BarryMilo

I got it for Christmas, so just last month actually! I think it's possible it's just too late now, apart from a historical perspective. The concepts have become obvious and the prose is... not for me.

In terms of influence I suppose I'm mostly thinking of movies and shows such as the Matrix, but I also read so many short stories involving VR and techno-dystopias it's hard to pinpoint. Snowcrash is certainly up there (yes I tried to read Snowcrash first, having done no research, and liked it even less). Having played every Shadowrun game doesn't help (the universe is in a lot of ways "just" fantasy Neuromancer).

All that being said, Neuromancer doesn't read like a cheap copy either. More like I've been riding bicycles all my life and someone presented me with a penny farthing. I appreciate the innovation, it's just not particularly mind-blowing anymore.

I am a sci-fi nerd and I also found Neuromancer incredibly boring, but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.

I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.

I remember seeing an uptick in HN job posts, of which a large percentage (30%?) were AI startups. Now, will they still be there in 5 years? 10? Who can say. But technically, right now, they are jobs.

I'm assuming you're talking about "at-will" states, coming from Canada I've heard there are also sane states. And even some at-will states have powerful unions no doubt.

Obviously the future is to train the model with the ads, so that they're indistinguishable from the core of the answer.

I kid, but also hope I'm wrong.

I guess he really is a world champion!

I'm in small Devops team and people are pissed off. Thankfully Proxmox works just as well for us (some would say better). Even a large-scale migration seems scriptable to me.

> so that is probably reproducible

Is it? How many more pages get published each day? If you include each YouTube video and social media post, it's easily several orders of magnitude. Organizing this kind of firehose isn't easy, neither is prioritizing/ranking it.

2006 was child's play in comparison.

Are there really people who don't know about inner monologues?

Hope it stops updating after business hours!

I get the urge to standardize infrastructure but... wow. After reading the whole thing, I get why they thought it was worth doing, but you'd think they'd just hire a Postgres guy or two. Especially when they looked at the missing features, this feels like a downgrade...

Doubt it, it mostly went more corporate over time.

Would you settle for a few days of testing in perfect conditions? Just kidding, companies don't care!

We're talking about the guy that presses the buttons for the people taking the elevator, yes? What serious elevator accident might arise from that?

I think you'll find elevator attendance errors rather cheaper.

Truly one of the worst takes on AI I've seen. What is the purpose of a lawyer? It's not to read the law, the text is free (or should be). It's to advise you, based on the law but also on the immediate, historical and sociopolitical coontext, as well as on their understanding of the characters of all the humans involved.

If that gets automated, we are in AGI territory.

Well, they are experts on dishonesty....

Looking at the website, this is fully open source. Nice! Looking forward to trying it out.

Aren't Django models close enough to types?

For me it's usually about useless. It "may" be this, "may" be that, and no clue about what information it would need for a more accurate diagnosis.

I love the idea that developers had the power to decide what is and isn't supported. That's clearly a manager's decision if not CEO.

Break? It's practically enshrined in the law, seeing as any given bank can only have one credit card affiliated with it. So if I'm e.g. a normal National Bank client, I get to have a Visa card or no card at all.

I suppose online banks could change things a bit, but without that, introducing a new credit card provider is practically impossible.

Thus proving OP's point: it's not your computer.

It seems you've taken a roundabout way to arrive at innovation.

It's interesting because this is something that makes programming feel like a "bullshit job" to some: I'm not creating anything, I'm just assembling libraries/tools/framework. It certainly doesn't feel as rewarding, though the economic consensus (based on the salaries we get) is that value most definitely is being generated. But you could say the same of lumberjacks, potters, even the person doing QA on an assembly line, all in all it's not very innovative.

That's the thing with innovation though, once you've done it, it's done. We don't need to write assembly to make games, thanks to the sequential innovation of game engines (and everything they are built on).

Samme with LLMs and Bitcoin: now that they exist, we can (and did) build up on them. But that'll never make a whole new paradigm, at least not rapidly.

I think our economic system simply doesn't give the vast majority of people the chance to innovate. All the examples you've given (and others I can think of) represented big risks (usually in time invested) for big rewards. Give people UBI (or decent social safety nets) and you'll find that many more people can afford to innovate, some of which will do so in CS.

I have to go back to work now, some libraries need stitched together.

See, I find this to be the core of what is wrong with the idea of "hard" sci-fi. The technology we have today is magic to a medieval peasant. Just because the explanation of how something works gets disproven, doesn't mean the invention itself won't happen.

Take FTL travel for instance. Sure, lightspeed is a hard limit, but we don't know yet whether wormholes are possible, which meanns warp drives are not impossible too.

But more than that, it's the effect that tech has on people that makes good sci-fi, not the tech itself. In this sense, even the technically impossible remains relevant. For instance, we'll (likely) never meet aliens, but most of us will one day be confronted with the themes of aliens stories, e.g. understanding people beyond our culture, dealing with the unfathomable, grieving our place in the universe, etc. "Hard"ness is just aesthetics.

Skill required near zero? I'm approaching 15 years as a developer and React is still completely foreign to me. I'd need days full-time just to learn one version of it, not to mention every prerequisite skill.

And what do you mean by "real" value? Carrots have value because we can eat them, React apps have value because they communicate information (or do other things app do).

Or do you mean artistic value? We can agree, if you like, that SPAs are not as much "art" as RCT. But... who cares?

I know it's not your main point, but I think most of us big sci-fi fans agree that "soft" vs "hard" sci-fi is a false dichotomy. Who knows what is and what will be possible? Just because the technology is wrong doesn't mean the idea is not interesting.

True, I guess most artistic industries must work this way, since we all know that about 95% of all art is terrible (and that was before AI).

I feel like there's a difference between a company and an industry, though in the end I suppose it's all a sort of natural selection. Good (or rather, "fit") authors publish second books and third books, while good companies get to exist into second, third years etc.

All it takes more courage than most of us have after writing our first book!

Good points all around!

It's funny because I expect most of us do it for the art, but artistic merit doesn't pay the rent. This is why many smaller publishers have "locomotives" that are guaranteed to sell so they can publish "good" literature books that won't sell. Don't know about the big American ones, seeing as they're flooding the market I assume they're just playing a numbers game, let God sort them out...