@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

ariadne

@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org

He/him. Programmer, writer, and artist on a journey of self-creation. Huge proponent of ecological thinking, open culture, and countering domination with solidarity. Currently brewing decades worth of worldbuilding, fridge logic, anime, and an occasional dash of real logic into an open-licensed far-future Universe as part of Project Canonicity.

Their world indicts our own by showing us how small our lives become when bottled up for the consumption of tyrants. Read more at wiki.canonicity.org.

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vga256, to retrogaming
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

i love visiting rural towns. went for a day trip with my mom just to get out of the city for a few hours.

inevitably, i found big box games at their thrift store 😅

and now i’m doing the most 12 year old thing possible: reading the seawolf manual on the ride home 😂

ariadne,
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

@vga256 I remember doing that! Always had to weigh whether to get two games from the EB Games clearance bin, or one from the shelf plus the manual to tide me over for that agonizing 20 minutes 😅

ariadne, to sciencefiction
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

Alright, Happy New Year's, let's do some catchup!

#WritingWonders January 1: "What are your writing plans for the coming year?"

Last year I tightened up a bunch of worldbuilding, finished an outline, and started on some visualization. This year, I aim to complete the first draft of Canonicity’s first Webnovel, The Maiden-Heretic of Laclathan! That’s the WIP I’ve been using for WritingWonders, the one with two chapters soon to have company: https://canonicity.org/works/TMHOL

#C8y #MaidenHeretic #ScienceFiction #AmWriting

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

Here is an interesting experiment design (I couldn’t do since it makes me too sad.)

2 sets of ants. The control group is washed, placed alone in the territory of another colony (one at a time) until they are attacked— but then they are rescued via asperator washed again and returned home.

The test group is washed & disguised with alien pheromones and returned to their home colony until they get attacked by their sisters but then they are rescued washed again and returned home.

ariadne,
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

@futurebird Apologies for the oddly-specific question, “Sir, this is a Wendy’s” and all 😅

I’m deeply and unironically interested in what the experimental outcome would be. My own (less scientific, more Medieval philosophic) explorations are focused on probing how much of a social organism’s social context is the result of external information processing between individuals. Essentially, I’m playing around with treating persistently-shaped networks of interactions between individuals like a substrate layer upon which some kind of rules-based thermodynamic exchange might be doing work in its own feedback loop, related to but independent of the individuals.

tl;dr Do we even know enough to make a solid hypothesis here, or are there existing papers on individual ants returning to their sisters with a cause for estrangement? Better yet, is there an existing myrmecology term I could be following with these questions haha?

ariadne,
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

@robotistry @futurebird To me that’s the mystery: how does a simple, direct ruleset emerge without a mind that contains those concepts? It’s more remarkable to me how simple their behavior architecture is than anything else, as if already reduced by logic. Slime molds we can kinda-sorta explain with Automata, but Ants literally go on goal-directed, kilometers-long campaigns carrying their sovereign like The 300 😄

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Today is Trans-Neptunian Object Day (TNO - same as Kuiper Belt Object) at #DPS2023, I'm giving a science talk later today, and I'll share a few highlights when I can.

ariadne,
@ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

@sundogplanets what an interesting result that would be! If observed, I wonder if it would be as simple as a relation to grain size, like a zero-G angle of repose (volume of repose?)

erosdiscordia, to writing

deleted_by_author

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    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @erosdiscordia always down to explore a new webnovel - that way I can do something cool while I procrastinate on mine 😂

    jamesthomson, to random
    @jamesthomson@mastodon.social avatar

    "We've always been at war with Lightning."

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @jamesthomson I knew they’d sell it as an ingenious move no one could have seen coming, but it stuck out even harder after the Mother Nature skit! Then again, the Mother Nature skit is pretty much how ancient kings claimed their authority. Deference, but only to something that won’t annoy them with silly things like “laws” or push back on their magnificence 🤣

    golgaloth, to worldbuilding
    @golgaloth@writing.exchange avatar

    What local games do your characters come across. Why do they constantly lose?

    #WorldBuilding #gaming #WritingTips #writing #ttrpg #WritingCommunity

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @golgaloth In their interstellar travels Saki and Sinóle are often involved in Tethyne Polo matches, where Tethyne Polo is Polo with 130-meter long, multi-thousand-ton sentient teleians* instead of horses.

    They often lose because Saki won’t take it seriously when there’s no weapons fire involved! Eventually she suffers enough blind strikes from her opponents to acquire her own reason to play: vengeance 😅

    *Teleian: an organism produced by Simulated Evolution. https://wiki.canonicity.org/index.php/Simulated_Evolution

    #C8y #MaidenHeretic #Mecha

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Contemplating making a legit "call out" video for all the leftist (in this case it feels more like "leftist") youTubers who can't be bothered to so much as mention the fediverse.

    It makes me kinda angry to hear laments and critiques of "corporate social media" -- but then there is an action one could take-- it's far from perfect- but it's here.

    Maybe I shouldn't be angry about it, just start it that way to uh... get attention? Yeah.

    IDK if anyone will listen- but, it needs to be said, right?

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird I think yes - blind spots are tough, even for people who purport to resist the status quo. IMHO some occasional polemic can grease the wheels when people are just shy of listening…

    john, to random
    @john@sauropods.win avatar

    What’s the smallest #rocket that could reach low-earth orbit, with current technology? No payload.

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @john Probably not much smaller than the currently-smallest rockets that do carry payload. The payload of modern rockets is only a few percentage points of the launch weight! https://www.rocketlabusa.com/launch/electron/

    …please forgive me if your domain knowledge is way, way more advanced than that and you wanted some math 😅

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @john For modern two-stage rockets, every pound of payload adds about 1 pound of upper stage and 10 pounds of lower stage. The essential problem is that the launcher has to accelerate both the payload and itself, with no help from intake air like Jet Engines have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Timothy is a human-sized wood louse in my story. I'm having some trouble finding the right name for his --conveyance. It's not exactly a stroller, nor is it a wheelchair.

    Timothy can walk without assistance, he's just very slow. So, he made a little cart where he can sit on a pile of pillows under a gay little red and white striped awning and have his friends who are in such a pointless hurry push him about.

    He could have motorized it, the ants have the tech, but he deliberately did not.

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird My first impression is that is sounds like a rickshaw/pedicab, which is a pretty hilarious image

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird I don’t know how your linguistic #worldbuilding works, but they have dozens of other names in various languages, too - there might be a cross-linguistic arthropod pun in there somewhere 😅

    futurebird, (edited ) to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    Do you think "mind uploading" will ever be possible?

    This is some scenario where a human mind is copied and modeled digitally.

    This isn't a ship of Theseus situation where a brain is slowly replaced over time.

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird Biology is so efficient, and evolution such a long process, I don’t believe there’s a compelling reason to assume an organism has a lossy representation. My stance is that “mind uploading” would have to involve a complete physical simulation, environment included, and at that point it’s just the same thing with an epically-higher power bill…

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird @TerryHancock Absolutely, custom hardware is likely table stakes. Even that, though, assumes consciousness (or thought, for that matter) isn’t inherently embodied. If it is, even partially, I’d expect the mind of the resulting being to rapidly diverge from whatever organism it was copied from.

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird @TerryHancock I agree we’d see at least the differences between identical twins even with perfect copies. My interest (can’t really call it a concern haha) is whether we’d see more extreme divergence owing to some physical rootedness.

    The potential emergence of truly alien values, drives, and/or aesthetic concerns would be utterly fascinating and spawn a whole host of brand new ethical nightmares!

    BTW I know my thinking is unconventional here - I’m working from the arbitrary intuition there’s something fundamental about biology that models of any resolution won’t capture. This proposal that time encodes information into objects is a good example (apologies for the clickbait title): https://theconversation.com/life-modern-physics-cant-explain-it-but-our-new-theory-which-says-time-is-fundamental-might-203129

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @TerryHancock @futurebird Yes! If I recall, Turing intended that as a spitball example rather than something definitive. My angle on this whole thing is that the divergence might very well be desirable. In fact, that’s the basis for a fictional civilization I’m playing around with: https://wiki.canonicity.org/index.php/Simulated_Evolution

    futurebird, to random
    @futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

    “long term-ism” is a moral magnifying glass: the answers to that question “what must we do today to save the future?” say more about those giving the answers than they do about survival of the species.

    It’s obvious if you consider what radically different but equally “logical” answers are possible.

    Here is my own answer:

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @futurebird I agree wholeheartedly, and imo this line of thinking doesn’t come up nearly enough. For all the proposed causes of history, there’s every possibility human achievement is a correlation between population, available energy, and average opportunity per person. Or, more people with more freedom to do what they want with more energy. The flaw isn’t “too many people”, it’s “too few wills”, where those wills seek power for its own sake.

    neil, (edited ) to random

    deleted_by_author

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    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @neil very anecdotally, with a whole spoonful of salt, the line seems to be where the promotion stops being from a person and starts being from an organization presenting itself in a way it knows is comforting to a person.

    I think advertising’s noise of deception, which we have to spend mental effort to unwind, grates on people.

    eldritch48, to random

    Return to Alflynd: Station Infection

    Within moments, the anomaly had 'stung' the side of the station from what looked like its bottom, and began pumping nano-particles into the station - Spreading like a bacteria through a new host, following corridors as if they were arteries.

    Top down view of the anomaly attached to the station.

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @eldritch48 Remember, folks, never leave home without your autoimmune nanosystem!

    paul, to random
    @paul@tapbots.social avatar

    New hobby. Googling "As an AI language model" site:amazon.com.

    image/png
    image/png

    ariadne,
    @ariadne@mastodon.canonicity.org avatar

    @paul I suppose these are fake reviews farmed out to MTurk or other services and they’ve figured out One Weird Trick to 10x earnings at $0.001 per review or whatever. Now Amazon might need to find even more exploitable workers to moderate torrents of fake reviews now that they’re so blindingly obvious they can’t ignore them…

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