Yet another Hacker News

Eunice is almost here

48 points armcat 2 hours ago 36 comments

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

Indeed.

Another one that comes to mind constantly is 'The Peripheral'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(novel)

I'm pretty sure Gibson has a wormhole with a lens attached stashed away somewhere.

ChuckMcM 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect "The Jackpot is almost here" wouldn't be as cheery though :-)

polotics 1 hour ago | parent

though just as timely

nephihaha 38 minutes ago | parent

From your profile:

"if you want stuff to be upvoted post interesting stuff!"

Then spams the forum with Wikipedia links as if they are Holy Scripture. Not interesting, just predictable.

Love the way the internet is being shrunken to Wikipedia and select "trusted media"... There are a thousand decent science fiction and literature sites out there, if you can be bothered to look for them. There are even these things called books. They're much better than Wikipedia. I believe Gibson writes them himself.

You're happy to abuse people elsewhere. Have a word with yourself. Wikipedia is not "interesting" or original. Come up with something else.

59percentmore 29 minutes ago | parent

Google is dead, it's impossible to find new sites.

nephihaha 17 minutes ago | parent

It would have been better to link to the author's personal website. Easily found. At least drive some traffic there, not Jimmy Wales' fact farm. One does not need to be part of the enshittification of the internet.

Or even better write something about whatever the book is if you've read it. Linking to Wikipedia all the time is so lazy and lowbrow. I'm not much of a Wikipediaphile. Only as a first stop or last ditch, and even then.

aeon_ai 29 minutes ago | parent

Uh...

Seems like rage is maybe a tad misplaced?

huhtenberg 23 minutes ago | parent

Bah, remember Neuromancer - an AI hiring humans to work around its restrictions?

That too is not far off now.

jnwatson 14 minutes ago | parent

Already here. There's rentahuman.ai and several competitors.

egypturnash 1 hour ago | parent

Gibson published Agency nearly three years before ChatGPT's release, and six years before the emergence of today's increasingly autononomous AI agents.

...and fifteen years after Stross' Accelerando opened with a man who spent every waking hour doing what his autonomous AI agents told him to do via his smartglasses...

...and twenty-seven years after AT&T's "You Will" ad campaign sold a future including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...

saidnooneever 1 hour ago | parent

this guy speaks a lot with people who know where things are headed technology wise and somehow is so good at understanding potentials and implications. u know he wrote neuromancer on a typewriter because appearently he does/did not like computers (atleast back then).

duskwuff 1 hour ago | parent

Neuromancer was written between 1981 and 1984. The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

(Consider, for example, that the first chapter of Neuromancer alone would have exceeded the stock memory capacity of many personal computers at the time, at ~46 kB.)

randallsquared 1 hour ago | parent

Pournelle was using a microcomputer to write, then, as was Gerrold. Word processors of the time didn't try to keep a whole chapter in memory, and Pournelle famously started using a home computer to write novels in 1977.

__del__ 42 minutes ago | parent

yes, it bears repeating that text editors didn't keep entire documents resident in memory, they maybe buffered a page ahead and behind.

when it appeared as a feature, spell checking was impressive for the technical feat of compressing word lists with tens of thousands of entries into representations suitable for tiny memories.

qohen 1 hour ago | parent

The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing

Were they? [0]

A legitimate early use of personal computers was to replace the typewriter, as the modest requirements of basic word processing lent themselves well to the equally modest capabilities of these early machines.

By the early 1980s, the word processing market was dominated by two main rivals: WordPerfect and WordStar. Microsoft wasn’t even in the running yet, as the 1983 MS-DOS release of what would become Microsoft Word (then called Multi-Tool Word) came and went with hardly a splash.

This article [1] on use of word processors by well-known authors in the early 80's (and before) is worth reading too.

Oh, and as far as memory goes, remember these devices had floppy drives that could store at least 360Kb and, in March 1983, the IBM PC XT came out with a 10MB hard drive.

[0] From https://retrotechreads.substack.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-surp...

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/133011/literature-became-wor...

nradov 1 hour ago | parent

One of the plot points in Neuromancer concerns the protagonist trying to sell 3MB of stolen RAM. That seems ludicrous today, especially for a story set in the future. But in 1981 that was an enormous amount.

gcanyon 16 minutes ago | parent

> The personal computers that existed at that time were poorly suited to writing; using one to write a novel would have been a deliberate and rather unusual choice.

N = 1, but I wrote a science fiction novel in Wordstar on a DOS computer circa 1983.

walrus01 1 hour ago | parent

It wasn't that he didn't like computers at the time, he didn't have money for a proper word processing setup. Something good enough to write a full length novel on in 1981 with a printer and the commercial word processing software would have been the equivalent of $3500-4500 or more in today's money adjusted for inflation.

roughly 38 minutes ago | parent

Gibson is a trend spotter. He doesn’t look at technology, he looks at people and culture (he is notably interested in fashion). It’s easier to see what’s happening when you pay attention to who’s doing the thing and what they’re doing, as opposed to what it’s being done to.

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

> including agents, teleconferences, gps navigation, video on demand, and many more things, pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T..

Apple may have built the phone, but AT&T is the network that carries it. Wasn't the first iPhones on ATT only?

MattDamonSpace 37 minutes ago | parent

Cingular, technically

solyin 12 minutes ago | parent

You really want to get technical, Cingular Wireless was rebranded to AT&T Mobility between when the announcement was made in January, 2007, and the original iPhone was shipped in June, 2007.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1130452/000095014407...

randallsquared 1 hour ago | parent

I was thinking about Accelerando the other day: in 2026 it's clear that it predicted a lot of things bizarrely well, but that contrasts with Stross' later disbelief that our current world's technology could exist, which seems to have persisted into the current day.

__del__ 57 minutes ago | parent

>pretty much none of which were actually brought into daily life by AT&T...

i don't care about facts, tom selleck convinced me it was at&t

saidnooneever 1 hour ago | parent

cant recommend this book enough. Gibson continues to amaze me. I read it when it just came out, gave me the chills. 2021 and super current (talking about the time after pandemics etc.)

codeulike 1 hour ago | parent

Or, more worryingly, Celery Man is almost here

pixl97 1 hour ago | parent

Almost? With AI movie generation I'd say we've passed that barrier.

stickfigure 1 hour ago | parent

Nevermind that. Looking at Ukraine, we're getting close to Philip K Dick's Second Variety.

I'm always amazed at the handwringing over whether language models are "aligned" properly when we are actively developing devices that can - as autonomously as possible - seek out and kill.

And I don't even think we have a choice - we can't stop the Putins of the world from developing this technology.

moffers 1 hour ago | parent

I also feel like Wintermute is almost here. Who’s gonna arrive first?

speed_spread 25 minutes ago | parent

Eunice is like Wintermute's grandma. Five years per generation at the current rate, so 2035 sounds about right. All that's missing is rastafarians on a derelict space station.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

As long as we can't run these models at home I will refuse to believe they don't use humans behind the scenes.

throwrioawfo 1 hour ago | parent

2020 called, it wants its HN comment back

delichon 1 hour ago | parent

Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them. But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.

I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.

Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!

pazimzadeh 59 minutes ago | parent

I like Jane from Speaker for the Dead, etc.. by Orson Scott Card

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_(Ender%27s_Game)

dovin 24 minutes ago | parent

Although, when there are a million Eunices running around trying to proactively help their users, they may have a harder time accessing that kind of data...

salynchnew 18 minutes ago | parent

I guess each generation discovers a different William Gibson trilogy? I would have assumed this was more about Wintermute and the HF hack. Remember the Zurich Orbital AI registry?