[2627] OK are we close enough?

[speedwell]

May 25, 2022 10:04:06 GMT saardvark said:

May 25, 2022 6:39:36 GMT jda said:

I am more interested in those:

well spotted!  but what are they?  "excitement/discomfort sweat"?  tears of joy?  teenage pimples?

The wide eyes and very slightly heightened colour just mean, physiologically, that she noticed him specially. In other words, he got her attention. 🙂

[drmemory]

May 25, 2022 10:48:05 GMT pyradonis said:

May 24, 2022 15:39:25 GMT drmemory said:

Anyway, for your first point, I always think of Arthur as being "special".  He is of a very different line that is raised from "birth" to be a companion and actually evolves over the years, getting different bodies and probably additional programming.  This is a very different situation than one who was supposed to be a pipe inspecting robot.  The basic maintenance robots always seemed much lower functionality and much more static to me.  I stand by my point until more evidence comes in.

You're making some assumptions here though - it was never said that Arthur was supposed to be a companion for a human (and if that is the case, we have no information about how many robots are made to be companions), and it was never said either that getting increasingly more advanced bodies over time is unusual for robots. From what we have seen with S13, it is hinted that all robot CPUs are made to easily interface with all kinds of chassis, even if it's just a wind-up mouse.

I can imagine that the relationship between Arthur and Juliette is indeed special. But a robot being romantically interested in a human is not. First, there is a section devoted to it in the school's student handbook (complete with a very speciesist guide on how to put a stop to it). And second, Arthur himself said he initially wrote a love letter to Juliette because all his friends were doing it at the time. Juliette states "she turned him down, [...] but [they] stayed friends". The way I understand it, Arthur was not even intended as a companion robot and it was simply chance that the two of them stayed friends.
So, TL;DR -> both the friendship and the romantic relationship between Arthur and Juliette are unusual cases. But romantic advances by robots towards humans are normal.

This is my first attempt at inter-comments.  Worth a try but I suspect I misunderstood the directions!  Oh well.  Anyway, we've seen no robot other than Arthur that was given different bodies over time.  Didn't Juliet say they were raised together?  I'm curious about whether that was an experiment or if there is a line of robots created to be single-user companions.Agree that there is precedent for other robots to form attachments, which are seen as undesirable by the court. I am saying that Arthur was meant to be a companion for Juliet, not claiming you said that, BTW.    I still think that too.

As the the Dr. Memory thing, well, I was ~40 years younger when I first started using this handle.  Sorry, things change over time!  I WISH my memory was still what it was when I was in my 20s!  I'm still pretty good at keeping the thread and remembering what happened in the plot and how it fits together, but no way am I confident that I remember every freaking detail of every episode, in sequence.

FYI, the handle came from my obsession with computer memory.  Back when a standard computer had like 16K, I expanded my Atari computers (not gaming systems, 800s and the like) to have all the extra memory I could stuff in, even though I had to program my own algorithms to manage it using bank switching and the like.  Now, when a typical smart phone comes with more memory than a Cray had then, it's all pretty obsolete, but at the time I was really into it.  Anyway, it didn't come from having a good memory - quite different from that. 

Wow, that's actually quite fascinating. Was this related to your job as well, or just a hobby?

Related to my job in the sense that I came into the computer industry when they were new and completely became obsessed with learning all I could about them at all levels, from hardware on up.  The memory stuff and early device driver stuff were all me, all hobby, done because I enjoyed it and liked making my BBS faster than the others. Long (and no doubt boring) story, but I had an Atari 800 with my user and password files and message base and file indices stored in RAM and rebuilt on boot, done from scratch before things like "write back cache" and "ramdisks" were widely known. Most done in assembly language... Also had >5 MB of disk space on 1.44" floppy drives on a CP/M box slaved to the Atari, which also allowed use of standard parallel and serial devices without lame (and pricy!) SIO interface boxes.

I think we're getting pretty far away from Gunnerkrigg here though and will stop now.    I will say that this stuff is probably an early instance of my loving to dive into the details and figure out how things fit together, though.  Still doing that to this day in both work and hobby... and here.  I'm sure the early computer nerd shines through!

[pyradonis]

May 25, 2022 19:16:36 GMT drmemory said:

This is my first attempt at inter-comments.  Worth a try but I suspect I misunderstood the directions!  Oh well.  Anyway, we've seen no robot other than Arthur that was given different bodies over time.  Didn't Juliet say they were raised together?  I'm curious about whether that was an experiment or if there is a line of robots created to be single-user companions.Agree that there is precedent for other robots to form attachments, which are seen as undesirable by the court. I am saying that Arthur was meant to be a companion for Juliet, not claiming you said that, BTW.    I still think that too.

They said they "grew up together". I realize how this montage of seeing them both getting older and both having their bodies change in their own way can make it seem as if they were intended to grow up together, but the way I understand it, it depicts a deep long term friendship that turned into love as they became adults, and they really only met for the first time when the young robots started writing love letters to students. Mind you, since we're dealing with the Court it's possible that someone still intended for them to grow up together - but without either one's knowledge.

[pyradonis]

May 25, 2022 19:16:36 GMT drmemory said:

This is my first attempt at inter-comments.  Worth a try but I suspect I misunderstood the directions!  Oh well.

This should help:

If you simply quote someone's post, the BBCode will look something like this in the editor:

If you posted it without changing anything, the result would look like this:

If you want to cut the quote in two, just insert a quote closing tag and a quote open tag in the appropriate place:

It will then look like this if posted:

You can then simply write your answers under each separate quote block:

And voilà:

[blahzor]

May 23, 2022 12:53:09 GMT Igniz said:

Erm, guys...?

Seems Tom fixed this

[saardvark]

Jun 7, 2022 8:26:31 GMT blahzor said:

May 23, 2022 12:53:09 GMT Igniz said:

Erm, guys...?

Seems Tom fixed this

well spotted!