Top all-time · #232
Peter Watts
Personal blog · rifters.comwritingphilosophy
Peter Watts writes Echopraxia, a personal blog at rifters.com about writing and philosophy. Since 2009, 198 different Hacker News readers have linked it 366 times, most often “Blindsight, by Peter Watts”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Often recommended · 17 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Peter Watts's site for Blindsight, which he hosts free online, and for his other fiction such as Starfish and the Firefall series.
- Recommended for · 17 comments
- One commenter calls Blindsight brilliant; another calls it a fantastic read and Watts compelling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A webpage for new Peter Watts' novel.
Most-linked posts?
- /real/Blindsight.htm33 people · 42 mentions · first linked 2009-10-11
- Blindsight, by Peter Watts24 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2019-06-26
- Blindsight (2006)21 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2018-11-04
- No Brainer13 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2015-07-28
- /real/shorts.htm10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-05-22
- No Brainer. (2015)8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-09-08
- /real/shorts.htm6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-06-17
- Iterating Towards Bethlehem (2009)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-12-24
- /real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-04-30
- /real/Blindsight.htm5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-06-30
What Hacker News says?
I was also thinking about VPNs but the static copy still has to serve a lot of traffic so I don't know if that's an economically viable solution. Furthermore it creates a market for VPN credentials, but that's another issue. At least I expect that a bot with sold or stolen credential will be easier to discover. Anyway, why not git clone the project and parse it locally instead of scraping the web pages? I understand…
Comment linking /maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm
on “FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies”Submitted No Brainer as a story · 314 points
HN discussionBlindsight has been one of my favorite books from my first picking it up. Watts is such a compelling author! It looks like Blindsight is also still available for free on the author's website [1]. [1] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?”Submitted It Awaits Your Experiments as a story · 194 points
HN discussionI like http://www.rifters.com/echopraxia/enceladus.jpg
Comment linking /echopraxia/enceladus.jpg
on “Spaceship Generator”Submitted Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction as a story · 89 points
HN discussionAvailable to read online, I read it last year: https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)”Submitted Iterating Towards Bethlehem as a story · 86 points
HN discussionPeter Watts Blindsight has some interesting commentary upon this in the form of a science-fiction story and some extensive notes [1]. It arguably is feasible to manifest sufficient behaviors to "pass", but the behaviors are not deeply introspected like you noticed. We suspect our subconscious already does a ton of heavy lifting without that introspection, so some of the theses Watts popularizes from the book's bibli…
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute”Submitted No Brainer (2015) as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI wonder how tightly tied your perception of 'delicate' and 'elegant' is with 'impractical' / 'less capable'? It reminds me of this blog post on the topic of 'cuteness' in Japanese culture: > Female protagonists in Japanese genre productions have to be cute, apparently. And cuteness is, I’m told, context-dependent. Big anime eyes and tiny pointed noses may be necessary but they are not sufficient. There must also be…
Comment linking /crawl/?p=4843
on “Enough with the dead butterflies”Submitted Blindsight (2006) as a story · 73 points
HN discussionHomo sapiens whedonum https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm
Comment linking /blindsight/vampires.htm
on “Name one thing in this photo”Submitted Peter Watts: The Scorched Earth Society [pdf] as a story · 63 points
HN discussionby assuming these alien beings would react exactly how human's would This is a tangent, but Peter Watts's brilliant novel Blindsight deals with this issue (among many others). Describing how would unfortunately ruin a key plot point. He uploaded the whole novel to his website: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm but in my view it's more than worth getting in paper: http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts…
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “They're Made out of Meat”Submitted Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain (2008) [pdf] as a story · 62 points
HN discussion> I actually wonder if we're swinging too far in the opposite direction of data vs. "understanding" the world. It may turn out that we can make some things pretty good using ML but not the last 5% needed to make them truly usable. Interesting hypothesis, care to expand your thoughts? Are you saying something along the lines that our current ML techniques builds an initial raw decision with statistically-based reason…
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “A rising sentiment that IBM’s Watson can’t deliver on its promises”Submitted Writer Peter Watts Guilty Verdict in Border Incident as a story · 50 points
HN discussionIt's worth mentioning that Blindsight is available online for free: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “DeepMind: A Generalist Agent”Submitted The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC as a story · 38 points
HN discussionThe Chinese are moving pretty fast, but the sad truth is that it's all too slow: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433 The next couple generations are in for a rough, rough ride. Your point about IP transfer is a good one.
Comment linking /crawl/?p=8433
on “CO2 in the atmosphere just exceeded 415ppm for the first time in human history”Submitted Consciousness, Dune and Abu Ghraib as a story · 22 points
HN discussionAlso note that the author has made the whole book available to read free online and via ebook: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on ““You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?” (2018)”Submitted Cop/Out as a story · 13 points
HN discussionIt was my first though as well. Idea of aliens, which can just "skip" the sight of humans is pretty cool. The same goes with concept of consciousness as a parasitic/optional part of inteligent species. Blindsight is one of the best, 10/10 on Mohs Scale of sci-fi hardness. I love the description of scientific concepts behind sci-fi story at the end. Such a shame, there is so little books with that kind of deep resear…
Comment linking /crawl/
on ““You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?” (2018)”Submitted No Brainer as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> Blond Sight Blindsight* ... I was trying to CTRL+F for "Blond" and couldn't fint it =). Finally found the link here: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm And downloaded it. Thanks.
Comment linking /real/Blindsight.htm
on “Summer Reading List”Submitted The Viral Vasectomy: Covid's Silver Lining – Peter Watts' Blog as a story · 8 points
HN discussionBe sure to check out the "Vampire Domestication" multimedia presentation on that page, for some background on the "vampires" in the series. Thank you, that was a fantastic read, really fills in the universe that Blindsight was set it. Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
Comment linking /real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
on “You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are? (2018)”Submitted Blindsight by Peter Watts (full novel) as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
