Mark Galeotti

Comment Threads

• https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkhqNwupf5SV3SbmWfKf2SXvMI0WLKaQzk commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Given that the ATHENA AI is operating in effectively a limited loop of "Nudge human, observe for a time, repeat" with break-outs for "task achieved" and "human out of range for nudge, do something else", then to be effective it HAS to multitask, though in an unusual fashion. Humans spend about 8 hours per day asleep, so anything monitoring a human is going to be idle for a third of any day. What I would expect the thing to look like is a huge number of execution threads, each of which spends pretty much all of its time waiting for...
• Humots commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Is ATHENA doing projective identification?...
• frithiof.jensen commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Only if written in Java .-p Erlang has very efficient thread- and event management mechanisms and relies on message-passing instead of locks so it fits well with soft-realtime distributed computing that I think one would want in ATHENA (The language was originally developed for 1980's digital telephone exchanges). The hard part of ATHENA is the tweaking mechanism - it requires super-human understanding of biochemistry and human intelligence to tweak the psychopath's medication into something that will also make him psychotic. OTOH - such mechanisms can perhaps be evolved, partly by accident. There exists several parasites and fungi in nature which...
• flatboat70452 commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Sorry for being late on this thread. I found that Halting State had a reasonable and enjoyable "blossoming love" associated with the main heterosexual relationship, but all the homosexual or bi-sexual or other relationships in Rule 34 were purely physical, and not nearly as entertaining. I also thought the "new romance" in the first Laundry book was very good. But by the second it was just functional like eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom. I think you do great with "boy meets girl" and should make that a regular in most of your books. You can dump them if...
• anonemouse commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  Google '[Toymaker's medication] "side effects" psychosis' spider 3 levels deep on all links on all results, and you'd probably hit something usable - as long as you were able to access the academic repositories; and we know ATHENA's a research project, she's probably got at least one node able to take advantage of an institutional subscription. The number of things one needs to figure out from first principles is inversely related to the power of one's ability to search. ",)...