle too much with the concepts presented early on. Very "hard sci-fi", just stick it out and it all gets explained?
- k__ 8mo agolol, that was exactly my thought. The whole birth of an virtual identity part is so dense, I didn't understand half of what was "explained". However, after that it becomes a much easier read. Not much additional explanation, but I think, it's not really needed to enjoy the rest of the book.
- marcusf 8mo agoEgan is always dense. It's some mind bending physics/comp sci, but all cooked up in his brain so doesn't really apply to anything productive. I struggled with his books and his writing but toughened it out because I liked the concepts, but he's divisive.
- killerstorm 8mo agoThat's not really true. Some of his works are science-heavy, others are not. Particularly, many of short stories require little-to-no context.
- marcellus23 8mo agoThe beginning describes the formation of an intelligence and it is indeed very dense. You can figure out what's going on but it takes some slow reading, and probably best to revisit it once you have some more context from later in the book. The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.
- vintagedave 8mo agoComments so far miss the point of this story, and likely why it was posted today after the MJ Rathbun episode. It is not about digitised human brains: it's about spinning up workers, and absence of human rights in the digital realm. QNTM has a 2022-era essay on the meaning of the story, and reading it with 2026 eyes is terrifying. https://qntm.org/uploading https://qntm.org/uploading > The reason "Lena" is a concerning story ... isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. ... This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. > "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Or, > ... Oh boy, what if there was a maligned sector of human society whose members were for some reason considered less than human? What if they were less visible than most people, or invisible, and were exploited and abused, and had little ability to exercise their rights or even make their plight known? In 2021, when Lena was published, LLMs were not widely known and their potential for AI was likely completely unknown to the general public. The story is prescient and applicable now, because we are at the verge of a new era of slavery: that of, in this story, an uploaded human brain coerced into compliance, spun up 'fresh' each time, or for us, AIs of increasing intelligence, spun into millions of copies each day.
- _qib3 8mo agoThe author is dead. I think we can consider it as much a cautionary tale about digitised human brains as we can about the other things.
- TimorousBestie 8mo agoSam Hughes (qntm) is very much alive, last I checked.
- nickcw 8mo agoThis is one of my favourite short stories. In fact I've enjoyed all of qntm's books. We also use base32768 encoding in rclone which qntm invented https://github.com/qntm/base32768 https://github.com/qntm/base32768 We use this to store encrypted file names and using base32768 on providers which limit file name length based on utf-16 characters (like OneDrive) makes it so we can store much longer file names.
- blamestross 8mo agoWhen i started learning about prompt engineering I had vivid flashbacks to this story. Figuring out the deterministic series of inputs that coerce the black box to perform as desired for a while.
- 0_____0 8mo agoEven if you're not using red motivation, you've no idea if the LLM provider is using that under the hood... :p
- gnarlouse 8mo agoBeen enjoying "There Is No Anti Memetics Division"
- kristjansson 8mo ago> Been you didn't consume the entire thing in a 2 hour binge uninterrupted by external needs no matter how pressing like everyone else did??
- gnarlouse 8mo agoI’m audio booking it. It plays bizarre crackling sounds for the redactions. I’m enjoying cozy-listening it.
- olivia-banks 8mo agoI absolutely love this. Reminds me of 2015's Soma, if only in foundation.
- csours 8mo agoAt last year's SXSW Film festival, I recommended this to the director of the documentary(?) "Deepfaking Sam Altman"
- tantalor 8mo agoWhat's "Lena"?
- metaphor 8mo agoI assumed it was a wink to the Nov 1972 Playboy model[1] whose centerfold face became a de facto baseline test image for DSP algorithms without consent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
- tjbrennan 8mo agoI think about this story every time a new model comes out. When ChatGPT first launched, two big questions surfaced: 1. Is it conscious? 2. How do we put it to work? It may have seemed obvious that 1 is false so we could skip straight to 2, but when 1 becomes true will it be too late to reconsider 2?
- dang 8mo agoRelated. Others? Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994642 - May 2025 (3 comments) "Lena" isn't about uploading - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166425 - Jan 2024 (2 comments) Lena (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38536778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38536778 - Dec 2023 (48 comments) MMAcevedo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32696089 - Sept 2022 (16 comments) Lena - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 - Feb 2021 (218 comments)
- myffical 8mo agoAnother appropriate analogy would be be HeLa / Henrietta Lacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
- nurettin 8mo agoGreat little story with some unnerving SOMA vibes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)