"if you want stuff to be upvoted post interesting stuff!"
Then spams the forum with Wikipedia links as if they are Holy Scripture. Not interesting, just predictable.
Love the way the internet is being shrunken to Wikipedia and select "trusted media"... There are a thousand decent science fiction and literature sites out there, if you can be bothered to look for them. There are even these things called books. They're much better than Wikipedia. I believe Gibson writes them himself.
You're happy to abuse people elsewhere. Have a word with yourself. Wikipedia is not "interesting" or original. Come up with something else.
I think he's a bit upset that I stopped his attempt to 'support Ukraine' by painting the Zelensky government in a bad light by posting Russian disinformation to HN.
You're not wrong. Seems to be a Russian shill account trying to spread misinformation about Ukrainians buying lots of Bentleys? Or else just a misinformed... person.
The fact they got so angry at you calling them out seems to indicate the latter.
It certainly didn't help. What strikes me as odd in the whole exchange is that anybody that wasn't aware that this was Russian disinfo would just say 'oh, oops, didn't know that' and move on. So this is with purpose or the person has no idea what they're up to. And obviously no russian troll ever laid a trail of being in the West... Note that they never acknowledged that it was disinfo.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Slashdot had the concept of the 'AC', an 'anonymous coward'. It's not the most prestigious label to aspire to but it is interesting to see the kind of venom on display here, which I highly doubt that person would commit to if they weren't anonymous.
You are a coward though. Instead of addressing the issue I was talking about, you made a disgusting insinuation about me personally. Which you refused to retract, even after being proven wrong. You had the chutzpah to tell me how to speak English, even though it is your second (or third etc) language.
You have arrogant statements all over your profile page telling people what to post, and then you keep putting Wikipedia links on here. The irony of that is lost on you. (The difference between the writing on say, Britannica, and Wikipedia, is night and day.)
Everybody already sees Wikipedia. It's about all we are allowed to see on search engines anymore. It sums you up.
I hardly ever write on the Ukrainian conflict on here, and get accused of being a Russian shill, because I posted once or twice on this matter.
It's not my main interest. Not even close. I post far more on other subjects. I avoid talking about Gaza because someone like you would jump on whatever I say. There are certain other topics I cannot discuss openly on here, because of the same.
It was an American who once said, "truth is the first casualty of war". If your discussion only consists of endorsing everything the government says then you are not in favour of free speech.
I don't agree with Putin. I have said repeatedly I think his.government is corrupt.
If you disagree with something I say, then post a decent rebuttal that doesn't involve labelling me a "shill", "bot", 'Russian agent" etc.
You have a self-righteous comment on your profile about making interesting comments, but are one of the folk dumping Wikipedia links on here all the time.
Not only is Wikipedia full of bad writing and often an unreliable source, it is the default of internet bores.
You previously made a false accusation about the use of the definite article in English (which is not your first language), and refused to retract it even after an article from that well known Russian propaganda site the BBC was posted proving you were talking complete and utter shite ... Then my device started going haywire. Probably just a coincidence, right? Maybe.
Gibson published Agency nearly three years before ChatGPT's release, and six years before the emergence of today's increasingly autononomous AI agents.
...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...
...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...
I was thinking about Accelerando the other day: in 2026 it's clear that it predicted a lot of things bizarrely well, but that contrasts with Stross' later disbelief that our current world's technology could exist, which seems to have persisted into the current day.
cant recommend this book enough. Gibson continues to amaze me. I read it when it just came out, gave me the chills. 2021 and super current (talking about the time after pandemics etc.)
Nevermind that. Looking at Ukraine, we're getting close to Philip K Dick's Second Variety.
I'm always amazed that people are handwringing over whether we're getting language models "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.
And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.
Eunice is like Wintermute's grandma. Five years per generation at the current rate, so 2035 sounds about right. All that's missing is rastafarians on a derelict space station.
Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them. But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.
I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.
Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!
> But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.
There's a discussion to be had about whether we software engineers can still say we made something or not. I think that with sufficient effort put in, we can still make that claim but should be careful about how we phrase it.
I also think that if you put in just 30 minutes of effort you absolutely cannot claim to have written it or had much input into it at all.
Arguably they spent years developing a spec for an app, which the LLM was then able to follow. Most of my pet projects are things I've been working on idly, developing in my head far in advance of actual time spent coding, which the LLMs are able to just go to town on building out very quickly.
I think we underestimate how much skill we put into our prompts to build these personal apps or pretty much any of these few-shot vibe coded projects. Not that a complete noob couldn't do this, but they would get there much much faster if they had heard of Kotlin and downloaded an .apk from github. This isn't meant to dispute the Eunice claim or even the magic of a bot writing better programs with little more than an idea and an hour. Prompting lowers the barrier to entry, but those of us with experience are still having an easier time of it than the beginners.
Although, when there are a million Eunices running around trying to proactively help their users, they may have a harder time accessing that kind of data...
I guess each generation discovers a different William Gibson trilogy? I would have assumed this was more about Wintermute and the HF hack. Remember the Zurich Orbital AI registry?
I was just looking at https://claudia.gallery and the MCP specs there (which reminded me instantly of Idoru) when I chanced upon this, and the Gibson quotes.
It's actually surprising to me that "chat while working" isn't a more common behavior outside of complex sub agent ecosystems. My hobkin agent framework just runs the chat in a parallel thread and weaves it into a common context, it's really nice to be able to give / get updates in the middle of tool turns.
So, I think it's important to bear in mind that the prophecy is to some degree self-fulfilling.
People in technology read science fiction. That reading in part informs and inspires the kinds of things they work on and explore. This is illustrated pretty directly with the new Tesla vehicle and various deferred dreams of flying cars—this is not an innovation influenced by practicality, it is influenced by regressive adolescent fantasy.
I think there's some degree of that in a lot of technical innovation. Yes, it's still uncanny how well Gibson tracked developments (or perhaps equally, how much his fiction has influenced the kinds of things people pursue, consciously or otherwise).
I don't know about this guys, we used to have phones and as soon as we had the chance to use text messages instead we went all in on them. I personally, and many of the people I know avoid voice calls as much as possible.
So if I can't really be bothered to speak with other humans, why would I want to speak out loud with an AI? I may be wrong and soon we'll all have Jarvises, HALs and Samanthas but not sure the adoption will be as fast and broad as these companies want to makes us believe.
People avoid voice conversation because they don't want to deal with human live interaction. Most people don't mind talking to themselves, as sad as it sounds. I'm guilty as well.
As someone who needs glasses to use computer, it's really convenient to be able to use voice for interaction, also while driving or at home in the kitchen. I'm waiting for good smart glasses as well, since I don't want to have to keep taking my glasses out just to check any piece of information -- menu, price tag, train time, and so on.
These days, I constantly find myself filled with a kind of techno-dysphoria, where not only do I not want to use the tech in the way it’s being packaged/sold, but I’m filled with dread and disgust by the idea of people who do so breathlessly anticipate and proselytize its arrival.
The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.
If anyone is enjoying the Jackpot series, I highly recommend 'Daemon' by Daniel Suarez (2006). He completely nails the technological capability / potential of an autonomous ChatGPT. I'm surprised it's not mentioned more.
It's been here all year, agentic AI is over a year old even in the mainstream. Real time TTS-SST can be better than Dessa, and with an actual brain and custom voice.
this article is just a marketing copy for openAI right?
Also it leaves out all the parts that are not publicly releasable from these mainstream companies that will finish the job,
Limbic system, dream and reflection pipelines, brainstem,
Self improvement and learning, continuity of state, stable memory vectors across time and the ability to tell dreams from memory,
I could go on. I wish people would explore what's already out there to play with instead of gushing at the crumbs openAI throws the plebs.
The "Fuck knows" response highlights Gibson's style perfectly. Not any writer is bold enough to not take themselves, or their works, that seriously. That's why I enjoy it so much.
58 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadAnother one that comes to mind constantly is 'The Peripheral'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(novel)
I'm pretty sure Gibson has a wormhole with a lens attached stashed away somewhere.
"if you want stuff to be upvoted post interesting stuff!"
Then spams the forum with Wikipedia links as if they are Holy Scripture. Not interesting, just predictable.
Love the way the internet is being shrunken to Wikipedia and select "trusted media"... There are a thousand decent science fiction and literature sites out there, if you can be bothered to look for them. There are even these things called books. They're much better than Wikipedia. I believe Gibson writes them himself.
You're happy to abuse people elsewhere. Have a word with yourself. Wikipedia is not "interesting" or original. Come up with something else.
Seems like rage is maybe a tad misplaced?
The fact they got so angry at you calling them out seems to indicate the latter.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Slashdot had the concept of the 'AC', an 'anonymous coward'. It's not the most prestigious label to aspire to but it is interesting to see the kind of venom on display here, which I highly doubt that person would commit to if they weren't anonymous.
You have arrogant statements all over your profile page telling people what to post, and then you keep putting Wikipedia links on here. The irony of that is lost on you. (The difference between the writing on say, Britannica, and Wikipedia, is night and day.)
Everybody already sees Wikipedia. It's about all we are allowed to see on search engines anymore. It sums you up.
It's not my main interest. Not even close. I post far more on other subjects. I avoid talking about Gaza because someone like you would jump on whatever I say. There are certain other topics I cannot discuss openly on here, because of the same.
It was an American who once said, "truth is the first casualty of war". If your discussion only consists of endorsing everything the government says then you are not in favour of free speech.
I don't agree with Putin. I have said repeatedly I think his.government is corrupt.
If you disagree with something I say, then post a decent rebuttal that doesn't involve labelling me a "shill", "bot", 'Russian agent" etc.
Not only is Wikipedia full of bad writing and often an unreliable source, it is the default of internet bores.
You previously made a false accusation about the use of the definite article in English (which is not your first language), and refused to retract it even after an article from that well known Russian propaganda site the BBC was posted proving you were talking complete and utter shite ... Then my device started going haywire. Probably just a coincidence, right? Maybe.
That too is not far off now.
...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...
...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...
i don't care about facts, tom selleck convinced me it was at&t
I'm always amazed that people are handwringing over whether we're getting language models "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.
And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.
I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.
Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!
There's a discussion to be had about whether we software engineers can still say we made something or not. I think that with sufficient effort put in, we can still make that claim but should be careful about how we phrase it.
I also think that if you put in just 30 minutes of effort you absolutely cannot claim to have written it or had much input into it at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_(Ender%27s_Game)
Yep. He _has_ to come from the future.
People in technology read science fiction. That reading in part informs and inspires the kinds of things they work on and explore. This is illustrated pretty directly with the new Tesla vehicle and various deferred dreams of flying cars—this is not an innovation influenced by practicality, it is influenced by regressive adolescent fantasy.
I think there's some degree of that in a lot of technical innovation. Yes, it's still uncanny how well Gibson tracked developments (or perhaps equally, how much his fiction has influenced the kinds of things people pursue, consciously or otherwise).
So if I can't really be bothered to speak with other humans, why would I want to speak out loud with an AI? I may be wrong and soon we'll all have Jarvises, HALs and Samanthas but not sure the adoption will be as fast and broad as these companies want to makes us believe.
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-p...
As someone who needs glasses to use computer, it's really convenient to be able to use voice for interaction, also while driving or at home in the kitchen. I'm waiting for good smart glasses as well, since I don't want to have to keep taking my glasses out just to check any piece of information -- menu, price tag, train time, and so on.
The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.
Definitely not even in the same ballpark as Gibson, or even Stephenson.
Also it leaves out all the parts that are not publicly releasable from these mainstream companies that will finish the job,
Limbic system, dream and reflection pipelines, brainstem, Self improvement and learning, continuity of state, stable memory vectors across time and the ability to tell dreams from memory,
I could go on. I wish people would explore what's already out there to play with instead of gushing at the crumbs openAI throws the plebs.