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I re-read the book recently and it was really fun to read about the tech now. The descriptions of how difficult it was to build a database that could handle sto
by yoyohello13 3mo ago
I re-read the book recently and it was really fun to read about the tech now. The descriptions of how difficult it was to build a database that could handle storing 3bil base pairs, which is trivia now. Probably the most sci-fi part of the book, they had image recognition tech so advanced it could track individual dinosaurs from arbitrary video angles alone.
Also, Nedry got absolutely shafted by Hammond in the book. Nedry describing the difficultly in building a complex system with minimal requirements had me sympathizing, lol.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoCrichton was frighteningly good as a prognosticator and futurist. Certainly for a writer with a medical degree. He fought the good fight, trying to inculcate caution. Most of his books (even from the seventies) hold up surprisingly well until the early 2000s. They got a bit weird by 2006. But then so did our ideas of future tech.
- yoyohello13 3mo agoIt was kind of scary how prescient Jurassic Park was. Just swap genetics for AI and his warnings are incredibly applicable to modern times.
- MrToadMan 3mo agoMuch like his earlier work Westworld which was also scarily prescient for modern times. > These are highly complicated pieces of equipment. Almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work.
- ricardobeat 3mo agoThat’s an amazing connection, had no idea they were written by the same person but the underlying theme is pretty consistent.
- criticas 3mo agoor The Andromeda Strain. I was on the edge of my seat for the last half of the movie as a 10 year old when it came out. The book still holds up as a medical mystery - thriller and warning of unintended consequences.
- anthk 3mo agoDolly, the cloned sheep. That was huge in the news.
- msh 3mo agoOn the other hand he also did a ‘climate change is fake’ book (state of fear).
- ablation 3mo agoThat was a really, really bad book. By that time it feels like he was a shadow of his former page-turning self.
- jambalaya8 3mo agoyeah, not one of his best. not his worst, but not great.
- flumes_whims_ 3mo agoGell-Mann Amnesia? Interestingly enough, the term was coined by Crichton.
- 10729287 3mo agoHe even wrote a non fictional book on Personal Computers back in 1983 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Life
- toast0 3mo agoAll the cool kids were writing those. https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-youre-nothing https://archive.org/details/herbert-barnard-1980-without-me-...
- avadodin 3mo agoOne of the greatest "bad" writers. On my top ten.
- notahacker 3mo agoI still remember one of the characters in the book being awestruck by the number of Cray supercomputers the park had, and certain this must mean they were doing something really, really significant Even by the time of the film regular consumer hardware had reached parity. Now we use more power to run to do list apps
- twoodfin 3mo agoI did this research once, and actually consumer CPU’s didn’t hit the performance of the original Cray-1 (1976) until roughly the Pentium II (1997). The Crays used in the fictional Jurassic Park (Y-MP’s?) would have been much more powerful still. The Cray machines were incredible feats of design and engineering.