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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Letting ancient evil code run? Have we learned nothing from A Fire Upon the Deep?!

Link to the Prologue of Fire Upon the Deep: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/-0812515285/A_Fire_Upon_the_De...

It's very short and from one of my favorite books. Increasingly relevant.

I 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.

There'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.

That's from the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky. (Which is also excellent.)

Deepness 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.

If you liked that and you haven't read it yet, give "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L. Forward a read.

I 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.

"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)."

＼(＾O＾)／ zones of thought mentioned ＼(＾O＾)／

Do 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

Legitimately 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".

Learning from fiction? Let's learn from the Dune then and start Butlerian jihad already.

I'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.

I love that book

Army of Darkness?

The Mummy?

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