You can duplicate human beings. Hmmm. Page 31.
And since it’s the end of August, it’s the end of 3x week updates, too. Back to Mon/Thurs next week. It was fun while it lasted!
O Human Star
by Blue Delliquanti
MORE OF BLUE’S STUFF
You can duplicate human beings. Hmmm. Page 31.
And since it’s the end of August, it’s the end of 3x week updates, too. Back to Mon/Thurs next week. It was fun while it lasted!
How do you figure out all the computer stuff? Do you actually know about it or like search it up or find it on legit sites and think you could through it in? Or do you have a friend who is a total techy?
You probably already awnsered this, but I just can’t find it.
I think about the big ideas (artificial intelligence and its outcomes) a lot, and brush up my knowledge of the more technical stuff with research. Every now and then, though, like this update, my audience will clue me in to something I hadn’t known or thought about, which is okay! It makes the story more interesting.
Darn whippersnapper! Back in my day, ctrl-C (spelled ^C) would TERMINATE a process!
In Unix-style shells, ctrl-C /terminates/ a program—sinister.
This is the part where I stop pretending like I’m a smarty-pants and admit I did not know that. :O Very interesting!
Don’t worry too much about it. There’s plenty of techies, even Unix techies, who grew up on GUIs and think “copy” first and “end program” second.
Reading this on a Unix box, I didn’t get the point until I read the comments – to me, Ctrl-C terminates, Alt-W copies.
In a print edition, maybe you should write a footnote that in many computers in 2012, this was the method for making a copy of selected items using the keyboard. The future will likely move away from key combinations to gestures (like are used in Android and IOs), so this reference will become incomprehensible.
Writing for a hypothetical future audience that doesn’t understand any of your cultural references would make for pretty shitty writing. Two-thirds of the book would be footnotes. Most people today don’t know what a slide rule is, but nobody’s tried to edit a description into all of Robert Heinlein’s old science-hero stories. Science fiction ought to make you think and wonder and look stuff up.
Besides which, I doubt Control-C will be vanishing any time soon. Gestural and voice interfaces will continue to gain dominance in casual, day-to-day use, but there’s nothing on the horizon that could replace the keyboard for high-speed precision data entry, so it’ll still be required in a lot of technical fields at least. And as long as the keyboard remains, so will the common shortcuts, because why would we change them? Control-C to copy has been around for at least 25 years; the QWERTY layout is 130.
Ok, so not so much artificial intelligence as rather cloned intelligence. Why not.
Biological neurons aren’t actually binary — there’s a lot of work going into modeling them (see “Biological neuron models” on Wikipedia), although they get complicated fast. When you’re dealing with artificial neurons, you *can* use binary values, but you get much more useful results using other functions. (Very roughly speaking, the whole point of using a neural net is to be able to do fuzzy classification, for which purpose a continuous function can produce finer-grained answers. The “Artificial neuron” article on Wikipedia has some history of the use of the various functions in AI.)
A sigmoid curve — looks kind of like an elongated S — is a pretty common neuron function, and is what we used to implement our neural net the semester I took the MIT undergrad AI course.
EUREKA!
Hey! Love your comic so far!! Been reading it since 4/14/2015.
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but quite often on as I’m reading through pages, I’ll get some sort of strange message where it refuses to load the page, and I’ll have to refresh the page several times for it to work. I have never seen this message before on any other website, and it persists on your website no matter how many different browsers I try.
It doesn’t bother me–just was hoping you knew, in case this was something you wanted to correct!
PS: Had a webcomic in highschool…back in 2003. Reading yours really brings me back. I am so sucked in to your story line!
“It’s only a copy from that initial point.” Eeee! Love this!