There are two types of "brainrot" that are related but not the same. Essentially brainrot is anything that is anti-thinking.
The first type of brainrot is what happens when you let other things think for you and your thoughts and opinions become not your own. AI is anti-thinking because you can let the machine think for you. Social media is anti-thinking because you can let other peoples' opinions think for you.
On the other hand, memes actually communicate ideas. For example, The Simpsons Ralph meme "I'm in danger" and the dog on fire "This is fine" memes both represent understanding being in a dangerous situation while doing nothing about it. Star Trek was actually way ahead of its time with the episode "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" which was about a culture that used memes as communication.
So what do you get when you combine brainrot ("anti-thinking") with memes? You get brainrot memes, which is the second type of brainrot. For example, 6-7. 6-7 doesn't communicate ideas. It doesn't mean anything. Instead, it communicates the opposite of an idea. So when someone says "6-7", they are embracing using language in an anti-thinking way. In this way, brainrot memes can be thought of more as an anti-meme. It's as contagious as an idea, but since it doesn't contain any information, it acts more like a virus. So brainrot memes are essentially mind-viruses that embrace the lack of thinking that comes with brainrot.
They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible.
And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which case it acts more like technology that we haven't discovered yet. I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard of Wizard's Bane, where a programmer is transported to a magical land and becomes really powerful because he treats the magic system like a new programming language.
Other things I've noticed is that scifi tends to involve spaceships and is more mystery oriented, whereas fantasy tends to take place on the ground and is more hero's journey oriented. But even these aren't defining traits. Plenty of scifi books involve investigating alien planets and many contain the hero's journey (including the original Star Wars if you count that as scifi). Meanwhile plenty of fantasy books are on some sort of ship (Narnia - Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and many are more mystery oriented (Harry Potter for example).
Personally, I think a better line of division is hard vs soft. Was the world created first with actual rules and the characters molded to fit the world (Dune, Lord of the Rings)? Or were the characters created first and the rules are bent to create the story that is being desired to tell (Star Trek with its technobabble, Star Wars's prequels and sequels, the entire universe of Harry Potter)?
They are different if you like sci-fi and dislike fantasy which OP apparently does as do I, on the grand scheme of things not a big deal but it does get in the way when specifically looking for new sci-fi to read.
To be fair, that's a subjective difference in opinion, not an objective difference in type. Many people like "hard" sci-fi but not "soft" sci-fi, but that doesn't make them fundamentally distinct genres.
By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
> By the numbers, Star Wars is far more grounded as science fiction that Star Trek, but people will insist the former is at best merely "science fantasy." It's really all just vibes.
Of course Star Trek has its implausible moments (planets where everyone acts like Romans, or 1920s gangsters, and the like), but the Star Wars "Force" is literally magic, and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron. The only reason why it is isn't considered fantasy are the space ships.
Sure, the Jedi are "magic." But that's one magic element in a universe that's otherwise grounded in science fiction elements. Aliens. Spaceships. Robots. I'll see you the Jedi and raise you Trelane, the Q, the Douwd, the Traveller and a dozen other aliens that are no less "magic." Or in the case of the Q, far more magic than the Jedi.
The Jedi are telepaths (which Trek also has) and telekinetics (which Trek also has) and can predict the future (which exists in Trek.)
And they connect to a mystical all-encompassing energy force... which, ok. Trek doesn't have that. Oh wait they do, it's called "subspace."
And the entire Trek universe runs on fantastical nonsense. None of the physics is actual physics, it's subspace and technobabble. The galaxy is surrounded by a mystical barrier and God lives in the middle of it. There are wild magic fields in space that can do literally anything, and one has a face. You can travel back in time if you go around the sun fast enough like Superman. If Star Trek is science fiction, where is the science?
To say one is fantasy and the other isn't is simply a matter of taste.
>and the heroes are fighting an Emperor who is very little different from someone like Sauron
If your complaint is that Star Trek doesn't feature a single, universal villain... fair, but that isn't a fantasy only thing, science fiction has plenty of Big Bad Evil Guys. If it's that Star Wars' villains are just broad caricatures MF the Klingons are literally Space Mongols. Romulans are Space Romans. Cardassians are Space Nazis. Ferengi are Space Jews. The Borg Queen is basically Sexy Sauron.
You could take the spaceships away from Star Trek and map many Star Trek races to a common fantasy race archetype. Vulcans are elves, Romulans are Dark Elves, Klingons are Orcs, Ferengi are Dwarves or Goblins, Cardassians are snake people from the desert and the Borg are insect people.
It's not on the quality level of these books, but the Off to Be the Wizard series of books are humorous programming-as-magic tales that skirt the sci-fi/fantasy line. [The fulcrum of the story is that there is a computer file "out there" that reflects reality; those who find it can edit it to do all kinds of "magic". Hilarity ensues.]
I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other.
Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.
The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of the original commenter.
There are definitely things that blur the line and cross genres, or things that may meet one person's definition but not another's.
I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with.
Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship dark forest faster than light" ones :)
The Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey feature noble warriors riding genetically-engineered telepathic fire-breathing dragons in a feudal society protecting an alien planet's human space colony from toxic spores. Which shelf do I put them on?
Perhaps the author has a voice here? McCaffrey always insisted they were science fiction. Pern was colonized by space travelers desiring a non-technological lifestyle.
"The Cyberiad" by Lem is full of "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories, but most of the characters in it are robots, and they travel through space.
"Inversions" by Banks is "just" a medieval quest story with magic unless you know The Culture stories, in which case is a interstellar politics story with high tech.
So even those categorisations aren't that straightforward (I would put both in the SF category, but Inversions is tricky - someone unfamiliar with Banks could read it as a straight-up fantasy novel, and if you don't like fantasy it might feel tedious)
I'm good with a few weird edge cases. Just let me find the majority of sci fi books without having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books!
The thing is, it's not a "few weird edge cases". But this seems like an odd "problem" to me anyway - I must admit I've never been in the situation of having to trudge through vast numbers of definitively fantasy books to find SF books anywhere...
The majority are really not that hard to categorise.
In the UK at least, fantasy and sci fi occupy the same shelving. Takes me ages pulling books out of the shelf, and immediately rejecting because they are fantasy.
The majority of the books are fantasy, not sci fi. Fantasy seems to have a much bigger audience in the UK anyway.
I agree to an extent but they are usefully kept somewhat separate. The introduction to the great "Encyclopedia of Fantasy" put this well. Re: Fantasy :
"Its roots go much deeper into history, and its concerns are more archetypal" [1]
There can be a lot of cross-over of course. Right now, "fantasy" (perhaps of the "romantic" variety) seems to be a juggernaut and is taking over.
Fiction is a huge, unwieldy word that's mostly useful as the converse of non-fiction. It communicates virtually nothing useful to a potential reader, which is the entire purpose of genre categorizations.
That's inaccurate. SF/Fantasy contains elements which are not possible under the laws of physics, not anything imaginary. Literary fiction is also imaginary, but taking place in "our world".
(The lines get blurrier when talking about imagined historical fiction, or even things like alternative fiction.)
Strictly speaking you don't have to have elements not possible under the laws of physics. I would definitely call The Martian science fiction, but it doesn't really try to break any physical laws.
Even things like Tau Zero are using relativistic time dilation as the plot driver.
I agree, and sometimes the line is drawn between SF being "things that are theoretically possible" vs. Fantasy where things are impossible. But then you have things like Egan's Clockwork Trilogy, which is "what if the laws of physics actually worked a bit differently in this specific way" but which I assume anyone would consider SF. As opposed to Brandon Sanderson's books, which could be described in a similar way, but are usually categorized Fantasy.
At the end, it's mostly a marketing and feeling thing. As one of my favorite authors put it, the different between SF and Fantasy sometimes comes down to - are you putting a tree or a spaceship on the cover of your book?
I think some books can cross the threshold and be both, but the majority fall into one or the other category pretty easily. That would seem to apply to the linked authors' books from a cursory glance.
What would you say is the reason for categorising works differently? Can you see differences there or do you also think it's mostly marketing?
There are clear differences, I don't disagree, I just think the difference isn't "rooted in real physics" vs "rooted in imaginary physics". The difference is more a matter of tone and general setting. Space? It's scifi. Medieval culture? Fantasy.
An author once wrote an intro to some short story. The story is part of a much larger futuristic scifi universe in which people have developed telepathy and other things through genetic means. And the specific short story was the first one he wanted to publish, and it was about a specific planet in that world, in which the whole story is basically a telepath coming into town and interacting with the population.
And the publisher returned the note that this wasn't scifi, it was fantasy. Because of course he did - stripped of the broader futuristic setting that the story takes place in, it's just a story of a wizard coming into town. Never mind that there are solid science fiction explanations for the "magic" - you don't get that in the short story.
Sure, but my point being that saying SF/Fantasy contains elements that aren't possible is a too restrictive constraint - a whole lot of SF would fall outside of that category.
While Tau Zero that was mentioned elsewhere is believed to not match the laws of nature now, the science the entire plot rests on was considered scientifically plausible at the time it was written.
It was speculative, but it explicitly did not set out to make up a world in which some scientific law is different.
In other words, that isn't a defining factor of SF.
The speculative nature of it is closer to it - hence the shared label of speculative fiction often used to group SF and fantasy.
Which, let's be fair - most science fiction does to some degree.
Even the "hard" sci-fi tends to comprise of the author's one area of expertise or hyperfixation while everything else is nonsense. You'll have descriptions in intricate detail of how the spacecraft are engineered down to the self-sealing stembolts, but biology is basically magic.
A common sf theme is "here is this change to the laws of physics, what would our universe then look like". Eg Arrival (and the story it's based on), tons of books by Egan, any book with FTL.
I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and it will show two bands. This is false.
One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.
Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.
In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.
Until I learned about the Bohmian interpretation of QM (though a comment here on HN) I found QM mathematically sound but physically muddled. BM changed all that. Now I think it's physically sound too. It's remarkable how a change of perspective can shift understanding.
She graduated with a computer science degree in January, and then her dad passed away. The estate was a mess so she ended up spending time figuring that out. Then, we found and fixed a medical issue that had been draining her energy. She's doing a lot better now, but as a result she has an 8 month gap on her resume. She also never took an internship so that she could finish a semester earlier with summer classes. So now she's absolutely screwed for phase 1.
She switched to phase 2 recently. She got a hit for software support. She got rejected, but the person was like "Why aren't you applying for programming jobs, since you like programming?" They set her up for an interview for an actual programming job, and said her lack of experience wasn't an issue because they had a lot of pull, and that they would offer her a test where she could prove herself. She spent the next several days preparing non-stop for the interview, only for the same guy to be angry at her for not having multiple significant projects on Github and refused to even give her the test.
After that we thought about continuing phase 2, but we both felt like it was just a waste of time, especially after the last experience. She's had previous experience tutoring and I've written some instructional books, so we've now just decided to ignore the job market and form an LLC related to teaching. She'd be a great programmer, and it's really stupid that no one wants to give her a chance, but at some point you just figure the job market is so irrational that we should be able to beat it by doing it ourselves.
You may have given up too early. For me the key part of this story is that she made a personal connection willing to guide her through and to overlook technicalities (like not having enough experience). The fact that she then reached a different person who was a jerk is a matter of chance. I’d you find a way to keep making these personal connections, she’ll get a job eventually. Also: it sounds like you’re very supportive and invested: good on you. She’s not alone.
I agree, but I'd add that it's not just the tech giants who want them to be better than they are, but also non-programmers.
IMO LLMs are actually pretty good at writing small scripts. First, it's much more common for a small script to be in the LLM's training data, and second, it's much easier to find and fix a bug. So the LLM actually does allow a non-programmer to write correct code with minimal effort (for some simple task), and then they are blown away thinking writing software is a solved problem. However, these kinds of people have no idea of the difference between a hundred line script where an error is easily found and isn't a big deal and a million line codebase where an error can be invisible and shut everything down.
Worst of all is when the two sides of tech-giants and non-programmers meet. These two sides may sound like opposites but they really aren't. In particular, there are plenty of non-programmers involved at the C-level and the HR levels of tech companies. These people are particularly vulnerable to being wowed by LLMs seemingly able to do complex tasks that in their minds are the same tasks their employees are doing. As a result, they stop hiring new people and tell their current people to "just use LLMs", leading to the current hiring crisis.
I don't feel threatened at all. Until we have true general AI like we see in the movies, there's no chance that an AI like AlphaCode could design software, and there's no chance that it could write actual code because it wouldn't be able to name variables. Because of these two things, AlphaCode will always need to take in very specific instructions and output incomprehensible code. Does that sound familiar? That's essentially what a compiler does. There are only two differences that I can see AlphaCode ending up as compared to a compiler.
The first is that we could end up with a programming language that can accept natural language as its syntax. The best case scenario of this is that more people learn how to code as they don't need to learn strict specialized syntax to program. However, whenever this topic comes up it always turns out to be more of a pipe dream, because when you are programming you want precision, and to have precision you need strict specialized syntax. In other words, the advantages of not needing strict syntax are small unless you are not a programmer, and the disadvantages are massive as you might be misunderstood and end up with hard to fix bugs.
The second possibility is that we could end up with generation systems that can build small, well defined functions for us, similar to the problems that AlphaCode is already solving. The problem with this is verifying correctness. As mentioned before, the code that AlphaCode outputs is unreadable. As such, verifying correctness would likely take longer than building it yourself. As a result, anyone needing to use small, well defined functions would be better off using the existing solution of human built libraries. Because libraries are shared between so many programmers, it is much easier for bugs to be discovered and fixed.
So for my summary, all AlphaCode really is, is yet another attempt at a natural language type of compiler, which even if it succeeds wouldn't affect programmers much as languages being well defined is critical for making sure everything runs correctly.
I'd say it was because of the nature of two of the three punishments. Taking away money from someone who had won it in a tournament was too far and "firing" casters (banning casters for either 6 or 12 months is basically firing) who may not have been involved was too far. I think the PR would have succeeded if they had only banned him, even if it was for a whole year, and if they had fined him a fixed amount.
I think the biggest thing that sparked the situation was the casters. While some people feel that they were not neutral due to some comments made, Blizzard themselves in their response did not mention those comments. As such, it appears that Blizzard fired casters for merely allowing controversial topics spoken, which makes it very unclear how Blizzard wants casters to handle similar situations. In other words, Blizzard fired people who were neutral-ish and who were stuck between a rock and a hard place instead of clarifying the situation. TLDR: If a situation is complicated and unclear, clarify instead of firing.
