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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

AKA "smartdust"

> The concepts for Smart Dust emerged from a workshop at RAND in 1992 and a series of DARPA ISAT studies in the mid-1990s due to the potential military applications of the technology.[2] The work was strongly influenced by work at UCLA and the University of Michigan during that period, as well as science fiction authors Stanislaw Lem (in novels The Invincible in 1964 and Peace on Earth in 1985), Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. The first public presentation of the concept by that name was at the American Vacuum Society meeting in Anaheim in 1996.

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

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Vernor Vinge's first use of that concept in a book was published the same year as that workshop. I wonder how the timing of that works out. It's not uncommon for the stage to be set by previous work and multiple actors putting 2 and 2 together in a fairly short period of time.

I can never keep track of who has published works as serials or as short stories prior to novelization. I don't see anything in Wikipedia about that for A Deepness in the Sky though.

Another interesting old reference is the two-part "Utility Fog" article in Extropy magazine from 1994 and 1995:

http://fennetic.net/irc/extropy/ext13.pdf

http://fennetic.net/irc/extropy/ext14.pdf

eat your heart out pham nuwen

There are people who unironically like the Emergence out there in the wild.

I have given up hoping he will ever finish the "zones" series. It's been ten years since _Children of the Sky_.

Better almost that he never wrote CotS and left us hanging. :(

amazing author IMO. came out of nowhere, wrote very little, kubrickian in that he doesn't want to repeat himself, idea quality is astounding in that his ideas are new, influential, and fully formed. You can read true names every 5 years and still be like 'oh that piece came true'.

Rainbow's End is the icing on the cake.

Everyone has N novels in them, maybe he just reached N.

(Not to nitpick but it's "Rainbows End", without apostrophe. More evocative, eh?)

And yeah, he's amazing!

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

> Rainbow's End is the icing on the cake.

What Silicon Valley keeps forgetting is that Rainbow's End wasn't supposed to be aspirational.

Except for the robot EV taxis, that's pretty cool I guess.

no user serviceable parts within

"Rainbows End" (no apostrophe) -- different meaning.

This is an idea that has been extensively explored since 1996, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_sensor_nodes

It's a pity that the theme is now surveillance as the utility of sensor networks is rather high. Perhaps larger devices that could roam the planet and especially the oceans would be to better to spend money on. There's so much to learn yet we waste the opportunity snooping on each other.

all the perverted governments out there who can’t get enough of our hard coded data. if this tech existed then, then how much behind the curtain is still yet to revealed. it’s pretty common for governments not to show off advanced technologies right away. in reality, that would probably be a breach of security revealing any of those secrets.

these are larger than dust, they actually have a small "propeller"

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/09/23/microflier1-013b...

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2021/09/23/microflier_sq-3e...

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