Comic for Monday, July 31st
Jul31
This really was supposed to be the weekend I catch up any number of things, but unfortunately basically the whole backlog is being carried over to the next sprint. Didn’t get as much done as I’d like, and what I did get done took longer than I’d like across all fronts. My friend was moving on Saturday, so that was a basically a lost cause, and realistically I have no idea what happened to Sunday.
The bonus comic will start shortly on Patreon, but the first one won’t go up this weekend (I say as I type at almost midnight with it not done lending a certain certainty to my statement).
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“What are capable of doing?” Should probably be what are YOU capable of doing.
Compared to Mium’s interaction with Tyler, I do feel that Query is being much more helpful to Kally (I do like Magnema’s assessment).
I do appreciate the continuing reference to Kally being difficult to communicate with… I assume this is a reference to the fact that it is difficult to predict what Kally’s response to information provided will be… after all the goal of provisioning information (at least if Peter or Mium is doing the providing) is to push the recipient in a particular direction.
And lastly… would Kally have really referred to Mium as person? She is intelligent, and kind of recognised Mium as Query, so wouldn’t she refer to Mium as (at the very least) an AI… although I would expect her to make the jump to SMAI pretty quick. Of course if she asked “Are you the same SMAI I talked to earlier?” then the response might be less vague… hmmmm: I suppose that comes down to whether you treat copies (or instances) of a SMAI as individuals or not. Certainly there is no argument that a copy of a person is NOT the same person (because the word person implies an individual). I could go on an on… but in any case I really don’t think Kally would have used the word “person”… maybe “entity” (that still leads to a vague answer, but at least indicates Kally is aware Mium is not a person, and perhaps has decided not to call him a SMAI in front of the other analysts with low security clearance)??
As for the person, I think it’s heavily influence by the fact that Mium looks like a human. She probably doesn’t necessarily even think of Query as ‘person’ per se, but probably thinks of Mium as ‘person’ even if she thinks he’s the same thing as Query. Looking like a person is like +50 to personhood, when it comes how people reflexively refer to something.
If she was thinking about it more carefully, yeah, probably entity or just “are you the same AI”, but she is currently trying to wrap her head around that the same thing she’s talking to (that she is familiar with as a floating little ball) is walking around wearing a blue scarf and looking like a human (or at least so she suspects currently).
I always note, everyone is an unreliable narrator – she calls him a person not because he is a person, but because she’s still trying to deal with that Mium looks like a person and it’s sort of freaking her out.
Fair enough then. Sometimes I forget that technically Kally is a no-nonsense kind of person… so trying to wrap her head around the whole Peter-is-up-to-something and Query-Mium-WTF shebang just far too much nonsense to handle 🙂
A shame the written word doesn’t carry the character’s tone / intent… I’ll just read it as “Are you the same ‘person’ I talked to earlier?” I guess 😉
Can anyone find the links to MIUM’s last “aggregated querry” (I believe it was in answer to Tyler Webber, to which Tyler mumbled to himself about trying to force some answers out of MIUM, but Peter overheard and told him how spectacularly bad an idea that would be); or the incident with Naomi that MIUM/Querry refers to when he says that he can’t answer the question about being the “same person” (it was when she came in and asked if MIUM was there, and mium said yes through the computer, and she disagreed, and MIUM got confused till Peter explained that Naomi was referring to the F8 chasis, which still confused MIUM because he thought of them both as “himself).
If anyone can find those incidents in the archives to link to, I think that would be really helpful for reference.
Mium asking Tyler to refrain from aggregated queries occurred on the 20/2/2017.
Naomi asking Mium if he was “here” thus confusing him occurred on 29/5/2015. Lol. That one still makes me laugh.
i want to say that he is the same person just communicating via a different body.
which makes some tracktion in the fact that the kor’s world guy called him a virus person and…
holy s–t kors world are borg! well not borg as in all thoughts are one and one’s thoughts are alls. but in the way that they grow up with cybernetics and who could say where the ai’s thoughts start and the human’s thoughts end.
Hmmm. Hmmm…….
Hmmmm.
Hm.
I think it is interesting that the other analysts (or at least Miss Holmgren) fully expects Query to not be super useful. He is an AI that can and seemingly will answer more or less any question, but unless it is something he wants you to know, the answer will be too obtuse to use.
The interesting part however (when combined with Query’s constant gripping about communicating to humans by talking to them) is that the subsystems that are tied into him are very likely ways to request information through an exacting something like SQL… Structured Query Language. With these tools, you can specify a granular data point you need, and chances are it will actually be what you want to know.
While for a human, trying to formulate a question that cannot be misdirected using words would be a nonstarter in most cases, if you can sit down and type it, you can actually get useful information back out of him. This is why the analysts view Query the interface as something to banter with, and Query the tool as something operation critical enough they seem to be (unless I am mistaken) somewhat going out of their way to protect their continued use of (they seem to be deliberately casual talking about it here and to Aaron way back).
Mium always goes literal when he doesn’t want to answer the question really being asked.
I like to think he has an “internal trolling value” stored for each user. For someone like Miko and Peter, it is moderate (but counterbalanced by that they know how to ask him things in a way he will answer). For Tyler, it is really high. For Naomi, it is fairly low. For Kally, it is in the clouds. I wonder if it is because he is a tool made by Peter, or if he just views Kally as more dangerous person to give real answers to.
Yea. I suspect its partially motivated by the risk of actually telling them the answers to what they are asking. But a lot of it is just him having fun. He isnt actually required to answer questions.
The more Mium talks, the more sarcastic he appears, and the more questionable it is as to how “intentional” it’s supposed to be.
I mean, sure, you gave literal answers as to what is happening now. But….I’m quite sure you know damn well you did not give a single answer she was really looking for. (That last one’s especially funny though.)
His “relationship” to the analysts is also amusing. Especially the “they’re giving feedback on your analogy, to which you immediately restate your analogy using said feedback”.
He actually answered more of the question than one might usually think of a literal question genie, by reading into them.
“Peter is sleeping” -> not currently doing anything you have to worry about
“Talking to you” -> this has implications of something like exclusivity of that activity (at a practical level), but I think reading into them would be a mistake
“Communicating data” -> the fact that he considers this ‘most relevant’ says something about his abilities
“Data processing backlog” -> By referring to Naomi, this entity (“Query”) at least confirms some degree of connection to the other (“Mium”), with some of the level of connection implied by the level at which he references her; the reference to the “backlog” also says something interesting about his opinion changing on the matter, which is interesting in itself, albeit not relevant to the question (although perhaps it would be relevant to the third question).
The restating the analogy one was good. It is one of those things where I see from MYM/Query logic how that make sense, but is obviously not the right thing to do in that social circumstance.
It also stands out to me from the meta-analysis of “why are we seeing this page?”. It is pretty well established that these analysts know Query’s primary process (the talking bit) for years, and Miss Holmgrem here has never seen him use an analogy. It is a pretty big clue that MYM/Query is changing. Consider that he is has just acquired a new little sister who is basically a human, integrated a new prototype that had at least some degree of sentience, and had both possible original computers likely destroyed (Query the mobile unit was destroyed protecting Kyle, the Avon lab where we know MYM was sacked by the IDS), there could be a lot of things going on under the hood.
To me, at least, a major plot of the comic is MYM/Query’s evolution, even if it is one of the more background ones. If we view it terms of arcs, that one has probably come up not much less than Peter’s overall plan.
panel 5: “this would be an instance where you would come to my front-yard and were looking through my mailbox.” also, “this would maybe more like your BACKyard?” Panel 7: “what are you capable of doing?”
Are you sure with the second one? I noticed that, but as many times as I say it, I always say “would maybe be more” instead of “would maybe more”. It’s sort of messing with my head 😛
“This would perhaps be more like” I guess is how I think of it? I could just change it perhaps and save myself the trouble I guess…
you can type it to “This would perhaps be more like” if you want to.
Haha, I ended up changing it. Using perhaps twice reads a little funky, but it’ll do. Thanks as always 🙂
you’re welcome. what about Panel 7?
What is Peter up to? -> Peter is sleeping.
God help us, Query/MYM has gone full literal question genie.
Could swear thats been done before. Or maybe we just predicted that would be his response so many times.
MIUM has done this before. I think it was when talking to Tyler. Tyler asked some questions (mostly about who and what MIUM was), got a useless responce, muttered to himself about trying to force some information out of him, and hat Peter hear him and stop that line of thinking. I believe Peter told him something to the effect of: “trying to force MIUM to do something he doesn’t want to is a worse idea than calling Cali’s dragon “fluffy”; at least if you do the one you will know she is angry when she rips your arms off, but with MIUM you will spend the rest of your life wondering if every inconvenience is MIUM getting back at you.”
If you know where it is in the archives, then great. I wasn’t able to find it, though.
Mium asking Tyler to refrain from aggregated queries occurred on the 20/2/2017. Next page is Peter giving Tyler friendly advice with regard to Mium. (Well remembered EnderDDT).
Also relevant: Miko noting to Peter that Mium is “starting to go literal genie” occurred way back on 31/7/2015.
The purple gorilla will do what the purple gorilla wants!
It seems like he is inclined to operate within the scope of what people ask him, but how literally he takes them is his range of freedom, which serves as his opinion of the asker.