Hacker News Reader

Comment by suoduandao3 | Hacker News Reader

The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book. I was intrigued to learn it's also one of the top recommended books by Tim Ferris guests. I wonder how many separate reasons there were for that.

View on HN

"Kids need to get answers from humans who love them".

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...

Thank you for sharing this!

The Diamond Age was one of my favorite books and Neil's answer distilled and clarified a major theme of the book perfectly.

God dammit I wish I had seen that a few months ago when there was a dozens-long HN thread where people were arguing that that wasn't what he meant or that it wasn't important to the success/failure of the different branches of that project in the book.

> The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book.

Wait, did you mean The Diamond Age is an excellent book? Or... has someone made/written the book-within-the-book into an actual (e-?)book?

I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

The full title of the book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to refer to it by its main title, rather than just its subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of a different book, even if that book is a fictional book within the book.

If I started talking about how great The Modern Prometheus is, people would generally either a) be very confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad for not simply calling it Frankenstein.

I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.

I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even closer to reality!

I’ve seriously toyed with the concept. It may be possible now to get an application like that on a tablet, offloading computation to OpenAI and its ilk, but it wouldn’t be reliable. We’re not good enough at text and image generation to do it autonomously yet. We’re a little better at speech synthesis than Stephenson predicted, but it might still be nice to have a ractor too.

Interestingly, I started reading it over xmas break -- based on a recommendation. I got, probably, a quarter of the way through it before I went back to work. And I haven't felt the urge to pick it up again.

I was reading above comments about how liking NS is a matter of taste. So I'm not sure if I just "don't get it" or if maybe it's just "not my type of story."

FWIW, so far, I just simply don't care about any of the characters. Just curious for those that like the novel: should I? Or is it more about the ruminations of technology that is important in this book?

Like a lot of nerdy scifi writers, NS's characters can come off a little... archetypal rather than complex or subtle. It's a lot more pronounced in his shorter works, as there's a lot more internal dialogue in his longer ones - if you find that a deal breaker, it's not confined to the start of the book.

It might help to think of the characters as archetypal because he's writing about the future and these archetypes will be present in the future - the people who make history will seem a bit cartoonish because they'll be more extreme in their behaviour.

And if that doesn't satisfy you might still like his longer books like Anathem - the characters were still recognizeable there, but there was a lot more humanity to their behaviour.

I’ve read a couple NS books. I feel like the plots and characters are the dues to be paid in order to explore the SCI for concepts and worlds. Kind of like the stitching between action/chase scenes in a Fast and Furious movie. The plot is not the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com