Freefall

"Ecosystems Unlimited is pushing through a stability patch Friday night."

Riiiight. Now we have an deadline, except I have no idea what day of the week it is internally in the comic.

Edit: On the Nice forum they've figured it to be Tuesday.

edited 4th Feb '10 6:52:38 PM by LarryD

Wow. That is not enough time. If everything goes well Florence and anyone else worth warning will probably know about GITD by Friday, but considering nobody at EU will talk to any of them, they won't even know about the deadline, rather less be able to talk to someone who can slow it down. And the person they'd probably have to convince to stop it has a 90% chance of being identical to Kornada (though not actually Kornada; despite narrative causality he sadly doesn't have the right job to be making this decision).

Even assuming they could get to someone in an authority position, those executives may just dismiss the warnings as "the sky is falling" nay-saying, "assuring" their would-be warning sources that everything is under control. CEOs and the like don't have to understand the "fiddly bits" (to borrow from elsewhere), that's what they've got worker drones to do... who will get ignored anyway if what said drones say looks like it might impact the bottom line.

(When I proposed Incompetence, Inc., I had mentioned EU as a possible example. I was encouraged away from that viewpoint, in the YKTTW discussion, but that may have just been me not waiting long enough, depending on how GITD is handled when Jean's Friday rolls around. However, Kornada and Varoa don't exactly inspire me with a lot of confidence, though to be fair they are where the Dilbert Principle says they should do the least damage. If lobotomizing most of the robot population that's making a colony world liveable is "least", I'd hate to see more destructive positions they could hold! )

I'm fairly certain that Kornada is not in any way responsible for GITD. Varroa might be—here the guard at least thinks he's partly responsible for the remote and memory-blockers working on Florence.

I don't think that guard is blaming Varroa, specifically, for the blocker and such, just using him as a convenient representative of the company as a whole.

As for Kornada, he's not involved with the technical aspects, but from his "this will make me rich" comment a while back (too lazy to look up the strip ), it seems that he's aware of it, and is (or thinks he is, "think" being used very loosely here) involved with it in more than an "yeah, I know this exists" way.

(Tangentially, is there already a trope about people claiming something will make them rich? Especially since usually... it doesn't.)

Kornada has proven to be an idiot of the highest order and probably knows nothing about GITD, except that it may be profitable somehow.

He knows something about GITD, though other than being certain it's not the technical details (again, worker drones for that sort of thing, and as you said he's not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer) the details we need for any solid guesswork are rather lacking (convenient to slip in an off-screen retcon, if nothing else ).

edited 6th Feb '10 8:06:04 PM by Nohbody

Hmm. "Make me the richest person on the planet." Sounds like I was wrong—the only way that sentence makes any sense is if Mr. Kornada is the person responsible for GITD.

The way I figure it, Kornada saw a problem — the robots developing free will — and commissioned GITD to "fix" it, heedless of any consequences, which is perfectly in line with his character.

Tangentially, I wonder if/when and how the techie that created it will come up. I mean, I know geeks in general (not the animal killing variety) have a reputation for not being as aware (or aware, period) of things outside their hobby, but the hyper-aggressive pruning done by GITD seems, to me, to be something whose end results (ref the robot that needed its leg fixed, a while prior to the post I linked) should be fairly predictable, and a point of concern (at the very least) for a planet whose entire ecology is dependent on the affected robots.

Most likely Kornada found a geek who could be tempted with "solve this problem in the code" and didn't think about how it could be used.

As I noted earlier, the robot running GitD that Florence meet at EU, did not suffer the complete shutdown the commnet node did. The tech(s) responsible for GitD might not have considered the consequesces of installing GitD in a robot that has already gone through the neural pruning stage.

Edit: Monday's strip is up. And it's back to Quality Control! Notice the dead commnet node in the background.

edited 7th Feb '10 9:14:43 PM by LarryD

My guess: they debate over it just long enough for the Savage Chicken to take off for its orbital mission. Oops.

That wouldn't surprise me at all, Fighteer.

(There are times I think that Mr. Stanley is intentionally dragging things out, for the sake of sadism. )

What, so only Helix survives? Doesn't play out right at all if you ask me; Helix may be part of the "main cast" but he's not nearly involved enough in this storyline to be the only robot not crippled by the intelligence-killing virus. Mostly he's the comic relief. Someone like Sawtooth or Blunt and/or Edge, that could go somewhere (even if I both expect and hope that it won't come to that), but not Helix.

Taking reasonable precautions, building communication nodes: off. Audible isolation barriers: on.

Maybe we'll get back to reading the notes Friday.

Edit: Well, almost. Blunt gives final instructions. And Jar-Jar-Bot quotes Dickens.

edited 11th Feb '10 9:25:33 PM by LarryD

Tap... tap... tap... tap...

Wha? Huh? Oh, a new comi... zzzzzz

Tap... tap... tap... tap...

Any millenium now...

I'll admit, I can't quite break away from this comic since it's the first webcomic I ever read and got hooked on, but...damn, the pacing sucks. It's slower than molasses going uphill in January. With crutches.

I also sometimes can't help but feel that the attempts at Hard Sci-Fi get in the way of the comic as a whole. I mean, with all the silliness going on, is it really necessary to portray space travel realistically?

Considering that the premise wouldn't even be able to exist if space travel weren't hard (Florence would have been sent back with the Asimov, or someone would realize she was gone after a short while and send someone to look for her), I don't see how you can complain about it being thrown on or detracting from the story.

I forget and am too lazy to look it up: Is space travel STL or just a slow version of FTL?

They have FTL, but it's very expensive and still takes weeks to months to get from one star to another. Communications are lightspeed unless carried on an FTL ship.

You know, I used to not really notice the pacing, except for an occasional mental grumble, but with the current GITD story, the more it gets stretched out, the more annoyed I get. If Mr. Stanley is a sadist, as I mentioned previously in this thread, though, complaining about it would just tell him that he's on the right track, furthering the hassle.

Oh, and Fighteer, you forgot dangerous. The FTL drive is called the Dangerous And Very Expensive (or DAVE) drive, after all.

edited 13th Feb '10 5:04:59 PM by Nohbody

Well THAT'S a problem◊.

Looks like Edge gets to play the hero after all, despite initial appearances. Florence was right to give him a chance. There's simply no way Edge will go along with GITD, even if Blunt will—even if it weren't for all the legitimate reasons, Edge is way too proud of his own intellect to accept a forced lobotomy.

edited 14th Feb '10 7:19:32 PM by Brickman

If there's a robot equivalent of crack, I'm wondering if Blunt has been partaking in it.

You kidding? Gardener In The Dark is everything Blunt ever wanted. It renders all the robots on Jean completely safe to humans, and ensures that they won't ever stop properly doing their jobs. To the degree that it's even still necessary at all, which is somewhat diminished (though still nonzero), quality control and all related tasks for ensuring their safety will become very easy. How's he supposed to know they f'd up the implementation?