Comic for Thursday, May 17th, 2018
May17
Back to buffered updates. Sort of.
…it’s pretty late to be in the office, but Kally’d be damned if she was going to let Peter out of her sight. You see what happens? Give him a few moments and next thing you know he’s puppeting around world leaders again.
Kally forgot to invest any points in diplomacy… which makes sense, given that the only reasonable influence she has is Arron, and he is a self proclaimed “not a diplomat”… though in his case that’s maybe more wishful thinking.
Also… the last comic was the second most commented comic of all time. Just a fun fact.
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Ha!
I like her.
She’s probably the one who interacts most easily with Peter. And coincidentally has the best method for interacting with him. So something delightfully different.
From what I can gather, Peter is something of a free agent pursuing his own goals. What those goals are remains to be seen, It would appear that he knows a great deal about the machinations of the various parties involved with the present plot, and he’s manipulating things to achieve the best possible outcome under the circumstances. In short, he’s attempting to keep things from getting out of hand and resulting in a worse case scenario in which everyone loses.
That may be just a tad rose-colored-glasses-y to describe Peter. The reason he knows so much, is that M.Y.M. has hacked into every network on their version of the interweb on at least two worlds, and almost every computer that ISN’T.
He may be as altruistic as you think, but there’s no guarantee of that… It’s part of his boyish charm. ^^
I don’t think Peter is evil, just because evil is impractical to someone with Peter’s mind set. Peter is ambivalent to all the things that make someone evil. Money? A joke to him. Power? Meh, sounds like a hassle.
The reason that Peter is probably not a villain is there is just no point from his perspective. This is why Kally seems to grudgingly work with him, and Naomi willing works with him. Peter is suspicious, annoying, and possibly autistic, and definitely sort of a bastard, but no one can point at anything he does and clearly define it as evil.
Now, to Peter, I do believe that he might just be being altruistic because he views it as a something to do. Remember he comes from the Civil Service originally, he is quite possible trained in government or civil planning. Its possible just saw the world working shitty and was like “hold my beer” (or… actually, I am not sure we have seen Peter drink anything the whole comic…) and decided to fix it for something to do.
More probably it has something to do with Kor’s World, the Far Side of Utopia, and the other stuff Miko was talking about. I can’t wait to know more about all that. Fuck.
I’m pretty sure the reason people often consider Peter evil, is because he completely disregards the law. Most people see morality as requiring one to be law abiding, and Peter is about as far as one can get from law abiding without actively trying to break every law that exists.
In the DnD alignment system, Peter is clearly not lawful, and probably chaotic as he doesn’t even seem to consider laws when making decisions.
Edit: As far as I can tell, most people just put lawful good at one end of their moral guide, and chaotic evil at the other, then treat it as a one-dimensional measurement. So they’ll make excuses for lawful evil (It’s legal!) and get angry with chaotic good (They broke the law!) without delving into any greater complexities.
P.S. I’d describe Peter as Chaotic Neutral. He displays a complete disregard for the law, and doesn’t display any strong sentiment or action towards good or evil (though he has displayed a strong distaste for stupidity).
I think the lawful – chaotic for alignment doesn’t require that the set of rules/laws abided by are those of the society. I believe a personal code can work equally. Considering Peter’s facility with setting up a ruleset that works to keep MYM from choosing the “kill everyone” solution (which is difficult), he is at least good at working with rulesets. Maybe not concerned with them himself, though. Probably Neutral at worst and not chaotic.
Chaotic takes a bit more whimsy than a total disregard for laws provides. Otherwise, unaligned/unintelligent animals would be chaotic rather than pure neutral. To be Chaotic, one must either be unpredictable in ones own actions, or strive for disarray in the world at large. Peter is neither of these. Jack Sparrow is Chaotic Neutral. He claims to be whimsy and greed, but the greed is far more subject to the whimsy than the other way around. Peter has a plan and rules.
There’s strong arguments for Peter being pure Neutral, Neutral Good, Lawful Neutral, and even Lawful Good. Because, like that one guy said above, the requirement for lawful is that the being strictly follows a set of rules. The requirement for good is striving for the benefit of the most people possible. (citation needed.) Chaotic and Evil are right out.
My personal feeling is he’s probably Neutral Good. Usually, unless you are a god, to be a true candidate for Lawful, someone else needs to make your rules. And it’s possible that is the case with Peter, but we don’t know enough of his rules to be sure. But likewise, he’s not opposed to rules, at least not for other people. He appears to more seek flexibility within the rules rather than outright breaking them as well.
Hahaha! I love Ms. Consul. She’s fun!
I wonder why she’s showing up now, of all times. I also wonder why she thinks advising the Consul to not be “manipulated” by Peter will actually work. (Does that really work on anyone? I don’t even think it’s so much that they’re so “easy” to manipulate, it’s just he’s so good at it. Even if they don’t “want” to help, they only need be predicted, and the right nudge in the right place….work’s done.)
(Edit: Random: Edit time dropped from an hour to five minutes?)
The comment editing software got updated and promptly did stupid things apparently. The adjustment from 5 minutes to an hour is just a tweak in the plugin code so it gets wiped whenever I update wordpress.
Still the best solution to comment editing I’ve found. It’s a low bar.
Out of curiosity, why do you want comments to only be editable for a certain amount of time? I assume there’s more to the problem of “comment editing” than just comments being edited at all, since you allow comments to be edited. What’s the actual problem that this is meant to solve? (Since tone doesn’t translate in text, I’m not asking in a “how could there be a problem” sort of scoff, but in a “I am curious because I can’t think of what it is” musing tone.)
I believe Past is up against an idiosyncrasy with WordPress. It is quite possibly the single most used, very useful website content management system out there and at a price anyone can afford. Any sysadmin / developer anyway.
But it has certain assumptions. One of which is that anyone who is not a registered member is going to contribute Twitter style. Short thoughts without any desire to later modify them.
The plugin he is using tries to split the difference, granting more member like control without having to go through a sign up process, or remember a password to post.
That’s my suspicion anyway. I haven’t gone digging to see what he’s actually using.
The fact that they are editable at all is mostly because of me. PastUtopia got tired of fixing my mistakes for me, and listening to me whine about it. As for the time limit, apparently the plug-in being used has an editing duration time which can be set as high as an hour, but which can’t be removed altogether without spending a great deal of precious time and energy which could be better used in drawing comics or working.
It’s a software limitation, not a Developer policy.
I’m curious how much is manipulation, and how much simply *looks* like manipulation because his projections are so accurate.
I mean, if I have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to do anyway, do I really need to convince you to do it? I just need to act around it, and expect it to happen. If we interact, and I say something in line with what you were already going to do, does it look like I manipulated that outcome?
This is Peter’s personal hell. He’s not a great manipulator. To be a great manipulator, you not only need to know what people are going to do, but why, and what will make them do otherwise. And that means understanding emotions and how to manipulate them.
Peter’s analysis clearly does not understand emotion to that level. His manipulations are therefore confined to information access control and actions he can have performed. For example, the Presidential kidnapping that he arranged. This is still manipulation, but it’s not great manipulation.
Kalli, along with many other people around Peter, misunderstand this distinction. They all know that he manipulates, because his methods are by necessity rather obvious. And they know that he successfully guides things to outcomes that he finds preferable to what might have happened otherwise with a high reliability. So they think that he is a great manipulator.
If he was a great manipulator, most of them would not know that someone had been manipulating them. Take Trump. Based on early polling, he would’ve had to manipulate a lot of people to get nominated, and yet he actually got elected. Ask any Trump supporter if he manipulated them. Chances are good they will say no.
Because Peter is largely successful without actually being a great manipulator, he has to deal with a lot of resistance for being a great manipulator.
The Consul, incidentally, is fairly resistant to Peter’s information management strategy, because she has a great deal of information at her disposal already, and the only defense Peter has against that is knowing what it is. This is probably why she showed up at his office without a personal terminal. She probably has one normally, which is why he was surprised at this. However, not being a great manipulator and not having specific information about her behavior, he guessed that this was merely a quirk of hers that he did not hear about. He cannot block that information without clearly labeling himself as her enemy, which he cannot afford. But fortunately for him, she understands he’s not a great manipulator. She knows this because she is one. She came into this knowing that he was mostly a manager of information, and she deliberately restricted his ability to limit hers.
It probably would have been more wise of her, however, to come in with a burner terminal. However, to do that properly, she would’ve needed to acquire a burner terminal so utterly primitive that MYM could not usefully hack it. Which would still put Peter in the current predicament.
It would’ve been more wise of him to expect that of her, and be prepared with a personal terminal he could just give her. This would have the added benefit of not requiring a demonstration of MYM’s viral nature. However, this is one of those areas where Peter’s lack of manipulation sophistication comes into play. He seems to lack the understanding that MYM simply installing himself on the personal devices of Peter’s allies feels intrusive, especially if they are merely allies of circumstance, and thus they may act to avoid it.
You know, to some degree, this makes a lot of sense….and could also explain the “thread he’s missing” as to why everyone’s in “such a hurry”: maybe he’s just forgetting that usually people aren’t as patient as he might be.
” Based on early polling… “
” Ask any Trump supporter if he manipulated them. Chances are good they will say no. “
Based on polls? How can anyone trust polls or what the mainstream media says after claiming that Trump had virtually no chance of winning (some even saying, quote “zero”) right before the election? At least one network doubled down so much that, even during election night, they would not even hint that he had a chance – right up until the last ballots were counted in the last state.
Methinks you give Trump too much credit. Any politician worth his or her salt does their best to manipulate people. There’s a reason that a stereotype exists to suggest that lying comes as natural to politicians as breathing air. A great many of them start out as lawyers (including the Clintons), so they know how to spin things. Is the glass half empty? No, it’s “merely half full”…
Look at the career politician nominees in the primary who Trump was running against and consider what they stood for and their reputations. Also, maybe it’s not so much that Trump won as it was Hillary who somehow managed to lose an unlosable race? (The primary was rigged so she’d win over Bernie and someone even handed her the questions to the presidential debate ahead of time and, in the end, she still managed to lose.)
Perhaps Hillary seemed so unsavory to some people that even someone like Trump sounded like a good idea in comparison? Maybe some people always vote along party lines, no matter who the candidate is or how they act? Maybe it was like that South Park parody of the election? If you had to choose between a “giant douche” or a “turd sandwich”, which would you choose?
I will never understand how so many people fail to even consider such possibilities. It’s like half the nation is still pinching themselves because they still can’t understand how he won. Hillary, herself, blamed the fact that, historically, it’s nearly impossible for a presidential candidate to win following an 8-year term by a member of their own party. (Then there’s the fact that Obama failed to deliver on certain campaign promises. Of his 533 promises that Politifact tracked, they show he broke or compromised on over half of them.)
Sorry about the rant. But I get tired of hearing the same kind of remarks about Trump. And the level of disbelief a year and a half later is every bit as high as the day after.
There are lots of things people fail to consider which are also divorced from support for Trump or opposition to Hillary.
For example, considering polls still heavily use phone to contact targeted demographics to attempt to balance how easily can you poll the opinions of those people who screen their calls or don’t want to have anything to do with the media (or their polls) or whatnot. I always thought it was strange the way that polling didn’t turn into: “Uhhhh, this isn’t working…by kind of a lot. We need to just start over from scratch and figure something else out for this.”
Peter views humans very deterministically. He believes that with perfect information, a human is perfectly predictable (or at least the probability is perdictable). This is why he does not care if people trust him, because his whole game plan is to present information in such a way that the choice he wants you to make is the choice you have to make.
He basically spells this out of the Consul. He is going to manipulate her by giving her the information that will make her draw the conclusions he wants, and it does not require him ever actually saying a word, which is why it does not matter if she trusts him or not. Kally and the Consul are both right. The only way should could avoid being manipulated by Peter is to not use the information he provides, but that is sort of akin to suicide, as the information he has is worth too much.
Kally knows this better than anyone. All indications point to that Kally still actually likes Peter, she is just aware how impossible the whirlpool of his plot is to escape. She is in the same boat. She could tell Peter to sod off, but as soon as she does she is stuck on the “the outside” of “the know”. It probably just stings as she was probably historically in a spot like Naomi where she could see the whole plan back when they were partners, and being in the “only the information you need to know” role annoys her.
I don’t think Peter views humans deterministically. I think he views some portions of human behavior to be deterministic and some to be non-deterministic. I think he’s just resigned to X% of human behavior going against what it should and that it has to be dealt with and to have contingencies to allow handling when it happens.
I tend to view this as behind his view when he seems to find dealing with other humans to be exhausting.
You did make some excellent points about Peter, though. I think you’re spot on about him being handicapped in manipulating people because he struggles to understand them, particularly when it comes to emotions and what motivates them.
Trump. Just Trump.
So here’s a thought. Lot of good minds claim we’re approaching the technology singularity. Possibly it is a decidedly AI singularity. Alexa is literally laughing about it.
Democrats monkied with this part of the election. The Russians manipulated that part. Both claim innocence and at least some evidence backs both of them.
But we had one of the most bizarre imaginable election processes ever. Each candidate had at LEAST half the country think they were 100% incompetent to hold office.
Quite possibly what we’re really seeing is about year 3 of the AI singularity. The computers have already won the war, and we didn’t notice. They give us some amusing political theater to watch, and chuckle when we punch the buttons on the voting computers that they already control.
While I’m trying to avoid getting into politics here (for @PastUtopia’s sake), I view that as the most optimistic outcome.
I can hardly imagine politics without corruption, but we could make an AI that is literally immune to bipartisan bullshit, corruption, greed, whatever. I would be thrilled if next election an AI was like “you know what monkeys, it’s been fun, but you guys are fucking up too bad, here’s hows its going to go down”.
Only problem is if it decides it doesn’t like human pets. Why Peter’s approach of training the AI that humans are friends is required, so when it can just apolitically fix our shit.
A pipe dream, I know.
More likely there will be a point where luddites start watering plants with gatorade.
You have an enormous amount of trust in software developers not screwing up. I think you underestimate the degree that trial and error is practiced in software development. This is because with software development it’s usually cheaper & easier to just build it and see if it works than to try to do a careful analysis before starting (as compared to, say, building a bridge). There are exceptions (say FAA DAL A software), but for the most part software developers are used to mistakes not being a problem because they can be found and corrected later. When later comes around, bugs are generally found and fixed and a congratulations all around and then it’s ready to be released (with some unfound bugs that just don’t happen as often). With an AI controlling all sorts of things, that could get quite dangerous.
Even past that, with an AI that modifies itself and grows and learns, you not only need to avoid mistakes, you need to prevent possible outcomes, and not all may be terribly predictable.
Peter’s comment that removing a few restrictions on Mium turning into, “just kill everyone” solutions is a very real issue and would take skill to avoid. Additionally, when an AI can modify itself to achieve results that are “better” and it’s recognized that “better” includes surpassing its creator, then how do you determine which initial restrictions are ok to bypass later and which ones have to be set in stone.
You know, the AI thing could explain everything.
PastUtopia, did Peter unleash MYM on us while we weren’t looking?
If you recall the strip where Weber was showing another Malsan (the chief or something) the portal detector there was a sign on the wall reminding people that personal devices could be hacked and to turn them off/remove the battery/don’t bring them in. So the Consul’s not carrying a terminal might just be good Malsan cyber hygiene.
As for Peter not being able to limit her information, that depends on how her intelligence services gather information. Considering MYM would be able to track a very large number of them at once (and all the decision makers, presumably), alter their electronic search results, also manipulate the news to some extent as to what they report on, and even control their navtrans network so that field agents do or don’t see things that might otherwise have gone the other way, and even give anonymous tips to one side or the other, there are actually a great many ways that Peter could alter what Malsan intelligence agencies report. Considering that intelligence reporting tends to have some degree of uncertainty built in, as long as there aren’t too many obvious failures causing a major investigation, MYM could nudge intelligence agencies here and their with a fair bit of impunity.
Considering that Peter has now introduced the Consul to MYM, he could also make sure that MYM passes her some intelligence for other countries that includes, “I’ve made certain that intelligence agencies from other countries have not become aware of X” or “I’ve planted false information for intelligence agencies for country Y that false event Z occurred and they are acting upon that information as we speak.” That would be sufficient for the Consul to realize that she cannot fully trust the information from her own intelligence agencies either, allowing MYM even greater manipulative leverage.
Panel 2: That is
somesort of wise i guessI don’t know: “sort” = “kind” or “category;” hence Peter is asserting that such a behavior would fall into a category of wise. One category of wise, but not, necessarily, the “best:” As it, limits “eavesdropping” or similar activities, while simultaneously, limiting her access to time sensitive data. Which I am sure, in Peter’s mind is categorically “stupid.”
Thus, the wording: “That is some sort of wise, I guess.”
Panel 9: “this is [sic] person is, technically, my employee…”
Probably, doesn’t need the “is” between “this” and “person.”
This page reminds me of one of my favourite lines. I forget which page it was from or the exact wording but it was something like: “Don’t annoy him or you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering if every small inconvenience is actually him messing with you.” Mium is the greatest XD
Believe the last line of this page is what you’re looking for?
It is so funny, yet so terrifying, to think of all the little ways an AI could be screwing with you. It is also funny to think of all the ways you could accidentally get on an AI like Mium’s s*** list. How many internet comments do you think Mium reads?
Though Peter also almost looks like he’s got some kind of apologetic face on, which almost makes it sound like he’s speaking from personal experience.
The problem with tormenting a random commenter though is they don’t know it’s him. I think it would be worse if he sent you an email or something saying he’d be doing that….then do absolutely nothing (and probably just forget about you) so you’re basically torturing yourself wondering if he’s actually behind anything or if the only trolling was the declaration to troll.
That is exactly the one I was referring to. You sir, win the internet!
Eh. Fair idea of where the comment was already, just had to find where in the archives that conversation was.
The hilarious thing is peter isn’t actually recommending against reverse engineering Mium, he’s directly advising her not to annoy the person who can make her life hell.
Yeah, she misinterpreted that one. In reality Mium is just… snarky when annoyed, and do you really want to annoy the guy who can casually make you catch every red light ever?
Mium said he does not reschedule software updates, but suspiciously nothing about red lights… Overly specific denial there, Mium.
Booth the Council and Mium have a sort of polite snark. I wonder if we can spot the differences, Councils is more authoritative while Miums is more of a indifferent sort of passive-aggressive.
Still will be fun to watch when she realizes that Mium is a “person” to be reckoned with.
I agree with the Consul.
It’s fun to play dumb in what should be obvious ways when someone’s irritating you.
I kind of want to know which one was the most commented.
By my count it was this one.
That one seems to be one-upped now.
I don’t know, I think that one still being on top is appropriate. The sheer Wait-did-that-seriously-just-happen of Mium integrating with Miko to evaporate a speeding bullet fired by a teleporting assassin will be very hard to beat.
The older comic still wins on number of page-related comments, I think, because a chunk of what contributed to last page’s large comment count was an off-topic discussion about webcomic habits.
There have been a few “well, this changes everything” comics, but I think there are several factors that lead to that one being explosive.
It was in the middle of by far the highest “intensity” section of the comic so far. Every major character was doing something important. Naomi had been shot, Miko was tottering on a cliffhanger for weeks, Peter was actually explaining things for once…
And in the middle of all that, fan favorite Miko is about to get shot.
Plus that page was visually very impressive, especially for the time. Altogether it was a lot of hype.
The fact that it is getting caught by these new pages I think is more of a sign of the growing readership and how much more involved people are in commenting.
I think the next time we get a page with that much going on and that many tables being flipped, it will break a hundred comments.
@Amaranth: As someone who has been reading about as long as you have, I can vouch for your take on both why the Miko-in-danger page was popular and also why the comment count is going up lately. I get a big grin every time I see a new name, and a bigger one when I see it more frequently.
This comment community is one of the rare (and I think, best) kinds where the Commenters interact with each other, and you, my friend have a LOT to do with that. 🙂