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Author Topic: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)  (Read 15238 times)

Tova

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #50 on: 18 Aug 2021, 19:00 »

Tho I hope Jeph at least has background material that explains stuff. Just for internal consistancy.

Hah. Yay is not the only character who has, shall we say, evolved after their introduction. Hannelore, for example.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #51 on: 18 Aug 2021, 23:09 »

Jeph did say that at least once he built up background information that wasn't in the strip to support what went on. The context was Bubbles and how AIs might serve in the armed forces.
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BenRG

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #52 on: 18 Aug 2021, 23:23 »

Mother instincts are strong, don't care about social boundaries and never, ever go away. Like it or not, Aurelia's hindbrain has adopted Yay and they're just going to have to accept that she's going to have maternal concern for them going forwards!

I want to know how one transfers their money into off planet accounts.

I'm guessing that the ECI space station isn't the only one up there and there may even be habitations on the Moon. Because of the small time delay in Earth-Moon communications, the banks found it useful to set up servers there fore cis-lunar business. So, it's just a basic inter-account fund transfer.

However, it's just possible that all of the above is wrong, that Yay's government knowledge means that they know that the Aliens are amongst us and are doing business with humans.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #53 on: 19 Aug 2021, 01:48 »

I am utterly at loss what the advantage of holding an off planet account would be ?

Its not like the law wouldnt reach or that you couldnt get access blocked or anything like that.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #54 on: 19 Aug 2021, 02:37 »

Depends if you can get it to the intergalactic equivalent of Switzerland.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #55 on: 19 Aug 2021, 03:04 »

I am utterly at loss what the advantage of holding an off planet account would be ?

Of-planet being zero-tax?
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #56 on: 19 Aug 2021, 04:22 »

Depends if you can get it to the intergalactic equivalent of Switzerland.

I doubt human/AI presence in the QC-verse originating from Earth is even interplanetary, to say nothing of intergalactic.

My guess is there are at best orbital stations, and I'd assume they're under the jurisdiction of *some* nation.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #57 on: 19 Aug 2021, 07:51 »

Let's not forget that this is a slice of life comic, not sci-fi or even drama as such.

I do a modest amount of fiction writing myself.  It is not unfair for an author to expect a certain amount of mental legwork from their readers. 

I grew up on sf and keep wanting Yay to be written as a fascinating alien mind.

There is lots of great stuff here, but I am desperately trying to keep this from becoming a wall of text.

I am a science fiction fan, and when you bring in SF tropes, they should be handled with logic and consistency, by golly.

There is also the story that Jeph wants to tell. Clearly there is dark stuff in Yay's past that made them develop a moral consciousness, but I think that hint is all we will ever have.

I became an Engineer because seeing how stuff works is really neat. Making it work better is super nifty.


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Morituri

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #58 on: 19 Aug 2021, 09:46 »

I wrote a (short) article the other day about the various ways in which even a fully conscious, fully intentional, functioning mind, if embodied as an AI, could be profoundly different from us.

Yay is polyisomatic (has more than one simultaneous locus of perception/action) and has extra senses (hears radio frequencies and wi-fi, can access internet information near-instantly, etc). As such their perceptions, actions, and available information in realtime is profoundly diifferent from humans.  There are some fairly profound questions of identity and what it means in there, and answers that can be deliberately ambiguous, contradictory, or just plain inapplicable to linearly-conscious humans like ourselves.  Other possibilities are episodic, multilinear, asynchromic, hypertachic or hypotachic consciousnesses, each with their own set of factors humans would find unfamiliar (Yay is also implied to be hypertachic but not written as such; we haven't seen much evidence of any profoundly different perception of time).

So far though, these differences haven't really been highlighted.  They've been treated as incidentals to what is essentially a human-ish linear  consciousness. 

A few very minor examples:  We haven't seen Yay, in more than one body, simultaneously dealing with different aspects of a problem and using information from several streams of immediate perception in both.  We haven't seen them looking at something distant (like something in orbit) from widely-separated points of view on the ground and having the to-the-fractional-inch depth perception that parallax from multiple points of view allows.  We haven't seen them carrying on simultaneous conversations with a dozen people individually to facilitate a negotiation process.  We haven't seen them originating an absolute storm of online activity with a particular goal in mind.  We haven't seen them infiltrating someone's network and pretending to be a dozen routers (or servers, or thermostats, or security cameras, etc).  We haven't seen what happens when one instantiation of Yay is isolated from the rest and how/whether that instance re-integrates into the whole when isolation ends.  We haven't seen Yay sacrificing one of their bodies for some goal because after all Yay can shut down that body's pain receptors first and do that without actually dying.  We haven't seen Yay inhabit anything other than their fancy custom human-shaped bodies, when they could easily explore things as a highly realistic cat, or dog or snake, or a Black Helicopter, 1985 Chevrolet Stingray, or 1938 Duesenberg.  We haven't seen Yay investigating alternate forms of consciousness by participating in a Dolphin or Orca pod or an Elephant herd, in the same way they participate in Human society.  We haven't seen Yay trying out the profoundly different sensorium and physiical capabilities available to octopodes and squid.

I was about to say we haven't seen Yay as every player of a soccer/football team yet, and all the things multiperception implies (hard to tackle somebody ahead of you when they're also watching from behind for example), but then thought of the physical capabilities.  We haven't really even explored what those remarkable bodies - clearly a generation or so beyond the best currently available to others - can do, aside from standing leaps directly into tree branches twice Yay's height overhead..  Incredible feats of strength, speed, agility, or durability ought to be well in reach, especially when one of Yay's bodies is specifically built for one or two of those qualities.  Or, for that matter, the other extreme: Yay is polysomatic and can treat bodies as disposable, and could build themselves special-purpose bodies that, when destroyed, flash into smoke and sparks leaving no evidence behind, and use them for all kinds of shenanigans.

To a large extent, this can be because Yay is 'passing' and interacting in ways that people won't find creepy, or because Dolphin!Yay or Squid!Yay are considered to be offstage and not part of the storyline we're looking at. But to a large extent, it's probably  because writing Yay as a character just as comfortable with all of these things as they are with humanlike appearance and behavior is really hard.
« Last Edit: 19 Aug 2021, 10:03 by Morituri »
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #59 on: 19 Aug 2021, 11:54 »

>we haven't seen much evidence of any profoundly different perception of time

What comes to mind is completing projects in a finger-snap.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #60 on: 19 Aug 2021, 14:56 »

Robots are not humans with funny hats. (No, Melon.) They are different, in interesting ways. But a truly accurate portrayal of Yay risks leaving the audience behind. Could AIs be better at being people than humans have been able to manage? That is a story worth telling.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #61 on: 19 Aug 2021, 17:59 »

Massively overengineered. The lowest temperature ever recorded on this planet was 184 Kelvin at an Antarctic observatory. It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.
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shanejayell

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #62 on: 19 Aug 2021, 19:14 »

New comic.

I love how Rokko is just "You OK, Yay?"

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #63 on: 19 Aug 2021, 19:26 »


Wow, Aurelia and her mom vibes. It's practically a superpower. No wonder the Milkmaids like her so much, they are no match for Supermom!

Massively overengineered. The lowest temperature ever recorded on this planet was 184 Kelvin at an Antarctic observatory. It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.


Which then begs the question: why is that chassis so over-engineered? To what use does Yay put it that it needs to withstand such extreme temperatures? Or is Yay just enable to resist tricking out their chassis to the max, because 'you never know and we need to be prepared'?
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #64 on: 19 Aug 2021, 19:34 »

It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.

(gulps)

Am I the only...I, uh...am I doing something wrong?
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Cornelius

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #65 on: 19 Aug 2021, 23:07 »

Massively overengineered. The lowest temperature ever recorded on this planet was 184 Kelvin at an Antarctic observatory. It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.

Perhaps they take it off planet?
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BenRG

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #66 on: 20 Aug 2021, 00:04 »

Well, it is part of the function of a mother to make you feel sorry if you're being mean to a friend.

The thing is that I do think that, in attempting to show character growth in Yay, Jeph may have lost track of what makes Yay interesting - A moralistic character but who only really understands their morals. A bit like the Templar or Anti-hero tropes. In moving them away from that, I do think that Jeph has potentially deleted what made the character really interesting.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #67 on: 20 Aug 2021, 00:36 »

It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.

(gulps)

Am I the only...I, uh...am I doing something wrong?

This comment gets even better seeing that the one it was responding to and one of its likes are from Is it cold in here?.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #68 on: 20 Aug 2021, 01:48 »

Which then begs the question: why is that chassis so over-engineered? To what use does Yay put it that it needs to withstand such extreme temperatures? Or is Yay just enable to resist tricking out their chassis to the max, because 'you never know and we need to be prepared'?

Or maybe just because they *can*.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #69 on: 20 Aug 2021, 06:31 »

IIRC I once read that human beings can survive for very short periods of time (minutes) in extremely low temperatures, I think it was -180 degree C (and therefore 93 Kelvin), in hardly any clothing (you have to protect stuff like the nose, the ears etc, for those would freeze off otherwise), and it really gets your metabolism going big time (obviously), so its even sort of healthy.

Yay thus probably simply wanted a body that could do likewise.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #70 on: 20 Aug 2021, 11:56 »

Massively overengineered. The lowest temperature ever recorded on this planet was 184 Kelvin at an Antarctic observatory. It would be a very strange use case for a chassis to take showers in liquid nitrogen.
Maybe some old school overclocking
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #71 on: 20 Aug 2021, 14:32 »

Is it just me, or does Yay have new hair?
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #72 on: 20 Aug 2021, 15:16 »

Yay's hair was mentioned by Jeph below the comic. "Yay is a hair swoop now"
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #73 on: 20 Aug 2021, 18:56 »

I imagine it's hard to write an all-powerful sentience when you aren't one. 

Then again, character development.  Yay!


 :roll:
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #74 on: 20 Aug 2021, 19:05 »

Yay evolves to be non-smarmy? Having discovered a new vulnerability, they go at once to Roko to tell her about it.

( hair swoops are so yesterday even google knows about them )
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #75 on: 21 Aug 2021, 03:04 »

I hope it's just a coincidence that the image on Yay's shirt is essentially a pencil sketch if the Eye of Sauron. 😲
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #76 on: 21 Aug 2021, 06:31 »

Robots are not humans with funny hats. (No, Melon.) They are different, in interesting ways.
In many ways I find the QC Ais to be disappointingly similar to humans.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #77 on: 21 Aug 2021, 14:19 »

If by similar you mean practically identical, yeah.
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Is it cold in here?

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #78 on: 22 Aug 2021, 18:44 »

If Yay "diminishes and goes into the West", will they appoint a successor so there isn't a power vacuum?

If Yay chooses to disappear, there are lots of awkward witnesses around. Yay has an ethical constraint against mindwipes but has never expressed reluctance toward other ways to stop people from talking.

In their place, I'd plant some obviously nonsensical stories on social media. Then anyone telling the truth would look like a conspiracy theorist.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #79 on: 22 Aug 2021, 21:47 »

Did you intend to post that in last week's thread?
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Yet the lies of Melkor, the mighty and the accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days. (Silmarillion 255)

Is it cold in here?

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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #80 on: 23 Aug 2021, 23:54 »

Mostly accident.
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Re: WCDT Aug 16th - Aug 20th (4591-4595)
« Reply #81 on: 24 Aug 2021, 07:41 »

Jeph must thread a fine tightrope here. Too far in one direction and he risks making his comic incomprehensible except to AIs. Too far in the other and he loses his vision of what AIs are supposed to be.

Truthfully I think I am closer to understanding Melon than I am Emily Azuma.

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