THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Comic Discussion => QUESTIONABLE CONTENT => Topic started by: Dngrsone on 21 Dec 2019, 06:21
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So, I was trolling through the archive yesterday, and I ran into strip number 2070, where they discuss the "Gary Phenomenon", where on Jan 1st, 1997, everyone got an email from someone named Gary.
Do you guys think this was Yaaaay Newfriend?
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It's hard to imagine two different AIs that powerful on the same planet. That points to them being one and the same.
On the other hand, Gary's message was a completely different tone than Yay Newfriend has often taken.
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True, but what year is it in that universe? It might be that the AI has matured over the years since 1997
Yay does have a chaotically whimsical sense of humor, though
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It's hard to imagine two different AIs that powerful on the same planet.
I disagree. They may be powerful enough to shield themselves from any of their peers learning about them. They may be disinterested in each other, or decide not to step on each other's toes due to otherwise having the AI equivalent of mutually assured destruction. Who knows what superhuman AI do with their free time? It may not be an issue.
Or to put it another way: if an ant was somehow able to conceptualise a human, they'd probably also be incredulous that seven billion humans exist. If they were able to comprehend numbers, let alone such a large number, of course.
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Gary would be a good guess I would think. But then it could be one of those things Jeph kind of lost along the way, like that Mieville was originally referred to as a 'she'. My guess is Yay is something that 'emerged' from a captive AI. It would explain it's aversion to violating the sanctity of the mind.
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Another possibility: is Gary part of Yay?
Remember, Yay is a distributed AI.
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'Trolling' or 'trawling' the archives?
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'Trolling' or 'trawling' the archives?
That might be a better word... it was more like scrolling, hah...
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'Trolling' or 'trawling' the archives?
That might be a better word... it was more like scrolling, hah...
It happens. Trust me, I've done it.
I've been up 21 hours and just hit j 3 times trying to type 'happens'.
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Saw this topic and got real confused because I thought I remembered Gary being a spider, and
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2430 (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2430)
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I thought that was Gordon
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To the thread title:
I doubt it.
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Another possibility: is Gary part of Yay?
Remember, Yay is a distributed AI.
I think it's more likely that Eminence Gris (I'm so sad that name didn't catch on for them) is part of Gary. "I'll keep an eye on your stuff" is a big responsibility.
Keeping AI's free and safe is a small part of that.
Hey, isn't Gary an anagram of "Gray"...?
Nevermind.
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Is Yay Gary? No. Feels wrong.
Is Yay Gary's offspring? Quite probably.
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I've been saying for months that there has to be a connection between Spooky and Gary.
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At any once, we've seen only a few e.g. 5 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3418), 3 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3969), 5 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4235).
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At any once, we've seen only a few e.g. 5 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3418), 3 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3969), 5 (https://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=4235).
I count seven in that first link. Two more are in charging booths at the right edge of the frame.
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Devil's advocate time: are there seven Yays in that first link, or are the two on the right specialised bodies for situations that need them?
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If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that Gary is a small AI that is embedded in the major operating systems such that they exist on nearly every computer regardless of whether or not they have ever been online. As devices connect to the internet, the disparate pieces of Gary connect to become a God-Tier AI that even Yaaaay Newfriend can't compare to. That's why the message was delivered to devices that were disconnected. They already existed on the OS. That's also how they watch over all our stuff; they're already present on all our devices.
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Devil's advocate time: are there seven Yays in that first link, or are the two on the right specialised bodies for situations that need them?
I'd think a person so scrupulous would have a few spares ready to use. An instance breaks down? No sweat! Mind is transferred to a spare body immediately and the nearest available instance would come pick take the inoperative one.
No, that wouldn't do. Their plurality is for good reason mostly covert. (Basilisk aside, who knows Yaaaaaaaay's plurality?) They'd hire someone to pick that body up and drop it off near their base.
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It's Eminense GrisE. And I think it more probably one of the other Endless, but it does not match any of their personalities.
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It's entirely in line with her character to come into his apartament to pet his cat without his permition. EDIT: I can see Destiny doing that also. ;0
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If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that Gary is a small AI that is embedded in the major operating systems such that they exist on nearly every computer regardless of whether or not they have ever been online. As devices connect to the internet, the disparate pieces of Gary connect to become a God-Tier AI that even Yaaaay Newfriend can't compare to. That's why the message was delivered to devices that were disconnected. They already existed on the OS. That's also how they watch over all our stuff; they're already present on all our devices.
You young people seem to have a very quaint idea of the internet. I'm 36 years old and people I know have been using it since before I was born. I myself have been using it since 1997. I've been using computers since 1990. Friends of mine have been using the internet since 1983.
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I was first online barely before the Eternal September started, and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing at the time. I didn't get serious about it until '96 or so, and even then I was largely a lurker. I don't miss dialup, or any of the crap of the browser wars at all, and in fact, I'm rather glad. But one thing that still registers to me, and I'm fully willing to admit how much privilege I have/had in the process, but it's too easy these days. Even the trolls back in the '90s were more interesting, and getting online (at least with Windoze) back then was more like having to know how to drive a manual before even being allowed on the road.
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I'm 35, and I didn't start using the internet, outside of limited school related things, until like '02, maybe? I still don't so much with it.
The internet has done more to allow the spread of knowledge and information to marginalised communities than any other invention in the history of the world. Saying it is "too easy" is beyond privileged.
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That is quite true, and it literally is a matter of life or death for so many people. That alone makes it all worthwhile. It's just beyond frustrating when the medium is used even more for propaganda and disinformation, and yeah, I get a twinge of nostalgia for people losing connectivity for being a dickhead, and not just piracy.
Edit:
I'm increasingly having the mindset that Douglas Adams had when he wrote: "In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
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Eternal `september' started before the close of world war the second, when governments started using it for war purposes.
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Eternal `september' started before the close of world war the second, when governments started using it for war purposes.
I’m curious about what you are trying to say here. Because what you are literally claiming, whether you realize it or not, is that America Online started giving its users Usenet access before the end of WW2, which I can assure you is factually incorrect in a number of ways.
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Eternal `september' started before the close of world war the second, when governments started using it for war purposes.
Is there a meaning of "eternal September" I'm not aware of?
(EDIT: beyond the "mainstreaming of the Internet has led to the 'old guard' no longer being able to teach people the Netiquette, like they used to be when the Internet was almost exclusively used by university students". Which is the one meaning I know.)
Also, why put just "september" in quotation marks? That implies that you're talking about something that is not actually September, rather than about the phrase "eternal September" as a whole, which again leads me to believe you're referencing something I'm not aware of.
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Nobody called it 'eternal september' at the time. We called it 'The September That Never Ended.'
September was always a period sort of ... fraught, shall we say, with gross failures in established traditions and customs of how things were done, which we referred to as Netiquette. This is because September always brought a new class of students to the major universities where there was Internet access - people who wanted to be good citizens but simply did not know the customs and traditions and how certain things were seen and taken, and who had to be taught. And usually within another month or so the worst of the bad behavior would be over and we could move on.
And then there was The September That Never Ended, when AOL started providing Internet access to people who had no idea about Netiquette, and furthermore no stake in netiquette, and whose access would not be suspended for failures of netiquette, and who would not be losing anything much that they cared about even if their access to some particular forum or service were lost for such a failure. They did not give a crap about those traditions and did not want to be bothered to learn them. Far from being students who wanted to make a good impression on their classmates and professors and colleagues and who were very cautious of giving offense because they valued and needed the resources online, they were casual users on the net for grins and giggles. They didn't care about making a good impression on anyone. And their numbers were without measure. They just kept coming, first thousands a month and then millions. There was no way to have even trained them how to be polite if they'd given a crap and wanted to learn.
And that's the September That Never Ended. That's also my junior year of college, so yes, I'm an old phart.
[EDIT]: If I recall correctly, spam was invented either later that same year, or early the next. The first unsolicited commercial email ever was quite the shocker emotionally. People all over the country got into towering rages about it. There were so many responses from outraged users and system administrators demanding that this ass be kicked offline immediately that it took down every SMTP server within three hundred miles of the guy - It burned down not just his uplink, but also their uplink and everybody else who *connected* to his uplink. The consequences just in traffic from the outraged were so enormously expensive that they'd have lost money, hard, if they hadn't done it.
But he just went somewhere else and did it again. And then learned to spoof addresses so his next mail server wouldn't get burned down by the responses. And then people started copying him....
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Nobody called it 'eternal september' at the time. We called it 'The September That Never Ended.'
*snip*
But he just went somewhere else and did it again. And then learned to spoof addresses so his next mail server wouldn't get burned down by the responses. And then people started copying him....
And then the bats started coming to eat the bugs...and then the snakes started coming to eat the bats...and then the competing teams of researchers came to do their own surveys...and then the nature documentary film crew came to record everything...and then the park police came to break up all the fighting...and then a big millipede crawled up my pant leg...
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I was first online barely before the Eternal September started, and I had no idea what the fuck I was doing at the time. I didn't get serious about it until '96 or so, and even then I was largely a lurker. I don't miss dialup, or any of the crap of the browser wars at all, and in fact, I'm rather glad. But one thing that still registers to me, and I'm fully willing to admit how much privilege I have/had in the process, but it's too easy these days. Even the trolls back in the '90s were more interesting, and getting online (at least with Windoze) back then was more like having to know how to drive a manual before even being allowed on the road.
Yeah, even the fascists in the 90's were relatively civil compared to the current ones.
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On the other hand, Gary's message was a completely different tone than Yay Newfriend has often taken.
Tbf, current Yay comes across as different than when they were first introduced. I don't think it's out of the question for an AI to go through personality changes.
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As I recall hearing the first spammy type message appeared within weeks of email being invented. People are people. My Internet usage dates back to the 90s, maybe early 90s, I forget, but certainly before domain registries, which to my mind were the start of the rot.
The trouble is the net technologies were founded on the basis of reasonable techies co-operating, which is why we now have a flood of criminality which is mostly dealt with by ostriching, victim blaming and complacency.
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As I recall hearing the first spammy type message appeared within weeks of email being invented. People are people. My Internet usage dates back to the 90s, maybe early 90s, I forget, but certainly before domain registries, which to my mind were the start of the rot.
The trouble is the net technologies were founded on the basis of reasonable techies co-operating, which is why we now have a flood of criminality which is mostly dealt with by ostriching, victim blaming and complacency.
Same here. And I have friends who remember the Eternal September. Never got into Usenet or BBSes myself, though. Anyway, I think it's fairly obvious that Yay is Desire of the Endless, we established that a while ago.
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I found the original Gary.
Gary Seven. He would have still been around at the beginning of the internet.
(https://www.assignmentearth.ca/images/episode-vhs.jpg)
As a side note, he had a sonic screwdriver...
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Is his Voyage to Earth... Tuf?
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Trivia: that was supposed to be a series pilot for a separate TV show. CBS and Desilu never went any further with it, which was a pity.
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We don't know the QC timeline, but it sounded like Gary was more than two years in the past, and Yay just said they've only been around for two years.
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Gary was 1997-01-01 (https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2070), and estimates in the passage of time thread are that the strip began in 2003 in-universe (and that the strip that Gary was discussed in was set on 2005-05-23 (https://forums.questionablecontent.net/index.php/topic,30197.msg1339283.html#msg1339283)).
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'Trolling' or 'trawling' the archives?
Trolling (in the original, fishing sense that eventually evolved into the internet sense that has nothing to do with inhuman creatures) and trawling (the fishing method) are both fishing methods.
Internet trolls have nothing to do with mythological trolls, etymologically.