I've been using an old iPad as a clock for a while. The "Clocks" app I installed lets me configured 5 different alarms (quite handy since my week varies a lot).
Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years:
* 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022.
* 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns.
* 2025 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Bennett Jackson - a very bizarre Holmes & Watson take set in a land constantly invaded by sea kaiju, and where there's "magic" (or is it science) based on harvesting the dead kaiju's bodies.
These are all excellent books, each of which has something different to recommend them.
Are they as good as Dune? Well, it's very hard to say _now_. Assuming humans still exist in 60 years, will they still read them like we read Dune 60 years from its publication? Maybe.
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land won in 1961. I've read it, and I don't think it's aged very well. It's certainly not Dune.
How many people are still reading the 1969 winner, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar? I _have_ read it. It's good, but nowhere close to Dune. And how about 1978's winner, Gateway by Frederik Pohl? It's ... fine. It's not even in the same category as Dune, IMO.
Dune is an outlier among _all_ winners. It's one of the best SF books of all time, with a voice that still seems fresh today. Most Hugo (and Nebula) just don't live up to this standard. There are a few that do, like Left Hand of Darkness, Ender's Game, Hyperion, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (better than Dune, IMO). But those are outliers just like Dune.
I haven't yet read the last few ones because I found the Aztec ones underwhelming. The Calculating Stars to A Desolation Called Peace was when I started feeling they were not so strong and decided I'd go read prior years instead. But I suppose the vagaries of 'winner' vs. shortlist probably take this. It is true that all those others you're talking about are much stronger. I do think that The Ninefox Gambit, The Fifth Season, The Three Body Problem are all just as strong as the ones you've mentioned.
Having read Network Effect and compared it to Piranesi, the two seem simply leagues apart. Perhaps the real thing here is that I'm over-indexing on taste instead of some object measure of quality. Piranesi was otherworldly in the way of Strange and Norrell but Network Effect was Yet Another Story in comparison.
And it's true what you say. Some of the past winners were also relatively weak. Downbelow Station seemed incomplete though I think Neuromancer was unbelievable.
It's just that when I went back and just picked old winners to read it felt like banger after banger after banger. The one where I only remember Kallikantzaros or Lord of Light or Dune or The Left Hand of Darkness. Ringworld I could see people being put off by, but it had this whole thing with the ringworld and the trifold symmetry thing and all that.
Then again, everything that comes now has to avoid everything that came prior, sort of O(n) problem. You can't be new when much has been written.
I love both the Murderbot books and Piranesi. I think they're excellent for _very_ different reasons.
With Murderbot, the "corpos control everything" scifi future setting is nothing new. I think the brilliance is in its portrayal of the main character, primarily through its inner voice. Murderbot is a really unique character and it is written very well.
Conversely, in Piranesi, the main character is basically a cipher. He doesn't know who is, and we don't learn a lot about him or his psychology for most of the book. I felt like he was mostly there to let us experience the world, which as you put it was otherworldly and quite unique. The brilliance of the book is the prose and the world, not the character.
But like I said, I think comparing anything to Dune is pretty tough. Dune is a landmark work that still influences modern writers, and that modern audiences still enjoy reading. The recent movies have translated it to the big screen and captured an even larger audience (an amazing feat given how weird the books are).
Very, very few SFF books have had a similar impact. There's Tolkien, who is arguably the most influential SFF writer of all time. What other SFF works from the 60s or earlier are still as widely read and influential as Dune and LotR? Almost none, except Le Guin's Earthsea books, which barely squeaks in with a 1969 release for the first book.
Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?
I really like that the Hugos added a Best Series category in 2017 to hopefully avoid this sort of thing. It seems like a great series is a different beast than a great single novel.
All Systems Red won (Novella) in 2018, Network Effect (book) won in 2021, and The Murderbot Diaries (series) won in 2021. Wells and Hugo have a .. cantankerous relationship
We've done the same thing in my job. I think what they're saying is that rather than passing/returning `SomeStruct` and having it maybe be optional, they either pass `SomeStruct`, with a rule that it's never nil, _or_ they pass `Option[*SomeStruct]`. Then anything that deals with optional types is forced to explicitly check.
This is exactly how Rust works, except there it's built into the compiler, and there's no such as nil in most code.
The initial murder case Kovacs investigates in both the book/show involves a wealthy man who is killed but has his backup mind inserted into his backup clone so he is “recovered” so the victim has no memory of his killing since the backup was prior to killing instead of optimally just prior to death. There is also a big subplot that is show only with Kovacs’ sister and clones.
Imagine that you are a consultant. You get a call that starts with, "Hi, this is Joe Schmoe and Schmoe Law Firm. I need a new billing system. Can you build me one?"
And you respond by saying that you can, but you need to do a _lot_ of work with him to spec this billing system out. You can't just build "a new billing system" without any more details. You tell him that this will take many hours of work between the two of you where you ask him questions, write a spec, get his feedback, and repeat that a number of times.
At this point, he says "wow, that sounds like a ton of of work for me just get started", and he gives up.
AI does not fix any of this, and this is the thing that I think most people will not want to do, and that's why I think this blog post is making a very good point. The amount of work it takes to build a new software system, even with a super competent programmer as a partner, is still quite significant. And it requires thinking about hundreds of tiny little details in a way that drives a lot of people nuts. They will only do it if they _really_ have to do it.
Think payroll. I used to think payroll is relatively simple. Then I spent some time on government of Canada Phoenix pay system (go ahead... Google and weep). And it's... Insane. System has been live for a decade and still regularly gets hit with some weird scenario from some department that nobody foresaw, it wasn't captured in requirements, but upon review by business analysts is a valid scenario. Bob was a CS5 in department of defense and speaks French so gets bilingual bonus and his boss was away for half a day so Bob gets acting cs5 pay and is in public alliance union so these are the dues, and it is second Tuesday of a month and blue moon, but then Bob got moved to department of agriculture and then 3 months later realized that his previous manager at defense didn't put in his promotion on time so now you have to figure out his retro pay for when he was in defense even though everything on his file now has agriculture labour agreement and codes and rates etc etc etc. And this made up example is a fraction of the complex examples.
Clear and comprehensive Requirements are always the tricky bit, at least in business software. Twilight zone covered it perfectly and presciently decades before AI, with genies taking your requests literally and giving you unpredictable and usually negative outcomes.
Or AI won't fix diffusion of responsibility that you see in companies through outsourcing, offshoring or matrix organizations...Or to go through committees to know if they should change shh root access with abc123 as password.
I'd love to see this for Taiwan. I'm here now (on my Nth trip where N >= 11), and my impression is that 7-11 is the clear winner in all the cities I've been to, followed by Family Mart and then some stragglers like Hilife and OK Mart (it's ok).
My personal favorite is probably Family Mart, because they have multiple very delicious vegan rice balls to choose from.
Yeah, it's quite difficult to walk for any length of time without encountering one, usually a 7-11. They're everywhere. And they actually have some decent food. It's a bizarre thing to experience for an American like myself.
I was wondering about this myself. My guess is no, since AFAIK the only way to do this sort manual memory management is to use unsafe code. But there's also things like the (bumpalo)[https://docs.rs/bumpalo/latest/bumpalo] crate in Rust, so maybe you wouldn't need to do this sort of thing by hand, in which case you're as leak-free as the bumpalo crate.
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