Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
gwerbin 13 minutes ago [-]
They can do it, it's just not "by default", they need to be prompted to do it. So at least the danger is manageable if you know what you're doing and how to prompt around it.
bargainbin 40 minutes ago [-]
You’re absolutely right! I do have insufficient data for a meaningful answer. This is not an *insightful prediction* — it’s *Dunning-Kruger masquerading as qualified intelligence*
fragmede 2 minutes ago [-]
Did a human write this?
croisillon 24 minutes ago [-]
No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.
jasongill 2 hours ago [-]
This is one of those stories, just like the SR-71 "ground speed check" story, that every single time I see it posted I just have to read the entire thing again. I love it.
PaulHoule 58 minutes ago [-]
You better watch out. When my evil twin feels y'all aren't upvoting my posts enough he thinks "let's do a search for articles that have gotten 200+ votes at least 5 times in different years" [1] It's a highly effective strategy that I know dang doesn't like!
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.
derwiki 29 minutes ago [-]
I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?
JKCalhoun 8 minutes ago [-]
Probably because actual people died.
cdelsolar 5 minutes ago [-]
I am guessing because it takes hours to read.
rationalist 1 hours ago [-]
Once I discovered that the SR-71 Ground Speed Check is most likely not true, it doesn't hold the same weight for me anymore.
Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
actionfromafar 1 hours ago [-]
Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!
rationalist 1 hours ago [-]
Who knows, but there isn't a whole story with details behind it to make someone think is.
A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
CGMthrowaway 47 minutes ago [-]
People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
satvikpendem 2 minutes ago [-]
And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.
jjice 32 minutes ago [-]
An absolute classic! Was just telling a buddy about this one the other day while talking about The Egg by Andy Weir (another short story I really enjoy). Every time I read this one, I get chills at the end. Asimov really was a master.
jimmydddd 6 minutes ago [-]
It's amazing that in the late 1930's, someone with his academic credentials and intellect decided his life would be best spent writing science fiction.
ANTHONY6632 29 minutes ago [-]
Totally agree, that ending sticks with you for a long time. Asimov had a way of making simple ideas feel massive.
antirez 9 minutes ago [-]
I'm happy to see this short story posted here, it is one that I deeply loved when I was 14 or alike, and read it again multiple times. But I wonder: how did it survive in those sites without being shut down by the Asimov writings copyright holders? Given that the story is short and highly shared, it was just tolerated?
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
Procrastes 49 minutes ago [-]
I remember the first time I heard this story. I was maybe 7 at a planetarium and they animated it with music little hand drawn starships and retro computers floating among the stars. They turned the stars all out for the final scene.
jjoonathan 29 minutes ago [-]
Outer Wilds vibes! I love it!
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
monsieurbanana 20 minutes ago [-]
I... Think you just spoiled me. Somehow I've managed to avoid all information about it so far, but now that you said it's like the last question...
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
jjoonathan 12 minutes ago [-]
"Similar" is doing substantial work. If this is your only clue, it is likely to mislead you for at least 50% of the game, and I strongly suspect you will have fun anyway :)
cdelsolar 4 minutes ago [-]
this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
quentindanjou 1 hours ago [-]
I wasn't expecting to find my favorite short-story on HN today! That's a pleasant surprise! This is how I started my journey in reading Isaac Asimov, I really recommend it!
larrykluger 1 hours ago [-]
A classic. It was dramatized by the Rochester NY, USA Museum of Science as a planetarium show, and I saw it there about 1974 with my father. Great times.
0xmattf 1 hours ago [-]
One of my all-time favorites. Almost every time I'm involved in a conversation about books, I always mention this. It amazes me how many people have never heard of it.
OhMeadhbh 29 minutes ago [-]
In the 80s, our local planetarium did a show based on this story. The executive director of the museum associated with the planetarium had a very nice deep voice and was the perfect narrator, though it gave the Cosmic AC a slight Texas accent.
moffers 2 hours ago [-]
My favorite short story of all time. Between this and Deep Thought in HHGttG, I couldn’t believe the prescience when the bitter lesson was learned and LLMs and GPUs started eating the world.
shivaniShimpi_ 1 hours ago [-]
the LLM parallel does hit different on this read multivac says insufficient data across ten trillion years and the whole story is basically if more compute and more data eventually gets you there. what's weird is the story answers yes, not on any timeframe that helps the people asking tho.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
waltbosz 20 minutes ago [-]
I feel like the software running multivac represents something vastly more advanced than today's LLM.
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
mercer 49 minutes ago [-]
maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...
IAmBroom 5 minutes ago [-]
My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
baq 1 hours ago [-]
It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)
bitshiftfaced 2 hours ago [-]
For a while I thought I really liked sci fi novels and short stories, and maybe that's somewhat true. But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular. Other writers in the genre are more hit or miss. Can anyone recommend other writers that are on his level?
Arainach 1 hours ago [-]
Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
Darkphibre 22 minutes ago [-]
His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.
NetMageSCW 28 minutes ago [-]
Have you tried Arthur Clarke? I would say he is close to Asimov in many ways, being from the same time.
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
Esn024 20 minutes ago [-]
I think Brian Daley's books have a somewhat similar feel as Asimov's, particularly "Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds" and its sequels.
I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.
Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple writing that isn't all that common.
NickDouglas 1 hours ago [-]
Try "The Illustrated Man" by Ray Bradbury, but skip the terrible frame story. The actual short stories are beautiful literature and canonical sci-fi.
NetMageSCW 29 minutes ago [-]
As someone who loves the Big Three (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein) and have read a lot of SF, I pretty much despise Bradbury. There’s no science in his science fiction.
npilk 1 hours ago [-]
It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.
>> But I've started wondering if maybe I just liked Asimov's writing in particular.
A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
sjg1729 28 minutes ago [-]
I was also quite fond of Palimpsest by Stross. It’s a retelling of EoE but a more modern treatment (and the writing is quite a bit better, IMO)
shivaniShimpi_ 1 hours ago [-]
ted chiang if you haven't already. story of your life, exhalation, the lifecycle of software objects. same thing asimov does where the sci fi premise is really just a frame for a very human question. except chiang does it in like 30 pages and you feel it for a week
jakeinspace 2 hours ago [-]
Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.
robrain 52 minutes ago [-]
Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.
boxed 2 hours ago [-]
I mean.. a genre can't be all hits, that makes no sense :P
If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:
- Ender's Game
- The Martian + Project Hail Mary
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Dune
mwigdahl 1 minutes ago [-]
Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
comicjk 1 hours ago [-]
A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.
rationalist 1 hours ago [-]
The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
xeonmc 32 minutes ago [-]
Though Dune is highly acclaimed for its concepts, I couldn’t quite get into it personally.
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
baq 1 hours ago [-]
- Hyperion
arc_light 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ANTHONY6632 30 minutes ago [-]
I like the concept, has anyone tried this in production?
appplication 18 minutes ago [-]
Running it now but don’t have sufficient data to make a recommendation yet
RajT88 36 minutes ago [-]
Somehow never read this one. But did write a short story ~20 years ago with a similar arc. I guess reading a lot of Asimov and Clarke and others will do that to you.
ghaff 27 minutes ago [-]
You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.
grimgrin 58 minutes ago [-]
okay so i'll be the sole commenter of: hex.ooo is an incredible domain name to me, maybe because i dig its UI, but certainly just in general
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.
eschulz 1 hours ago [-]
I love this story. When I first read it online in college many years ago I was surprised, and disappointed, when I suddenly realized it was a short story. It's a great one to recommend to people.
jjoonathan 20 minutes ago [-]
Outer Wilds, the video game, does a brilliant job expanding on this theme if you're hungry for more. "There's more to explore here."
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.
Aliyekta 2 hours ago [-]
Claude Mythos
ramon156 1 hours ago [-]
[reference] [reference]
Rendered at 14:35:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
So I'll post another article about robot grippers which you should upvote instead of the breathless "AI will give us more Nobel Prize winning research" posts because: (1) robots that can change bedpans and pick strawberries really will change the world, and (2) they give out a certain number of Nobel Prizes a year and AI won't change that.
[1] old issues of Byte magazine are a good bet: try https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1986-05
0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
I'm a bit proud of having suggested the author to add the 2019 entry (thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678).
Hopefully there's another repo of Internet stories somewhere else?
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.h...
Way too many unlikely variables all lining up, and no other accounts of the story from all of the people (pilots, air traffic controller, etc) supposedly on the frequency.
A short anonymous joke that may or may not be true is better than a long story that is almost certainly made-up by someone in authority.
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
(It's a video game that does a brilliant job touching on similar themes to The Last Question. If you liked The Last Question and can fit a video game into your life, you will probably like Outer Wilds. Warning: if you start searching for "outer wilds," the algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you. Progression in the game is gated behind knowledge, so this is worse than usual. If you have trouble resisting the temptation to google past a rough description, it's a sign you should just jump in and play it. End recommendation.)
It's on me for procrastinating playing the game for so long, it was bound to happen.
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
feels uncomfortably close to the actual situation where the models keep getting better and the answer keeps being "not yet, ask again later" while the answer is getting ready years late
I wonder if Asimov considered multivac to be an ancestor to his positronic robots, or if the two exist in different universes. I don't recall the two ever appearing in the same story.
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
I also find C.J.Cherryh's books to be often quite interesting.
Asimov really did have a knack for clear, deceptively simple writing that isn't all that common.
You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
A less commonly mentioned Asimov book that I really enjoyed and will read again is "The End of Eternity". If you've not read it, the ending is IMHO amazing and unique.
Last Question reminds me of it because of the style.
If you want good sci-fi a good list can be:
- Ender's Game
- The Martian + Project Hail Mary
- A Fire Upon the Deep
- Dune
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
Warning: progression is gated behind knowledge so spoilers are worse than usual and The Algorithm will aggressively try to spoil you if you start poking too deep into "outer wilds" searches. If you like The Last Question and can fit a game in your life, Outer Wilds is a solid bet.