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Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
It's not a guaranteed way to control their behavior, but you can more than move the needle.
[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf
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...
I don’t know how people managed to write graphics card drivers back in the day. In the 80d it’s going to be all assembly code too, I think.
They are more black magic than the non-driver kernel components. I can at least understand the concept of kernel components such as VFS/Scheduler and read legacy kernel code without too much trouble, but drivers, even those in Linux 0.12 back in 1991, are crazily hard for me.
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.
After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. I also undertook another task, but I won't tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you.
It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. The idea seems to drown out everything -- and I'm satisfied that it should. " - Isaac Asimov
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Education_and_car...
No he eventually became a full professor too.
"He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary(equivalent to $68,000 in 2025), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students.[g] In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry."
Indeed after becoming a giant of the field in the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrote most of the novels and short stories we know him for (Robots, Foundation and Empire) he took a long hiatus. In the 1960s and 70s, as far as I can tell, his meager sci-fi output consisted of some short stories, a couple of novelizations of sci-fi movies, and a standalone novel (The Gods Themselves).
After Sputnik he focused on science writing, believing that to be more widely useful.
He only returned to writing more Foundation, Robots, and Empire novels in the 1980s.
https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH
(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.)
Great game, but if you get stuck for a long time, just look up some spoilers. Multiple times I abandoned the "right" approach to a problem because I couldn't get it to work and wasted countless hours trying to solve it the wrong way - only to find out I should have stuck to the right approach.
The game doesn't give any guidance, and wasting those hours is not rewarded.
The only other tip I'll give:
When you first play the game, spend the first 1-2 hours on your little planet learning everything (how to maneuver, how to use the signalscope, etc). Once you leave the planet, a timer will start. There is no way to "save" the game. You will die when the timer runs out. Don't panic. That's expected. Don't try to figure out what you did wrong to die - you will die no matter what. The game will restart, but anything you learned in the past will be in your computer's memory for retrieval.
OK, 2 more tips (one I wish someone had told me - I finished the game without it):
1. You can make time go by if you sleep at the fire.
2. There is a way to "meditate" until you die. This is very useful when you get stuck and can't get out of somewhere. To find out how to meditate, talk to the people on other planets (you may have to talk more than once before he teaches you).
That's all I'll say.
If so, please let us know so that other people do not get spoiled, and can you provide a link or links to the game that doesn't spoil it?
Thank you!
At it's core, it's a game about exploration to understand what's happening. I recommend looking around and being curious to enjoy it, and avoid rushing. It's my favorite game.
To give you an estimate, I completed the base game with all secrets in about 20-30h. There's also a DLC called "Echoes of Eyes" adding a new area to explore. In total, I spent 45h to fully complete the game.
There, I said it. The reason I say it openly is because I almost quit the game not understanding that this is supposed to happen.
Not really much of a spoiler.
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.
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...
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
For others who share some similarities, though with a greater emphasis on character and adventure, perhaps Hal Clement, Larry Niven or Robert L. Forward.
You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
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.
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
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.
They’re just too dry for my tastes.
> He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
> Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Re-estimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."
...
Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."
The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."
The last question God might be for you If you’re super rational and are really into technology.
Belief in God is like a supermarket. Once you decide to enter you’re probably going to find something that works for you.
Putting aside the bidirectional issues of non-interaction, what if mankind, or the universes collection of agents (if there are others and we interact with them) at some future point manages to create a supercomputer or entity in a substrate that exists outside of our time in the causal sense.
As long as we don't apocalypse ourselves or self destruct or get distracted from self preservation and miss the asteroid that ends us - we end up bringing this thing in our imagination to reality, just like all the other stuff we imagined and subsequently made.
Maybe God is real we just haven't made it yet.
This is all imagination of course, a fun thought about possibilities, humans tend to make the things they imagine and desire if it's actually possible.
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".
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
didn't know about ooo, maybe because it's not available on namecheap!
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:
https://hex.ooo/library/
I consider these other two also great stories that I must read every time:
I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility
https://qntm.org/responsibilit
Gorge
https://qntm.org/gorge
If you like Asimov's short stories, you might also like Robert Sheckley's short stories. I had a phase where I binged on sci-fi short stories, and Sheckleys and Asimov's were always at the top of my list
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.
On this read, I noticed Multivac answers 7x adding a few more words, maybe to imply progress toward its final answer:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. (4x)
LET THERE BE LIGHT!