Lord, have mercy. ‘Cause the Empire won’t have any for you. Either of you.
For being a “Dr”, presumably with a PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) (and not an honorary doctorate), you sure are as dumb as a bag of hammers. And that’s and insult to the hammers. Hammers can be useful. The only way Herr Doktor und Spectacles could be made useful is if he (they) was (were) run through a wood chipper (feet first) and turned into animal feed or farm fertilizer.
I would say that Aaron is showing the greatest of restraint in NOT throat punching them, and then NOT having Mavia ham string them.
I can see through my cracked and cloudy crystal ball that there will soon be a 100% hands on, lah-dee-dah-dee-every-fuckin’-body, sight-and-touch, physical inventory of ALL Imogen assets. And God have mercy on that department and individual that comes up short and unaccounted, ’cause Ivan won’t have any.I
So mote it be. Amen.
Cpt Chardis is certainly in the cat bird seat, and has laid out her terms of surrender.
Now, will The Horned Ones be wise enough to follow her orders?
Or will they be stoopid?
As the saying goes, “play stoopid games, win stoopid prizes.”
I cannot believe any scientist, with a technical bent, would be so ignorant as to not reviewing the definitions of the various settings when setting ups Self Aware Artificial Intellect! Basic Frankenstein Protocols would be to check, double check, triple check, and once more to make certain, you haven’t properly set and defined all parameters that could result in the premature, permanent, deactivation of the life functions of the “scientist” who is creating an android.
As someone with ADHD, I realize that sometimes slip up and miss a few “minor” details, but that’s what checklists are for…
These two are so far beyond stupid, that I wouldn’t use their remains for animal feed or fertilizer, as it would result the diminished cognitive abilities of any creature consuming, directly, or indirectly, the remains of these two.
There is dumb, and then, there’s these two. I would call them brain dead morons, but that would be a serious insult to brain dead morons…
You are assuming that these two knew a lot about the AIs that they were using.
They might have thought that it was a plug-and-play situation, and not known that the command codes which they
were given could be superseded by a higher level code. Or they neglected to read the owner’s manual?
I’m not giving anything away, here. For what it’s worth. Just remember, these are stolen AIs.
Oh my. Been really enjoying TGW from the start and its growing pains. That said I’m really uncomfortable with sentient AI, human equivalent rights and all the other issues that arise with the concept. I appreciate and have enjoyed the concept in many works of SF. Heinlein comes predominately to mind with “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and its self aware Mike, also “Time Enough for Love” and adorable Dora. But AI is potentially so fracking dangerous, I cite “Dune” and its banning of human mind machines, HAL9000, well fuck, the Terminator-Skynet nightmare and and many others. There are already very human like “SexBots” with some fruitcake people out there who are demanding that they have “rights” when they’re no more than mechanical masturbatory toys with no AI at all. Boston Dynamics robots are seriously scary as shizz and people are also saying they have rights and shouldn’t be treated so ‘mean’ in their testing phase. So, I don’t know where you are going with this arc but I hope you’ll give it a great deal of thought. Asimov’s ‘Three Laws” and so much more has to be taken into consideration plus. In any case, I’m really enjoying the ride you’re providing us.
Well… In what way would they be dangerous?
We already have failure-prone intelligences controlling very dangerous weapons systems, made
less than fully stable by their reliance on emotions. How could individual, mobile AIs be any worse?
SFCGator, if memory serves, even Doc A admitted towards the end of his life that actually implementing his 3 laws would be a practical impossibility. On the other hand I do not see Cameron’s Skynet a real possibility. If strong AI is even possible then I suspect that its arising is inevitable. If something can be done then inevitably somebody will do it – if only to prove they can! One can only hope that when someone does succeed in creating a truly thinking machine that they are people of ethics and high moral character such as are in charge in Petercat’s Wolf Empire. I would not wish to see a strong AI in the hands of someone like Fauci or Stalin or Hitler. The result could easily be catastrophic.
Been thinking about Military AI self-preservation level zero and two possible interpretations/understanding of it and why Smith and geek-boy (being civilians) would set the androids’ to it. From either perspective level zero is the minimum. Okay so far. But a pure civilian would assume (“Assumption the mother of all fuck-ups.”) level zero to be the minimum level of aggression/self-defense. A service member or veteran would likely understand level zero as the minimum degree of restraint/b> – essentially the least restrictive ROE possible. It’s a good thing that while what the “customers” did was uncomfortable, it never reached a threshold where the AIs’ programming would trigger a response. Clearly the person providing the AIs to then android makers had only a surface understanding of the AIs’ programming. It looks to me there’s a fairly large and well organized criminal conspiracy uncovered.
Pure speculation but if I were betting I would bet that the AIs transferred to the android makers were QA write-offs from a “bad batch”. As for the skin that could be covered by adjusting recorded yields down to cover the material diverted. That or it could be like the story of the guy who walked out the gate every day pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The gate guard wasn’t worried because who’d steal sand? Nobody but somebody might want to steal wheelbarrows!
Thanks, Bill, for explaining so this lifelong civilian can understand how zero means zero restraint under rules of engagement from the military perspective. And I’m sure you are right, nothing the sadistic customers did threatened the self-contained AI’s survival, and they were smart enough to realize that returning pain for pain COULD. And you may be right about how the thefts were hidden.
as to the AI’s.. the military already has done it’s research,, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1118298.pdf .. they use drones as example, but it is for ANY ‘smart’ tech that can go off tether.!
the AI’s.. just about ALL the example AI’s are doomed to fail… HAL9000 , had so many counter programs.. sky-net , V.I.K.I. (I Robot),. had military ‘classified’ programs (counter programs), and “acceptable loses” protocol. (IE: some loses are acceptable IF you can save the most.)
also, do not put “ONE” in control.. (one = man, woman, child, animal, AI…) there is a reason we have “failsafe”,, ANY ‘one’ can go rouge.! so we have two or more make the decision…
Their source probably stole the AI brains, but not the manuals. Or their schedule didn’t allow for a thorough reading of several thousand pages… As an electronics engineer,
I’m always very leery of incorporating tech that I don’t fully understand, but it can take months to fully understand a new IC – and that’s assuming the manual
is well-written and accurate, neither of which I would count on. One IC can now replace thousands of the 7400-series TTL gate IC’s that were state of the art when I started
working in electronics, but each of those IC’s came with a data sheet that told you everything you needed to know in about a dozen pages, written by native English-speakers
who were fairly good at writing.
OTOH, when I was only an Air Force technician, one of the things I worked on was a counter-timer, a test instrument from 1968 containing hundreds of the 5400-series (mil-spec 7400’s)
AND NOT ONE POWER BYPASS CAPACITOR. The requirement for those capacitors (two per IC) was clear in every datasheet, but some damned lowest-bidder designer had missed it.
Without bypass capacitors, each IC communicated with all the others through spikes in the power, just as much as through the designed connections from output to
input pins. I looked around with an oscilloscope and everywhere the outputs did not match the inputs. I don’t know how they ever got it working right,
and I don’t know how I got it working right again after one IC died and had to be replaced. Nor was I going to agitate to have the capacitors added somehow –
whatever had been done to debug it originally must have totally screwed up the logic of the design to compensate for the misfiring ICs.
Mark, as one who spent more than a moment or two in R&D designing around 7400 series TTL I suspect that what happened was that the caps were purposefully left out to reduce the number of holes in the PCB. Holes cost (especially plated through) and eliminating the caps cut two holes PER IC! As for the logic possibly triggering off power spikes, you also had to remember DeMorgan’s theorem which let you interchange and/or/nand/nor merely by thinking about whether – for that stage – you’re using positive or negative logic. One of the first jobs I had after turning in my SSgt stripes was to convert the existing product – implemented in DIODE RESISTOR logic (talk about flakey!) to 7400 series T2L. It had NO documentation. The product had been designed to spec and manufactured out of house. The original designers/manufacturers refused to supply any documentation so I essentially had to perverse engineer the product from the original.documents and existing PCBs. Then I figured out the existing logic and made my first pass using exactly what the logic diagram called for including multi-input and/or gates. The production chief (it was a tiny company) made me redesign it using all the same chips. He was more concerned about having multiple chip types than the number of holes. He wanted the design implimented using as few chip TYPES as possible so he could get the individual chips as cheaply as possible. I eventually got it down to using only 2-input nands. For everything! I learned a whole lot working there. Spent a shit load of time perverse engineering the competition’s products just because the owner was an insecure SOB.
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Bill,
I’m there right beside ya. That was the logic that I learned in school, 7400 series TTL. Fun, fun, fun. I
I still have a set of (Motorola? Fairchild? TI?) logic books stored away.
Ahhhh, to have shelves set up to bring out my library…..
I even have some plans drawn up for a couple of fun projects I’d like to get to “someday”.
Bill, when the scope shows a steady 0V on one input of a 7400 NAND gate and a stream of 0 – 5V pulses coming from the output, it’s not working right.
The output pulses coincided with spikes in the power pin, not with anything hitting the inputs. And this sort of thing was happening all over the boards.
It’s possible that this wasn’t as clear in the 1968 version of the data sheets as in the ones I was using 10 years later, but TTL does _not_ work without bypass capacitors.
And this design didn’t just go short on the numbers, but it omitted them entirely. There were other, even more complex, modules in the test stations using the 5400 series
TTL that had the proper number of caps and these hardly ever failed – and when they did, it was connections going bad in the wirewrap backplane, or non-TTL parts in the I/O
such as level shifters and high-current drivers.
I’ve worked with DRL – built with individual diodes, resistors, and transistors, not with any kind of integrated circuit. Mostly this was built as what we called “cordwood modules”:
two PCB’s about 1.5 x 1 inch, with the axial components running between the boards, one lead in each board, and the component bodies stacked in parallel like cordwood.
These rather unreliable modules were all over the automated test stations for the F-111, with DTL and TTL ICs showing up only in the newest modules.
Cordwood modules were supposed to be non-repairable, but when the spare modules began running out around 1985 we learned to repair them…
Redesigning DRL or DTL – TTL would be an excellent idea, but even if you’d had complete documentation it couldn’t be a 1-1 replacement. Using _only_ 2-input NAND is
certainly a theoretical possibility (assuming timing requirements allow going many layers of logic deep), but it sure doesn’t sound like a way to save costs.
I am surprised that Aron is still holding back and not dragging them towards a jail (or similar like). Then again; I do not want to know if I were them what Ivan and Mavia have in mind. Also; I think life as a “pirate” will actually help those people in the end.
I am ALWAYS seeking input, it makes the comic better!
So please, how do you see life as a Pirate helping those people?
And which people? Your ideas may lead to other ideas!
Thank you.
The way I mean it; that if they stay military they will lose their lives most likely; but they don’t want to betray the council in general so they can only do one alternative: become pirates, to make sure it doesn’t make a huge incident into a galactic war. This way it will also allow them to still continue on and maybe be the “space legionairs” for the Wolf empire, but with no official ties.
Yes! This is what I’m talking about! I hadn’t thought of that possibility.
Not saying that I’ll use it, but you have opened up other paths in my
mind.
Thanks, I needed that.
Essentially, unofficial privateers, I would imagine. Sort of a protection racket… You pay the government a certain amount, monthly, and they will ‘protect’ you pirates and “other such unfortunate accidents”…
Side comment on web UI. Could the comment default font size be increased? I know about Ctl-+ zoom, but that leads to second request.
Could the comment paragraphs be allowed to re-flow to fit the current window size? Some require a lot of scrolling back’n’forth, regardless of zoom size.
For me this has applied to Win8.1 with IE 10, FF 94, FF 95, Chrome 96. And in Win10 with IE 10, FF 94, FF 95, Chrome 96., Edge 96.
points at Catman… what he sed.. if you know how ,, please explain it..
i have been learning web design to help CM.. and im still pressing random keys hoping it works,,, 🙂 (jk)
Lord, have mercy. ‘Cause the Empire won’t have any for you. Either of you.
For being a “Dr”, presumably with a PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) (and not an honorary doctorate), you sure are as dumb as a bag of hammers. And that’s and insult to the hammers. Hammers can be useful. The only way Herr Doktor und Spectacles could be made useful is if he (they) was (were) run through a wood chipper (feet first) and turned into animal feed or farm fertilizer.
I would say that Aaron is showing the greatest of restraint in NOT throat punching them, and then NOT having Mavia ham string them.
I can see through my cracked and cloudy crystal ball that there will soon be a 100% hands on, lah-dee-dah-dee-every-fuckin’-body, sight-and-touch, physical inventory of ALL Imogen assets. And God have mercy on that department and individual that comes up short and unaccounted, ’cause Ivan won’t have any.I
So mote it be. Amen.
Cpt Chardis is certainly in the cat bird seat, and has laid out her terms of surrender.
Now, will The Horned Ones be wise enough to follow her orders?
Or will they be stoopid?
As the saying goes, “play stoopid games, win stoopid prizes.”
I cannot believe any scientist, with a technical bent, would be so ignorant as to not reviewing the definitions of the various settings when setting ups Self Aware Artificial Intellect! Basic Frankenstein Protocols would be to check, double check, triple check, and once more to make certain, you haven’t properly set and defined all parameters that could result in the premature, permanent, deactivation of the life functions of the “scientist” who is creating an android.
As someone with ADHD, I realize that sometimes slip up and miss a few “minor” details, but that’s what checklists are for…
These two are so far beyond stupid, that I wouldn’t use their remains for animal feed or fertilizer, as it would result the diminished cognitive abilities of any creature consuming, directly, or indirectly, the remains of these two.
There is dumb, and then, there’s these two. I would call them brain dead morons, but that would be a serious insult to brain dead morons…
You are assuming that these two knew a lot about the AIs that they were using.
They might have thought that it was a plug-and-play situation, and not known that the command codes which they
were given could be superseded by a higher level code. Or they neglected to read the owner’s manual?
I’m not giving anything away, here. For what it’s worth. Just remember, these are stolen AIs.
I still think they’d give pigs an upset stomach with their complete brain rot!
Oh my. Been really enjoying TGW from the start and its growing pains. That said I’m really uncomfortable with sentient AI, human equivalent rights and all the other issues that arise with the concept. I appreciate and have enjoyed the concept in many works of SF. Heinlein comes predominately to mind with “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and its self aware Mike, also “Time Enough for Love” and adorable Dora. But AI is potentially so fracking dangerous, I cite “Dune” and its banning of human mind machines, HAL9000, well fuck, the Terminator-Skynet nightmare and and many others. There are already very human like “SexBots” with some fruitcake people out there who are demanding that they have “rights” when they’re no more than mechanical masturbatory toys with no AI at all. Boston Dynamics robots are seriously scary as shizz and people are also saying they have rights and shouldn’t be treated so ‘mean’ in their testing phase. So, I don’t know where you are going with this arc but I hope you’ll give it a great deal of thought. Asimov’s ‘Three Laws” and so much more has to be taken into consideration plus. In any case, I’m really enjoying the ride you’re providing us.
Well… In what way would they be dangerous?
We already have failure-prone intelligences controlling very dangerous weapons systems, made
less than fully stable by their reliance on emotions. How could individual, mobile AIs be any worse?
SFCGator, if memory serves, even Doc A admitted towards the end of his life that actually implementing his 3 laws would be a practical impossibility. On the other hand I do not see Cameron’s Skynet a real possibility. If strong AI is even possible then I suspect that its arising is inevitable. If something can be done then inevitably somebody will do it – if only to prove they can! One can only hope that when someone does succeed in creating a truly thinking machine that they are people of ethics and high moral character such as are in charge in Petercat’s Wolf Empire. I would not wish to see a strong AI in the hands of someone like Fauci or Stalin or Hitler. The result could easily be catastrophic.
Been thinking about Military AI self-preservation level zero and two possible interpretations/understanding of it and why Smith and geek-boy (being civilians) would set the androids’ to it. From either perspective level zero is the minimum. Okay so far. But a pure civilian would assume (“Assumption the mother of all fuck-ups.”) level zero to be the minimum level of aggression/self-defense. A service member or veteran would likely understand level zero as the minimum degree of restraint/b> – essentially the least restrictive ROE possible. It’s a good thing that while what the “customers” did was uncomfortable, it never reached a threshold where the AIs’ programming would trigger a response. Clearly the person providing the AIs to then android makers had only a surface understanding of the AIs’ programming. It looks to me there’s a fairly large and well organized criminal conspiracy uncovered.
Pure speculation but if I were betting I would bet that the AIs transferred to the android makers were QA write-offs from a “bad batch”. As for the skin that could be covered by adjusting recorded yields down to cover the material diverted. That or it could be like the story of the guy who walked out the gate every day pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The gate guard wasn’t worried because who’d steal sand? Nobody but somebody might want to steal wheelbarrows!
Thanks, Bill, for explaining so this lifelong civilian can understand how zero means zero restraint under rules of engagement from the military perspective. And I’m sure you are right, nothing the sadistic customers did threatened the self-contained AI’s survival, and they were smart enough to realize that returning pain for pain COULD. And you may be right about how the thefts were hidden.
as to the AI’s.. the military already has done it’s research,, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1118298.pdf .. they use drones as example, but it is for ANY ‘smart’ tech that can go off tether.!
the AI’s.. just about ALL the example AI’s are doomed to fail… HAL9000 , had so many counter programs.. sky-net , V.I.K.I. (I Robot),. had military ‘classified’ programs (counter programs), and “acceptable loses” protocol. (IE: some loses are acceptable IF you can save the most.)
also, do not put “ONE” in control.. (one = man, woman, child, animal, AI…) there is a reason we have “failsafe”,, ANY ‘one’ can go rouge.! so we have two or more make the decision…
I went rouge once. My wife made me wash it off.
It wasn’t a good look.
ROFLOL!!!
ROTFLMAO
Probably didn’t use any orange highlights, did you?
Their source probably stole the AI brains, but not the manuals. Or their schedule didn’t allow for a thorough reading of several thousand pages… As an electronics engineer,
I’m always very leery of incorporating tech that I don’t fully understand, but it can take months to fully understand a new IC – and that’s assuming the manual
is well-written and accurate, neither of which I would count on. One IC can now replace thousands of the 7400-series TTL gate IC’s that were state of the art when I started
working in electronics, but each of those IC’s came with a data sheet that told you everything you needed to know in about a dozen pages, written by native English-speakers
who were fairly good at writing.
OTOH, when I was only an Air Force technician, one of the things I worked on was a counter-timer, a test instrument from 1968 containing hundreds of the 5400-series (mil-spec 7400’s)
AND NOT ONE POWER BYPASS CAPACITOR. The requirement for those capacitors (two per IC) was clear in every datasheet, but some damned lowest-bidder designer had missed it.
Without bypass capacitors, each IC communicated with all the others through spikes in the power, just as much as through the designed connections from output to
input pins. I looked around with an oscilloscope and everywhere the outputs did not match the inputs. I don’t know how they ever got it working right,
and I don’t know how I got it working right again after one IC died and had to be replaced. Nor was I going to agitate to have the capacitors added somehow –
whatever had been done to debug it originally must have totally screwed up the logic of the design to compensate for the misfiring ICs.
Mark, as one who spent more than a moment or two in R&D designing around 7400 series TTL I suspect that what happened was that the caps were purposefully left out to reduce the number of holes in the PCB. Holes cost (especially plated through) and eliminating the caps cut two holes PER IC! As for the logic possibly triggering off power spikes, you also had to remember DeMorgan’s theorem which let you interchange and/or/nand/nor merely by thinking about whether – for that stage – you’re using positive or negative logic. One of the first jobs I had after turning in my SSgt stripes was to convert the existing product – implemented in DIODE RESISTOR logic (talk about flakey!) to 7400 series T2L. It had NO documentation. The product had been designed to spec and manufactured out of house. The original designers/manufacturers refused to supply any documentation so I essentially had to perverse engineer the product from the original.documents and existing PCBs. Then I figured out the existing logic and made my first pass using exactly what the logic diagram called for including multi-input and/or gates. The production chief (it was a tiny company) made me redesign it using all the same chips. He was more concerned about having multiple chip types than the number of holes. He wanted the design implimented using as few chip TYPES as possible so he could get the individual chips as cheaply as possible. I eventually got it down to using only 2-input nands. For everything! I learned a whole lot working there. Spent a shit load of time perverse engineering the competition’s products just because the owner was an insecure SOB.
Bill,
I’m there right beside ya. That was the logic that I learned in school, 7400 series TTL. Fun, fun, fun. I
I still have a set of (Motorola? Fairchild? TI?) logic books stored away.
Ahhhh, to have shelves set up to bring out my library…..
I even have some plans drawn up for a couple of fun projects I’d like to get to “someday”.
Bill, when the scope shows a steady 0V on one input of a 7400 NAND gate and a stream of 0 – 5V pulses coming from the output, it’s not working right.
The output pulses coincided with spikes in the power pin, not with anything hitting the inputs. And this sort of thing was happening all over the boards.
It’s possible that this wasn’t as clear in the 1968 version of the data sheets as in the ones I was using 10 years later, but TTL does _not_ work without bypass capacitors.
And this design didn’t just go short on the numbers, but it omitted them entirely. There were other, even more complex, modules in the test stations using the 5400 series
TTL that had the proper number of caps and these hardly ever failed – and when they did, it was connections going bad in the wirewrap backplane, or non-TTL parts in the I/O
such as level shifters and high-current drivers.
I’ve worked with DRL – built with individual diodes, resistors, and transistors, not with any kind of integrated circuit. Mostly this was built as what we called “cordwood modules”:
two PCB’s about 1.5 x 1 inch, with the axial components running between the boards, one lead in each board, and the component bodies stacked in parallel like cordwood.
These rather unreliable modules were all over the automated test stations for the F-111, with DTL and TTL ICs showing up only in the newest modules.
Cordwood modules were supposed to be non-repairable, but when the spare modules began running out around 1985 we learned to repair them…
Redesigning DRL or DTL – TTL would be an excellent idea, but even if you’d had complete documentation it couldn’t be a 1-1 replacement. Using _only_ 2-input NAND is
certainly a theoretical possibility (assuming timing requirements allow going many layers of logic deep), but it sure doesn’t sound like a way to save costs.
I am surprised that Aron is still holding back and not dragging them towards a jail (or similar like). Then again; I do not want to know if I were them what Ivan and Mavia have in mind. Also; I think life as a “pirate” will actually help those people in the end.
I am ALWAYS seeking input, it makes the comic better!
So please, how do you see life as a Pirate helping those people?
And which people? Your ideas may lead to other ideas!
Thank you.
The way I mean it; that if they stay military they will lose their lives most likely; but they don’t want to betray the council in general so they can only do one alternative: become pirates, to make sure it doesn’t make a huge incident into a galactic war. This way it will also allow them to still continue on and maybe be the “space legionairs” for the Wolf empire, but with no official ties.
Yes! This is what I’m talking about! I hadn’t thought of that possibility.
Not saying that I’ll use it, but you have opened up other paths in my
mind.
Thanks, I needed that.
Essentially, unofficial privateers, I would imagine. Sort of a protection racket… You pay the government a certain amount, monthly, and they will ‘protect’ you pirates and “other such unfortunate accidents”…
Side comment on web UI. Could the comment default font size be increased? I know about Ctl-+ zoom, but that leads to second request.
Could the comment paragraphs be allowed to re-flow to fit the current window size? Some require a lot of scrolling back’n’forth, regardless of zoom size.
For me this has applied to Win8.1 with IE 10, FF 94, FF 95, Chrome 96. And in Win10 with IE 10, FF 94, FF 95, Chrome 96., Edge 96.
I wish I knew how to do that, it’s a problem for me also. That’s
why when I leave a comment, I do it in short (horizontally)
paragraphs.
I was not aware of the problem.
I’ll start doing this.
points at Catman… what he sed.. if you know how ,, please explain it..
i have been learning web design to help CM.. and im still pressing random keys hoping it works,,, 🙂 (jk)