Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a bit from a novel I read (won't be naming the title to avoid spoilers) where one of the minor twists is that the gigastructure of galaxies that we observe in the universe - the thing that's conducive to things like "star formation" and "life" - is an art project by intelligent species who've been alive since around the time of the Big Bang.

(No, it's not part of the Xeelee Sequence :P)

View on HN

You're talking about the ending of Men in Black, right? ;)

If you would recommend it, could you email the title to j@justus.ws? I’m on a sci-fi kick lately and always looking for good recs.

Will do. I also recommended some authors in another comment in this thread, and I try to keep my Goodreads mostly up to date, including ratings: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4016206-pavel-lishin

Comment the title is base64 to avoid spoilers because ChatGPT does not recognize what book this is.

Good idea!

Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK

Holy cow. ChatGPT 4 actually decoded this. It went into analysis mode, wrote some python, ran it, and gave the correct answer.

Its base64. Its not an encryption.

Sure, but it’s pretty amazing to me that ChatGPT didn’t just hallucinate a response to a generic request to decode a string. It recognized the string as base64, wrote a valid program to decode it, and returned the correct response.

Maybe I’m just old and amazed, but that seems pretty cool (terrifying?) to me.

What's terrifying about it? Serious question. Lately people are associating all sorts of doom to LLMs so I'm curious to understand.

I’m not sure how I feel yet. Rapid rate of change can uproot systems pretty quickly. I guess I’m just holding judgement to see if this is a new Industrial Revolution, and fallout that might occur. Ideally this wouldn’t be a worry, but we don’t live in an ideal world.

I personally use AI as a tool, and feel more productive FWIW.

If that's terrifying to you, definitely do not check out Sora by OpenAI

Why are you surprised? Is base64 hard for chatgpt, or am I missing something?

I basically said “decode this thing.”

I’m just surprised it hit all the steps properly rather than hallucinating a response.

Base64 encoding is a common way of jailbreaking LLMS. The llm just deals with vectorspaces so to it, base64 is just another language for the encoding/tokenization layer to learn.

Yeah - I’m just shocked I didn’t get a hallucinated response for the query.

I wonder what other code you could get it to execute for free.

It can also decode w/o analysis mode. Try GPT Classic

Gemini does too, not sure that's all too surprising

Did you ask it to create code for this?

Me: Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK ChatGPT: "xxxx" is a science fiction novel by Robert x xxxx. It explores themes of discovery, the nature of the universe, and the potential for cooperation among diverse life forms. The story revolves around a space station, xxxxxx, and its crew as they encounter mysterious wormholes, alien species, and cosmic phenomena, challenging their understanding of the universe and their place within it.

ps. I don't know what is there to spoil by sharing a book title but whatever :)

I'm under the impression that the spoiler is what they said about the gigastructure of galaxies. If you don't know the title, you can't related it to the spoiler they just told you

Ah, makes sense. I'm slow.

Well, on an unrelated note, do you have any scifi author recommendations?

I have so many. In real life, this is where I get a very intense look in my eye, and about 50% of the time, I can see that the person I'm speaking with has realized that they're now trapped in an hour-long conversation with me.

I'll make it a short list of recent authors I've liked:

- Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's best known for his Children of Time series, but his other scifi books are also excellent; I haven't read the fantasy ones. "The Expert System's Brother" is particularly excellent.

- James Cambias. "A Darkling Sea" is a tremendously cool novel set at the bottom of an ocean under a moon's icy surface. Arkad's World has some very interesting world-building & aliens. And Corsair is a fun near-future technothriller about near-space and moon mining.

- Stephen Baxter (author of the Xeelee Sequence) writes very good books, but just about none of them have a happy ending, and they're mostly grim - but very interesting.

- It's not HN if I don't recommend Greg Egan, Peter Watts, and Neal Stephenson.

Thanks. I have yet to read the first 3, so I'll add them to the list. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll stumble into that art-project novel.

None of those are that novel, but I gave the answer in base64 elsewhere in the thread!

That particular novel isn't the author's best work, but it's decent - his other stuff is much, much better imo.

Children of Time is such a great series, one of my favorites. I really loved the two corvid characters in the latest book. Tchaikovsky really is a great sci-fi writer, I'd recommend his Shards of Earth trilogy.

I'm also surprised to see somebody recommend A Darkling Sea! I don't think I've ever met someone else who's read it and recommended it before. The somewhat odd sidestory of the aliens who communicate through sex has turned off the couple people I've recommended it to from the story, pun not intended.

I am desperately trying to find the third book as a borrowable e-book at a library, but I'm coming up blank :/

I'm convinced Tchaikovsky must be a collection of writers or using a generative AI heavily because nobody can write that many interesting books in such a short time.

I'm working through The Final Architecture series right now, it's got some absolutely great SF.

That's an interesting point. It seems though the man has written many books prior getting published so maybe he is just running through his back catalogue. Remarkable perseverance to keep going after all the rejections.

Hermes?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com