/lit/ - Literature

>>19189283
Blindsight is a really good spooky scifi

Halfway through Blindsight and enjoying it immensely. It took a little while to get into Watt’s dense PhD-tier vocabulary and hard science infodumps, but I’m in the flow of it now and enjoying the ride.

He seems to have a hard materialist doomer worldview similar to Bakker’s but maybe a little less overtly grimderp. Iirc they’re friends IRL.

>>18970897
Watts is even worse. He spent the last 4 years being an insufferable faggot crying about bad orange man then people found out he got arrested at the border a decade ago, got the shit beaten out of him by cops, and the dipshit can’t even enter America because of the incident. So he shut the fuck up and faded into irrelevance real quick

I think I'm getting filtered.
10% of the way through.
Is he just going to keep talking about things like we all know about them already? That's the one thing I never sign up for.
This better start adding up real fast.
Maybe I'm just tired too but the ship's interior description flew right over my head and I'm just picturing some of the rooms from Ender's Game that I had imagined up already but with camping tents.

>>18251296
Not OP but this is a hugely popular sci-fi novel someone recommended on here that has dialog that sounds like it was written by a middle school redditor

>"For me, the big story about #gpt3 is not that it is smart - it is dumb as a pile of rocks - but that piles of rocks can do many things we thought you needed to be smart for. Fake intelligence may be dominant over real intelligence in many domains."

This shit scares me. I was on an 8 hour road trip to LA while listening to picrel in audiobook and I realized that for long stretches of road my mind went on autopilot because of the lack of visual stimulus. Yet I was still responsive to an extent. I would still swerve away from the occasional tumbleweed or roadkill and my hands on the wheel follow the curve of the road. But if you asked me how I was driving for the past few minutes I couldn't tell you because I couldn't remember.

Studies have shown that when people improvise on the piano, they had already subconsciously decided what notes to play beforehand. Yet the people will tell you they decided to play each note deliberately.

This idea that a lot of what we think is creativity are just mechanical processes under the hood and our memories are post-hoc rationalized to make us feel like we were at the helm the entire time is frightening.

Yes you may enter the above as a prompt.

>does in one book what bakker tried to do in 7
Is Watts the superior philosophy phd?

bout to crack into this bad boy. it's /sffg/ approved, no?

Maybe It's the PDF I got, but this seems like it wasn't proof read? I read it In one Day so I might of missed things.

These people really don't understand the reality of their lives. My father grew up poor in a tiny village in Greece and dropped out of school at 13 to work in a shipyard, at 16 he came to the US. Now i'm here, an engineer at a fortune 500 company. It's absolutely mind boggling the generational jump in status that has occurred solely due to capitalism.

The only catch is not everyone has it in them. Some people just can't/don't want to compete, and unfortunately a capitalistic country like the US is not a good place for those people. We are like the top .5-1% of the entire planet.

Arguing that it's too hard to juggle making it and making friends in a place like that is akin to arguing that it's hard to get meat in a lion's den.If you want to live in chad town you have to learn to play by chad rules.

>>16074684

Jesus Christ Blindsight is great, but Jesus Christ is it depressing.
Are there any recent optimistic sci-fi books that are good? I want to get rid of the taste of existential dread.

Just finished pic related. How are the sequels?
Also, if you happen to know of any innovative hard sci-fi besides this and Jean le Flambeur series I'd be interested.
Thanks in advance, lads.

I wouldent call it a straight horror novel, but some parts filled me with absolute dread. Thw follow up echopraxia is pretty good too but very different.

Just read Blindsight by Peter Watts. While being a mostly hard sf novel (the vampire shit is gay and tacked on, but perhaps he did that because those were hot in the early 2000s,) the parts about the qualia debate and whatnot make the "being sad and suicidal is masturbatory bullshit and you should feel bad for even being this introspective" argument better than any cold rationale could. People are depressed when they have the luxury to be so, but that's just the thing: that luxury is an illusion, and no one truly has it. You are building up debts and won't stop because a predator is not currently chasing you, threatening to rip your limbs apart, but one day he will come to collect. You are no different from the impoverished African kid who can't afford to be depressed because he must survive, you just don't realize it yet.

the superior sci-fi

all categories, not just sci-fi