Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

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I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?

On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.

The AIs are supposed to be very expensive, but it's left to the reader to figure out why—maybe it wouldn't work out that way in real life, but if the reader can't explore every part of the economic and technological space of the world (they can't), they become immersed within it, and allow the subconscious to come up with reasons for why such technologies exist in the story.

What's interesting in sci-fi at the time is that, because software wasn't fully solidified as a concept (nowhere near, in the case of Neuromancer) everything acts like a tool. What you buy stays just as it is, until it becomes obsolete. There's something quite appealing in that completeness. As you say, software is jarring in a way firmware isn't, and it lets developers be lazy.

As for toilets:

> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer

> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer

This is an interesting call out when it comes to the communication/presentation of aesthetics of technology in the book. There's no narrative about actually relieving himself, just the mention that, of course, he has to and this is how it's being handled; the reader fills that in from these few scant details. The need to relieve himself, and ultimately the mention of the Texas catheter, is used as an indicator of how he's able to remain jacked in for so long, and as foreshadowing of expected jacked-in duration as they approach the final stages of the Villa Straylight run (when he purposely neglects to put it back on). So even in the "advanced" technology of the cyberpunk future of Neuromancer, people still gotta piss and wearing a catheter is still uncomfortable.

> The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use.

And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.

Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.

320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.

> but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how

Oh, that's easy! They are cool!

NB in ~50 years cool would change it meaning and things would be no longer cool for a contemporary reader but some other word designating an awesomeness and delight.

Heh, and cool hunting is the setting in Pattern Recognition.

That they are cool is the only thing that needs to be said. The reader fills that in with their own perception, which is how we're ending up with the Torment Nexus, because some people think the Torment Nexus is cool.

> you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are

Rollerblading in motorcycle gear; duh.

> Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI,

I think there's a simple explanation to this one: there must have been an atmosphere that consumer demand for everything is default insatiable and any excess productivity will be used to increase total production, regardless of products.

If a sub-Wintermute AGI equivalent to Claude Opus class of ours could run 12 completely synthetic TV stations with help of one part-time human overseer, a cyberpunk entity like Sense/Net would have 1000 employees each responsible for six AGI units amassing 72000 total TV channels in its relevant company sub-division alone. Same in the real world today would mean 2400 of its 1000 employees including interim CEO got fired at the end of the week when its 3 AGI units went operational, but works like Neuromancer were written in a different time than ours.

> they don't show people having driver problems,

This one is probably because 1980s home computers didn't have much of the software "stack", plus peripherals were more or less hardwired to RAM buses. Apps ran side by side with guys from Nebraska[1] code, and could read or write to memory addresses where it thinks where the card is connected to, without having to call syscalls and have OS figure out device addresses and bus protocol packet constructions. So it likely wasn't obvious that there will be situations in the future where the mcguffin black box unit would ask an outdated binary build of an outdated framework that would be needed to be pulled from someone's Download folder and/or fixed by 16-hour tinkering(but the Chinese ICE in Neuromancer had security potting, so maybe that was it).

1: https://xkcd.com/2347/

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