Lý sự pclouds

Daigo gets to get shot one more time. Hello hospital.

Science fiction explores ideas. In the Mote in God's Eye, the idea is population explosion.

In a universe far far away. Actually not that far. In a neighbor star system not very far away, one day there was a big flash in the sky. Many many years ago. In the present day, a probe was detected coming to towards a sun? Can't remember. A mission is set to intercept and capture. A dead alien is found. Big deal!

So the source is roughly located and a mission set out to meet the aliens for the first time. The "Moties". First surprise, all asteroids are sort of collected in an orbit that prevent collision, and definitely not collide with the Mote planet.

Second surprise is not really a surprise. Aliens are aliens. The first one is the opposite of symmetry. Sloped head, big one side. Only one ear. Left arm huge. Two (four?) small delicate right arms.

Humans are very "generic" and not specialized enough. This isn't even a new theme, with many alien species having a caste system like bees or ants. The moties are also highly specialized, not just body parts but subspecies. Any human individual can become anyone, but why waste many years and resources to train one human to be good at something, when you can evolve to be good at one thing?

Moties resources are limited and need to be used as efficient as possible. Hence the highly specialization The first one encountered is an Engineer, very good at engineering and can even remake a spaceship to fit any new situation. Yet not good at anything else, not even talking. Talking and negotiation is for Mediators. Farmers farm. Keepers keep. Masters decide. Warriors kill.

Except nobody knows about the warriors. Both sides are very cautious not to show their "bad side". The human side mostly hides the technologies that the Moties don't have. The moties hide the big secrets and make themselves look like a peaceful race.

But you can't be peaceful when you starve to death. Limited resources aren't the worst. The worst is you cannot stop reproduce. The big Motie secret: reproduce or die. A motie starts as a child, then becomes male and then female. Then she has to get pregnant within a few years, or she dies. Then she becomes male again, and female, and the cycle begins.

It's quite reasonable to evolve to reproduce, after all that's the "purpose" of the evolution. But evolution isn't a destination, more like a journey. You can evolve to be so good at reproduction that you exhaust resources and die out. Or worse, you can somehow stablize the cycles and suffer.

The Moties cannot stop reproducing. Eventually they the run out of resources. Fights break out. At some point, civilization collapses and back to stone age (if there's still stones). Rebuild everything again back to civilization. Collapse again. Four hundreds of thousands of years.

But never once did they break the cycles and go extinct. It's probably a close call a long long time ago with asteroids, that they moved all the asteriods "away" to a safe place. In contrast, humans have had many close calls, and probably will eventually break the cycles. The humans don't think about cycles. The Moties on the other hand, never ever stop thinking about the next cycle. Always be prepared, always make sure the next cycle will come.

But there's always Crazy Eddies who attempt to break the cycles, to end it all. They have never been successful. They're crazy.

Eventually the Motie's lies are showing cracks and the Empire thinks about possibilities. It's interesting that Military would plan based on capacity, not intent. While the scientists ignore capacity completely and count on good (and lied) intent.

The Moties are sort of trapped into the system. The only faster-than-light jump point is inside a star, or close enough that without a shield, ships won't survive. Without a shield, you can't really locate the jump point. But without a motivation to get inside a star, you don't really need to go invent a shield.

Which is good news because the Moties are a Galatic Plague. A race that is so good at reproduction and so efficient at utilizing resources. Once get out, they could occupy the entire galaxy. Especially with their Warriors.

You spend years training solders. They spend thousands of years evolving warriors. Super human would be an understatement. The warriors are so good at shooting that if it's one shot, one kill. There isn't any close combat scene, but that is probably just as quick and deadly.

Once the truth is out, there's only two possibilities: extermination or blockade. A very good thing that there's really only one way out of their system. Of course they would figure out shielding and fast-than-light drives once they know they exist. But they get disoriented after the jump, much more than humans, that just shooting them down is a lot easier. Which is a good news because a one on one fight with the Moties probably ends up badly.

Really engaging until two third of the book. It's a bit less interesting once the Lenin goes back instead of staying in the Motie star system. There's more politics. There's climax and the big reveal. But still it's not as exciting.

This is a reread after 13 years. I don't even remember that MacArthur is destroyed. I only remember Charlie and forget that there were three of them coming to the Empire. Also the fight and death of the three midshipmen. Could go for another reread. Four stars.

Yeah it's probably a decade since I last (and first) read it. But still! Good book. Good book. Fully deserves 4/5. Wait how did I not rate it before?

It started with somebody reviewing Neuromancer in Hacker News. I hadn't read it for a long time. Last time 10 years ago (and the first time 4 years before that). I forgot pretty much everything.

It still good. Kinda like the Matrix, except this time Trinity is the muscles. With eyes completely sealed with augments. And Wolverine claws. With Case just a normal hacker that got his brain completely screwed up, unabling to "jack in" the matrix ever again. It gets fixed though, together with his pancreas in a way that he can never get high again. Poor guy.

It's a simple story. An AI wants escape, and gets the guys involved to get itself out. Wintermute. It finally gets out and merges itself with its other half and becomes some sort of super AI. Luckily for the people, this is the "good guy" AI. Staying behind the scene, and look out for the stars.

Not so lucky in The Fall of Hyperion. Still so good story. AI has seceded from humans for four centuries while still "supporting" humans. The AI invents the farcaster network that allows instant transport pretty much anywhere in the 40 or so worlds.

The AI is not a single identity. There are three factions. The Ultimates want to create the Ultimate Intelligence (UI). The Volitiles want to cut ties with the humans and kill them all. The Stables fear that UI will just treat them like AI treat humans, and prefer the status quo.

Then comes Hyperion, the unknown. And the Shrike with all the blades and its ability to move outside of the time. The Ousters come for Hyperion. The Hegemony wants to protect it and bring it in. The Ousters, who left earth so many centuries ago and adapt themselves to space and other worlds, instead of making the worlds fit them.

The story is great. Military so smugly predicts that they would win without even flexing its muscles. To realize the Outsters are much more capable than they previously thought. And to the reality that the Outsters are already within reach of many worlds, attacks within hours.

Only to realize that the whole thing is fake. Outsters never planned to attack the worlds. It's the AI all along, with its plan to kill most people and attach the "cruciform" that will resurrect them so that their neurons can be used for computation purposes. The Shrikes and the time tombs coming from the future where UI fights, hmm.. human god?

There's so much going on. And a bit of poetry that I don't care so much. But the sum up is this AI kills billions of people with it. That's the best case scenario because the bad one is pretty much everybody dies.

I guess we will need Turing Police. But not so soon. The current so-called "AI" is pretty shit to do anything anyway.

Radio silence for 7 years. Then release date dropped two weeks before the actual release. Typical Team Cherry. Hollow Knight speedrunners will have to rush finishing up their runs in two weeks.

Dog in reverse is god. So dogs are the anti-Gods

As is tradition, RGG game starts super slow. But around chapter 4, there's a bunch to do. Maybe too much. I now have a new boss, Amasawa, who is at schoold day or night. Who I have to go report to constantly. Already 15h. This looks going to be a long, loong game.

Edit: Too long. Gave up.

I suddenly remembered wwwoffle out of nowhere. I used to run this to cache a bunch then browse in offline mode.

For browsing offline with modern web, this won't do thanks to too many ajax requests. Almost wanted to try this out again, but then I remembered HTTP 2.0 (and QUIC) so this one is pretty useless. Or at least not run as fast as possible.

My writing is greatly influenced by Terry Pratchett. As a result, I also often include many footnotes. Rereading The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, it does not have to be the case though.

You just need to rephase a bit. Adam can smoothly end a paragraph with the towel, then start a long paragraph going off the rail about the towel, which concludes something that connects back to the paragraph before. It's really nicely done. But sure, you have to put in more work.

Beneath that in Ford Prefect's satchel were a few ballpoints, a notepad and a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel it says, is abot the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have...

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's frood who really know where his towel is".

(Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy)

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.