I've heard this brought up many times but I don't really understand the implications of it. I can't really think of a system of government which hasn't killed large numbers of people. Even the USA's early wars like the civil war have death tolls >500k. We also lose ~7k homeless people every year.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
Do you have any recommendations for science fiction books that explore interesting ideas?
There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book.
Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.
Disagree for dungeon crawler carl & any of the Bobiverse - while they're fine books, wouldn't class it in the category of interesting ideas, it's just pop fiction.
I'd look at the following:
Hyperion Book One (For the book style + ideas throughout the short stories - you only need to read book one)
Solaris, Lem (What would an alien intelligence truly look like, especially in planet size scales, really interesting theories)
House Of Leaves (Classic for exploration of horror - not sci-fi, but within the wheelhouse)
Maxwell's Demon (Hated the ending, but the first half of the book explores some interesting ideas)
Children of Time (Good sci-fi based book exploring morality + intelligence)
Annihilation (Sci-fi, no spoilers but great book)
Venemous Lumpsucker (near future sci-fi, fantastic as a set of vignettes within the story)
Closest to Antimemetics divison personally would be Maxwell's Demon + House of Leaves.
My hard disagree on the Bobiverse as well. Feels like the typical book I ought to like based on my interests and the other things I like, but the ideas somehow fall way, way short of qntm's writing.
And +1 on "Annihilation" – I started reading that to another recommendation for "books similar to TINAD" here and basically couldn't put it down. The similarity is purely based on mood, though – don't expect an actually similar novel in terms of ideas and presentation.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not science fiction. At least I would not recommend it to someone looking for science fiction with “interesting ideas.” It’s a comedy about an RPG with magic.
But if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s pretty good
Probably the most novel part of DCC is that it's kind of an implicit response to a whole class of 'what if the world worked like an RPG' fiction, examinining the premises those works as a genre leave glossed over. Which is neat in a meta-textual kind of way, but yeah, definitely not science fiction.
That was a good mindbender indeed. I'd add "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Steven Baxter. Beware of spoilers high up the wikipedia page [0]. Tells a good tale of unexpected externalities of disruptive technology introduction.
Very personal counterpoint: I find Stross writing extremely bland, contrived, and badly paced.
I really really disliked Accelerando in particular, finding it completely vacuous, the sciencey namedrops is self-aggrandising and sound like attempts at reader flattery, the entire plot is telegraphed, characters are generic and perfectly forgettable.
It was several friends recommendation and I only got reading through the whole ordeal because whenever I asked "well I'm about there and it doesn't click" they answered "no spoiler, just a dozen pages and you'll see!"
Not a critic, again this is my personal experience of it. If people enjoyed it, more power to them.
+1 for Stross, Egan and the Bobiverse - I haven't read the others so will have a look, just wanted to add Stand on Zanzibar by Brunner, if the Bobiverse is there then MurderBot should be to.
I love all these. I'd add Blightsight by Peter Watts to the list. It has the creepy, psychological bent of Annihilation combined with the hard science elements common to qntm's, Neal Stephenson's and Greg Egan's books.
Would love to find more books like Blindsight, something about the way it described agency without consciousness was both creepy and extremely memorable.
Blindsight was great. I had such high hopes for their follow up novel Echopraxia, but sadly it felt rushed and under-edited, but the ideas were spectacular.
I wanted to like this, as the premise was fascinating and the word-smithing was pretty good. But something about it left me feeling a little disappointed at the end. More so the end of the entire trilogy, than Annihilation by itself though, IIRC.
I'll second your feeling on Annihilation trilogy. To me, the whole message boiled down to "my life kinda sucked, and now it sucks even more". The phenomenon ostensibly at the center of everything seems to take back seat to protagonists being bummed about it existing / their lives in general.
His book is great, but to be clear I feel like he writes exactly one book. I've read it in many forms and it's an amazing book. But don't be surprised when you realize that every book is just him trying to find a new way to look at the same object over and over again.
Very enjoyable but his short stories are great because they force him to focus on one idea instead of how his whole world view fits together.
If you want the druggy, high-concept, ersatz-reality version go with Philip K. Dick - namely The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS.
If you want the intellectual take go with A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), Oryx and Crake (Atwood) or Solaris (Lem).
If you want the 60s hard-science rooted societal outlook from an ex-Naval Engineer with strong views on gender roles, it's all about Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers etc..
If you want something to share with the young adults in your life, or simply some of the finest writing in the contemporary British YA canon, then Philip Pulman's magnificent homage to 'Paradise Lost' - the 'His Dark Materials trilogy' - cannot come more highly recommended. Usually categorised as 'fantasy', and heavily indebted to Milton and Blake, this represents a master-class in parallel-universe world building with its own take on a Steampunk Oxford and a number of other science fiction tropes.
Blindsight by Peter Watts explores interesting ideas about conscience and intelligence, but these ideas are wrapped in a mediocre action movie plot that becomes nonsensical by the end.
You really start wondering when they are introduced and it all kind of clicks at the end, when we realize we had the rug pulled from under our feet when the book started, and we only know it by the point we land on our faces.
> "science fiction books that explore interesting ideas?"
I think that's a big part of being in the Sci-Fi genre and I don't really get people whinging about writing style - this isn't Chaucer, it's fun geeky ideas. I second basically any Greg Egan and Charles Stross and Arthur C. Clarke stories, and:
Vernor Vinge's trilogy: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, Across Realtime. Ideas from "World War II on an alien planet around a variable star where the whole planet freezes every few years" to timewarp bubbles, galactic zones of thought, cyborg enhancements, semi-sentient plants.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - what if we use genetic engineering to forcibly evolve monkeys towards human intelligence? Whoops our virus infected spiders instead.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - much lighter Hollywood popcorn-action sci-fi, a potential world-ending threat and a cool alien encounter.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - What if a guy's dreams could change reality, he sees a therapist who has a dream-influencing machine and wants to take over the world.
Peter F. Hamilton trilogies, much more fantasy mixed with sci-fi but has future Space Opera ideas - genetically engineered, cyborg enhanced, mind uploaded, human factions, several varieties of aliens, various future-techs.
I really like Ray Nayler’s work, who intersects his real experience in international politics with science fiction technology. His Tusks of Extinction uses the sci-fi notion of brain transfer and bringing back mammoths to explore the economical pressures behind poaching. His “Where the axe is buried” explores surveillance state technology with political bodies that feel like real modern nations.
The second and third times through get easier, once you can appreciate the patterns and links that seem extraneous and confusing at first. Totally different kind of book, but I’d put it up with Infinite Jest as far as being convoluted but incredibly rewarding. And of course more SD / tech focused.
In terms of ideas, Chiang and qntm are a tie for absolute favorite for me. I've probably thought about each individual short story more than about some entire series or multi-season TV shows in combination.
Exploring "interesting ideas" is kinda broad, but I find Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Iain [M.] Banks all packed full of stuff that gets the noodle baking.
On the note of memory consuming entities and coming with spectacular worldbuilding and an outstanding prose: Leech by Hiron Ennes. Ennes latest book The Works of Vermin is even better.
What I am saying is if your system lets me pay $x/token and open router lets me pay $y/token if x<y then someone could make money just by providing those tokens through the open router API. That would either drive up demand for your systems increasing costs or drive up supply on open router decreasing costs. Eventually the costs would converge, no?
I really can't think of a better way to respond to this situation. It is clear to me that over the next decade the amount of people who will have been hot-headed kids on the internet who grow up to fully-fledged adults who have said they no longer agree with things in ways that are not kind is going to be a lot higher. I've no doubt said things that I no longer agreed with that made sense in the context of when they were posted.
Thank you for being a good role model and setting the example that saying "that was bad, here is the context, but I don't like that I said that."
Maybe a better way to accomplish this is a free yearly physical with a doctor? The doctor can then be required to share any changes in disability with the government. Missing x years of appointments also stops your benefits. If you can't come to the doctor maybe they could do a house call?
This is not correct and we have recent examples to counter this claim:
1. There are government employees directly employed by various branches of the government (ex: USDS was under the executive allowing them to be retasked by EO into DOGE)
2. There are government employees appointed into office who cannot fired after appointment (ex: Fed Reserve Chair)
3. There are also government employees who are non-political appointments
I think there are also more categories. I don't think your reply was charitable.
Sorry, my comment was not clearly phrased looking back. #1 is an example of an elected official who can hire/fire. #2/#3 are not. These are all from recent litigation (in the court room and within public discourse) during the Trump presidency.
I don't think RevEng was saying it is impossible to do technically. I believe they were saying the charging infrastructure near their home makes it impossible to do practically as the chargers are often limited to 50-100kW. Aging Wheels did a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouPiwt5hxXQ
I have already seen multiple CLs from people who are both senior and junior where I know they did not look at the code. I thought, at first, they worked and upon review it looked good but when I synced these changes I found either big bugs that a human would never make or a test would never catch or lots of code repetition.
One example was an engineer who was refactoring some code that ended up doing this:
def execute(jobs):
for job in jobs:
asyncio.create_task(compute(job))
yield await compute(job)
This is very simplified, it as actually broken up into two separate loops and hidden behind multiple nested calls but at some point there literally was a `asyncio.create_task` where the result was not being used.
I looked at this code because we were hitting some quota limits very early for some reason and it turned out we ran 2x the reads we needed to. I refactored this code, 1/2ed the execution time, fixed the quota issues, and took it from ~300 lines to 80 lines.
This was code from a *senior software engineer* with 15 years in the industry. What is very interesting is I see similar bugs from juniors who do or don't use AI.
I am not saying AI can't be useful. On weeks I have had clear tasks set out, while the rest of my team was OOO, I tackled probably 5x the work our team normally accomplishes (this was after all the work was identified, just working). My skip actually said "Wow, we had a very productive week!" so multiple layers noticed the productivity. I think what made this possible was:
1. I fully understood the **entire** task and the end-user needs.
2. The code base was structured "fine" with enough decoupling between components that I wasn't hitting merge conflicts with myself.
3. I self-reviewed all the work before sending anything to other people (opened all the changes in my IDE, read all the tests).
4. If something seemed too complicated I refactored it manually.
5. I left the AI chugging for long periods of time on objectively measurable tasks.
I don't think the practice of engineering software is dead. The architecture of your software now has measurable impact on productivity. I don't think thinking about performance is outdated. If you're running code no one has reviewed but is functional you wasting cycles / money. Having domain knowledge still improves your velocity.
Because of these reasons I think there is still marginal value to programmers. Companies which maintain internal talent pools and build tooling to scale the impact of people will probably beat out smaller companies that just vibe code.
An ex of mine mentioned to me that she was going to join a local community group trying to prevent development on an empty lot near her apartment. I asked why she would want to do that? Her concerns, and the concerns of the people she was showing me on facebook, were:
1. "They didn't do an environmental review"
2. She didn't want to hear construction noise.
3. She didn't want the construction to cause rats to leave the lot and go to buildings.
4. She also said she didn't want her rent to go.
Have you thought about ways to include the sessions / reasoning traces from agents into this storage layer? I can imagine giving an rag system on top of that + LLM publications could help future agents figure out how to get around problems that previous runs ran into.
Could serve as an annealing step - trying a different earlier branch in reasoning if new information increases the value of that path.
Removing the contexts of those deaths makes it very difficult to evaluate the true causes and if the political ideology is to blame or if the centralization of power common across all governments leads to deaths.
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