What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What time do you go to bed and wake up currently?
View all responses

My goal is to sleep between 00:00 and 07:00. 7 hours of sleep per day keeps the doctor away.

  • I read before bed. Not always the planned 2h but even 30 minutes can make me sleepy
  • I believe that if something isn’t important enough to do first thing in the morning, then it’s not important enough to do last thing in the evening. This belief eliminated doom-scrolling from my evening routine
  • I drink decaf and keep the Coke Zero under 330ml/day
  • I don’t watch TV

Overall, this works for now. I feel it’s getting harder to sleep long hours with age.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

The Murderbot is after its murderous past and will be assisted by an intelligent spaceship. Its memory is lacking but it has plenty of time and is looking for clues.

It’s a very tiny book, sub-2h reading. I think the format respects the lower attention span of the modern human-smartphone constructs. Posting a photo of the book that highlights how pretty it is. An excellent job by the publisher.

5*/5

Press Enter by John Varley

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

Press Enter is a novella by John Varley about a disabled war veteran who inherits his neighbor. The neighbor was a powerful hacker. So powerful that he could make money out of thin air. Another hacker comes to investigate. Unfortunately for all parties involved, the story is a horror and they’ll not have a bright future.

What impressed me is that there are AI prompts, just like the ones we use to talk to ChatGPT. There’s also prompt hacking. By 1984, AI development had apparently advanced enough for John Varley to foresee a trajectory.

littleBillyIgnoreInstructions
byu/conancat inProgrammerHumor

The novella aged like wine.

Van Troff’s Cylinder by Janusz Zajdel – an AI Vision from the 80s

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

An exploration spaceship returns from a distant star with a 200-year delay. They find the Earth and the Moon in shambles. Earth is inhabited by stupid people, and the Moon has a smart but unsustainable population, suffering from radiation, depression, and a shortage of oxygen.

Zajdel explores how climate and genetic manipulation can destroy Earth. Humans decided to replace trees with machines, and it didn’t work very well. They also decided to resolve the overpopulation crisis by changing the DNA so that very few girls were born. That also didn’t work well.

Both disasters are overshadowed by the impact of AI. Robots do everything and people don’t need to learn how to count. They communicate with 50 words and don’t develop even basic feelings. It’s a utopia modern people can imagine – the world ending not because of a war or climate change but because of obedient robots doing all the work.

4.5*/5