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wise_bloodon Ask HN: What are you reading?

20 years ago I read a The Guardian article about the "top geek novels". I immediately read a bunch of those.

Recently I managed to find the list again, and it's been endless pleasure:

- American Gods -- Neil Gaiman

- Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley

- The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett

- Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks

- Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson

- Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell

- The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson

- The Dispossessed -- Ursula K Le Guin

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick

- Dune -- Frank Herbert

- Foundation -- Isaac Asimov

- Giles Goat-Boy -- John Barth

- Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon

- The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

- I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov

- The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

- The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K Le Guin

- The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick

- Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland

- Neuromancer -- William Gibson

- Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell

- Orlando -- Virgina Woolf

- The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner

- Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson

- Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner

- Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein

- Trouble with lichen - John Wyndham

- UBIK -- Philip Dick

- Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

- Woman on the Edge of Time -- Marge Piercy

(I am creatively interpreting "The Colour of Magic" as "all Discworld", "Dune" as "the six Dune books", etc.)

wise_bloodon Why 'What's Opera, Doc?' looks like that

There's a reason why this is #1 in "The 50 Greatest Cartoons" (1994)

https://looneytunes.fandom.com/wiki/The_50_Greatest_Cartoons

(I don't link THE wiki because it doesn't have the full lists)

wise_bloodon The Millennium Problems for Biology

I was gonna write "Implement the three laws of robotics", but then I remembered that the point of the short stories is that there are a number of loopholes...

wise_bloodon Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher

https://elonka.com/UnsolvedCodes.html

wise_bloodon A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

> Aren't you just calling any want, suffering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

wise_bloodon Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Release Date and Gameplay

trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuFfiTEr2yc

wise_bloodon OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on ARC-AGI-3

repeating myself, but:

once 3 is solved, we would come up with 4. then 5, 6...

it will be AGI when we cannot come up with a task easy for human but hard for machines. thet's the whole point.

wise_bloodon Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark

> may be able to do some tasks that an average human can't

we are past that point for a while now (chess, go)!

the important part is the G in AGI: General.

wise_bloodon Nvidia AVO scores 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 interactive reasoning benchmark

> Once ARC-AGI-3 is solved (including on the private set), would we be convinced that we have achieved AGI?

no? once 3 is solved, we would come up with 4. then 5, 6...

it will be AGI when we cannot come up with a task easy for human but hard for machines. thet's the whole point.

wise_bloodon The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb (1986)

I'm going through this collection right now, and loving it: https://www.loa.org/books/311-the-philip-k-dick-collection-3...

wise_bloodon Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

good adaptations of GitS:

- the first Oshii movie

- the two seasons of SAC + SSS

- this new one*

*so far

wise_bloodon Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

if for some reason you, random reader of this comment, decide to start watching Patlabor, be aware that there are two continuities:

1. Patlabor The Early Days (88-89, 7 OVA) -> Patlabor (89, Movie) -> Patlabor 2 (93, movie)

2. Patlabor The TV Series (89-90, 47 eps) -> Patlabor The New Files (90-92, 16 eps) -> Patlabor EZY (26-27, 3 movies)

wise_bloodon Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

as someone who loves Astro Boy (and everything else Tezuka made): Atom The Beginning was a disappointment. But I also believe that Pluto sucks too (some smaller stories, like the pianist, were great).

The Ghost In The Shell: Global Neural Network features one story by LRNZ. His work Geist Maschine (in italian only) is amazing.

Among the Cyberpunk 2077 comics, Big City Dreams is also very good.

wise_bloodon How to read more books

- get books you want to read

- choose a time (in the evening)

1. after that time, screens become forbidden

2. read until you're sleepy

3. sleep

wise_bloodon Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

Out of curiosity, I checked my FB profile

my last post is from 2018, the last post I was tagged in is from 2020

6 years of nothing

wise_bloodon Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says

whataboutism

wise_bloodon Pac-Man, but you're the ghost

I had a version of this for old Nokia phones (Symbian), playing via blutooth. Really fun

wise_bloodon Chipotlai Max

I can swear by anything that Lindelof does for TV

Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, Mrs Davis: they are all great

Can't wait for Lanterns.

(His movies career is... less good. He shines in serialized stories I guess)

wise_bloodon The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid

you can find the sqlite dump of their database

no trackers, but the hash is enough to find seeds on dht

everything pre-2023 just works

wise_bloodon ML promises to be profoundly weird

has the whole youtube been indexed?

wise_bloodon Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game

Oh man

My first distro was a live cd with Knoppix.

It had this game, I played so much. This, and Kobo deluxe.

So many good memories

wise_bloodon Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)

If you want a list of common points among traditions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Points_Unifying_Therav%C...

some may be more difficult to comprehend, but it's all there

wise_bloodon Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)

https://suttacentral.net/mn22/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain...

wise_bloodon ARC-AGI-3

> . Once they beat these tests, new ones will pop up. They'll beat those, and people will invent the next batch.

that's exactly the point! once we cannot invent the next batch (that is easy for humans to solve), that will be AGI

wise_bloodon World Happiness Report 2026

that's also why I much prefer the HDI (Human Development Index), it tracks more meaningful metrics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

wise_bloodon The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

If we include tasks in the physical world, yes we are.

for abstract tasks (like ARC-AGI), who knows?

wise_bloodon The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines

the ARC definition is the one I like the best, something like:

"it is AGI when we can no longer come up with tasks easy for humans to solve but hard for computers"

wise_bloodon Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?

I feel like I could've wrote this word-for-word.

I'm Pierre Menard

wise_bloodon Japanese Woodblock Print Search

good job! I tried with a image of a Uniqlo t-shirt and it worked great

image: https://image.uniqlo.com/UQ/ST3/WesternCommon/imagesgoods/48...

result: https://ukiyo-e.org/upload/ac8aa7d9-d1c7-414d-b6d9-849371c88...

wise_bloodon The Perils of ISBN

TMDB is the best metadata provider for my home media server, they just have everything.

Two great features are: season names and episode groups. The other day there was a thread about Babylon 5, where seasons have names and the watching order is different from the airing order. Perfect application of both