I haven't read Anathem yet (adding that to my reading list) but Cryptonomicon is high on my list! Snow Crash was incredible and it's one of the few books where I still remember most of the characters in it.
Honestly, IMHO it's complete and utter crap compared to the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE work Stephenson did with everything that came before.
Snow Crash? A milestone in modern sci-fi. Diamond Age? A truly incredible work of art! Even lesser stuff like The Big U or In the Beginning Was the Command Line were really, really good.
Then came Cryptonomicon, and it was good too ... but he was already deteriorating into loving the sound of his own voice way too much by then, so you had to wade through a bit to get to the good stuff.
And then there was Anathem ... where he made up half a language and required you to learn it to read the book (and it was like ten zillion pages long). Good writing is NOT about just throwing whatever brilliant ideas you have onto the page ... it's about cutting it down to the good stuff. Stephenson just stopped doing that by the time he got to Anathem.
To be fair, lots of people were willing to wade through all that fake language BS and Stephenson writing 100 words when 10 would do, and they all report loving the book ... but as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
I found Anathem significantly better than Diamond Age fwiw. Different strokes.
Diamond Age you can tell why he is very popular with silicon valley executives (and honestly is showing its age nowadays -- Japan is oddly relevant and the description of future China would read comical for someone in the 2020s). Anathem you can tell why he is popular with nerds like me.
It was published in 1992, but it was likely written in large part during the 80's ... and back then the world thought Japan was the future because of the popularity and success of Japanese tech corporations.
Their failures a few years later would dispell that myth ... but for awhile it really seemed plausible, and you'll see a similar fixation on Japan in lots of sci-fi from the 80's.
Yep. Sorry, thought I made it clear in my comment that this was a reference to the book showing its age.
The comment about popularity with executives was related to this romanticization of Victorian-era social structure that I see as a prominent undercurrent of Bay Area-coded literature, more recent iterations include Too Like the Lightning.
I'd make the same contrast between Anathema and Snow Crash. Cyberpunk in general seems to appeal to a class of person that's not quite a nerd's nerd - perhaps a little more extraverted, the kind of person that might go to conventions.
I noped out of Anathem when I realized learning the new language was going to be non-optional and non-trivial. I was also at a place where I needed my reading to be recreational rather than mind expanding.
Makes me wonder what Anathem looks like in other translations and whether... Mathic was it(?), was as much an issue in translation. Maybe I'll take another go at it. It's been years, and people that I respect greatly have told me it's one of their favorites.
I loved Snow Crash, and I still think about Diamond Age fairly often, 20+ years later. The ideas in Diamond Age were really just incredible.
I even enjoyed his first book, the Big U.
But I also agree about Cryptonomicon. After eating up Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I've tried to make it through Cryptonomicon twice and failed. I just can't seem to finish that book.
I'd disagree. Especially his last two books are very much getting to the point, and I really liked Seveneves and Termination Shock as well, all after Anathem. ("Fall" is the exception that proves the rule/trend; I'll just pretend that didn't happen. One of the very few books I've ever not finished after making it beyond the first half.)
> as a complete and utter Stephenson fanatic, even I abandonded him at Anathem.
You might want to give his later stuff a try. I think he's really improved his ability to wrap a story up, without compromising on the grand ideas.
A nothing event? Having access to our database is a nothing event? For most applications, all they keys a businesses castle are stored in a platform providers parameter store / secret key system. Downtime is bad for customers and slightly bad for a business. Stolen credentials are critical for both.
So far I found they accessed my S3 buckets, used my OpenAI key (which OpenAI thankfully detected odd behaviour and revoked the key automatically), did readonly operations on my Valkey instance, etc.
I don't think Palantir is concerned? Palantir is LLM agnostic and holds IL5, IL6, compliance with ICD 503, etc. Their entire platform is built around eliminating risk.
They are suggesting that a Democratic President could label Palantir a supply chain risk.
If:
1. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk is politically motivated
2. We collectively accept that is okay for the US President to bar all defense vendors and contractors from working with an American company for political reasons.
What defense related company(ies) would a Democratic President have political reasons to ban?
It has been reported that Palantir and its founder have a history of political contributions to the Republican party.
Instead of Republican presidents driving left leaning companies out of defense and Democratic presidents driving right leaning companies out of defense, it would be better if neither party used supply chain risk as a political weapon.
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