Hacker News Reader

Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

That movie has aged incredibly well!

As a story, yes. But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.

The future seems more like Blindsight [1]: hyper-intelligent, completely unconscious systems outperform, out-manipulate, and out-compete human beings purely through automated efficiency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

Isn't that Accelerando?

A major difference is that Blindsight is actually readable and enjoyable. Also, vampires in space.

Oof; I loved both books, but Accelerando was much easier to read.

That thing is a bastardization of singularity sky for the masses

Weird. I found Accelerando to be both.

I'm reading it now and am enjoying it!

I haven't read Accelerando but I found Blindsight really difficult to read and like visualise what is going on.

It felt like he tried to jam way too many story threads into what is a reasonably short book too. The vampires are a good example of that.

Same, it was a slog and difficult to figure out what was going on.

"No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."

> But Terminator failed on a basic premise: Skynet becoming self-aware.

A strange claim. Why do you think that?

> The future seems more like …

Oh, so Terminator failed because it didn’t match a different fictional speculation about the future?

We are in "the future" relative to both works. The current intelligence threatening our planet is an unconscious token predictor, much more like the hostile non-entity in Blindsight (which even speaks to humans via token prediction) than the mechanical persons in Terminator 2.

Near as I can tell, the LLMs aren’t the threat. Just greedy morons with too much power, same as usual.

Good point. If only the evil we must fight was as simple as Skynet. Reality is much sadder since people are hurting people.

>Skynet becoming self-aware.

Did it? I thought Skynet was a defense system trained to see humans as enemies, it just worked by design, like HAL 9000. Screamers became self-aware.

Skynet becomes self aware. From T2: "The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."

I don't have much of a problem with becoming self aware. More questionable is hooking up AI to launch nukes - you wouldn't want to do that with Claude. There's also the time travel thing.

> That movie has aged incredibly well!

Except for the titular event not happening!

You know that's true of most films, right? "Aging well" doesn't refer to howly closely it matched reality.

yet...

Resolution-wise it hasn't due to the extensive use of early CGI.

That CGI looks quite OK, and even surpasses much of "modern" CGI. Have you ever seen "Flash"?

This is considering the effects were done in 1990.

Edit: a lot of what people think is CGI in T2 is actually NOT.

https://www.facebook.com/StanWinstonSchool/videos/bullet-hit...

Some confuse style with quality.

There was a lot of cartoon animation done by hand in the 1930. Frame by frame drawn, far superior to modern animation. However the styles are different, and some prefer one style of animation over another.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1q986...

I've just noticed in the 'full version' linked to in the reddit comments, it's a poorly done 480i -> 480p, and the interlace fields are reversed.

If you watch the panning in the original star-scape at the start of the video, you'll see it jittering back and forth as it pans. Sad. If properly converted to 480p, that scene would be super-smooth too.

(It's less apparent elsewhere, unless there is side-scrolling)

What do you mean? The cgi is great, even today. They obviously put a lot of work and effort into it

T2 and Abyss were trailblazers. I remember on the T2 director’s commentary how they were so amazed when they got the effects back months later because they’d never seen anything so good.

Careful! Some of the scenes you would think as CGI are actually using practical effects. Even a couple of scenes with liquid metal on screen were using models.

The ILM documentary on Disney+ talks about the techniques on that movie, super interesting documentary in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com