15 KiB
Mother of Learning Chapter 33: Gateways
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Author: u/gamarad LessWrong (than usual)*
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URL: https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/33/Mother-of-Learning
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Score: 43
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Created: 2015-03-02T02:53:15
Post:
Comments:
u/Stop_Sign [+16] (2 hours later)
I loved the quick description of the necromancer war. Noble families who realized they would never inherit the title? Brilliant. It really built the world and made magic much more of a thing that's always existed, especially since there was just so much history summarized in those few paragraphs
u/FTL_wishes [+14] superluminal (32 minutes later)
If Zach's initial movements repeat over loops, it would strongly suggest that Zach himself is carrying memory packets for Red Robe, and this is what he's doing at the start of every loop. Probably some sort of compulsion spell.
The Bakora gates are a nice touch. A unique deconstruction of the "ancient artefact" trope so common in fantasy/sci-fi.
u/PeridexisErrant [+5] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (4 hours later)
Zach himself is carrying memory packets for Red Robe
This was my proposal in the last thread, and there's a nice bit of evidence for it here :) Even better: once Zorian can break Zach free, Red Robe won't be a problem!
u/gamarad [+2] LessWrong (than usual) (10 hours later)
I have a feeling that breaking Zach free is going to be a pretty big problem in and of itself.
u/Stop_Sign [+3] (14 hours later)
And he'd likely only get one shot to do it
u/None [+14] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+4] Utopian Smut Peddler (4 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/None [+5] (5 hours later)
[deleted]
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+14] Utopian Smut Peddler (6 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/Kodix [+6] (a day later)
I don't know, I think what you're saying explains Zorian's relative lack of interest sufficiently. He did follow up on it enough to research more when he has the opportunity.
To be perfectly honest, personally I didn't mark the teleport gates as ridiculously important except in the same way as the sad cat sitting around on the bridge when Zorian didn't fish out the bicycle in early chapters - it will certainly be important later, and it merits research, but that's mostly meta-knowledge.
Zorian's in the middle of something, and I don't expect him to drop everything to chase a small clue. Hell - his combat training will directly contribute to being able to visit the gate under Cyoria.
Although personally my attention was more on the Sovereign gate and how it sounds precisely how the time-loop situation could be described to other people (as opposed to loopers).
u/Nepene [+5] (a day later)
Yeah. Zorian is rightfully very cautious. Makes a lot of sense for him to focus on becoming good at combat rather than trying to solve the big mysteries and find the source of an invading army. I mean, he could try the good old scry and die techniques, he might succeed, but it'd be very risky.
Plus, psychologically, it's all very scary for him. Red Robes could murder him and his family at any time if he found him. It's a lot of mental effort to go confront all of that, especially when he rationally knows it could be a very bad idea.
u/Kodix [+7] (a day later)
Here's the author's take from a PM on fictionpress (quoted with permission):
Yeah, from Zorian's perspective the gates are a neat little mystery that he has no reason focus on at the moment. They're far from the only mystery scattered through the world, and he is still heavily under impression of the evens of 'Soulkill' and focused on making sure it can never happen again. The gates do not help with that, they have no obvious link to the time loop, and they appear to be objects that have stumped more capable mages for centuries so what the hell could he do about it?
He's also leery of engaging in debates as an author, which seems very reasonable to me.
u/Nepene [+7] (a day later)
Thanks for that, and thanks to /u/nobody103 for being awesome.
That is something I hadn't really considered- he is just one wizard. The Sovereign Gates and the other ones are centuries old, all the obvious low hanging fruit of how to activate them or find them has likely been tried, he had no reason to believe he would perform better than hundreds of other mages.
It's the sort of rationality that Eliezer mentioned- if your main is doing something else no one else has done they better have a damn good reason for no one else trying it. And I guess he knows lots of others have tried to do stuff with the gates.
While I understand his leeriness of engaging in debates, I do appreciate when he talks to us. Engagement and learning more about the story is very fun.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
Very well put. There's got to be a trope name for this...
u/literal-hitler [+7] (2 hours later)
Frankly, it's probably where the invasion is attacking Cyoria from.
u/Igigigif [+5] IT Foxgirl (3 hours later)
The mechanic behind it might even be responsible for red robe's perma-kill spell.
u/xamueljones [+7] My arch-enemy is entropy (4 hours later)
u/Nepene [+7] (9 hours later)
It's probably also what the Aranea map is pointing to.
u/DaystarEld [+5] Pokémon Professor (17 hours later)
Finally got around to reading this story, so I can post in updates! \o/!
Does anyone else find it suspicious that the person Zorian happened to get asked to steal "trade secrets" from is likely heavily involved in the invasion? If Gurey doesn't end up being some undercover intelligence agent or something, I'm going to cry shenanigans unless there's a merchant in practically every town and city that's connected to the secret plot.
Also, this was probably mentioned in earlier posts, but if we're getting pseudo-confirmation that souls can't be killed, then that confirms my hypothesis that what happened to the spiders is probably what happened to Zach, and they'll all come back in one of the restarts, feeling disoriented and sick at first.
u/whywhisperwhy [+1] (19 hours later)
What exactly is your theory- that the spiders were the victims of soul merge spells like Zach was (where the damage was foreign bits of soul)? I ask because I'm not sure what you're referring to.
My own personal theories are that the only things that would render non-time travelers essentially mindless at the beginning of each restart are: (1) some mechanism that ejects their souls from the time loop, (2) the purple spell actually attaches a marker to their souls like Zorian's, but also damages them (any other form of soul damage wouldn't be moved back in time, according to my model of the time loop).
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (19 hours later)
Not exactly soul merge spells, but we don't actually know what soul alteration magic was used on Zach and Zorian: maybe the lich intended to damage their souls together out of efficiency, but the time loop spell made it go awry by cancelling it early due to Zach's death and causing the soul melding to occur.
Since people aren't dropping dead all over the place in each successive restart (Red Robe should be permanently killing off everyone of any importance in each invasion to make it a cakewalk when the time loop ends), I think RR is lying about it killing them permanently: he probably knows it's a temporary thing, and did it to disable them for the next restart so he could confront the third time traveler (Zorian), knowing he would go to the spiders to warn them in the new iteration.
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (20 hours later)
I've been assuming that Red Robe knows more about the time loop (whether they're an original time looper or stole that knowledge from Zach), which would make it more likely that as a necromancer they would be able to use it for something sophisticated. But I'll admit that since we've seen temporary soul damage before, so that's another possibility.
Edit: I guess that I'm just more taken with the other theories because I like how strong it makes Zorian's adversary... for plot reasons I think it makes a better story compared to essentially losing your allies for a few turns instead of having permanent consequences while simultaneously revealing how powerful the opposition is. Maybe not the most objective logic.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (21 hours later)
Don't get me wrong, it absolutely makes the stakes shoot straight up: it was an emotional hammerblow to have all the spiders get killed off for good. There just seems to be weak evidence now for RR having lied or been wrong, and the part of me that wants the spiders to not be dead is happy to acknowledge that evidence, even if it's not for objectively valid reasons either :)
u/stringless [+3] Rebel Alliance (3 days later)
How often does this update? I read from the beginning after seeing this post and now I'm hooked.
u/nobody103 [+7] (3 days later)
About once a month. I'm aiming to increase that, but I'm making no promises.
u/stringless [+2] Rebel Alliance (3 days later)
I'm okay with waiting a bit for a better result. Which is incredibly appropriate.
u/Nepene [+2] (5 hours later)
I did love the history lesson. Beautifully written, amusing, made the world much more real.
The priest's no selling of his teleport wards also amused me much.
It also explains even further the earlier Zoltan vampire/ Quatach Ichl debate where the vampire was a prominent member of society. Many houses converted their leadership to undead for immortality and as such those houses have likely continued to claim to be the true houes in Ulquaan Ibasa.
u/Sgeo [+2] (2 days later)
Typo:
I took her a full minute to realize he had slipped out of the room
u/aeschenkarnos [+3] (4 hours later)
"And you think our attackers belong that group?" surmised Alanic.
^ belong to that
u/Shrlck [+1] Dragon Army (13 hours later)
I love the setting of this story.
A magical society, post war of magic vs tech+ magic, perfect for urban fantasy.