I remember this being an incredible book when I read it back on my moto droid phone in 2009ish on Kindle app...time to listen to it on audible. The biggest thing I remember is it invoked some deep thoughts from me on what is conscious and whether transferring consciousness to another medium would still the same person. Seemed (and still seems) to me that continuity would be broken...but isn't that true when we go to sleep and wake up? I loved this book because it provoked a lot of questions like this. Been meaning to revisit it for years.
I’m not going to replicate all that in this comment box. However, as far as sleep is concerned: No, your brain doesn’t shut off during sleep. Everything keeps running except for some interconnects, mostly it’s a mode switch.
The same isn’t true for concussions, and concussions usually come with short term memory loss. One might imagine that’s because you lose information that only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
Yes, this. It's hard to express how disconcerting this is to someone who hasn't experienced a concussion or neurological fainting spell.
I passed out one night alone after an undiagnosed neurological condition resulted in what was, as best we can tell, a seizure. Hit the floor and stayed there for an unknown length of time, because I didn't have a clock handy. The experience of, for want of a better term, "recohering" to find oneself awake and covered in one's own cold urine is very different from the experience of waking up. There's a distinct discontinuity of self that you don't get from waking from a dream.
I still have the distinct sensation that for some undetermined length of time, I simply wasn't there. It was a spiritually and epistemologically haunting experience.
Hahaha funny seeing you @fzakaria here, knew I recognized that name! We worked on a hypemachine scraper a long time ago 12 or 13 years ago, glad to see you are still around writing great software and interesting articles!
The knowledge of that scraper went into a Chrome extension that sees some good downloads to this day
(I guess people this use hypemachine... I have kids now so my music listening time is on a pause)
I don't think there has been a ton of iteration on it, but did you run into any specific problems or bugs or is this lack of recommendation based off caution against adopting something that is not being iterated on? Just asking because while I haven't used it in years, it's been my go-to for small projects in the past, it seemed to do what it advertised very well. I hope that someone picks up the swarm torch, I really liked the abstractions and workflow it enabled. K8s was always too heavy for me and introduced too much complexity I was uncomfortable with
While the way secrets work in Swarm seems weird when compared to Kubernetes, this is usually pretty easily solved by a quick overriding entrypoint in the docker stack file that does essentially this:
I have been wanting to play around with drone swarm simulated behavior, does anyone know of a sim that would let me do something like this with 10 or so drones?
Came here to post almost this exact sentiment. I am not sure why but in college I checked out the Peace War and I largely credit that book and a few others for getting me back into reading. A couple years ago I decided to order a first edition and it's sitting on my shelf. The deepness books were great as well. "Software archaeologists" was a fantastic concept, I felt like that today digger through excel VBA
Additionally I think he was the first sci Fi author I found who was a computer science practitioner/professor. This led me to discover other great authors like Greg Egan.
I came here hoping someone would mention this, it's really strange and for a while I had just attributed it to the Air Force base traffic or Tampa International nearby, but it keeps coming up. Always interesting to learn more
I just dove into this the last few months working through a Udemy course on building a vampire survivors clone in Godot 4....highly recommend (here is the author talking about it https://youtu.be/Yd-sndQnWIo?si=yWU9WJ2roSVlMzDE). I was amazed by the tooling and had a blast doing it. I'm primarily a backend dev and this scratched a different itch. There appear to be some RTS courses but I can't vouch for them. I would find one that looks interesting and dive in. I typed out all the code and did the steps as he did and feel like I learned a ton. I am still looking to learn more about multiplayer in Godot 4, but I found a few YouTube videos and it doesn't look super complicated, especially if you are not concerned off the bat about cheaters. Additionally I have been following this project (Godot 4 MMO), the code is organized pretty well: https://jdungeon.org/ but very early in development
Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
This book is great...I am a big fan of the rifters trilogy also by Watts.
They have some great fictional speculation on the Internet and how it's chaotic mix of automated agents tearing at each other that really reminds me of what could be possible with the content creation of LLMs.
"In Peter Watts's Rifters Trilogy, which includes "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "ßehemoth", the internet is a significant theme, especially in its altered, chaotic state. It is described as no longer trustworthy, having been overwhelmed by self-evolving viruses and the descendants of self-evolving anti-viruses that spiraled out of control. In this futuristic setting, the internet has been renamed "Maelstrom" to reflect its chaotic and unpredictable nature, becoming a space that is both electronic and ecological, complete with its own digital ecosystem" - synopsis I ironically used chat gpt to write
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