False equivalence; a hammer and a chatbot are not the same. Browsers and operating systems are tools designed to facilitate actions, not to give mental health opinions on free-text inquiries. Once it starts writing suicide notes you don’t get to pretend it’s a hammer anymore.
I think the distinction is a bit more subtle than "designed to facilitate actions", which you could argue also applies to an LLM. But a browser is a conduit for ideas from elsewhere or from its user. An LLM... well, kind of breaks the categorization of conduit vs originator, but that's sufficient to show the equivalence is false.
My guess is that you’ve not had your house egged, or have some poverty of imagination about it. I grew up in the midwest where this did happen. A house egging would take hours to clean up, and likely cause permanent damage to paint and finishes.
Or perhaps you think it’s no big deal to damage someone else’s property, as long as you only do it a little.
they just wrote a paragraph about evil being easy, convenient and providing value, how the evilness of others legitimizes their own, how the inability to achieve absolute moral purity means that one small evil deed is indistinguishable from being evil all the time, discredited trying to avoid evil as stupid, claimed that only those who have unachievable moral purity should be allowed to lecture about ethics in favor of good, and literally gave a shout out to hell. I don't think property damage is what we need to worry about. Walk away slowly and do not accept any deals or whatabouts.
I don’t treat literature like tech books. A new novel doesn’t supplant an old one. New expressions of old ideas don’t make old ideas obsolete
There are always better books, but how do you know? Do you take my word for it? “Hey, I’ve read ALL the books, and these new books here are the best … trust me.” Better to read the old books yourself and be sure, right?
The core ideas are only mainstream in extremely modern and extremely liberal contexts. I bet the majority of teachers in this country would get shit for assigning this book, even at a college level.
Funnily enough, at the time (50 years ago) one common criticism of LeGuin was her lack of space battles and ray guns. Science fiction has always had those tropes and always will. Luckily, LeGuin brought more to it.
“Anymore?” After 40 years in software I’ll say that validation of intent vs. outcome has always been a hard problem. There are and have been no shortcuts other than determined human effort.
I don’t disagree. After decades, it’s still hard which is exactly why I think treating validation as a system problem matters.
We’ve spent years systematizing generation, testing, and deployment. Validation largely hasn’t changed, even as the surface area has exploded. My interest is in making that human effort composable and inspectable, not pretending it can be eliminated.
Specification languages need big investments essentially - both in technical and educational terms.
Consider something like TLA+. How can we make things such as that - be useful in an LLM orchestration framework, be human friendly - that'd be the question I ask.
So the developer will verify just the spec, and let the LLM match against it in a tougher way than it is possible to do now.
yeah how else do you want to organise who gets paid what? its nice and virtuous to claim that poor women should get paid more.
but there's simply not that much money to redistribute, unless more companies provide employment and drive labour demand up - exactly what is happening in this article.
so you can gesture all you want about women being poor and deserving more money, but it doesn't mean anything. you can't pay them above market rate, where will the money come from? certainly not taxes - there's simply not enough to go by.
Honestly, I love this comment, and I’m going to save it.
You’re so convinced that money is more important than human dignity you use the word “generosity” as invective. It can be hard to remember that this point of view exists, so thank you for the reminder.
its easy to talk about "human dignity" but its hard to talk about practical concerns on how to get the money for the dignity. please tell me, how do you expect the poor women in villages to get above market rate? unions? then the companies wouldn't even step foot in India and would rather move to Cambodia or Bangladesh or Ghana.
Because you’re not the audience. Clearly, in 2010, many people were still angling for Epstein introductions for the obvious reasons. The “warning” is a signal.
I’ll always upvote Bradbury; what a master. Isaac Asimov used to talk about “the big 3” of science fiction of his era: himself (natch), Arthur C Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. The more I read of all those cats, and boy have I read them, I came to see that Asimov was wrong, and that Bradbury was a different and better writer altogether.
Bradbury’s stories are about people, deeply real and deeply feeling people. This thread is young and already comments are about how Bradbury made folks feel. He was a humanist, like Ursula LeGuin, and less interested in exactly how the ray guns worked. Frank Herbert seems like this to me as well, very humane, opposite of Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson and (later stage) Neal Stephenson.
If you love Bradbury then take a look at Ian McDonald. When I read “Rainmaker Cometh” for the first time I had to do a double-take, so sure I was that it was a new Bradbury story.
Borges famously wrote a preface to a Spanish-language edition of "The martian chronicles". Excerpt:
"Ray Bradbury has preferred (unknowingly, perhaps, and by secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. Martians, who at the beginning of the book are horrible, deserve his pity when annihilation reaches them. Men vanquish and the author is not proud of their victory. He announces with sadness and disappointment the future expansion of mankind over the red planet - that his prophecy reveals as a desert of vague blue sand, with ruins of chess-like cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships to wander on the sand.
Other authors stamp a coming date and we don't believe them, because we know it is a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the gravitation, the fatigue, the vast and vague accumulation of the past - the 'dark backward and abysm of Time' from the Shakespeare verse. Already the Renaissance had noted, by mouth of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that the real Ancient Ones are us, and not the men from Genesis or Homer.
What has this man from Illinois done, I ask myself when closing the pages of his book, that episodes from the conquest of another planet fill me with horror and loneliness?
How can these fantasies touch me, and in such an intimate way? All literature (I dare reply) is symbolic; there are a few fundamental experiences and it is indifferent that a writer, to transmit them, recurs to the fantastic or the real, to Macbeth or to Rascolnikov, to the Belgium invasion in August 1914 or to an invasion of Mars. Who cares about the novel, or novelry of science fiction? In this book of ghostly appearance, Bradbury has placed his long empty Sundays, his American tedium, his loneliness, like Sinclair Lewis did on Main Street."
Strong second here. I’ve read lots and lots of all three.
Clarke wrote good stories. Asimov had some good ideas but was a fairly poor writer of fiction (his characters and dialog, in particular, are rarely better than terrible, and many of his stories hinge on a single gee-what-if shower thought and have little more going for them) and is in my estimation easily the weakest of the three.
Bradbury… is good good. He had a combo of talent and a mind to put it to a certain kind of use, some (or many) elements of which the other two did not possess. I would unhesitatingly recommend Bradbury to a literary fiction reader who’s not much on genre fiction for its own sake, and might not even bother to suggest where they start. I would selectively recommend bits of Clarke’s work where he’s treading a bit closer to the sublime than usual, or some of his short stories that are at least competent, fun short reads with some ideas or imagery or the odd line that sticks with you. I might not recommend any Asimov at all.
Some authors are good, no italics. Bradbury is good.
> Bradbury’s stories are about people, deeply real and deeply feeling people. ... and less interested in exactly how the ray guns worked.
Maybe this is why I never really got Bradbury. When I read scifi, I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described, and Bradbury's worlds aren't really logical (e.g. who would live on such a strict timetable? wouldn't all the singing and rhyming be annoying? how is the house still being powered?). But it makes a lot more sense if the point is to convey feelings. Kind of like an impressionist painting I suppose.
FWIW it’s not that I don’t find the worlds logical, just that Bradbury doesn’t explain them. E.g., have you read Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)? At one point he spends about 30 pages describing in loving detail the tech behind a high-atmosphere human glider suit. Really cool stuff. I still don’t remember a damn thing about the person who wore it.
Were it Bradbury, or LeGuin, we’d have had two sentences about the tech behind the suit and pages about the people involved. We’d have learned more about the character and, maybe, our common humanity.
I really enjoy the original Earthsea books. I guess my expectations of sci-fi are different than magic/fantasy; technology feels like it should be explainable in a way that magic doesn't. I'd probably enjoy Bradbury more if I approached his stories as fairy tales rather than sci-fi.
I think that’s a fair take. A lot of his stuff is straight fantasy, some is very nearly realism; a lot of time he seems to enjoy ignoring the lines while he colors. Try “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” perhaps; almost zero science to it :)
I have the inverse perspective. I am uninterested in the mechanics because to me, all science fiction stories are actually stories about the present. The more mechanical a story is, the more I feel it is obscuring that truth. The author can never erase the fact that they are living in the present and that their work is ultimately about the present. They can only obscure it under layers of verisimilitude that, definitionally, is only an appearance.
I remember reading a golden age science fiction story where an engineer is angry because he dropped his slide rule as he was getting into his backyard moon rocket. We’ve not always been good at predicting the future, that’s for sure.
> I can't help but consider the logic of the world that's being described
Focusing your attention on the mechanical logic of a story's world is one lens by which to analyze it, but that is a choice and you can choose to analyze it from other lenses as well. Being able to apply multiple perspectives to anything is a useful skill to practice instead of tacitly accepting the view that comes most easily to us.
Thank you for suggesting Ian Mcdonald, have not read any of his.
I absolutely rever and adore Bradbury, probably because he has a knack of articulating so well, the emotions and esthetics that we have in common, that I leave unarticulated, more so now that I am no longer a teenager.
He captured childhood in a way that perhaps no one else has. His children have dignity and purpose and seriousness and are still absolutely full of joy and randomness. William Wordsworth, maybe, revered and portrayed childhood as well as Bradbury.
I also love sci fi that explores the human condition. However my first foray into Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) left me a bit cold. Are there other works you'd recommend?
Short stories are, IMO, where he really shines. The Illustrated Man is a good collection to start with, as is The Golden Apples of the Sun. But read them slowly, and (this may be a controversial statement) in a physical paper book.
I'll bear it in mind, thanks. Fwiw The Martian Chronicles are effectively a bunch of short stories and I did read it in paperback. But come to think of it I read Fahrenheit 451 many years ago and distantly remember enjoying it.
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