Of course there's a heavy dose of childhood nostalgia driving this, but I do love everything about this design style and outlook. It ties into the "early" days of the internet and web, when the vibe was around having a "Library of Alexandria" in your family home, the computer as a bicycle for your mind and just a general feeling of "abundance" that permeated the environment. I would come home from school and watch Star Trek TNG and get a utopian view of the future, flip over to PBS and watch Carmen Sandiego or Square 1, have dinner, then crack open Microsoft Encarta on the family PC and browse through random topics. The world of technology felt like it held infinite promise.
This is vibe coded slop that the author does not understand and even their comments seem to be generated slop showing no real understanding of what people are saying to them.
Thank you for taking the time to look through the repository. I’m continuing to iterate on both the code and the documentation to make the intent and technical details clearer. You can find my research paper(under peer review) here:
One of the short stories in this collection "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim, won the BSFA award for short fiction, the Locus award for Best Short Story, the Nebula award for Best Short Story, and was nominated for a Hugo for Best Short Story. So I think that should pretty firmly answer your question on the relative quality of the works included.
I guess the reason it won all those awards is the same reason I dislike it as much. It's more of a political pamphlet than a sci-fi. Definitely far from "Best SciFi Ideas".
Just a few days ago this company came up on HN as part of a substack post which pointed out the numerous warning signs that this company is likely a scam, so its crazy to see them given so much credulous reporting from mainstream media.
After persuasively demonstrating an inability to ship a fancy alarm clock even with 100MM in funding at his last startup, the founder has now decided to turn his attention to easily surmounting the decades of insane hard science and engineering that forms ASML's moat. Of course if this goes the way of the alarm clock startup there's also the fusion startup he's running that could form a fallback...
It's not crazy. It's routine. That's what the mainstream media does best. Remember just a couple months ago when the mainstream media bought the line that a standard SMS fraud operation was actually a terrorist thread against the UN?
This book was generated by an LLM, and if I look at the Github organization that manages the repo, it looks like a bunch of other written material, all generated by LLMs. I scanned through the material a little bit and it seemed like exactly the sort of surface level gloss of topic that you'd expect an LLM to output. I didn't feel a ton of motivation to thoroughly go through the whole thing, in the same way that the author didn't feel a ton of motivation to actually learn about Lisp and then synthesize their knowledge into something novel that could potentially help other people. So it possible that there is more to this document than meets the eye, but right now I don't think I'm wrong in saying most people won't miss anything by skipping this.
I didn't really have a firm top 5 in mind, I meant it more in the sense of "this was very memorable indeed".
But what the hell, it would be fun to reminisce some more.
Kind of cheating because the book is a classic, so this is just for the story: I was 15 years old in 1996, and we took a family vacation near Westhoek in Belgium. There's a nature reserve with sand dunes. I spent a few days lying in the sand dunes while reading "Dune" for the first time. This was at the same time that Hale-Bopp was visible in the night sky. It's still one of my favorite books just because of how visceral that reading experience was.
"Diaspora" by Greg Egan starts in 2975 when the majority of humans are disembodied computer programs running in simulated-reality communities. Originally, humans were uploaded/digitized but by this point, new digital consciousnesses come into being. The first chapter describes the "birth" of such a consciousness, and again, I found reading this to be a very visceral experience, and rather beautiful. Given that this was written in 1997, it is also surprisingly prescient of today's understanding of auto-encoders and how LLMs train.
"The Carpet Makers" ("Die Haarteppichknüpfer" in the original German) completely blew my mind as a teenager because of how the story was structured. It starts with a description of a family that - like many other families - is working on an elaborate carpet made from human hair, a carpet that it will take them an entire lifetime to complete. Then the book begins to zoom out and you learn more and more about the universe it is set in, but not in an annoying fashion where a curtain is being pulled back and the author feels very clever. Its unusual structure exposed me to the idea that Sci-Fi didn't have to be primarily about rockets, if done well, it could just be quite good literature that happens to be set in space and speculates about technology and it's sociological impact. Other works demonstrate that better, but this is the one that made me realize that.
And then finally, and from quite recently, my hands down favorite short story ever. And it's actually metamodern! First you'd need to have read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf) by Ursula K. LeGuin, who is generally worth reading. In 2024, Isabel J. Kim wrote "Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole" (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/), and it's great. I re-read it every now and then, and it chokes me up every time. The way the prose is a complete juxtaposition to the original story: rough, unpolished, conversational. It pulls no punches whatsoever, and bounces between humor and moral horror. 10/10, will read again, many times, whenever I happen to think of it.
It's not an ad-hominem. When people are talking their book, you should know that they're talking their book, and that knowledge doesn't have to negate any sound points they're making or cause you to disregard everything they're saying, it just colors your evaluation of their arguments, as it should. I don't think this is controversial, and seeing that comment flagged is pretty disheartening, adding context is almost never a bad thing.
It is quite literally an ad-hominem, in that it is aimed at the person, not the argument. The issue isn't that more context is bad (I agree with you, it's useful), it's that as a policy for a discussion board I think allowing this kind of thing is a bad idea. People can be mistaken, or lie, and comments get ugly fast when it's personal. Not to mention the fine line between this and doxxing.
(e.g. here, the OP has claimed that they do not in fact have a vested interest in AI - so was this "context" really a good thing?)
I appreciate this response and I’m also as confused as you are. It’s information relevant to the conversation, not an accusation (it would be an odd accusation to make, no?)
I don't care, in part because the claim is false, but there's literally a guideline saying you can't do this, so I guess it's worth knowing that you're wrong too.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
In this case it’s relevant to the discussion as the user was questioning why you were making the points you were.
It’s not an accusation of shilling, it’s context where context was requested.
As a test imagine if you changed the context to something good such as “AI achieves the unthinkable” and the responding user asked why someone was so optimistic about the achievement.
It’s relevant context to the conversation, nothing else.
I believe that at least one of them worked for Meta before they embarked on this journey and I believe that they basically used the big tech money to FIRE. They've been able to them supplement and transition their income with the games and apps they've produced as well as related income from their 100rabbits work, as well as having minimized living expenses and no children. None of this is meant to be judgement or in any way demean the work they currently do, I love all of their stuff. Just trying to answer your question.
This comment is completely untrue, the place I had read the information was incorrect and I was wrong in passing on second hand information I hadn’t personally verified. One of the people in question has clarified and corrected this comment. I can’t edit the comment at this point otherwise I would, so this is the best I can do.
One of the two authors of the site up here, I just want to clarify before this becomes a rumour, I never worked at Meta, nor in big tech, neither have my partner.
Prior to moving on the water, Rek worked in a 10 person animation studio in Japan(Toneplus), as an animator/illustrator, and me(Dev) worked as a designer at a 15 employees company Cerego(we were building smart.fm). Afterward we worked independently making little games, got nominated for the IGF that one time, but never worked directly for a company again.
We budgeted the sailboat like this: 2 years worth of rent and related expense at our current rate, and so we could afford a 40k CAD$ sailboat. The way we looked at it was that if we managed to live aboard for over 2 years, we'd start making up the money we borrowed. It has been nearly 10 years now that we live aboard.
We're super opened with our finances and how we made this possible, so just ask us instead of making stuff up :) Cheers!
Thanks for dispelling the myth above. Very cool (and inspirational! as aspirant to the 100r lifestyle down the line) that you managed to do it without a big tech windfall :)
I generally agree with the sentiment behind this, but like many other things, underneath the zoning issues what it actuallyactually goes back to is cultural issues. For a large number of other countries you could loosen zoning up and ultimately someone would start operating an abattoir next to an elementary school and it would make the 5 o'clock news and then the city council would throw a bunch of new regulations in and the whole thing would be over.
I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.
The Japanese deal with this by zoning policies being set at a national level. Localities pretty much can decide what part of town the smelly/industrial businesses go, and the rest scales based on population.
The locality will plan where their high-rise/commercial district is, houses on side-streets are can all be triplexes with an option for a low-impact business as in the article, and secondary streets have dedicated businesses.
As an area's population grows the federal zoning allows that bigger buildings can be built - small apartment buildings instead of houses, etc. The locals can't pull-up the ladder behind them and say "no new houses", locking out young people and renters and transplants.
I assume that the problem in the US is more regulatory capture than culture. Starbucks doesn't want you to be able to sell coffee to your neighbors. And your neighbors don't want more housing to be built, because it might affect their home values. I've seen how home owners adamantly oppose these things.
And for decades we've been left with most new housing being built by developers as cheap as possible - clear cutting some space on the outskirts of town and throwing together cookie cutter houses, car dependent and without much of anywhere nearby to socialize. It's a shame that in a country of 330+ million people there's not more variance.
Nuisance-based zoning exists as a solution to this. E.g. you can operate a flower shop but not a noisy arcade. Yet somehow this concept doesn't seem to be able to get a hold.
It doesn't get a hold, because, again, culturally it is very hard for it to take hold. Just like your other response that says "well we should just start enforcing existing laws", the problem is that by the time you get into defining a nuisance in the face of some profit-oriented rules lawyer, or getting bylaw enforcement some breathing room in their workload from the 10000x other calls they have regarding bylaw infractions, you're downstream of the underlying cause and just trying to bandaid things up as best you can. You don't need nuisance based bylaws if people are starting out from a mindset of not wanting to be a nuisance to their neighbors, and Japan probably has bylaw enforcement and its probably really great, but it doesn't just get enforced by magic it gets enforced because they likely have a much smaller workload than exists for bylaw enforcement in my area, and that smaller workload is serviced by a number of people that is probably more sustainable as people generally don't constantly try to oppose any sort of taxes collected and so the department has sufficient funding that isn't at risk of being continually cut every civic election cycle.
On and on up the chain I could go, turning this comment into a wall of text as we work our way up the cause and effect ladder until we ultimately arrive at the things a society values, aka its culture. Its ultimately all downstream of a society and culture that either is constantly looking for a loophole to grab whatever profit there is in a desperate race to the bottom, winner-takes-all struggle, or a society that prizes something different.
I think its important to think about this point in the context that Jessica attended one of the most elite private schools in the US, Phillips Academy, with an annual tuition that is currently ~60kUSD/year. Notable alumni include both Bush presidents, and many billionaires or their children. Afterwards she attended Bucknell University, another private elite institution, tuition ~65kUSD/year, where the median family income is > 200kUSD/year, and 73% of the student body is from the top 20% income bracket.
So its important to "find your people", but as always it's as important to situate advice in the context where the advice-giver issues it from, and in this case Jessica has spent her entire life as an elite, finding other elites in elite circles, and I'm going to hazard a guess that this is probably something that has had a positive impact on her life.
I think your friends are probably on to something, realizing that you're responsible for helping to guide your child as they grow up has a way of crystalizing certain arguments, and various "hypotheticals" fall by the wayside as the attraction of an intellectual experiment and being the devil's advocate just doesn't really have the same pull anymore once it's your own child's future at stake and not just some thought experiment about "volumes and contrasts". As always people are free to make their own choices, and even listen to a speech from someone who was able have almost $200,000 of money spent on their high-school education, a speech about how to plan your career that is big on "gumption" and "stick to it" energy, and surprisingly short on "be born in the top 1% of economic circles", but given that this is a speech at the aforementioned Bucknell, I am pretty sure that most of the crowd is already pretty hip to the realities of the world they're about to enter.
Surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment. I didn’t know anything about the authors upbringing, but just from reading the speech, I had a strong feeling that it was something like this.
The reality is that the people who control the funding don’t want anything to do with the average slob. “Find your people” is a euphemism for “be rich and well connected, and hang out with other elites”
