6.5 KiB
[FF][RT] Collision Course, Ch. 4: On Message. (from the story previously known as Ship of the Line: Secretly Awesome)
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Author: u/immute Secretly Awesome*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11338629/4/Collision-Course
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Score: 19
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Created: 2015-07-11T23:21:30
Post:
Comments:
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (10 hours later)
I suspect Willow/Secretly Awesome has serious problems with Giles' attitude towards vampires and souls...
The Culture is from a materialistic universe. The strong Church-Turing hypothesis is true, to "laws of physics" levels. There are no "philosophical zombies".
So it doesn't matter if a vampire has a soul or not, by the Culture's standards it's still a person.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)
The Culture is from a materialistic universe.
They aren't in the same universe and ideas which are silly in their universe may turn out to actually be true. Which is more likely to be more accurate; their preconceived notions from a universe which never existed in reality or the natives' interpretation of gathered evidence which implies the existence of a soul?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 days later)
It doesn't matter whether the culture's expectations are correct or not, they are still going to treat a vampire as a person. Because that's what their very thoroughly tested and culturally critical assumptions will make them do.
If something without a "soul" is not a person, then what about culture drones? What about Minds? Even if a soul is real, "not having a soul" doesn't mean you're not a person, it just means you don't have this backup option when your primary substrate is no longer viable.
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
I forgot this was also a Stargate crossover until I went back to read the edits. I'm really curious to see how that comes into play. Story continues to be awesome!
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (10 hours later)
I'm pretty sure it's there to give some actual meaningful enemies to fight and new worlds to
conqueroptimise. If it was just a vanilla earth this would be a very short story along the lines of "And then the Culture expanded outwards from one world all over again, almost exactly like last time".
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+2] Utopian Smut Peddler (11 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/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (12 hours later)
Well there's already the Ascended, the Ancients and the Ori. The Replicators might count as well depending. I'm kinda expecting the Goa'uld to fold fairly simply. Not quickly and easily because of their numbers, but yeah.
It is a little bit of a worry though. Overpowered characters are fun for a while but you can't really do lasting tension with them.
u/Nepene [+2] (11 hours later)
A very fun and interesting to read story.
I have been meaning to read the culture novels for a while. Never got around to it. I was never really sure of them. They're absurdly powerful so I doubted there would be much conflict, and I wasn't sure about how much I cared about the character development of alien minds, and even for the books I hear they heavily focused on the fringe's of society.
Shall be interesting to see how this develops.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (13 hours later)
and even for the books I hear they heavily focused on the fringe's of society.
That's how Bank's maintained his conflict. Most of the books have secret agents plots around civilians or citizens of the Culture becoming agents of the Culture and interacting with other cultures or agents of the Culture interacting with other cultures.
If you want a good anti-death book though, then I don't think you can do better than Surface Detail, aside from one rather spectacularly parallel-killer soldier/warship, that is. If you do read it, the weird ending may force you into reading a few other books or spoilers to understand the big reveal.