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CGMthrowaway 5 hours ago [-]
>INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
Boy, it sure would be nice if real LLMs were capable of giving an answer like that.
temp0826 2 hours ago [-]
Living in South America a bit really showed me this. I think it's a cultural thing here but someone will always give you an answer, even if it's wrong, confidently. It was hard for me at first- I am usually the first person to say "I don't know" (often followed by "but let's slow down and find a good solution").
jfaulken 2 hours ago [-]
This was similar to my experience running a software team in India (I'm an American) a couple decades ago. I had to learn not to ask yes/no questions because the answer would always be yes.
HiPhish 2 hours ago [-]
It's a long-standing jodke that AI stands for "Actual Indians".
throwaway132448 56 minutes ago [-]
Talking about South America as a homogeneous unit is… weird. Even neighbouring countries speaking the same language can be entirely different in this regard.
temp0826 34 minutes ago [-]
I agree (and I don't normally generalize like this, so I apologize). I've spent most of my time in Peru but noticed it in neighboring countries as well.
gwerbin 4 hours 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.
saghm 38 minutes ago [-]
"Just don't accidentally forget to do the thing that makes it safe" is not a very effective strategy for something that so many vested interests are trying to push into all corners of society. If it's so easy to misuse it, then it shouldn't be used in any context outside of where there are no major consequences for bad output and there's amble opportunity and ability to validate it
Bridged7756 4 hours ago [-]
Not really. They're still non deterministic language predictors. Believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control these machines' actual behavior is really far fetched.
They com like that from factory. Hardcoded to never say no.
LPisGood 4 hours ago [-]
The thing is that they are completely incapable of meta-cognition. Reasoning models don’t show their actual reasoning at all.
DonaldPShimoda 3 hours ago [-]
Right — they're not reasoning, they're generating text that statistically models reasoning. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
jeremyjh 1 hours ago [-]
That is what a base model does. After RL it is a very different thing, and anyone who says they know what it is, is naive or dishonest. These things are grown, not made, and we really do not understand how they work in many important ways.
eloisant 4 hours ago [-]
They're not hardcoded to never say no, but some of the models were trained to be "yes men" because their creators thought it would be a good property to have. GPT-4o for example.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Not believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control their behavior is obviously incorrect to anyone who's actually used these things.
It's not a guaranteed way to control their behavior, but you can more than move the needle.
wwweston 34 minutes ago [-]
The word most relevant to this conversation is “influence.” Influence is possible and users observe it and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes. “Control” is incorrect.
fl4regun 3 hours ago [-]
yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.
gwerbin 2 hours ago [-]
You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.
wat10000 41 minutes ago [-]
That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis.
Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.
romaniv 4 hours ago [-]
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cortesoft 3 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of humans who refuse to give that answer, too
Tallain 3 hours ago [-]
This continues to be the most tiring response to any criticism of LLM output. It's pretty much guaranteed to show up at this point. I guess with similar enough input tokens, we're guaranteed the same output...
Forgeties79 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month to talk to most people in my life lol
_diyar 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have to talk to LLMs?
vhantz 2 hours ago [-]
Another way to say the same thing:
"to talk to most people in my life lol I don’t have to spend dozens if not hundreds of dollars a month"
Forgeties79 1 hours ago [-]
According to HN, every employer, and general social chatter, apparently yes.
bargainbin 5 hours 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*
croisillon 4 hours ago [-]
No Information before. No information after. This is not a failure — it's narcissism as a service.
combobyte 1 hours ago [-]
YaaS — yes-men as a service
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
Did a human write this?
mikemarsh 4 hours ago [-]
I would guess a real human, one with a good sense of humor at that.
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
Woosh
ryanjshaw 4 hours ago [-]
I reckon that’s how we know we’ve hit ASI.
narginal 4 hours ago [-]
2061, mark the date
otikik 3 hours ago [-]
Just add a skill to Claude
jasongill 6 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 5 hours 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.
The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.
parineum 48 minutes ago [-]
Housing is supply constrained and not tied to labor costs in a significant way. It largely is tied to the price of land in it's location. It's not going to get noticeably cheaper with cheaper labor and materials. Although, I can tell you that the products that one uses in a home have gotten cheaper (fixtures, flooring, etc) with a few exceptions, copper wiring and pipes for instance.
Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.
keybored 30 minutes ago [-]
> Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.
I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.
gwerbin 2 hours ago [-]
Citation needed. Sometimes? Sure. Almost always? Questionable assertion.
parineum 60 minutes ago [-]
Food, clothing, electronics...
Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.
Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
jihadjihad 6 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Don't forget the "Can't send emails farther than 500 miles" one, too [0]:
I love this one. I thought it was old when I first read it, and today I realised that was 36 years ago!
kraquepype 2 hours ago [-]
~20 years ago for me... I remember finding it when I first started working as a sysadmin. That and the story of the first "bug" report. That was a fun time.
Yes! Thanks for posting! This gives the feel of what my career looked like in the 80s and early 90s.
markus_zhang 3 hours ago [-]
Man you should share your story. I got through a few Linux device driver labs but the more I read the less I understand. Even the keyboard driver or the tty driver are thousands of lines long.
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.
For me it's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans", which is often quite problematic.
derwiki 5 hours ago [-]
I loved reading that. Why is it problematic?
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
Probably because actual people died.
cdelsolar 4 hours ago [-]
I am guessing because it takes hours to read.
rationalist 5 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 5 hours ago [-]
Don't tell me the "dreaded 7-engine approach" also isn't true!
rationalist 5 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 5 hours ago [-]
People will be reading this story for ten trillion years
ChocMontePy 2 hours ago [-]
It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long:
"This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.
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
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.
ANTHONY6632 5 hours ago [-]
Totally agree, that ending sticks with you for a long time. Asimov had a way of making simple ideas feel massive.
jimmydddd 4 hours 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.
glerk 8 minutes ago [-]
What do you think would have been more valuable for him to do? His sci-fi books had a huge impact, and not only on sci-fi and literature, they literally changed people's lives. People decided to pursue a career in science or technology because they read these books when they were kids.
triceratops 4 hours ago [-]
He had an academic career too, becoming a tenured professor at age 35 at Boston University. Writing just paid better.
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
triceratops 4 hours ago [-]
> he was working as an instructor (not a professor)
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."
us-merul 4 hours ago [-]
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
I've read his biography. It was definitely intentional - and of course making a living by writing was a big factor. But he just didn't like the academic environment or his colleagues.
wat10000 3 hours ago [-]
Per Wikipedia, he published 40 novels and over 280 non-fiction books. He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
triceratops 3 hours ago [-]
> He's best known for SF but he certainly didn't spend his whole career on it.
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.
If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.
nahuel0x 2 hours ago [-]
Seconded, but note some paths were taken (at least partially), as in some way is a meta-book were each paragraph comprises an idea that deserves a full book on its own. Some Stapledon readers were clearly inspired by it, e.g. Dyson spheres were first postulated there, and Borges got the "The Garden of Forking Paths" idea also from it.. and also Virtual Reality (not bad for 1937!) . Asimov was also an Stapledon admirer and he said that Stapledon expanded s.f. to a cosmic scale, so I think that Stapledon influence is also very present in The Last Question.
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 5 hours 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.)
BeetleB 4 hours ago [-]
(No real spoilers in my comment):
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.
ghssds 9 minutes ago [-]
> (No real spoilers in my comment):
> Proceed to spoil the whole game
rationalist 4 hours ago [-]
Just doing a simple internet search for the name to see how to get it, brings up descriptions about how after X time, Y happens. Is that a spoiler?
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!
demurgos 3 hours ago [-]
This is a standalone game that needs to be purchased. For PC, it can be acquired through Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/). It is also available on consoles, it is not available on mobile. It is playable with keyboard and mouse, but it was primarily created with a game controller in mind.
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.
rationalist 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you, I just bought Outer Wilders: Archeologist Edition for Nintendo Switch, which appears to be the base game plus the expansion.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
After X time, you will die.
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.
monsieurbanana 4 hours 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.
SAI_Peregrinus 2 hours ago [-]
IMO it's a good enough game that you could read the entire plot summary and it'd still be a good story & fun game to play. Much like how you can re-read an Agatha Christie novel & still enjoy it, the best stories are spoiler-proof because even when there's a "twist" that "twist" isn't as important to the quality as the rest of the work.
jjoonathan 4 hours 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 hours ago [-]
this sorta comes up very very early in the game tho
donatj 2 hours ago [-]
There's a comic of this that circulated a number of years ago that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I saw this at a planetarium show when I was young, I think it was at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. It has always stuck with me.
breuleux 4 hours ago [-]
> How may entropy be reversed?
Considering AC could persist indefinitely in hyperspace while interacting with normal matter, the answer would appear to be "hyperspace", whatever that is.
mock-possum 1 hours ago [-]
“Build god, then we’ll talk.”
rootbear 1 hours ago [-]
One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.
bitshiftfaced 6 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 5 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 4 hours 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 have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur, they were all fantastic.
jperoutek 4 hours ago [-]
I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.
Froztnova 3 hours ago [-]
Exhalation is really excellent.
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.
NetMageSCW 5 hours 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.
npilk 5 hours ago [-]
It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.
perhaps Fredric Brown? He and Asimov were in my primary school reading anthology, and I will never thank enough the people who put the book together.
Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
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
NickDouglas 5 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 5 hours 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.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
Not much in many of Heinlein's either. Or in Star Wars.
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
Or even Star Trek to be honest. I don't know why Star Wars always gets passed off as "science fantasy" when it's a more grounded universe than Trek by far - space wizards notwithstanding (which Trek has plenty of.)
Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.
BeetleB 3 hours ago [-]
As a Trekkie, fair point. I think Star Trek does fall into the "speculative fiction" category, but Star Wars doesn't. It's just "space opera".
jakeinspace 6 hours ago [-]
Stanislaw Lem, if you can handle something a little more poetic and less strictly hard sci-fi.
Esn024 4 hours 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.
phkahler 5 hours ago [-]
>> 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 5 hours 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)
robrain 5 hours ago [-]
Becky Chambers - Wayfarer series and several enjoyable short stories/novellas. Low on blasters, high on sentient life in all its many forms.
robrain 38 minutes ago [-]
I know you can’t comment on modding - but seriously, someone voted me down because they don’t like a literary suggestion? Tough crowd.
boxed 6 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
comicjk 5 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 5 hours ago [-]
The Expanse series starting with Leviathan Wakes.
(I second Ender's Game, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary.)
mwigdahl 4 hours 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.
xeonmc 5 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
- Hyperion
redsocksfan45 35 minutes ago [-]
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arc_light 5 hours ago [-]
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Bud 2 hours ago [-]
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quentindanjou 5 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 5 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.
astravagrant 1 hours ago [-]
What an absolute masterpiece. Poetry and philosophy with narrative and humour. Wonderful stuff. Him and Clarke were lighthouses in their day, and to this day.
elhosots 53 minutes ago [-]
When i first read this story as a teenager in 1971 it started me on the road to atheism. Im very thankful to dr asimov not only for his great science fiction but his chemistry teachings as well
OhMeadhbh 5 hours 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.
hackan 3 hours ago [-]
Every single time this is posted, I read it again, and again. And I will, for the next billion years...
mentalgear 2 hours ago [-]
One of my fav scifi short stories for being a fine narrative describing the concept of a cyclical universe.
0xmattf 5 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.
moffers 6 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_ 5 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 4 hours 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 5 hours ago [-]
maybe 42 was just the end of sequence token...
IAmBroom 4 hours ago [-]
My favorite "explanation" of that answer is that 6*9=42 in base 13.
God's numbering system is "unlucky".
baq 5 hours ago [-]
It only takes understanding the exponential function and some imagination, right? Apparently an uncommon combination of traits in people ;)
> Adell was just drunk enough to try, just sober enough to be able to phrase the necessary symbols and operations into a question which, in words, might have corresponded to this:
TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
And then read Asimov's The Last Answer, good dichotomy of stories.
winrid 2 hours ago [-]
My favorite Sci-Fi AI is probably in Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs, the "brain board". It's not covered in much depth but I like it because it's basically vibe coding GPT3.5 from 1966:
> 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."
antirez 4 hours 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
sigalo 3 hours ago [-]
I was wondering the same. All the links to Asimov stories I've bookmarked in the past are now dead, so there probably is some enforcement of copyright.
shivaniShimpi_ 4 hours ago [-]
the thing that gets me every reread is the structure of the joke. same question, asked across the entire lifespan of the universe, same answer every time. asimov could have made it tragic but instead it reads almost like a bit that keeps escalating and then the punchline is that the answer was always going to come, just on a timeline so absurd it laps back around to funny
ANTHONY6632 5 hours ago [-]
I like the concept, has anyone tried this in production?
appplication 4 hours ago [-]
Running it now but don’t have sufficient data to make a recommendation yet
19 minutes ago [-]
bilsbie 4 hours ago [-]
I tell my kids, there’s a God out there for everyone.
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.
wat10000 44 minutes ago [-]
How does this fit with those of us who found one, then later on decided it was silly and gave up the whole idea?
fellowniusmonk 2 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is this, let's say that an entity is outside of time, an entity that maps 1:1 in every practical way to the theists God.
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.
grimgrin 5 hours 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!
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
It's an awesome name.
If you go up one level, you can see this story is one entry in a great library of stuff:
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 4 hours ago [-]
You should. It's short and it's one of Asimov's best.
RajT88 4 hours ago [-]
I did! That is how I know the arc is similar.
LetsGetTechnicl 2 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite short stories
hnthrowaway0315 4 hours ago [-]
I tried to ask ChatGPT the same question last year. Unfortunately it didn't give me a meaningful answer.
layer8 4 hours ago [-]
That’s because it’s a DC, not an AC.
sigalo 4 hours ago [-]
Shouldn't the guy who runs this site be concerned about copyright infringement? Not sure to what extent the Asimov estate cracks down on unauthorized copies but he should be cautious.
sowbug 2 hours ago [-]
It would be borderline insanity for the Asimov estate to enforce rights in a case like this. You couldn't buy better publicity than this thread.
sergiotapia 4 hours ago [-]
Every time this surfaces I simply must read it end to end. I must have read it 200 times by now and it never gets old. What a wonderful short story!
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
All time great short story. Has shaped my world view since I first read it many years ago.
throw_m239339 4 hours ago [-]
Check out "The Last Answer" from the same author.
dark-star 2 hours ago [-]
Just putting this here for people who never heard of him:
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
globular-toast 3 hours ago [-]
I've read it countless times. It still brought a tear to my eye.
butz 4 hours ago [-]
Color me surprised, when gemma-4 provided this answer: "Based on our current understanding of the universe, the short answer is no, it is not possible."
eschulz 6 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 4 hours 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.
4 hours ago [-]
Aliyekta 6 hours ago [-]
Claude Mythos
ramon156 6 hours ago [-]
[reference] [reference]
reader_x 2 hours ago [-]
Love this story.
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)
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.
Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.
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
People think they can do one-sentence quips to describe how economies work.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3
The story of this decade is that people think the economy is terrible despite the usual metrics like unemployment and inflation being not too bad. One explanation is that before 2008 young people could get on the housing ladder but we quit building single family houses and it got harder to get a mortgage -- you see cranes in the air in many towns and sometimes 5-over-1s going for miles in some places like the DC suburbs.
Housing doesn't really fit into the conversation at hand about cheaper labor leading to lower prices.
Something interesting that touches on both of these topics (housing and product cost) is that, if you look at how much of household income is spent on housing and food combined, they stay fairly constant. As commodity goods get cheaper and cheaper, more money is spent on the inelastic and luxury goods.
A conversation that you reframed from wealth distribution to the weirdly much more narrow “cheaper products for end users”. Even though wealth inequality has been studied plenty in itself.
I’m not buying the mind-commodity that you’re selling.
Over the longer term and adjusted for inflation of course. Any manufactured good that isn't supply constrained really.
Either the products have gotten cheaper (food) or the product has become significantly better at a similar price point (cars) and, often times, both (televisions).
0: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/magic.html
https://www.doncio.navy.mil/CHIPS/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=547...
https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.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.
[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Stiegler_GentleSeduction.pdf
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.
https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
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.
[1] https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
(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.
> Proceed to spoil the whole game
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.
https://imgur.com/gallery/last-question-9KWrH
https://www.behance.net/gallery/102075221/The-Last-Question
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...
Also, I am not sure he's translated in English, but Sessanta Racconti[0] by Dino Buzzati is high on my list of fantastic short stories (not sci-fi, just.. I don't know).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessanta_racconti
Even in a lot of hard SF, a lot of the science is wonky if it falls outside of the author's special interest or area of expertise. Relevant to Asimov, the only reason robots have "positronic" brains in his stories is that positrons were a new discovery at the time and it sounded cool and futuristic to him.
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.
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".
TIL Asimov predicted the Ballmer Peak in 1956
> 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."
EDIT: actually I see that the link historically posted here more often is now dead: multivax.com/last_question.html
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.
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!