Vernor Vinge (1944-2024), Imagined the Technological Singularity and Author of “True Names”

Illustration of Vernor Vinge standing in front of a wireframe singularity. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

Science Fiction (SF) writer, mathematician, and futurologist Vernor Vinge died last week on March 20, 2024. He is remembered in Locus, The Register, File 770, and Ars Technica. He has a robust entry in the Encyclopedia of SF here.

I wish that I had know about his novella “True Names” (1981) much further back, perhaps before I had read William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), which had already set the stage for my thinking about fiction involving computers and cyberspace. In “True Names,” Vinge came closer to what was and might have been, especially considering the Crypto Wars and the clipper chip. Though, it was perhaps serendipitous that I discovered Vinge’s stories when I was spending as much time in virtual worlds as out.

Some years after reading Vinge’s works, I pitched his novel Rainbows End (2006) as a First Year Experience (FYE) reading at Georgia Tech, but the reading went to another story that I had also suggested.

I am glad that I got a chance to hear him speak at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in 2008 where he was a Guest of Honor.

College Cat Studying in the Stacks, and Video Card Downgrade

Anthropomorphic cat wearing a hoodie, sitting in a library, studying two open books. Image created in Stable Diffusion.

I decided to sell my NVIDIA RTX A6000 video card and downgrade to an RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB GDDR6.

I’ll miss loading large LLMs on the A6000’s 48GB of memory, but between the 16GB of memory on the 4060 and my computer’s 128GB DDR4 RAM, I can get my work done–it’ll just take some magnitudes longer in some cases.

The college cat studying image above was one of the last that I generated with Stable Diffusion on the A6000.

Swapping out the video cards was completely painless on Debian 12 with NVIDIA drivers 525.147.05. I pulled out the A6000 and its power adapter, and installed the 4060 and connected its single power cable.

Cyberpunk Help Desk Cat Made with Stable Diffusion

A chubby anthropomorphic cat wearing a hoodie jacket is working at a cyberpunk help desk.

When I saw this image of a cyberpunk computer technician anthropomorphic cat that I generated with Stable Diffusion, the first thing that came to mind was the Bastard Operator from Hell. Having worked at a help desk, I think it would be an interesting experience to be his co-worker. It certainly wouldn’t be boring!

Almost Done With a Sabbatical Side Project

Anthropomorphic cat typing on a typewriter at a desk. City buildings seen in the window behind him. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

These past two weeks, I’ve been working on a sabbatical side project. I put my primary research project on hold so that I could think about it some more before proceeding. In the meantime, I’m using generative AI to help accelerate my work on an open educational resource (OER) focused on Science Fiction (SF) that I plan to launch soon. The writing is done on the project. What I am doing now is using an large language model (LLM) that I’m running on my desktop workstation to help me with editing. I think the end product will be pretty cool, and it will be something anyone is free to use after it’s launched. Stay tuned!

Blake’s 7 Cast Re-imagined in a Photorealistic Image Created with Stable Diffusion

Continuing my Friday Blake’s 7 posts (previously here, here, and here), this is a photorealistic re-imagining of the cast that gives the crew a gritty look and captures the bridge of the Liberator quite well. Originally, all of the male subjects had very similar faces. I used inpainting to modify them–a lot. Cally’s tattoo was a happy accident. Even though I got the image going in the direction that I wanted, it needs further development. Something to work on when I get a chance.