My [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore, and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats, eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a jumbled mess.
Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more prey.
I have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little sweet. Pairs will with fractals.
It's meant to be using "modern" jargon, set in the time of the story, that hasn't actually been invented yet. It also refers to a bunch of Classical mythology / works that I'm not familiar with. And also a bunch of obsolete CS ideas; e.g,. a "Chomsky organ", which would presumably be something that generates language based on Chomsky's ideas about grammar -- probably something like a Markov chain -- rather than neural networks, which is how LLMs currently "speak".
At any rate, it's written from the perspective of an AI which controls a ship. The AI may have once been a human on earth, and had its cognitive patterns transferred to the ship. It can do a certain amount towards modifying the ship, but they've apparently turned off its ability to speak. The ship at the beginning of the story has only 2 humans on it, down from hundreds. The ship is stationed at some place near the solar system (?) to look at a weird phenomenon, called 'Julia', presumably because it resembles a Julia set fractal, which defies all known physics. While the ship has been stationed there, the Earth has basically died.
That may give you enough clues to help you orient yourself, so that you can figure out what happens.
What parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can be confusing if you haven’t read a lot of it, because part of its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out from their context or by reference (like “laminate” and “squarely” — yes, I had to look it up), and some are the puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is Julia? What do they want?)
It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.
I'm not a genius at all, and didn't realize this story was about "Julia sets" until I finished reading it and came back here for the comments. I was pretty sure that Julia was something like the 4D space bubble found in the Three Body Problem series.
I just enjoyed the prose in the story. Those incoherent words were the interesting bits of worldbuilding that drew me in.
One does not simply read a study Bible (2 million words) but if you do then this work of fiction will be easier to understand in comparison.
I'm not promoting or demoting any religion by saying this, I'm talking about the Bible as an old work of fiction, although to be fair, a study bible can be recent and even copyrighted.
I read a good way down thinking this was some kind of highly metaphorical blog post about the programming language Julia
I clicked on it because I thought it was about the programming language Julia. I'm still not fully sure what Julia here actually is.
Julia Set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
Funny how that page spends so much of the introduction comparing Julia to Fatou, but the page for Fatou only mentions Julia in passing.
There should only be one article for what is essentially one concept.
Thank you!
My [interpretation? fanfic?] is that Julia is like a carnivore, and humanity is not it's first prey. Every creature that eats, eats to steal the disentropy of it's meal. Plants can steal order from sunlight, and certain microbes can steal order from thermal vents, but carnivores, herbivores, and decomposers steal order from the work of other organisms. The improbability of living is sustained by arranging stolen amino acids into one's own proteins, powered by the toppleing of sugar towers back into a jumbled mess.
Julia does not reassemble amino acids like earth life does. But it does absorb disentropy from it's prey. The extreme specificity of an interstellar spacecraft, it's contents and occupants, is absorbed by Julia, so that it can move, grow, and attract more prey.
I have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little sweet. Pairs will with fractals.
Purple prose about something unknown and unknowable and fractal-like. As if Nabokov wrote sci-fi.
FYI Don't miss out on the <!-- HTML comments --> .
The narrative style reminds me of the novel-game Caves of Qud. Very well done.
I assume this is a sort of poem about the programming language Julia...
;-)
More about the Julia set [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set
> Julia emits light, over an ever-changing spectrum
Haven’t heard of this feature in Julia lang, must be new in v1.12.4
Am I too dumb? I literally understand none of this.
It's meant to be using "modern" jargon, set in the time of the story, that hasn't actually been invented yet. It also refers to a bunch of Classical mythology / works that I'm not familiar with. And also a bunch of obsolete CS ideas; e.g,. a "Chomsky organ", which would presumably be something that generates language based on Chomsky's ideas about grammar -- probably something like a Markov chain -- rather than neural networks, which is how LLMs currently "speak".
At any rate, it's written from the perspective of an AI which controls a ship. The AI may have once been a human on earth, and had its cognitive patterns transferred to the ship. It can do a certain amount towards modifying the ship, but they've apparently turned off its ability to speak. The ship at the beginning of the story has only 2 humans on it, down from hundreds. The ship is stationed at some place near the solar system (?) to look at a weird phenomenon, called 'Julia', presumably because it resembles a Julia set fractal, which defies all known physics. While the ship has been stationed there, the Earth has basically died.
That may give you enough clues to help you orient yourself, so that you can figure out what happens.
Right there with you. Everyone else on HN is a genius so will love it, but for me this is just incoherent words.
What parts of it were confusing? I think science fiction can be confusing if you haven’t read a lot of it, because part of its art is to try and set the scene in as compact way as possible, with a combination of cues that you can work out from their context or by reference (like “laminate” and “squarely” — yes, I had to look it up), and some are the puzzles that the rest of the story will resolve (who/what is Julia? What do they want?)
It’s ok if it’s not your thing. It’s like an emotional crossword puzzle.
I'm not a genius at all, and didn't realize this story was about "Julia sets" until I finished reading it and came back here for the comments. I was pretty sure that Julia was something like the 4D space bubble found in the Three Body Problem series.
I just enjoyed the prose in the story. Those incoherent words were the interesting bits of worldbuilding that drew me in.
Despite the name, I wouldn't say it is "about" Julia sets, at least not any more than it is about any other kind of fractal
One does not simply read a study Bible (2 million words) but if you do then this work of fiction will be easier to understand in comparison.
I'm not promoting or demoting any religion by saying this, I'm talking about the Bible as an old work of fiction, although to be fair, a study bible can be recent and even copyrighted.
Baroque
this completely sucked me in after skimming half a paragraph while unsure what to expect. very golden age, thanks for the link!
i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.
Incredible
Very well written. Poetic.
I love the way that nothing is explained.
This is a rather neat paper on the Julia set:
https://www.math.stonybrook.edu/~scott/Papers/India/Fatou-Ju...
Needs a twist or a reason to care about the characters.
They're the last living humans, and the last human-derived mind?
I like Cordwainer Smith and Peter Watts; so I really liked this blend of their styles and subjects.
I adore Peter Watts, so I'll be checking out Smith then!
Watts is like brain candy, keeps my mind buzzing from all the ideas for weeks. Charles Stross can have the same effect, a sort of future shock.