Halting State
In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that's just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are
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88mentions
71people
2007–2026years
53% recommend45% neutral1% critical
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What Hacker News says
- I think of the books by Charles Stross halting state and rule 34 are both better books and give a better 15 minutes into the future feeling.
Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.
- Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross
Permutation City[2] by Greg Egan
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[3] by Dennis E. Taylor
Halting State[4] by Charles Stross
Singularity Sky[5] by Charles Stross
Dungeon Crawler Carl[6] by Matt Dinniman
Zero World[7] by Jason M. Hough
The Shockwave Rider[8] by John Brunner
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/166822...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Crawler_Carl
- Funky... I just posted a comment to this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFtjwm6cwvQ&lc=UgzDm9tFWfFev...
Copying it here...
Hi. Second Life's former Software Architect here. I have notes.
Mostly... I liked this video. It raised a bunch of valid points I remember people talking about before everyone laid off from Linden Lab went to go work for Facebook. I started at Linden right as Cory Ondrejka left. We had about two and a half good years before the money ran out.
Linden Lab was a weird mix of Games programmers and Enterprise technologists. The Games guys were trying to build things as fast as possible. The Enterprise people were trying to build systems that were easy to extend and maintain. Not surprisingly, there was tension.
But despite what you think about Second Life, it worked EXTREMELY well for conference calls. You didn't need as much bandwidth to transmit the state of avatar's body movements as you did to receive video streams. And SL put green marks over anyone who was speaking so you could always figure out who was talking. It was MUCH better than WebEx.
Charlie Stross came up with a concept in Halting State called CopSpace -- it's worth a read. I think it's more in line with what we were thinking the Metaverse would become... an actual tool that used the illusion of space to provide cognitive clues to "real" applications. IBM started using SL so geographically distributed employees could have meetings and engage the parts of their brains that processed 3d spaces in social settings. It absolutely could have been better... so much technical debt... so hard to extend.
But the interesting bit is we ignored headsets for so long. We were always trying to drive adoption, so a device that makes 10% of your customer base vomit didn't seem like a good idea. I know we experimented with early expensive headsets back in the day, but it was always an experiment. Our primary interface was going to be a large screen.
In early 2010, Linden ran out of cash and laid off about half their employees. By this time Cory was at Facebook and hired quite a few former Lindens. I was offered a role to work on radio devices, but was a little wary of FB at the time.
I think this video is mostly spot on. By the time FB changed to Meta, it seemed they were focused on the "game lobby" market. That's sort of in line with the casual nature of FB, but strapping a headset on your face is anything but a casual experience.
Also, FB/Meta waned a walled garden. One of my projects, VWRAP, was a series of IETF standards meant to "open" the virtual world. At Linden at the time, we convinced management it was a decent idea by suggesting it was "better to be the google of virtual worlds than the AOL of virtual worlds." (Google at the time hadn't gone full-on evil and was still making money while promoting open standards.)
I think there is still potential for a Second Life or Horizon-Like offering, but not with the cartoonish avatars, lack of 3rd party tool support, mandatory headsets and lack of a "casual" experience. Companies like Google and Facebook bank coin by keeping you engaged so they can sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Many "casual" virtual world experiences would be something you could engage with a mobile device for a minute or two at a time, much too little time to justify video ads. AR looked promising there for a while, but everyone I know feared it would grow into an virtual experience festooned with ads, spam and scams. Meta's new glasses (like Google Glass) make a lot of people uncomfortable with cameras. Ditto for Apple's VisionPro, I suspect.
I think Meta reached for the low-hanging-fruit and forgot that the V in MVP means "Viable." Which reminds me... anyone remember Google Lively?
- Mr. @cstross published an incredible series of books called Halting State about a future in which people have glasses that can life log, recording everything. Same with Daniel Suarez's amazing books Daemon and Freedom(TM). When I first read these books I thought "WOW I must have those glasses" because I would love if my glasses did facial recognition and identified people in crowds that I am connected to, recording, etc.
Way off the creepy scale if I were on the other side of that, but the idea is very, very tantalizing. IMO it's only a matter of time before we have wearable, discreet cameras that do exactly this. No celebrity, etc. will be able to hide in a crowd. It may very well be a nightmare.
- De gustibus, and all that. I really liked "Halting State" (especially) and "Rule 34", but most of the others you mention I would not put in any top 100 list. Egan has very outré ideas but isn't much of a writer.
The Martian was OK, good on the science mostly, but ultimately it's just a biography with not much to say about the impact of technology on the human condition.
Forward isn't much of a writer and his ideas are too much weed. Baxter and Robinson I haven't read. I think I started something by Robinson but gave up. And I can happily read Graydon Saunders. (Yes, fantasy, but well written).
- This book was THE ONE that made me realize, far FAR later in life than my peers, (my early 30s) that reading fiction -- that horrible chore you were forced to do in high school -- can be fun. You never forget your first time.
A close and long time friend* kept pushing it on me, saying gibberish like "intelligent space lobsters!!" while I rolled my eyes at him.
Finally, I gave in and agreed to read a few chapters. I ended up not putting the book down for hours.
After that, it was undeniable I had managed to acquire yet another addiction. ;-)
Quickly it progressed, intentionally alternating between "books my friends think I will like"** and "things from the canon for a well balanced diet". A Fire upon the Deep, Foundation series, Halting State***, Rendezvous with Rama, Snow Crash, Permutation City, Dune, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder... ... and then a friend handed me Player of Games, then Excession. Wow.
Luminous.
Dark Integers.
I worry that I've only been enjoying written fiction for fun for a few years, but, because I am surrounded by aficionados, am already spoiled by having experienced "the best of the best" :)
*Thanks, Gene :D That was a gift that keeps on giving almost 10 years later.
**being a nerd, many of my friends are scifi book experts, you know the sort, shelves and shelves of books.
***Thanks, kcr <3 for knowing how much I love $TROPE, I hate spoilers, and not telling me more than "just read it".
