hckrnws
Accelerando and Glasshouse fall in a "the ideas of one feed into the next" sequence that I find interesting to read in sequence... the first four of which are available on the web.
COMP.BASILISK FAQ https://www.nature.com/articles/44964
BLIT https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
Different Kinds of Darkness https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o...
Accelerando https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
("Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.")
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
(side trip to The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge as additional material for an alternative singularity)
Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (mentions averting a Vingeian singularity, though I see it more of a Strossian singularity that's at risk - and you've got suggestions of plot lines and backstory in Glasshouse that are not suggestions but rather main plot elements in Implied Spaces)
Many thanks for linking to these excellent stories by David Langford.
I would like to recommend pretty much every single SF story and novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Czajkowski).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Bibliograph...
Additional recommendations:
The COMP.BASILISK FAQ is in the 'futures' section of Nature ... which has a number of other good short stories. https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures
---
For Adrian Tchaikovsky, I really liked the Children of Time series and the exploration of believable non-human minds. The last one got a bit weirder, but still very good.
The Final Architecture is on my to read list (currently going through all of Coyote series by Allen Steele).
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Final Architecture” series is lots of fun. I also highly recommend the two “Bioforms” books. For standalone novels, I liked “Alien Clay” and “Doors of Eden” the most. For novellas, “Walking to Aldebaran” and “Elder Race”.
Thank you for recommending “Implied Spaces” as well. Walter Jon Williams seems like a new author for me to follow.
I was first introduced to him with Dread Empire's Fall series which has one of the more realistic space battles between capital ships. There was a long gap between the first trilogy (2002 - 2005) and the second (2018 - 2022).
Some of the ending of a trilogy is tiding up ends in a faster way that could have been left open if there was more certainty of the full arc, but I like it and it challenges a lot of the standard tropes of military science fiction.
https://paulsemel.com/exclusive-interview-the-accidental-war...
> Where did you get the original idea for The Accidental War and how different is the finished novel from that initial concept?
> The story hasn’t changed much since I first worked out the series arc eighteen or so years ago. I had always planned to write nine to twelve books in the series, but the publisher decided to end the series after the third book [Conventions Of War] due to disappointing sales.
> But those original books just kept selling. Initial sales weren’t spectacular, but the books kept going through one reprinting after another, and they never went out of print. Finally, years later, a new editor looked at the cumulative sales and made an offer for the books I would have happily written fifteen years ago.
I like that the characters are all self serving characters with various grays of morality that are self serving in different ways.
Once again, many thanks. I am enjoying “The Praxis” immensely.
Another space book series that I'm going to toss out there... *completely* different take on the universe and human nature... Nathan Lowell's Solar Clipper series. The author read (and is a very good reader) the first books as a free podcast. https://www.scribl.com/books/P2A75/quarter-share and https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/traders-tales-from-the... depending on your devices.
Thank you. When I think of completely different takes, I think of “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”.
Also, these are not to be missed:
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
I've read Singularity Sky, and Iron Sunrise. Also read http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-...
> My first two published SF novels, "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", have a long and tangled history. And I figure it's probably worth (a) explaining why there won't be a third one in that particular series, and (b) spoilering the plot thread I had kicking around that would have been in the third Eschaton novel if I was going to write it.
Freeze Frame Revolution I've enjoyed - I need to read the rest of that universe. https://www.goodreads.com/series/168556-sunflower-cycle
I've read Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky - The Children of the Sky is also on my reading list.
In high school I read Consider Phlebas and I need to do a read of the entirety of the series in one go.
I'll put the others on my to read list.
Having just finished “Conventions of War”, I must say I am highly impressed with Walter Jon Williams. I wonder what he did before becoming a writer.
Personally I liked Implied Space more than anything by Stross.
I.e.: for me Williams > Stross as an author in general.
It's kinda wild to me that Stross literally wrote about cryptocurrency, smart contracts (the legal corporations in Accelerando written in Python 3000, AKA what is now called Python3) and cryptocurrency thefts (the robbing of a decentralized bank due to a bug at the beginning of "halting state"). All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum, which is where most of that smart contract stuff started.
> All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum
Cypherpunks were working on this since the 90s (or even 80s). There was a very active mailing list way back then with experiments and a lot of discussions. Bitcoin was revolutionary but it was built on top of a lot of existing work.
Stross has a talent for keeping an eye on the weirdos of the net without necessary sharing their belief, so I'm rather sure he was aware of the Cypherpunks of the 90s where a lot of this stuff originated.
He also was a SWE at an online payment processor startup during the dotcom boom.
He stopped the trilogy after rule34 because it was coming true...
He has done a wonderful job of speculative fiction. Exposure to his work when i was a teenager definitely set me on my course to be who i am now.
Me too. Especially Accelerando. I didn't think it was formative until I read it again as an adult.
I'm finding this inclines me to class it with The Fountainhead in the category of books I'm glad found me at the wrong time.
Nothing against you, the work, or the author -- who, by all accounts including my own, deserves to be found in much better company than I have just implicitly placed him! Only that in both cases I think I would not much like the person I might have become for the radical influence of such a work.
For me, I've found his series the Laundry Files to be formative. And yes I'm worried about the proliferation of too many computational devices in the world. Also, interdimensional elves.
I should read it again in light of that. I did find that Stross's early work (Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Colder War) heavily influenced my worldview and path in life. I haven't touched Accelerando in over a decade although I go back to the other novels on occasion.
It may have been the timing of it, but whatever the cause I've been trying to find my way into the Free Intellect Foundation ever since.
You can write smart contracts in a Python inspired language also https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
that smart contract stuff did not start with bitcoin and ethereum; i think the term 'smart contract' was coined at agorics inc. in the early 90s, and was in common use among cypherpunks (the folks that gave you openssl, pgp/gnupg, bittorrent, wikileaks, tor, and, as it happens, ecmascript 4) throughout the 90s, when 'know your customer' still sounded like dystopian future science fiction rather than a widespread international treaty obligation
for some of the history, i suggest reading markm's eulogy for norm hardy: https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf... and this other bit of oral history: https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-ho.... also, this oral history interview with ann hardy, rip, who was the ceo of agorics and wrote the operating system that preceded keykos at tymshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (594 views)
the difficulty with smart contracts was figuring out how to decentralize them, and in particular how to decentralize payment, because an insecure smart contract isn't really a contract at all. previous efforts using centralized authorities (digicash, e-gold, peppercoin, mojonation, agorics itself, arguably tymshare) largely collapsed trying to negotiate the regulatory environment, though some failed in more conventional ways, like due to the innovator's dilemma. bitcoin found an inefficient but practically workable solution to the problem, which many of us had speculated was inherently unsolvable. satoshi's insight was to find a way to redefine the problem into something solvable, something many of us rejected for a long time. len sassaman famously rejected it until his death
like stross, i became disenchanted with the libertarian vision starting in the 90s, and abstained from bitcoin because i theorized that, if it worked, capitalism would destroy civilization. since then, my point of view has shifted due in part to moving to argentina, where i've been experiencing alternatives to capitalism, which make capitalism look pretty good by comparison
Oh, thanks for that agoric.com link, new to me.
I think Nick Szabo coined 'smart contract' in his 1996 Extropy paper. He had worked at Agorics and I don't know how much of it is their influence; from my pov the agorics papers were extraordinary, while I kind of bounced off that particular Szabo paper. Before Agorics, there was Amix which MarkM called something like the first smart contract platform, retrospectively. (I visited the Amix office during an 80s visit to SF, btw, but I didn't know anything about them then. Current DeFi people might see it as a stretch to apply the same term.)
Speaking of Extropy, Accelerando's universe owes a whole lot more to the extropians list.
oh, thanks! you could totally be right about szabo's paper; he was prominent on cypherpunks but i don't trust my memories of the language people were using on cypherpunks that far back
The first time I read this was over GPRS on an HTC Typhoon smartphone running Windows Mobile during my 2-hour commute to my first job in tech after university, and anything seemed possible. Surprised to be sitting here years later feeling much the same.
Sony PRS-505 e-reader for me, shortly after Doctorow's also Creative-Commons-licensed "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". I felt exactly the same.
Also, at least part of the novel was apparently written on a PDA according to Charlie :)
> Manfred's on the road again, making people rich ...
> I typed those words on a Psion 5. A perfectly-formed miniature computer with keyboard and screen, 8Mb of RAM, a 16Mb CF card, and a 22MHz ARM processor running an operating system called EPOC32, which was the missing link ancestor behind Symbian. It has a serial port and an infra-red interface by which it could talk to my mobile phone, a tri-band Motorola GSM device that had an infrared modem that supported the dizzy data rate of 9600 bits/second over the air.
Read this years ago and reread the first two chapters just now. Brilliantly written and within the conceit of "what if technological and aerospace advancement continued beyond the materials limits to the thermodynamic limits and private entities became exponentially emancipated from states and the old moral panics never re-emerged" the content of the book is almost all good but for one thing that we now know to have aged horribly. That thing is augmented reality.
Every augmented reality device more advanced than subdermal hearing aids to have ever been built has found only a very small minority of users who actually enjoy the damn things. Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality technology, smart vision, heads-up displays or VR in any way.
That's just because those technologies haven't advanced "beyond the material limits" yet.
VR is amazing, but I don't play much with mine because its such a hassle to set up, manage the cables and having to wipe off the sweat during the warmer months. The same goes for everything else, once I can get for example map AR that projects directions for me and its a small clip on that goes on my shirt or whatever else, then that's going to be a game changer.
VR equipment is amazing, what we're missing is VR centric Linux distributions, for the ecosystem to benefit from creativity of the commons. Right now odds are that if you can afford playing in VR, you probably are too busy with other business to get creative with it.
A VR centric Linux distribution is not going to solve the fundamental problem of people getting sea sick from doing 3D stuff in VR, of how sweaty and disorienting wearing the damn things is, of the cables getting in the way and the minor inconvenience that displays of text are almost completely unusable due to insufficient resolution.
The hardware still needs to gain an order of magnitude in several dimensions.
Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the pass-through camera's resolution is also enough to read printed text. At least, that's what I read about it.
At this point, the only dimensions to improve would be weight and price.
However, motion sickness is a real problem. With sufficiently good pass-through, it might not be that bad, but in my Quest 3, I get motion sick after 15 minutes at most when gaming. It's a bit better in pass-through mode, but most software doesn't seem to support it.
> Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the pass-through camera's resolution is also enough to read printed text
It's not even close to sitting in front of the cheapest full HD office monitor, not to speak of a modern 4K screen. I don't think anybody seriously writes text for a living with a Vision Pro in front of their eyes right now.
Maybe they'll fix all the other problems those headsets have, and the average consumer will accept a regression in image quality - just like when we transitioned from CRT monitors to LCD screens (it took something like 15 years until LCDs caught up with the best CRTs available).
> (it took something like 15 years until LCDs caught up with the best CRTs available).
I actually think colours still feel wrong.
Have you tried chewing on a ginger root beforehand?
Modern room-scale setups go miles towards dealing with the seasickness (at the cost of constraining your active space to a room-scale, so you have two abstractions for motion).
I agree it's about how people tend to allocate their focus. But I think it's more about dopamine than money.
I can't even be bothered to leave my terminal and work in a browser. The idea of trying to wrangle so many degrees of freedom as VR has... It just doesn't sound like something I'd ever get around to volunteering for because progress would be too slow to be rewarding.
Linux happened at all because people were content to work in text. High fidelity environments are just too much work for too little gain. Sure, some folk bother with a gui, but even fewer would bother with a 3d one.
What so far seem to have aged badly is the concept of devices interacting with your brain directly (unless massive cultural engineering), augmenting thoughts or whatever. Would you give permission to Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft to put thoughts directly in your consciousness? Ads and political manipulation are 2 things that the current us see as immediate and very probable misuse of that capability.
I would not but I think the general public is not against the idea. Most people interact with social media on a daily basis, for example, and it certainly has a strong effect on users thought process.
A little bit different than actually having a chip in your head doing these things, which I do think most of the general public would be very skeptical abiout, particularly as doom and gloom have overtaken much of the technical optimism about the future. And corporations are seen as leading us to a dystopian outcome.
Have you checked your screen time lately?
I would love to have a HUD that could remind me of stuff and add extra information to my surroundings.
The closest we've had was Google Glass but the tech isn't quite there yet to be able to have a powerful yet light device.
> Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality technology
Exactly. The technology is the problem. I'd love to use augmented reality and I always did but not if I have to wear a helmet (it weights a lot, subjectively and maybe objectively) or contact lenses (I can't wear them anymore) or glasses without prescription lenses or anything else that has been more or less technologically viable up to now. Make it as easy as smartphones or earpieces and everybody will use it. How? No idea.
A friend picked this for our neighborhood book club. Having read it, I told him that he should provide a cheat sheet for less technically inclined readers, covering for example "Thompson hack" and "Turing-complete". He did not--I think that he might have suggested that I draw it up--and it became one of the least popular books to have been read in the club's history.
Recommend Dune, next time, for extra lulz
Followed up with Anathem (by Neal Stephenson). It took me three tries to get into the book before going audible on it... and then realizing its a really neat philosophy text wrapped around a plot.
The cheat sheet is built in!
I think this is a classic by now, with reason.
I think some of the concepts in the book are both very prescient and very disheartening, e.g. the autonomous corporations that keep haggling with each other way past their usefulness to the beings who created them.
One of my favourite bits is how most of the mass of the inner solar system gets converted to Computronium consisting almost entirely of legal bots battling other legal bots.
The bit about jamming up democratic representation by creating living copies of individuals that have a particularly-useful mindset to those who want to jam up the system is the part that stuck out to me. Fortunately, I don't think it really has an analogue in the modern day (other than, perhaps, "when you have the capacity to craft culture, the culture you craft around you will become self-reinforcing").
> Fortunately, I don't think it really has an analogue in the modern day
How about conglomerates having defense contractor and mass media/news subsidiaries? An on-the-nose author may write a newscaster who says that they were "brought to tears by the beauty of the war machines" on air, or some such.
It was a fairly new concept in 2005 but the idea that the evolution of life as determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe terminates in inwardly-facing capitalist computronium predates Accelerando. While I'm unaware of the intermediate steps the idea took to get to Stross it's the thesis of many of the various essays that Nick Land scattered across Usenet in the nineties and probably goes back to Lyotard's writings in the eighties and earlier.
Charlie is on Mastodon, toots regularly and actually replies to others
cstross is also here on HN.
He's everywhere, and not just as a PR presence, he's actually involved. I've had a couple of interactions with him on Reddit where he politely drive-by corrected me (a real brush with fame for me). Add to that everything he's written on antipope (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=antipope.org) and I find it amazing he gets commercial work done at all.
The first third of Accelerando is a tour de force - the ideas-per-page ratio is just phenomenal, and 20 years ago it left me feeling future-shocked. But it's pulp, in the sense that it's very much rooted in the time it was written (the curse of near-future SF). If anyone knows of any works that idea-dense but written in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about them. Short fiction especially.
> If anyone knows of any works that idea-dense but written in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about them. Short fiction especially.
Fails for the 2020s part, but check out Greg Egan if you haven't already (his Diaspora is mentioned elsewhere in this thread). Dark Integers is a short-fiction collection. Also Vacuum Diagrams, by Stephen Baxter. These three authors are, IMHO, the absolute pinnacle of hard scifi. But be advised they are definitely kinda optimizing for being idea-dense. For more literary stuff with deeper focus on story structure & consideration of the individual characters, etc, you might want to look elsewhere.
EDIT to say, Dennis E Taylor is more recent and on reflection definitely deserves a mention. Also an ex-programmer-turned-author IIRC. The Bobiverse series is aimed at a wider audience of more casual nerds than the stuff above, and more of a recap of "big ideas" from other scifi without the head-spinning future shock of stuff like Stross and Egan. But it's solid nevertheless and easier to call it "fun". And despite the artistic license with the more dreamy far-future tech that's available to protagonists in the not-so-distant-future.. Bobiverse is kind of a "scifi procedural" flavor, so that probably makes it appealing to people who like stuff like Weir's the Martian.
Ted Chiang and Sam Hughes are two high-concept writers from the 00s-10s decades yet to be mentioned if anybody feels like looking for more to read.
It's easy: Write 2 good hours a day, maybe more if the spirit moves you. Then post for 6 hours.
depending on your personality this is a recipe for enlightenment or neuroses
Wow, cstross posts on reddit! That really makes me want to read his next book.
Not sure if sarcastic or not (and I'm normally pretty good at that).
So, to be fair reddit is supposedly the 18th most visited site online today[1]. Given it's popularity i guess i won't hold it against Stross. I, myself, find it somewhat hard to avoid, though i try my best and steer clear. IMHO it's just one of those toxic places, though there are many of them online. Actually it's becoming sort of like a fundamental law of tech and online these days(that everything is toxic - actually there are a few places that aren't so bad, but they are becoming harder to find). Someone should write a book. Funny, i didn't realize Ohanian had a connection to HN[2].
I tried reading it some months ago but quit after some chapters. At a certain point, it gave me the impression of randomly throwing in some technical terms (not related to CS, there's also other stuff) just to sound smart. I can have got the wrong impression of course, but it didn't meet my taste.
I can see that. Having read several of Stross's works, this is one of the ones that's less "gelled." I'd call it, structurally, an outlier relative to his other stuff; it's going a lot of places very fast and not leaving much time for the reader to get on the same page as the author.
Very compelling for the concepts it raises and plays with, but his other works do a better job of telling a story.
It isn't gelled as much because it wasn't really meant to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando#Plot_summary_and_b...
The publication dates of the short stories spans a bit over three years.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?91976 and https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?99386 and so on... each published separately. Consistent characters (possibly with some editing when brought into a single collection) but they appear to be written as short stories that are slices of the life of clan Macx and Aineko. As short stories, there's less opportunity for lasting character development.
My perception when I tried to read it was that it was just getting off it's own word soup, like I caught the author in a feverish and very private session with himself. Being somewhat traumatized, I haven't tried anything else by Stross since then. I like density but at some point, you gotta tell a story. It was obviously a secondary objective in that case.
That's a deliberate technique in prose pacing, especially common in cyberpunk and allied sf subgenres.
The basic insight is that prose which reads faster with less complexity feels faster, as if the events it describes occur at like pace. That's why a skillful writer rarely brings an adverb to a gunfight. It's also why clubs don't play melody-heavy stuff at 60 BPM, or even the liveliest among Mozart's string quartets.
The variation here discussed modifies that approach by increasing the pace and not reducing the complexity. The intended effect is more or less as you describe: to dislocate the reader among ideas and concepts that seem to flow too fast to grasp. Given what the text seeks to express in this way, the technique fits perfectly. (The novel's not called Accelerando for nothing! If you aren't familiar with that word, now may be an unusually enlightening time to become so.)
Granted, it doesn't sit the same with every reader. But it is very much the product of deliberate design, not mania, and deserves to be understood as such.
(To be clear, I don't like Accelerando; with one exception I judge it the weakest of Stross's work, and it's very unreflective of his later work with a more practiced hand. But that I don't appreciate the work isn't the same as saying no respect is due the skill and artifice that went into its making - it's a piece I don't enjoy, but not a piece that's bad.)
what were the terms and examples that feel like word soup? it has been quite a while since i read it, but i remember the ideas being quite self consistent (with some serious sci-fi conceit of course)
I don't remember a specific word or sentence being problematic, just a general torrent-of-consciousness from someone else that prevented my own brain from forming images and putting things together as I read. I felt the author was really trying too hard being edgy while at the same time not giving a fuck about the intended reader. "Look how many novel concepts per paragraph I can fit!" Huh, ok bro. Might as well just write a list...
Such a good book. This is the book that cemented exponential rate of improvement in my mind.
Don't know that AI corporations converting the Earth to computronium and kicking humans off to go live in the outer planets is improvement.
Why do you view it as "improvement" ?
An extremely relevant question since Economics 2.0 is portrayed entirely as a failure state in the book.
That was only because of the digital lobsters
When reading this for first time (like two years ago) it struck me how many issues of accelerando world we actually have right now in ours. In fiction they are just hyperboled to extreme (sometimes for comedic appeal).
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-craz...
> [...]
> one technique that suited me well back then was to take a fire-hose of ideas and spray them at the reader until they drowned. Nothing gives you a sense of an immersive future like having the entire world dumped on your head simultaneously, after all.
> [...]
> Now we are living in 2018, round the time I envisaged [the first chapter of Accelerando] taking place when I was writing that novelette, and the joke's on me: reality is outstripping my own ability to keep coming up with insane shit to provide texture to my fiction.
> [...]
See also :
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality...
And maybe :
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/08/dead-pl...
Read this book for the first time recently, a huge amount of prescient ideas in there.
I wrote a blog post exploring how far away glasses like Manfreds are: https://fleetwood.dev/posts/a-first-principles-analysis-of-c...
Thanks, nice article, especially the references !
1.) Why no mention of the Google Glass (and the «Glasshole» phenomenon) ? It would be interesting to compare their sales - I've only been able to find old and very uncertain numbers after a quick search. More about Hololens too.
2.) Large Language Models seem to be (mostly) a bad fit, considering how they are optimized at working with written text, and you're not going to get the kind of interface that allows you to write text on glasses. (Probably... though maybe combined with bracers with keyboards ?? Those are already popular in some work contexts (supermarkets).)
(Also, the legality of neural networks in general is still under question. Ditto for USian infocoms, especially GAFAMs.)
3.) If the smartglasses are made by a USian infocoms, I would expect seeing more ads, not less (well, except maybe for the high end models, which are fated to stay a small part of the market - see also : iPhones).
4.) > The shape of the human head is going to stay consistent for the foreseeable future, and whilst there is some leeway to be found in the flexibility of social dynamics, we can expect the form factor (and therefore volume) of the glasses to be approximately similar to glasses today.
I really would be careful with a prediction like that. Consider how social acceptability of people always having a cellphone/smartphone on them radically changed in only 2-3 decades. Or using headphones in merely half a century. If the experience is worth it, I would expect Hololens-shaped devices to catch on quickly (~570g compared to your suggestion of 75g as the top end !) But maybe slimmer, compare first generation mallet cellphones with the Nokia 3XXX line. (Again, see also how keypad bracers and Hololens are already a success in work contexts.)
5.) > J/h
That's a weird unit if I ever saw one, why aren't you converting to Watts ?
6.) > SOTA
(I know that it means «state of the art», but maybe avoid unnecessary abbreviations in your writing ?)
7.) > to cover a ~100° field of view (FoV) with human eye acuity of 1 arcminute, ideally 6K6K resolution is required for each eye [9]. This equates to roughly 1µm pixel pitch
What do you mean by «high resolution» ?
1 pixel / arcminute = 60 pixels / degree (aka 20/20 vision) is very commonly cited as the maximal acuity for human eyes. It's also a number that is wrong :
https://web.archive.org/web/20230323210745/http://www.homeci...
> NHK claimed the tests showed 310 pixels/degree are needed for an image to reach the limit for human resolution [in the context of watching TV].
(This seems to include the doubling for Nyquist–Shannon, as one might expect.)
This is roughly «11k».
(But then, «in context of watching TV» might matter, only actual testing will tell what the maximum figure is for each kind of glasses.)
(Incidentally, 20/20 vision is pretty bad : it's what a postmodern 60 years old has, after correction.)
But then, this is the top end resolvable by an average human, «high resolution», while relative, could be said to be hit long before that ! (Context of usage matters, for instance «high resolution» is much lower on TVs compared to monitors, where you're expected to interactively work with a lot of text.)
Last but not least, you don't need the resolution to be high across the whole 100° of the field of view : the human eye fovea that is responsible of most of the daylight acuity is only ~5° in size... also is almost entirely blue-blind (the situation is complicated by the eyes constantly moving, among other things). IIRC Virtual Reality headsets have already started to exploit this to massively reduce computation and therefore power needs ?
8.) I'm not sure what do you mean by «full stack», how is it different from «vertical integration» ?
9.) > Other: Everything else a standard smartphone does
That too might be shortsighted, a very different form factor probably means that successful devices won't need to replicate «everything». For instance, smartphones these days generally don't feature infrared transmission, (direct) radio listening, or physical keyboards, features that were popular on early smartphones, and that's for a very similar form factor !
10.) That triangle with smartphone might also be shortsighted, for instance people typically don't carry any more radios, walkmans, pagers, often not even a watch (whether dumb or smart) ! So the smartphone might disappear too (for instance if the computing center becomes on the back of a Hololens-like glass and/or in a bracer). After all, a cell/smartphone needs a large enough pocket or purse, and is fairly easily dropped/lost/stolen...
11.) What would an «ultimate form» or «final generation» even mean ? By definition, that would be one before the device's disappearance, by which point its usage becomes niche (see : the recently disappeared telegraph), so why focusing on that ? (And you might never know when it might reappear when the context changes, so that finality itself is always under question.)
Thanks for reading it!
- Yeah including info on the Google Glass would have been valuable.
- LLMs are a bad fit, but VLMs perhaps not!
- I agree in the longer term the dynamics will be much more flexible, I was referring to near term first gen smartglasses!
- Everyone uses SOTA in my sphere :)
- The 6K6K figure was taken from the references, and high resolution there is ~indistinguishable. Maximising resolution just for the fovea was a step too far for the blog post, but yes super effective technique!
- Yes full stack ~= vertical integration. What im getting at there is you can't just slap a skin on android and call it done as many vendors are currently doing.
- Yes agreed, triangle is near term as the rest of the blog is focused on first gen :)
- Final generation is iPhone X vs iPhone 1, obviously the real final generation will be ~Neuralink!
Very high density of ideas that make you stop and go “shit, that’s exactly how it’ll turn out.” Blew my mind.
I remember this being an incredible book when I read it back on my moto droid phone in 2009ish on Kindle app...time to listen to it on audible. The biggest thing I remember is it invoked some deep thoughts from me on what is conscious and whether transferring consciousness to another medium would still the same person. Seemed (and still seems) to me that continuity would be broken...but isn't that true when we go to sleep and wake up? I loved this book because it provoked a lot of questions like this. Been meaning to revisit it for years.
A lot has been said about uploading.
A whole lot.
Multiple libraries worth.
I’m not going to replicate all that in this comment box. However, as far as sleep is concerned: No, your brain doesn’t shut off during sleep. Everything keeps running except for some interconnects, mostly it’s a mode switch.
The same isn’t true for concussions, and concussions usually come with short term memory loss. One might imagine that’s because you lose information that only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
Yes, this. It's hard to express how disconcerting this is to someone who hasn't experienced a concussion or neurological fainting spell.
I passed out one night alone after an undiagnosed neurological condition resulted in what was, as best we can tell, a seizure. Hit the floor and stayed there for an unknown length of time, because I didn't have a clock handy. The experience of, for want of a better term, "recohering" to find oneself awake and covered in one's own cold urine is very different from the experience of waking up. There's a distinct discontinuity of self that you don't get from waking from a dream.
I still have the distinct sensation that for some undetermined length of time, I simply wasn't there. It was a spiritually and epistemologically haunting experience.
Also worth considering anaesthetics in this context, because nobody's totally sure what's going on there.
> One might imagine that’s because you lose information that only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
Cue Exhalation
>One might imagine that’s because you lose information that only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
Or you know, the literal physical damage to your brain cells from impacting the inside of your skull.
There’s some of that, no doubt, but other events that cause electrical shutdown and reset—even without the trauma—still cause amnesia.
Discovered this here a few years ago, wound up basically taking up the next 2 days ploughing through it unable to put it down.
A case where the title implies a journey it'll deliver on.
You'd think of all the ideas introduced, the money-making ones would be the first.
Why haven't algorithmically-maintained corporate swarms destroyed liability law yet?
Did it happen and I didn't notice, or was it simply judged unnecessary since we extended the concept of limited liability so far with corporate actors?
If you haven't delved, this author's entire bibliography is fantastic.
> Why haven't algorithmically-maintained corporate swarms destroyed liability law yet?
I haven't read the book, so what exactly are you talking about? Is it swarms of shell companies?
I think software engineers often confuse the legal system for a computer program, and become enamored with "clever hacks" to defeat it, but forget that programs (and the legal system) can be patched.
Precisely. And they have the shortcut of violence; while in theory someone could do something like "create shell companies faster than the legal process can crack them open, thereby hiding one's activities behind an infinite regression of spheres," in practice that's fraud and if the authorities glom that your meta-project is that, they can throw you in jail (or your proxies in jail) until you're willing to divulge what's actually going on.
A truncheon and jail cell are the ultimate debugger.
> while in theory someone could do something like "create shell companies faster than the legal process can crack them open
I don't think that even works in theory. It's not like a shell company is a computer process that totally ceases to exist after it terminates and can longer be investigated: there's all kinds of logging and record keeping for a real life company. The authorities can start investigating a defunct shell company and trace it back to its origin (which then will reveal the whole "infinite regression of spheres").
FYI guys, this excellent author posts here on HN :-)
This is my fav of his books, but his others are often just as gripping. Glasshouse is my 2nd fav.
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Best (fiction) book I ever read, and I will always associate it with the amazing psychill album I discovered at the same time (Easily Embarrassed - Idyllic Life).
WTF, I started reading this yesterday! Talk about coincidence.
I won't read other comments here because I want to go in blind, but I'm afraid I already spoiled something for myself (even though I supposed the book would take that turn) just by looking at the comment page.
At the moment it looks like run-of-the-mill post-cyberpunk-near-future fare, but I suppose it will take a different direction altoghether.
Very cool story for anyone into far-future, post-humanity, and trans-humanity. I also discovered this here, in a comment.
Fun to re-read that. So many dated references - Windows NT! Communism in Russia! Patents being valuable!
Just always remember: it's a dystopia. It's not a happy positive uplifting book: the conclusion is intended as a genocidal, catastrophic nightmare.
Exactly. It's a fantastic book and extremely fun, but in Stross' own words: "In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening."
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-she...
On it's origins (extreme burnout as a programmer in a high growth environment during the dot com boom):
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
I’ve found that dystopian sci fi has to be clear about this to the point of bashing the reader over the head with it, which unfortunately can ruin it as art.
Think of 1984 as a classic example, though good writing rescues that one as art. If the author hadn’t included a “Hannibal Lecture” from the party boss about what The Party actually was there would be trads and neoreactionaries praising it as a work about how great it is to have a state that provides meaning.
If you don’t do that you get people who think for example that Paul Atraides in Dune is Luke Skywalker and the monopolistic feudal system is good when he’s more of a tragic villain in a dystopia.
People even think the world backdrop of Neuromancer is cool. That would not be a cool place to live. The arc across the three books is really showing the twilight of humanity and the ascent of machine intelligence. We are reduced to the street life that William Gibson saw in the downtown East side of Vancouver while the machines take over.
William Gibson would object to the notion that the Sprawl is a dystopia though - at least not directly as one.
His point about it was that the conditions of the sprawl are a good deal better then the conditions huge, even the majority, of humanity live in today.[1]
[1] https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apo...
Plus, he considers that to be a positive world because it survived the Cold War, which definitely seemed doubtful in the 1980s.
Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy ending" genre, which I think is important to provide balance to all the literary genres as a whole, since many of them aren't exactly trying to make the reader depressed. That's not so much the goal of sci-fi authors either, but instead to make the readers think, which, yes can and often does drive is into the darker parts of what society, humanity and existence has to offer. It's important to have a functional place to approach these things, in my opinion, which is why I shy away from the utopia/optimistic stuff in the genre that rarely seems to gain the popularity the more darkly speculative and dystopian stuff does.
It's not for everyone, I guess. But it should be. Your 1984 example is fantastic since we are seeing this exact thing play out in US politics today, with a tyrannical group trying to usher in a police state and the sycophants that walk lock-step right along with it, enamored by the delusion that they are the good guys because their demagogues don't explicitly say the quiet part out loud.
These size books by Charlie Stross are great fun, especially with the quick pacing.
For some reason on longer journeys I keep trying his longer ones and don't get on with them at all.
This novel and the two unrelated Eschaton books are in the very short list of books I reread periodically. I feel like they're something special.
Loved this book, curious how it holds up but have way to many other things to read to find out for myself.
Did the author ever admit he was confused about Russian cosmism or is he still going on about that?
ok so I've been hearing of this for a while. Seems to be somehow similar to Diaspora, which I didn't enjoy that much and I have currently put on hold (I am around halfway through). Wonder if I would like it.
Diaspora is a book for Math PhDs, involving a lot of physics and math theories. Accelerando is a book that anyone can read. Involving hyperintelligent cats and sentient shrimps (actual shrimps, not aliens).
I would recommend it not just for the philosophical aspect (it has a very interesting way of placating transhumanism) but also for the entertainment aspect (aforementioned shrimps, did I mention the Iranian space program?)
Stross is a very approachable author, Accelerando is not his most accessible book, but if you can go through half of Diaspora, you can easily go through the entirety of Accelerando.
I think you mean lobsters.
Accelerando is a fixup of a bunch of short stories, and one was "Lobsters".
https://reiszwolf.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/lobsters-%E2%80%A...
I don't mind technical fiction, and I love a good hard scifi, but I guess the part of science I am most interested on (when I read literature) is the psychological one - Blindsight is by far my favourite sci-f. However I am totally up for trying Accellerando, so thank you for the reccomendation, you sold it to me :P
Try Adrian Tchaikovsky’s SF series; particularly “Children of Time” and “Bioforms”.
One of the best novels from when sci-fy was as positive, great read.
I didn't really get a positive feeling reading all the way through it. I know the AI cat "pet" had a positive outcome in it's liberation, but I didn't really feel that way for the humans.
Positive, but not for humans.
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singularity sky was better
Crafted by Rajat
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