Jemisin is one of the more visceral and imaginative writers I've encountered in recent years, and she did indeed produce and publish written works, so I do believe she is a real author, yes. I'd certainly be interested in reading and maybe discussing an actual critique, this being a forum where substantive posts are required in the guidelines.
I read The Fifth Season and hated it, but she's definitely a real author. I'd be interested if she has any other books that I might like better.
My main problems with the story were:
- The setting was almost unspeakably brutal, but there seemed to be almost no one interested in fighting those brutal systems. I could understand 1-2 characters being brainwashed to go along with the brutality, or even most, but no one seems to even attempt to go against the system. This made the setting feel unbelievable to me.
- There are two big twists at the end of the book. I won't spoil them, but they didn't feel like well-foreshadowed twists. The timelines for the different chapters weren't clear, which made it hard to guess the first, and the 'clues' felt like bad writing mistakes. For the second, the only clue is what words people don't say.
The plot also hinges on a misunderstanding of how tsunamis work, but that's forgivable to me.
I feel like in real life, that's how things work. People mostly accept the brutality of the society they find themselves in, because its normal. Its just in most books people want to focus on the drama. [Mild Spoilers] The fifth season starts with everyone kind of accepting, the characters are chewed up, and they do try to rebel in the end. So its not like there is no rebelling at all.
Generally i liked the fifth season, but i think people think its a bit deeper than it actually is. I find le guin to be a bit more nuanced and leave you thinking a bit more. The fifth season felt a bit more: evil people are obviously evil. The other side is i think jemisin has better developed characters than le guin. A lot of le guin (much like a lot of older scifi) feel very much like idea books where character development & plotting came second.
If you like those two authors, i would really reccomend Octavia Butler, who i think is a bit similar but better than both (lets see if i start a flamewar ;)
No flamewar here, I quite agree! I really enjoyed The Fifth Season (if "enjoy" is a word that can be applied to something so dark), but it did have flaws (I used "visceral" and "imaginative" in my above comment because I think those are her strengths: I really felt immersed in her descriptive writing).
Meanwhile Octavia Butler is absolutely one of my favorite authors regardless of genre. Her work stuck with me for quite a while, as has le Guin's (specifically, Left Hand of Darkness, I've actually had trouble getting into some of her other works, though I mean to try again). Butler to me is a visionary alongside my other favorites in the sci fi canon.
> I feel like in real life, that's how things work. People mostly accept the brutality of the society they find themselves in, because its normal.
For something like modern day police brutality, sure, most people aren't active advocates.
However, I think that really understates the level of brutality in The Fifth Season. The main characters are the oppressed people, like Jewish people during the Holocaust or Black people under Southern-slavery levels of oppressed. Yet there appears to be absolutely 0 mention of resistance fighters or an underground railroad. There appears to be 0 active resistance anywhere, even beyond the main characters. No protests, no riots, no terrorist attacks, no one even suggesting that maybe outright eugenics and genocide is a bad idea and then getting disappeared. It doesn't have to be the main characters getting involved, just a rumor that someone somewhere is doing something. If someone punched me in the face, I wouldn't let them get away with it and then punch myself a couple extra times for good measure.
I think what you're seeing there is Jemisin actively foregrounding and exploring a difficult fact, which is that people who were abused are more likely to turn around and be abusers.
Often times books turn abuse into the catalyst for a noble struggle and cathartic improvement, when in fact that often isn't the case. There's large swathes of human history where oppressive regimes were powerful enough to quickly and brutually suppress rebellions. When violence and abuse are normalized in a culture, it can take a long time and a lot of failed struggles to truly unwind the violence.
I think Jemisin is actively trying to explore that mentality, which is pretty brave because it does make the characters off putting. As the reader you want so badly for them to rise out of the muck and take on a noble struggle, but they're caught up in the cycle of violence.
I say this with respect for your viewpoint, I think you're being very fair about expressing your response, and I completely see where you're coming from.
For me the biggest problem with that series is that it seems to endorse collective responsibility on a scale massive enough that calling it genocide is a no-brainer. Several times, even.
1. There is nothing imaginative about it. A child throwing out random ideas and copying cool scenes from TV shows at random is not "imaginative". It's made worse when every edgy social-commentary trope is forced in.
2. The biggest offense, of course, is the word "science" in her being labelled a "science fiction" author. A 4th grade understanding of the first chapter of a geology book that is immediately violated is not "science fiction".
Of course, I am mainly upset about the destruction of the Nebula Awards by the inclusion of the Fifth Season in the list among authors who actually understand science, computer science, served in the military, and overall have, and further, an understanding of how things work. Jemisin might be on par with that guy who wrote about magic balls catching lightning (Sanderson) in the Stormlight Archive, but neither of them belong on a good science fiction list.
On your first point, you have to at least acknowledge that a ton of people strongly disagree with you. I've certainly bounced off of widely read and highly rated novels before, but rarely do I leave with a complete dismissal of the quality of the work. It seems almost personal to you, calling a widely and multiply published author a "child throwing out random ideas".
On your second point: The Nebula Awards specifically target "science fiction" and "fantasy" genres. I'm quite widely read in science fiction. I took a look at the list of novels that have won or been finalists for the Nebula Awards. It turns out I've read quite a few of them, scattered over the decades the Nebulas have existed. The Fifth Season is far from the only set of books with fantastical elements to have won, and the ones I've read that have won have plenty of world building elements that would be incorrect by a fourth grade textbook (FTL? Reincarnation? Fire breathing dragons?). Yes, the Game of Thrones novels (a Song of Ice and Fire), though quite excellent, are quite firmly in the realm of fantasy, and they were often Nebula finalists! By your criteria, the Nebula Awards were "destroyed" a long time ago. Several books, including some from the very early years of the Nebula Awards, are now called "science fantasy", i.e. science fiction that leans into fantastical elements. The Fifth Season is actually typically labeled as "science fantasy".
If the Fifth Season "destroyed" the Nebula Awards, then you would see more recent winners being almost exclusively science fantasy. I haven't read as many of the newer winners as I have older winners, but two of my favorite novels of recent years won or were finalists: Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is pretty much a core science fiction novel, and Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, which is even more fantastical than the Broken Earth.
One of my favorite recent-years science fiction novels, Children of Time, surprisingly didn't get a Nebula, but it did get a Hugo. Looking at its publishing year though, 2015, I see why! Three Body Problem was nominated, and Annihilation, which I absolutely adore (but can't spell), won that year.
I will acknowledge that people have tastes I don't understand - Children of Time was another collection of filler tripe that contributed nothing to the genre. Definitely put it down when I realized it's "A Deepness in the Sky", without the good parts, just "lol prehistory with spiders."
You brought up Martin - he has a passing understanding of history, combat, and was a veteran (aka is somewhat grounded in reality while writing fantasy), which is why Gemisin and Brandenson should not be used in the same sentence with him, and definitely not with Tolkien.
It's probably the only poem I tried to memorize other than "Good Timber" by Malloch. I am ashamed to say I forgot both, other than 4 lines about "the woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep."
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
EDIT: If you're looking for one to memorize, I should say.
Speak for yourself, I built the architecture that enabled a business to go from 50 mil to 3 billion revenue in the last 4 years and I have zero equity and a midwest salary. Really need to think about my life choices.
We were in a complete bubble the last couple of years. If you didn't work before the bubble, your perception of reality is entirely skewed. The mania was due to two things - tech companies outperforming everything else on the SP500 and easy credit for start ups. The response was over-hiring, a huge number of bootcamp grads, and everyone who could pivoting to an IT degree. Worries about the economy (record debt, etc) are just the icing on top of the tech over-saturation cake. Other, way overstated bubble is "AI destroying jobs". It's not reality, but the perception is there.
In short, it probably won't recover to bubble territory in the next 20 simply due to the huge supply of devs. On the other hand, the field does require some education, some IQ threshold, some persistence, etc, so there will be ok-paying jobs for a while. But again, if you started working circa 2021-2023, you will need to adjust your expectations.
Too many dumb ideas were overfunded (or funded at all). A lot of the bigger tech companies got into an overhiring and overpaying competition. And, as you say, companies are just being cautious for the future.
And it really goes beyond 2021-2023. The tech job market for the last decade or more has not been normal in the sense that tech jobs, especially on the US west coast (though also quantitative trading), have paid well out of line with pretty much every other STEM position which was not historically the case. When I was a product manager back in the day, I'm pretty sure the computer system hardware and software people were paid pretty comparably as I probably was as well.
I think there are questions about where adtech goes. If it has a major downturn, some companies are going to really feel it.
I think he is proposing that tech company CEOs have some hands-on engineering experience at least for a short while. I agree with that - "MBA only" bosses really have no idea what it's like to be on the ground. I can't even emphasize how true this is, "no idea whatsoever" is a huge understatement. I thought they were faking to be lazy at first, but they really don't understand that some people need to actually do the work and what goes into it. And I say that as an MBA/CFA before engineering.
SWEs are not a tier where people care about your class much if you have the skills, speak professionally, and appear professional. Just don't talk about yourself. "How are you?" "Good". Yes, no one cares about you or your problems, but that's just work.
If you are aiming for director positions, yea, it's different story. Pro-tip - it won't be enough to pretend, they are mostly all related or went to the same school, worked together before, etc. So acting the same won't help much either.
In other words, as a SWE, you are blowing this way out of proportion.
Yeah I don't know what these people are talking about. Some of the people I've met are as care free as it gets. Wonder if most of what people "experience" is imagined here.
Terraform feels like a useless wrapper on top of AZ CLI and resource definition yaml files. In general, Terraform provides nothing but a useless wrapper that people need to understand.
Furthermore, most companies don't need K8S either if they are using a cloud provider. It only starts being cheaper if you forget what you pay the DevOps team (or senior devs who do DevOps on top of code) AND have a huge number of resources. Otherwise you literally have to be in maybe the top 30 companies for K8S to actually save you money.
I see the negs, but I don't see any coherent arguments, much like "irl", past "We just need it, ok". Nevermind the fact that even the OS-agnostic garbage argument falls apart the moment you do anything complex since it relies on the host kernel. Doing some graphics stuff (no, not games or AI, just say, PDF report generation)? Guess what, your library might be relying on OS-specific libraries and will break the moment you put your "agnostic" container on Linux. And now Docker desktop needs a license and everyone needs to learn Rancher.
Again, you don't need Docker. You aren't CoreWeave or a cloud provider. You DON'T need to virtualize your hardware and parse it out in pieces on a moment's notice. You don't need K8S to do a rolling update for you when on the cloud, you don't need Ingress to load balance, you don't need ECS/EKS to break every day.
I am persisting in hopes someone convinces me I am wrong by the way. This isn't a rant, I have a decade of experience of someone building a fancy container/orchestrator infrastructure only for all of it to fall apart the moment the DevOps team leaves. Perpetual cost center that adds nothing.
And yes, I know, I am not doing it right and we need Flux to fix all our problems now.
1. The title sucks. This article is basically about adding lunges on top of walks. Conclusion: "Yes, adding lunges is good". Again, the title and the setup for this article completely misrepresent what it's saying.
2. My opinion, nothing to do with the article, though a lot to do with the misleading title: Overall, walking for 30 mins to an hour a day is huge and will increase fitness an incredible amount over nothing. Of course, it can replace neither intensive cardio, weight lifting, or mobility work. But throw a few hills in there, and it's probably sufficient to stay healthy.
Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:
o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
human intellect.
Yeah this is the angle I look at the most, the Humans+Internet combo.
I don't believe LLMs will really get us much of anywhere, Singularity-wise. They're just ridiculously inefficient in terms of compute (and thus power) needs to even do the basic pattern-prediction they do today. They're neat tools for human augmentation in some cases, but that's about all they contribute.
I think, even prior to the recent explosion of LLM stuff, that the aggregate of Humans and the depth of their interconnections on the Internet is already starting to form at least the beginnings of a sort of Singularity, without any AI-related topics needing to be introduced. The way memes (real memes, not silly jokes) spread around the Internet and shape thoughts across all the users, the way the users bounce ideas off each other and refine them, the way viral advocacy and information sharing works, etc. Basically the Singularity is just going to be the emergent group consciousness and capabilities of the collective Internet-connected set of Humans.
