- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Snowfire did get it, he just took the opportunity to clarify things. (I think. Being, communication is so weird ...)
The Practice War [Complete]
- Thread starter Snowfire
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi
Awww, the united global brainwashing didn't take? I knew we should have thrown more practice die at the final speech.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We did mention rebuilding earth and not forgetting our roots ...
Snowfire
Polyglot of Chimera
- Location
- Wordcats
Also Amanda is...well...Amanda.
She doesn't want the sort of power she has, she took it because it was necessary, and is more than a little terrified of the fact that a reasonably significant portion of the population would happily give it to her permanently. The moment she can, she'll step things down to more reasonable democracy.
That's not to say that she couldn't, given some effort, turn the Circles into the political party to end all political parties. It's more that it would follow the general agenda that she's pursued her entire life, which focused quite heavily on the restoration of the old world to act as foundation for the new. From it we learn, but do not leave it behind.
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- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Unity has many benefits. And some problems - if everyone agrees, there's not much diversity.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Yes, that's what the Shiplords tell everyone they protect.
- Location
- Somewhere other than where I am.
Someone finally gets it. Thank you.
- Location
- Anchorage, Alaska
The problem with text based communication: You can't wiggle your eyebrows. You lose so much subtle communication without that... like, at least 40%. Give or take.
- Location
- Illinois
- Pronouns
- Ze/Zer/Zem
40%? Try closer to 90%. Depending on who you ask, only 10% of the information conveyed in speech is done so through the words chosen. 30% to 40% is based on the tone of voice, which can be inferred over the internet, but such inferences can be wrong. The rest of the information conveyed is done so through body language and a bunch of other stuff, and none of that translates at all over text only mediums.
Then on top of all of that, you got people who are using the wrong signals....
Socialling someone is difficult.
- Location
- Somewhere other than where I am.
And then the final nail: Those of us that tend to screw it up even in person.
A Software Potential's View (Canon Omake)
Robinton
Probably petting Schrödinger's cat
- Location
- Scientifically proving a miracle
Disclaimer: The computer science you are about to read is essentially realistic; I hope it would be, that's my job!
A Software Potential's take on the Infowar
(Written by Robinton, edited by Snowfire. Hopefully canonical?)
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done," Linus Torvalds said.
No computer could ever really be guaranteed to be immune to hacks and viruses – not unless it'd been analyzed to death by Insight Focused and disconnected from the network the entire time. And even then, it became vulnerable the moment you plugged it back in.
All code had holes. Well, not really "all". Rather, there were two options: you could make the code so simple as to obviously have no bugs, or you could make the code so complex as to have no obvious bugs. No modern operating system was that simple.
And what did you use to build computers? That's right: computers. Computers that the Shiplords had hacked.
Jonathan Azariah Regrye knew this better than almost anyone; after all, his Focus had made him a natural programmer - even beyond his human ability. Born April 16th 2076 to two VI-raised video game addicts, John himself had been more-or-less raised by the sleeved VI Tess Fortuna Regrye.
In his opinion, people were... wonderful, but so insanely complicated. An hour of interacting with humans would leave him longing for the simplicity of a nice intractable software problem. (P does not equal NP. But searches can be performed in constant time, with proper indexing.)
The Circles helped. He managed to fully forgive his nearly-absent parents, build solid friendships, and learn what not to tell any girl he fancied. ("Yes, that dress makes you look fat. But, based on comparisons with your other dresses, it's the dress's fault, not yours.")
Then he'd Awoken a member of the Third Awakened, the most varied and in some ways strange of all the Potentials. He hadn't even realized until days later, too caught up improving Tess' beautiful self-modifying language algorithms. Afterwards, he only remembered seeing it all in his mind's eye, and knowing how to improve it.
And then, just a year after he Awoke, Project Insight found the Pattern, and John happily signed up to join the Ministry of Security. After all, he'd already built one of the world's best computers and firewalls; why shouldn't he help with cyber-warfare?
He had some passing familiarity with Adriana; she'd tapped him a few times for help with her latest secret project - he'd thought it was probably some sort of VI, and he'd been absolutely right! He had to actively keep himself from worshiping Amanda, and he was hardly alone in this. But Marcus? Marcus was his boss. And Jonathan had no idea how half of Marcus' tricks worked ("I've recorded an exact copy of the network packets, and this still doesn't make sense!!!").
For the first few years, all was quiet on John's home front. Some spelunking through reams of data revealed the odd disturbing pattern, suggesting that the Shiplords had left all sorts of hooks in the systems, but everything stayed quiet for the most part.
And then the Kingslayer protocol took effect. And it still took John (and all the Potentials he was working with) years to realize exactly what they were dealing with.
---
"There are two levels of Shiplord hooks - the ones built to shut down all power, overload nuclear reactors, or crash spaceships… and the subtler but more insidious self-propagating backdoors. The Shiplords left a self-propagating backdoor in every compiler, every firewall, and every piece of microchip design code that I've tested. It affects literally every computer system on the planet. That'll teach us to not trust trust!" John said in a tone of disgust.
It was, obviously, only a matter of time before he had to explain this to a non-technical audience.
"What do you use to construct computer chips?" he asked.
"...Computer chips!" a listening bureaucrat realized.
"Yep. So the Shiplords put in a virus that hacks all our computer-chip-design software. Any chips we make end up with a secret backdoor… that lets this virus hack that computer, prevents us from noticing, and lets in any Shiplord hacking attempts. They've got similar hooks in almost all of our software. Thankfully, the hooks are relatively simple - we are intelligent, and can simply write computer-chip-design software that doesn't look like design software, and voila, we have some brand-new hook-free chips. It took a few tries, but we got it. We've even gotten an Insight Potential to verify that, yes, our new chips are 100% hook free. But yes, that's why we're sending out ultra-priority updates to all the computer systems."
They couldn't remove the hardware hooks without completely replacing the systems, and they didn't have time and resources to replace every computer chip. But after the Subnet went down, John and Marcus managed to write a workaround. Older computers would run a few percent slower, but their hardware would be able to resist Shiplord attacks.
Of course, that left the actual software hooks, and those tended to be much more clever: reinfecting any platform with network access, rewriting themselves on the fly to evade antivirus software (and the occasional rookie Insight Focused). And, obviously, it was difficult to fix the software hooks while they were protected by the hardware hooks. So first, the government got a complete overhaul of their computer systems. Then it was time to start working on the firmware… then the software. John had had a sneaking suspicion they'd never really fix that. There just wasn't enough manpower.
Then hurricane Vision hit.
No, not a hurricane. Overwhelming force, yes, but pinpoint precision. A hurricane concentrated down into the edge of a scalpel.
As Vision systematically took down and cataloged every Shiplord hook - self-propagating and directly damaging alike - John could only watch in wondrous awe, and mumble, "I have seen the Vision."
A Software Potential's take on the Infowar
(Written by Robinton, edited by Snowfire. Hopefully canonical?)
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done," Linus Torvalds said.
No computer could ever really be guaranteed to be immune to hacks and viruses – not unless it'd been analyzed to death by Insight Focused and disconnected from the network the entire time. And even then, it became vulnerable the moment you plugged it back in.
All code had holes. Well, not really "all". Rather, there were two options: you could make the code so simple as to obviously have no bugs, or you could make the code so complex as to have no obvious bugs. No modern operating system was that simple.
And what did you use to build computers? That's right: computers. Computers that the Shiplords had hacked.
Jonathan Azariah Regrye knew this better than almost anyone; after all, his Focus had made him a natural programmer - even beyond his human ability. Born April 16th 2076 to two VI-raised video game addicts, John himself had been more-or-less raised by the sleeved VI Tess Fortuna Regrye.
In his opinion, people were... wonderful, but so insanely complicated. An hour of interacting with humans would leave him longing for the simplicity of a nice intractable software problem. (P does not equal NP. But searches can be performed in constant time, with proper indexing.)
The Circles helped. He managed to fully forgive his nearly-absent parents, build solid friendships, and learn what not to tell any girl he fancied. ("Yes, that dress makes you look fat. But, based on comparisons with your other dresses, it's the dress's fault, not yours.")
Then he'd Awoken a member of the Third Awakened, the most varied and in some ways strange of all the Potentials. He hadn't even realized until days later, too caught up improving Tess' beautiful self-modifying language algorithms. Afterwards, he only remembered seeing it all in his mind's eye, and knowing how to improve it.
And then, just a year after he Awoke, Project Insight found the Pattern, and John happily signed up to join the Ministry of Security. After all, he'd already built one of the world's best computers and firewalls; why shouldn't he help with cyber-warfare?
He had some passing familiarity with Adriana; she'd tapped him a few times for help with her latest secret project - he'd thought it was probably some sort of VI, and he'd been absolutely right! He had to actively keep himself from worshiping Amanda, and he was hardly alone in this. But Marcus? Marcus was his boss. And Jonathan had no idea how half of Marcus' tricks worked ("I've recorded an exact copy of the network packets, and this still doesn't make sense!!!").
For the first few years, all was quiet on John's home front. Some spelunking through reams of data revealed the odd disturbing pattern, suggesting that the Shiplords had left all sorts of hooks in the systems, but everything stayed quiet for the most part.
And then the Kingslayer protocol took effect. And it still took John (and all the Potentials he was working with) years to realize exactly what they were dealing with.
---
"There are two levels of Shiplord hooks - the ones built to shut down all power, overload nuclear reactors, or crash spaceships… and the subtler but more insidious self-propagating backdoors. The Shiplords left a self-propagating backdoor in every compiler, every firewall, and every piece of microchip design code that I've tested. It affects literally every computer system on the planet. That'll teach us to not trust trust!" John said in a tone of disgust.
It was, obviously, only a matter of time before he had to explain this to a non-technical audience.
"What do you use to construct computer chips?" he asked.
"...Computer chips!" a listening bureaucrat realized.
"Yep. So the Shiplords put in a virus that hacks all our computer-chip-design software. Any chips we make end up with a secret backdoor… that lets this virus hack that computer, prevents us from noticing, and lets in any Shiplord hacking attempts. They've got similar hooks in almost all of our software. Thankfully, the hooks are relatively simple - we are intelligent, and can simply write computer-chip-design software that doesn't look like design software, and voila, we have some brand-new hook-free chips. It took a few tries, but we got it. We've even gotten an Insight Potential to verify that, yes, our new chips are 100% hook free. But yes, that's why we're sending out ultra-priority updates to all the computer systems."
They couldn't remove the hardware hooks without completely replacing the systems, and they didn't have time and resources to replace every computer chip. But after the Subnet went down, John and Marcus managed to write a workaround. Older computers would run a few percent slower, but their hardware would be able to resist Shiplord attacks.
Of course, that left the actual software hooks, and those tended to be much more clever: reinfecting any platform with network access, rewriting themselves on the fly to evade antivirus software (and the occasional rookie Insight Focused). And, obviously, it was difficult to fix the software hooks while they were protected by the hardware hooks. So first, the government got a complete overhaul of their computer systems. Then it was time to start working on the firmware… then the software. John had had a sneaking suspicion they'd never really fix that. There just wasn't enough manpower.
Then hurricane Vision hit.
No, not a hurricane. Overwhelming force, yes, but pinpoint precision. A hurricane concentrated down into the edge of a scalpel.
As Vision systematically took down and cataloged every Shiplord hook - self-propagating and directly damaging alike - John could only watch in wondrous awe, and mumble, "I have seen the Vision."
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- Location
- Somewhere out there
Unfortunately, that's the Second Secret, not the Sixth.
- Location
- Somewhere out there
Some minor edits for you:
voila
catalogued
comma
dress's
realized
semicolon
colon
- Location
- Somewhere out there
Missed a "catalogued".
Well, you're focusing on too big at the start. Right now, legit with modern science from 1970's, we could have been making mile-wide space-stations from a metallic asteroid. The mirror focus into the core of a rock works with shocking little tech.
Who needs ring-worlds and Dyson Spheres when we have 100 O'Neil stations. That's more than enough to hold most of the (in game) population. We don't have enough people to need Mega-Structures.
But yea. You're right in that we really can't do those very big things. But smaller stuff on the scale of miles? We could do today. You know, if people actually cared about leaving Earth. *cries in the corner, his childhood dreams crushed by the apathy of the 90's + towards NASA and space*
- Location
- Somewhere other than where I am.
Indexed search is O(log n) not O(1), but this is otherwise very good. Thank you.
Edit:
Not just apathy, ignorance and incompetence played big roles, too. The Shuttle was redesigned by the Air Force to steal a Russian satellite, which mission, of course, never actually got approved. NASA got stuck with the bill and a white elephant. If not for that boondoggle, then for a bit more than was spent on air conditioning in Iraq, we could have had a moon base, and actually be in a position to colonize Mars.
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We need actual reusable rockets first, which is what SpaceX is working on. The 80s and 90s were such a wasteland for space science because we flushed too damn much money into the super-expensive boondoggle that was the Shuttle program, which admittedly was great for fixing the Hubble but other than that was pretty much a massive waste of money all the way through. If Musk can get it right, Falcon Heavy is going to be the workhorse that gets us to where we ought to have been by now, and if this EMDrive actually does what it seems to be capable of, in defiance of all current conceptions of the laws of physics, then we really could see Moon/Mars colonies in reality by the time most of us retire. Wouldn't that be something?
Anyway, yeah, I also don't think that Dyson Spheres and other physically-interlinked megastructures make much sense yet; that sort of thing is for when you have the resources of multiple star systems to play with and you want to show off by putting your Sun inside of a balloon. But we can make a Dyson Bubble out of graphene solar sail-equipped power satellites, harvesting a not-insignificant percentage of the Sun's total output, and the basic technology is something that we're probably only about a decade or two from being able to manufacture in the real world; with Sixth Secret nanotech it ought to be merely a matter of setting it loose.
- Location
- Somewhere other than where I am.
SpaceX's reusable VTOL rockets already work, they just need to make them bigger. Scaled Composites is working on what the Shuttle was originally designed to be, before the Air Force screwed it up. The EMDrive is completely unnecessary. Magneto-plasma engines for manned flights are quite sufficient, and ion drives are good enough for unmanned cargo flights. The main thing holding us back tech-wise is automation, and that is just a matter of somebody actually building it. We already have most of the tools. To go to Mars, we need a Moon base. A Moon base is only really practical as a jump-off point to the rest of the solar system, but could be built with current tech.
- Location
- Anchorage, Alaska
90% of human communication is in the eyebrows?! Wow, I would of thought that talking, smiling/frowning, nose wriggles, and wild hand gesticulations would have made up more than 10% of all human communication!
...Your going have to explain to me why a moon base would be a required (or at least desirable) step toward Mars?
Yeah, I think that was an error myself. What we need to get to if we're going to Mars is cislunar space, or maybe one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Landing on the Moon is just a waste, since that puts you inside another gravity well you'll just have to escape from again. Landing on the Moon now is only useful to train for eventual missions to Phobos and Demios, or maybe to mine the Moon for Helium-3.
- Location
- Somewhere out there
Indexed search can be amortized O(1) time with a hash- or radix-based implementation. O(log n) is if your data is sorted but you lack an index, or if your index is in a tree structure.
- Location
- Somewhere other than where I am.
Launch cost is the critical factor. The Moon's gravity well is much shallower than Earth's, and there is no atmosphere so you can use a linear catapult to launch with. Any large or long-term space based project is cheaper to supply from the Moon than from Earth, and it doesn't take all that big a project for a Moon base to pay for itself. It costs more to get to LEO than to go from the Moon to Mars.