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Vespa

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Tehhetteh said:
Another wave of chaos is when other shards see Taylor at work and copy her.
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Remember, QA selected a power profile and tried to force it upon Taylor. Only to discover a will strong enough to say "no". The deep connection to Vespa the hornet was a complete shock to QA because that wasn't part of the granted power. The narrow focus extreme range control wasn't part of the granted power, it's something Taylor forced due to her stubborn nature and iron will. Same with merging with an insect. And with merging with multiple insects at once. And the Mix-N-Match shapeshifting while merged with insects... All those walls that Taylor keeps powering through during her experimentation? That's her basically bullying QA into letting her do something the granted power was not suppose to be capable of. Thus why she's been regularly feeling QA's incredulity and confusion.

As such, other shards likely can't copy what QA is doing, because it's not really QA doing it.
 
That's from the PHO chapter, right?
Have you seen the spelling errors that normally frequent a forum such as that?
Because I have, and I'm surprised that Mppi didn't include more of them.
 
Laranor said:
That's from the PHO chapter, right?
Have you seen the spelling errors that normally frequent a forum such as that?
Because I have, and I'm surprised that Mppi didn't include more of them.
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Yup. I saw a number of errors, but considered they were 'in character' for the poster. PHO (like FB Messenger at least used to be) has no obvious way of editing/correcting messages, so once you post the thing...

You could argue a messaging system should have 'non-repudiation' - once you post stuff you can't withdraw it. But, you could post an updated message, say with spelling corrections, and the default message-reader logic is to display the latest version. This would (arguably) be more wiki-like behaviour.

Why even consider this? Because of other messages referencing your message - 'referential integrity', sometimes called 'link rot'. But, we've (currently) got what we've got...

Back to the old 'You can't delete anything (for sure) once it's posted to the Internet'...
 
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FaerieKnight79 said:
Remember, QA selected a power profile and tried to force it upon Taylor. Only to discover a will strong enough to say "no".
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It's not willpower by itself. That's stupid. Taylor's special but not that special. It's Taylor's inherited Papa-brain. It makes the most sense if this is an AU of the Toolbox fic where Taylor never found the journals. Her first interaction with anything Beneath-adjacent was her having superpowers. Similar to how Anton figured out how to use his mind to interact directly with Beneath-physics to do his tricks, She figured out how to sense and then modify her power expression. QA doesn't have to do anything to stop this because there's no way any entity predicted a host would be capable of doing such a thing, as they are all unaware of the Beneath. A host being able to do that is novel [DATA] and no protocols exist to stop her from collecting all of it that she can from Taylor.
 
Doubtful that's the case. What we're seeing is someone with an iron will who's too bloody stubborn to give up. What we've seen is not Taylor accessing unknown metaphysical layers. We've seen her brute force via stubbornness and enough willpower to force a shard to do things her way. Every time QA has tried to force the intended "always on, always at maximum range, always at maximum numbers" anthropod sensing and control, Taylor has clamped down via force of will. Not via an innate metaphysical understanding either, but via pure willpower. Enough willpower to make Batman feel proud, probably.
 
I'm not sure the hacking via willpower and expanding what QA does theory really works. Aren't shards supposed to be fairly specialized hardware? There's only so far Tay can go with fudging the parameters on her connection to QA, and the limits of that were shown when Amy did the whole power jailbreaking thing in canon. The more Taylor has been leaning into straight up biotinkering the more I'm convinced Shaper is actively involved, what she's doing just doesn't make sense otherwise.

Somehow I don't think the nostalgic media player is going to end the discussion about it by confirming anything, but I'll maintain that QA had trouble making connection parameters stick, called Shaper to remote in and hit the new host's reset button, Shaper decided there would be far more data to be collected from observing, both got surprised by Shaper's capabilities getting activated through the proxy connection, and they've been doing the shard equivalent of gleefully yelling "Write that down! Write that down!" at each other since.
 
And yet, Taylor accidentally bullying QA into giving her abilities via an iron will is exactly what she IS doing in this story. It looks like QA is completely confused about how Taylor keeps pulling out new abilities, and Shaper has no clue what's going on with the Giant Hornet, but would really love to learn more.
 
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Its more like QA drew a line in the sand and gave Taylor the impression that 'sorry, I can't let you cross this line'. Taylor being both clever and stubborn, forces her spirit or whatever to take two steps to the left, draw her own line in the sand then steps across it, all while looking the astonished QA in the eye and saying, ' No, I WILL move!"
 
MPpi's Taylors can bend reality to their whim without any help from the shards. If this Taylor wants to change her powerset from what QA wants, there's not really anything it can do to stop her.
 
I've thought many times of doing a story where Taylor figures out that the Shards are basically LLMs in many ways :) This is probably the nearest I've come so far. And poor QA is finding the whole experience a baffling mixture of enormous fun and total confusion...

I find it amusing in a horrible sort of way that canonically Contessa is acting more like an LLM and her Shard is the user who doesn't understand how these things work, nor cares ;)
 
The interesting thing about the LLM idea is that while Queen Administrator probably COULD have interfered, in numerous ways, at least at first... This is interesting new data that also reveals new cababilities about itself. Interfering seems to be more-or-less against QA's religion at this point.
 
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FaerieKnight79 said:
The ability to hit "Send" is by no means an indication of being fine. One of our cats hit Alt F4 and closed my word processing program after typing multiple paragraphs of gibberish, then she closed my web browser via alt F4 too. All while laying on half the keyboard for Reasons. What Reasons? Cat reasons, obviously.
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How, how do they do that? there's only so many combinations of shortcuts on a keyboard. (mine can pull the same trick)

Narshalla said:
Lung already saw it and basically wrote off the docks (because if you see one, there's a hundred you don't see!) and literally no one is going to give him grief (or call him a coward) for it!
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Because they agree, or because they have the survial instincts not to upset Lung?
 
The thing about LLMs is that they aren't sentient. LLMs don't experience confusion. If an LLM also has control over, for example, distributing superpowers, "confusing" the model may result in novel superpower distribution or it could result in retraining the model with the new input or it could result in the superpower resetting. It really depends on how things are connected.

It could be excellent fodder for a story though. Especially if the author knows enough about how to create, train, and hack LLMs.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
In computer terms, I think that Taylor has accidentally figured out that sending the string "apricot" down a channel that's only supposed to receive integer numbers at a fast enough rate lets her inject and execute arbitrary code in the power's program.
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I hope this isn't it. Arbitrary code execution, in this context, is dangerous. Write the wrong code, and you probably crash QA. And even if you get lucky and don't crash, you might create a malformed power, which kills you if you try to use it.

I'd prefer to believe the hack is at a higher level. That Taylor has broken into the power-design functionality, but that the power validation routines are still running. That when she's "pushing against her power" to try to get it to do new things, behind the scenes she's instinctively fixing validation errors until she gets a power that won't kill her.
 
finegeometer said:
I hope this isn't it. Arbitrary code execution, in this context, is dangerous. Write the wrong code, and you probably crash QA. And even if you get lucky and don't crash, you might create a malformed power, which kills you if you try to use it.
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When you look at the size of the power stores/power supplies all shards have, 'Kill your city', or at least 'kill your district' is/isn't as likely as 'kill you'?

[OOPS] is very likely the last thing you want to later find in the diagnostic logs of a shard...
 
I feel like an idiot for not knowing but what's a LLM? I'm always so excited when you start a new fic. Also your PHO chapters are always awesome.
 
mp3.1415player said:
I find it amusing in a horrible sort of way that canonically Contessa is acting more like an LLM and her Shard is the user who doesn't understand how these things work, nor cares ;)
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Alternatively... sometimes I imagine PtV as IT Support, trying to get the user Fortuna to follow just some simple instructions but really doesn't have the patience for it and figuratively pushes her to the side and does it itself. Which happens more often than not since the instructions require far more precision and timing than a human can achieve. And it pisses the shard off something fierce.


The entities are a bureacratic mess of a country. For the Warrior there's a "king" at the top, the queens to do the actual work and there are lots of lower ranks beneath them. The king is in seclusion and won't respond to anything beyond basic life signs.

Thinker is a queen on top and consorts are a rank below. High Priest is taking over as regent because Thinker is in a coma and fucks it up. The court is missing critical people and for some reason there are monsters now.

Basically describe Worm timeline from the perspective of anthropomorphized shards trying to get the show on the road despite numerous setbacks, sabotage and internal disagreements.

PtV = IT Tech support, it has to explain every little detail to Fortuna since she has no idea about modern society. Is constantly annoyed, petty and when its frustration reaches the limit, it assumes direct control. "Move over and let me do this, you idiot. I don't want to spend all day on this non-issue."

Shadow = loves cats. Really, really loves cats. Gave Sophia the attitude of a cat. Doesn't regret anything no matter how loud the other shards yell at it.

[Work this into Love and Peace]


AstaraelDBlack said:
I feel like an idiot for not knowing but what's a LLM? I'm always so excited when you start a new fic. Also your PHO chapters are always awesome.
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Large Language Models, basically (very) proto-AIs. ChatGPT is one of the better known ones.
 
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