@JohnLocke Ah, continuity-of-being questions. What fun!

Stories where you save/restore a person from backup are interesting. Glasshouse by Charles Stross, the Commonwealth books by Peter F Hamilton, Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan... Bit of question about if it would end up being a good thing or not.

Actually, probably both. Could be really good, or really really bad, depending on who's in charge.

@AndyD273 Damn, you read so much more fiction than I do. I'm frequently impressed when someone has idea X then you pipe up with "Idea X has been written about in books A, B and C." I'm very impressed.

@AndyD273 Yep, it always depends on who's in charge.

@Green I love stories, and don't listen to music... so that means anytime I'm driving anywhere or working around the house I'm listening to an audiobook. And I have a pretty good memory for stories. I'm sure there are other examples of that idea that I'm forgetting. Those are just the ones that popped into my head

*don't listen to music much

It does imply a pretty high level of tech, to be able to digitize a persons memories and personality. It stands to reason that any civilization that can pull it off on their own tech know how will also have AI.

@AndyD273 Agreed.

Solving the computational complexity of how human brains work then recreating that on manufactured (not biogrown) hardware means you know all the mechanisms. Even if you haven't mastered 'AI', you have transferred NaturalIntelligence from it's squishy home to a metal one.

And getting NI to silicon is harder than AI.

I wonder, would you bother to try to grow your own AI if you could just use a restored human personality? Actually, that could lead to a really interesting story. You get your backup done, and then spin off instances of that backup to do tasks... which leads to the question of ethics. Is forcing your backed up personality to do work considered slavery? If you spin off an instance, and then terminate it, is that murder?

It means new compute hardware (because I'm pretty sure the x86-64 will not be the instruction set of whatever hardware hosts migrated NIs). It means new programming languages. It means new sensory hardware to interrogate how an existing meat brain is organized. It means entirely new branches of psychology.

And it means huge increases in data management because just one byte per brain cell already puts you into the terabyte range.

@AndyD273 I'd say "That's a very solid; it depends."

What if you did a tree of origin to establish authority of descendent clones of yourself?

Say, I'm the root of the tree so I have life/death authority over all my digital clones. If I die then the clones directly under me have control over their trees.

Then there's the whole problem of verification of my death. It's a valid attack to usurp authority of my clones by spoofing that I'm dead, even though my heart is still ticking.

@Green What if your clones try to murder you so that they can get control of the tree...

@AndyD273 :shrug: Don't have murderous clones?

Hmm, probably if something like that happened you'd wipe all the instances and restore from a clean backup...

@AndyD273 That seems best.

I guess you'd find out real quick who the psychopaths are.

@AndyD273 Yeah, you would. With a thousand copies of yourself running around, one of them is gonna go nuts eventually.

Why am I suddenly worried about data-center induced global warming and massive increase in the usage of electricity, beyond our means to supply it?

Perhaps exponential cost increases for each additional clone you make. This would tamp down the number of clones pretty quickly.

@Hosch250 Fusion will be ready by then. No worries!

Unless someone runs the math and finds it's literally impossible on a less than stellar scale...

@Hosch250 sounds like a WB question that someone has already asked.

Well, if instances are meant to be short lived. Like I spin one up in the morning, it goes to work for me, does my job, and then gets spun down at the end of the day. That would keep things from getting out of hand personality wise.

But still leaves loopholes to make an interesting story

Hmm. What if you need to be actively controlling it or you lose control forever?

@Hosch250 Something like this probably wont be able to run on silicon, and whatever comes next might not have the same energy or heat issues. Maybe it will involve biological computers

BTW, has Google unlisted Europe yet?

@AndyD273 Yeah, probably. But even then you get food supply issues. If the population suddenly doubled, it would definitely break existing supply chains.

And your clone needs fuel somehow.

@Hosch250 I was mostly talking about a digital clone, at least in what I wrote. Like a virtual you that you could spin up from your own backup to do things for you. Not an actual flesh clone

Like if you had a report to write, you could have a virtual you write it based on your own personality and your own knowledge

OK, the computer running your digital clone needs fuel.

Either in the form of electricity or food or some other energy form.

Scale that up to 100s or 1000s almost over night, and wham, someone just got really rich and took out our power/food supplies.

If it's a biological computer, it would probably need food, or if it's a digital computer, probably electricity.

@Hosch250 Probably depends on what kind of efficiency you end up with, and how well virtualization works. If it is efficient enough then you might break even when replacing existing tech. For instance, a 100W equivalent LED bulb puts out the same number of lumens as a 100W incandescent, BUT only uses a tiny fraction of the electricity. A biological computer might run on sugar, which can be gotten from a lot of different sources, or sunlight.

True.

But sunlight is a very unreliable source of power.

But, it could be a primary power source.

@Hosch250 Works out for trees... They get pretty big.

@AndyD273 Over a very long time.

Right. It's all about efficiency

Of course that is a lot of ifs. But so is personality backup and virtualization.

Yep.

Just problems that need to be overcome somehow or other. Not roadblockers.

And you might be able to get a lot done with a very limited VU (virtual you), which might be less resource intensive.

I really want to write this story that I have in my head right now. Half temped to use it as the basis for the next round of story-go-round. I could maybe write it on my own, but I kind of like the collaborative writing process. So many ideas that I would not have gotten with out yours (and others) ideas to build on top of.

Glad to be of help :)

Like, I kind of want to propose the idea of a collaborative venture to write, edit, and publish an actual long form story, but I know it's also a huge time commitment, and there are a lot of complexities if someone drops out part way through...

Someone needs to kill these guys quickly: php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php

@Hosch250 Why?

Did you read that article?

@Hosch250 Yeah. I've used parts of that feature before.

In a very limited fashion, but it did come in handy.

Most of it is impractical, but it's also very optional

So, you can do $a = (read string from input), then $$a = "value". Then you can re-assign $a and lose access to $$a...

@Hosch250 There are less smart ways to do it. Where it came in handy for me was with pulling info from an array, where the keys had to be a specific string. So if they keys were were cat1, cat2, cat3... then I could use "cat".$i in a loop to go through all the values in the array. Or something along those lines. it was a while ago.

Why not just use an loop over a sorted array?

because that wasn't the type of array I had to work with

OK.

Hungarian notation...

I'm glad that SQL Server lets me use more than 8 characters in a field name. I work with a DB2 database a lot, and trying to figure out what the fields are for is a constant guessing game

Either that, or the guy that set up the DB2 database was an idiot. Apparently when he set it up they hadn't discovered normalization.

Or foreign or primary keys for that matter.

Actual field names from a table that I'm working with today: GHJDLR, GHJJBC, GHJJOB, GHJCOD, GHJVIN, GHJROD, GHJSTA, GHJGDT, GHJRCD, GHJLAB, GHJDCD. The unique identifiers for a row are GHJDLR, GHJJBC, and GHJJOB.

Holy cow.

words I live in fear of: "Can you figure out where they are storing the data for ____, we need it for a report." The table names are just as informative.

@AndyD273 Naming variables and datafields like that should be a capital crime.

@Green At least there is some consistency between tables, kinda... For instance, in the table GROMAST the unique identifiers are GHJDLR, GHJJBC, and GHJJOB. In the table GGRHIST the unique identifiers are GHIDLR, GHIJBC, GHIJOB, and I think GHILOG?

@AndyD273 Okay, so maybe just cut off their pinkies so they can't type '{' or '}' again.

The good news is that by the end of the year, if not sooner, we should have everything moved inhouse and I won't have to mess with those system again...

@AndyD273 hooray!

Hi @dot_Sp0T

I suspect they (Niardul and Brokhem) go report the phylactery to the group.

The residents either replace it or recover it.

Sounds good

@AndyD273 o hai

@dot_Sp0T heh

Hey, just curious if you could confirm or deny something... I read somewhere that a lot of Europe thinks that American work habits are weird. I might be remembering this wrong, but something about it being strange that Americans work so much. I'm also pretty tired, so maybe I'm thinking of something else

(also, it might not apply to where you are too)

@AndyD273 You realize how thick the irony is there right?

I've heard the same. Often referred to as "Work to live" vs "Live to work"

Well, what else are you going to do?

Sleep?

@Hosch250 That sounds amazing.

(Yeah, that's half serious, half sarcastic.)

@James Well, me being tired isn't works fault. I stayed up too late sanding some drywall and then got up to get the kids to school.

I'm more curious how different it is in any parts of Europe that @dot_Sp0T is familiar with.