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Letting ancient evil code run? Have we learned nothing from A Fire Upon the Deep?!
by jl6 7mo ago
Letting ancient evil code run? Have we learned nothing from A Fire Upon the Deep?!
- edoceo 7mo agoI've only just heard of it. But, I already knew to not run random scripts under a privileged account. And thank you for the book suggestion - I'm into those kinds of tales.
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo ago"It was really just humans playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, than human)."
- varenc 7mo agoLink to the Prologue of Fire Upon the Deep: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De... It's very short and from one of my favorite books. Increasingly relevant.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo agoI swear, I respect Vinge more and more based on how well he seems to understand human tendencies to plot some plausible trajectories for our civilization.
- Nition 7mo agoThere's a little throwaway thing in the book (or maybe it was in the prequel) that I always liked, re understanding human tendencies. They're still using Unix time, starting in Jan 1st 1970, but given that their culture is so space-travel-focused they assume the early humans set it to coincide with man's first trip to the moon.
- duskwuff 7mo agoThat's from the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. (Which is also excellent.)
- hinkley 7mo agoDeepness in the Sky is probably the first Sci Fi alien I read who didn't feel like a human wearing an alien suit. Fantasy sometimes does this better but usually with specific tropes.
- aerique 7mo agoIf you liked that and you haven't read it yet, give "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward a read.
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoI wish he could have seen the current state of GenAI. Several times in the book he talks about how the ship understands context clues and sarcasm, and that effective natural language translation requires near-sentience.
- xeromal 7mo agoI love that book
- NBJack 7mo agoLegitimately listening to this book for the first time after a coworker recommended it. It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite books that balances the truly alien with the familiar just right. Not so ironically, it came up when we were discussing "software archeology".
- 12_throw_away 7mo ago＼(＾O＾)／ zones of thought mentioned ＼(＾O＾)／
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoDo you remember the part where they built a machine in the Transcend that had to work at the Bottom of the Beyond? The other day I was using Claude for a task, but it occurred to me, what if Claude is unreachable. So, I told it to "encode your wisdom into this script in case you are not available" That was my own version of that
- hinkley 7mo agoArmy of Darkness? The Mummy?
- monista 7mo agoLearning from fiction? Let's learn from the Dune then and start Butlerian jihad already.