In Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep he describes the role of the programmer-archaeologist, whose job is to sift through mountains of abstraction layers and black-box code modules written in dead languages thousands of years prior, determine their function, and stitch them together to perform a desired function. In the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, one of these modules, buried beneath said layers, contains a booby-trap set by an ancient civilization that only the protagonist knows about. I believe the Unix epoch is mentioned briefly.
I've never seen a job ad for "idea people". Usually, idea people are made fun of, like Michael Keaton's character in Night Shift (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084412/quotes) - or Scriber, in A Fire Upon the Deep (http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uRjpxtbshBYC&lpg=PT110&o...). "[...] It's that, the actual doing, that's going slow." Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life too. The "big" problem is the space of ideas is huge, expanding exponentially, each variation admitting many more ways of varying. And... the vast majority are no good. So youth's easy…
Highly, highly recommend Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky [0], which won the Hugo in 2000. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony over centuries of time (in many ways thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation is in helping people to understand foreign ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of philosophical antipositivism [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and…
I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library. I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data…
This thread must have at least one A Fire Upon the Deep reference, so I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep Edit: tldr; Vernor Vinge, the guy who originally coined the phrase "the singularity", wrote a really excellent SciFi novel about information archaeology, artificial intelligence, galaxy-spanning civilizations, black holes, and all sorts of other dope ish.
I found it really really hard to gather with it and never finished it. Same was with "A Fire Upon Te Deep", but after the first quater it was okay for me, and I finished and liked it. What I really found hard was, that this takes all place in it's own Universe with it's own Rules. And no where is described/explained what the these things or rules are. Just like you would dive into e.g. Star Trek TV Show for the first time and see someone beam. The person would disapear and repear somewhere. Due to the fact that you see it, you understand what this beaming thing is. Not so in Vinges…
Most scifi I've read with FTL usually has some explanation that isn't pure fantasy. For example, I just finished reading A Fire Upon the Deep[1] by Vernor Vinge, and the in-universe explanation for FTL in the novel is that different regions of our galaxy effectively have different laws of physics, which is (admittedly somewhat handwavingly) due to the density of the interstellar medium. Sure, FTL travel is never grounded in our understanding of physics and the universe, but do you really think our understanding is anywhere near complete? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
That is an excellent... duology? For anyone tempted, "Fire Upon the Deep" is actually the first book while "A Deepness in the Sky" is a "prequel", but one that is a full force novel and not some blatant attempt to capitalize upon the first. I keep wondering whether he will ever issue a third book in the series -- there was definitely a potential open thread at the end of "Sky". Many things now cropping up on the contemporary science and technology horizons, Vinge explored in detail in those two novels. (And, as a personal comment, wow, how progress does keep seeming to accelerate. Those…
That a universal 'constant' may vary not just over the age of the universe, but in different directions from 'here', is also an idea in Vernor Vinge's 'Deepness in the Sky'/'Fire Upon the Deep' universe. There, faster-than-light travel and more rapid computation become possible further from each galactic core. If some physical laws are subject to graduated variation across the universe, the migration of intelligence might be biased in the direction of more-favorable conditions. Perhaps any matrioshka brains with a choice wouldn't be caught dead in our neighborhood.
There's an interview with Vinge from 2009 [0] which contains a screenshot [1] of him using Emacs with his home-brewed proto-Org-mode annotation system (which appears in parent's link). [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215121054/http://www.norwes... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170104130412/http://www.norwes...