AwesomeLowlander

joined 1 day ago
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[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 1 points 2 hours ago

Just read it. Man, that story was a brainfuck

 

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

This was an interesting read.

Spoiler

Although in the first half I was expecting actual humans to show up at some point. The analogy to entropy is obvious, but the author manages to shrink the unimaginable timescales of our universe's heat death down into something that we can feel and empathise with.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 2 points 19 hours ago

Clickbait PLUS American defaultism. Two for the price of one!

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the Frankenstein monster in the room. A few weeks ago, OpenAI admitted that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into a digital library of AI technology.

The incident, which happened while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, was the kind of science-fiction nightmare that could soon be a reality. How soon before AI models escape all their cages?

Yawn. The fact that he's giving this any sort of credence and treating them like the terminator waiting to get loose shows how out of touch he is.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago

I found Terraformental to be really fun early on, but it really seems to bog down a lot late game.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago

Yeah I installed that one, will check it out :)

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't think any of those are incrementals, though :)

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's only skipping if your password matches. Otherwise it'll just be a normal file.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sadly, doesn't look like there's much response to the prompts there :(

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 7 points 1 day ago

How would it be detected? It seems like the password detection and decryption is happening at the hardware level, and they take steps to have it show up as nothing more than a standard drive. I'm not an expert on this stuff though.

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 9 points 1 day ago

Yes, because shrinkflation wasn't a thing until Ozempic arrived.

Also, the % of the population taking Ozempic is what, a rounding error?

[–] AwesomeLowlander@quokk.au 9 points 1 day ago

They're not magically smarter than you

It's trump, I think we can take that as a given.

 

Story can be found at: Family Business

Kicking this off with one of my favourite authors, Adrian Tchaikovsky. For all the hype about Sanderson's writing speed, not many people know Tchaikovsky is neck to neck with him in the output department.

I liked the worldbuilding in this one, lots of hints about the lore dropped left and right, while keeping a fast pace. Ironically considering my intro above, it reminds me a lot of Sanderson's Cosmere and the bunch of misfit vagrants travelling through it. I suppose it's a pretty common trope in epic fantasy. The ending does leave something to be desired, it reads more like a prologue than a standalone story.

(This was reposted because the first post didn't federate well due to new community issues)

 

!short_stories@quokk.au

A community for discussing short stories. We'll be doing a Story of the Day discussion, but feel free to contribute your own!

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