I have to say that I spent a lot of time recommending this author to people. "Light", and "Nova Swing" are both ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE.
I was on holiday, and stopped at a second hand bookshop to grab something hopefully a bit trashy to read. I picked up Nova Switch because the cover made it look like some weird sci-fi detective romp. But after about three pages it became apparent that I had happened upon something very special indeed, and when I made it to the end I did something that I'd never done before. I turned back to page one and read the entire thing again.
It is magnificent. Everyone should read it. It turned out to be the second book in a trilogy, and maybe that was part of its appeal. It didn't explain anything, it just launched into a beautiful and strange sci fi world, filled it with extraordinary characters, and moved languidly through the story.
So much science fiction is just dreadful garbage. Harrison is most definitely not.
> It turned out to be the second book in a trilogy
It's funny, this happened to me as well. A long time ago my sister gave me Wizard by John Varley for Christmas. I read it and loved it, and only noticed after I'd read it that it was a sequel. So I read the first book, and later, when it came out, the third book in the trilogy. I just reread them again a few months ago. Varley is -- was :-( -- very talented.
So, so good. I’ve probably read Nova Swing six times by now…
The Death Sentence episode on Light is a very good discussion and introduction to Harrison and his work. https://soundcloud.com/death-sentence-pod/m-john-harrison-li... (start from 55 minutes in if you want to skip some three-year-old-news and obligatory death metal interlude)
I loved all three books. I do most of my reading before going to bed. These ones had a huge effect on my dreams, in a way no other books have. I'd describe it as adding colour where there was none before. The prose was exuberant. I usually find detailed descriptions boring, but here it felt like they had a purpose beyond just making you imagine what things looked like.
And what, pray tell, will this search engine search?
If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?
This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.
Peer review is what made information on sites like Stack Overflow and reddit have value. One on one conversations with an LLM are not an equivalent and direct substitution.
One of my favorite parts of Arc was that they already discontinued new features. It’s perfect, I get to open the same tool every day with fresh chromium patches. I would gladly pay for this experience yet they never asked.
Anything else like Arc does too much. This is a true disappointment, coming from The Browser Company
Just migrated to Zen this afternoon using https://github.com/Thinkscape/arc-to-zen, it's ok so far. I tried Zen a few months ago and at the time it didn't feel great compared to Arc (some transitions were not very smooth, some things didn't work just like in Arc) but it's really improved. After just a few hours I don't really feel a difference.
As a bonus it's based on Firefox so uBlock Origin is available.
I saw it mostly in the new tab screen. When you type, there's an option to query chatgpt instead of doing a search/url input. ALso they bundled the Max AI which summarized pages. To me that was only useful to summarize pop culture chat stuff like "Why is XXXXXX getting cancelled?"
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with
"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."
Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?
Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.
Firstly, if you're going to write about something you like, you should write it yourself. LLMs just make your writing worse. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Secondly, I love software rendering too. The nicest rendering I ever made was painters-algorithm sorted and shaded by the z-component. It just looked so simple and lovely.
I find some aspects of your writeup to be... quite annoying if I'm honest. The writing is good, but you fail to define several of your terms early on.
What is d_k - I assume it's the dimension of the k vector. Similarly, I assume d_v is the dimension of the v vector. What is the "i" suffix for here at this early stage? It doesn't need to be there, it's just confusing.
You say the keys are "used for lookup based on similarity". What does this mean? Similarity to what? The existing keys? Something else?
Your first example then introduces the identifier "M", which seems to be the number of memories. Again, this is not defined. It speaks again of similarities, and introduces "weights". But the matrix Mxd_k is a matrix made of all your keys, which aren't "weights" - or at least this term is new. The term "tokens" makes an appearance around this time also - something else that needs defining.
I think you need to go through the text of this article, with an eye to someone who is reading it for the first time. Define every term you use, remove unnecessary notation - and also perhaps explain at the start why one would be interested in a "memory store" of this nature.
There is a place for something that really explains what's going on here. I've yet to find it.
I found many of the things are clearly defined after the sentence „Here are the terms we’ll use throughout.“ right at the beginning (e.g. M, d_k, d_v).
Where he does NOT state what d_k or R^d_k mean and there are countless other examples. I happen to know because of classes I took, but it's insane and obnoxious to assume that every reader did or went through any higher education at all. This is not high school math. It's not terribly complicated either, making this situation even more frustrating. The author could have spent just a little extra effort explaining these things to multiply his target audience - but he's either incapable to think from a different POV or pandering to his peers by not wasting time defining "the obvious". Pure academic blindness on full display here.
Agreed 100%. Mathematicians SUCK at writing. No matter how hard they try, they'll gloss over important non-trivial definitions. And I think this author has been trying... but seems to at the same time ignore the negative feedback like yet another academia snob.
Instead of being condescending and annoying yourself, did you even try to reference other texts or resources to try to figure those things out? This is a freshman's complaint
"so companies are investing early on in the technology."
But this doesn't make sense. The AI bots are worse at the job, across all metrics, other than being cheaper. They're not "investing in the technology" in the sense of actual investment. They are just trying to save money. That's it.
If they cared about the experience of their customers, they wouldn't touch these things with a barge pole.
I was on holiday, and stopped at a second hand bookshop to grab something hopefully a bit trashy to read. I picked up Nova Switch because the cover made it look like some weird sci-fi detective romp. But after about three pages it became apparent that I had happened upon something very special indeed, and when I made it to the end I did something that I'd never done before. I turned back to page one and read the entire thing again.
It is magnificent. Everyone should read it. It turned out to be the second book in a trilogy, and maybe that was part of its appeal. It didn't explain anything, it just launched into a beautiful and strange sci fi world, filled it with extraordinary characters, and moved languidly through the story.
So much science fiction is just dreadful garbage. Harrison is most definitely not.
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