Hello, I'm a new mind here at EP and I'm building a character for my first campaign.
He's primarily a criminal "problem solver" with a near-perfect success record. He's been contracted by hypercorps for one-shot below-the-board operations and has built up quite the nest egg. He's looking to go public, starting his own microcorp on Extropia or maybe Titan.
The issue is that once he gets to have an office or two, he's going to need to talk to clients and he wants a) to do it personally and b) to be able to take up-to-the-minute data into account when making decisions.
The problem is that while he could send a beta fork back to the office when he's queried, but that's too slow when he has to deal with lightspeed delays, say, when he's off in the LLE on a mission. What I considered is having an implanted QE comm that can send an updated beta fork when queried, but when business gets going that would get really expensive, really fast.
So I thought about modern video compression and had an idea. What if he has a saved beta fork in each office, which is updated whenever he backups/leaves on a mission. Then, he has a record of what that beta fork is in his mesh implants. When his office gets queried, he compares a current beta fork to the one that's in his office and sends only the changes over his QE comm, thus allowing him to have a current beta fork in each office even when he's off blowing stuff up.
Is there anything wrong with this? Anything I can do to improve it?
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Ego fork "buffering" and running a microcorp solo
Thu, 2012-10-04 17:17
#1
Fion Ravenwater
Ego fork "buffering" and running a microcorp solo
Thu, 2012-10-04 18:23
#2
Gantolandon
QE comms are too expensive to
QE comms are too expensive to send anything with them except of text messages. There is a good reason why no emergency QE farcasters are being made, despite the fact they would be insanely useful for gatecrashing missions.
Besides, there are usual problems with using forks to work for you. You are supposed to hire people, instead of copying yourself and doing all the work, otherwise you're undercutting local economy and no one is going to like you for that. Even on liberal Extropia, while you won't face any legal problems, your competitors will absolutely hate you and your rep will take a hit. Someone may even try to "liberate" your forks, either by deleting them from the server, or just approaching them and making an offer. If your pruned copy has a choice to work for the rest of their life (and, because of constant updates, probably impossible to merge back when not needed anymore), or withdraw with a morph and some credits... what would it choose?
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Thu, 2012-10-04 18:50
#3
NewtonPulsifer
I read the Titanian kroner is
I read the Titanian kroner is pegged to 1 terabyte of QE bits.
Transmitting an alpha fork would cost 256 million credits assuming it was 256 exabytes per ego.
So teleoperation/jamming/avatars is the only affordable way to go with QE.
Also, there's a 4 hour legal limit on beta forks in PC jurisdictions. I don't know what the Titanian norms/rules/laws are.
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
Thu, 2012-10-04 19:33
#4
Fion Ravenwater
NewtonPulsifer wrote:I read
Where do you find the 256 exobyte for an ego figure?
Anyways, the idea here is that (like video compression) I only transmit the difference between the beta fork that's at the office and a beta fork made at that point in time. The total transmission should be pretty small, depending on how much of his recent memory he deems necessary for the fork to have.
The point is that the fork is only active when called upon, thus avoiding time limits on forks.
Well, the idea was that the forks in each office would only be active when called upon, and they'd be rewritten to the baseline (Fion himself) each time he backed up. They'd be in storage the vast majority of the time. Having someone "rescue" them might be an issue, and I haven't really thought about the psychology of knowing you're a fork. Any way to get around that?
Though the idea of people getting pissed at me about that seems unlikely.
That's straight from the core books, and I'd think people would understand that a guy in such a high-risk business would want to personally review any offers.
Fri, 2012-10-05 00:15
#5
NewtonPulsifer
I pulled 256 exabytes from a
I pulled 256 exabytes from a study via a Google search.
The problem is we have no idea of the size of a delta/diff between two different pruned beta forks, nor how efficiently one can compress an ego image.
Even the 256 exabyte number is likely wrong.
If you're just trying to patch a 10 hour difference, and arbitrarily decide on a 1% neural change in 1000 hours is about right, your 256 million cost drops down to 25,600 credits, divided by the quality of your compression and/or pruning done on a beta fork.
Probably still too expensive.
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
Fri, 2012-10-05 00:18
#6
Fion Ravenwater
NewtonPulsifer wrote:I pulled
It really depends on how much diversion you get after 10 hours. It isn't comparable to a standard fork reintegration as the Beta fork isn't changing, so I don't know how much stuff you'd actually need to upload.
Fri, 2012-10-05 09:46
#7
Jaberwo
How about regularly forking
How about regularly forking yourself and do pychosurgery on them so they are loyal to you.
Then copy them to every office while updating them with recorded XP which they view at two or three times acceleration and let them skip the unimportant parts.
They might develope problems, but you can always erase them and make new ones.
If the bandwith for XP is too expensive use a mnemonic augmentation.
This way you are almost never more than a few hours behind.
Fri, 2012-10-05 10:26
#8
Decivre
One wonders if there could be
One wonders if there could be a lossy means of storing an ego. The memories might be a bit fuzzier, but you'd think it might be feasible.
And if so, compression could be significantly improved for such things as FTL egocasting.
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Fri, 2012-10-05 12:35
#9
Arenamontanus
My own standard estimates of
My own standard estimates of fork sizes are far smaller than exabytes. I suspect we are talking petabytes. But your neural mileage may vary.
The issue of having copyrations is interesting. There are good reasons to think this is a Big Deal economically speaking (check out the talks by Robin Hanson on upload economics), potentially profoundly disruptive to the normal kind of economics we see in EP. So, yes, a lot of people will want to avoid copyrations squeezing out the corporations... but the economic benefits might be so tempting that they happen despite attempts at reining them in.
The fact that your rep on Extropia takes a hit may be irrelevant if you earn enough credits. And you can always hire security. Or keep the nature of what you are doing under wraps.
(and on Extropia, there are likely some people who would think copyrations are just fine - it just that your character is wussy and not going for the full banyan lifestyle or attempting to become a group supermind. Cast off those mental shackles, man!)
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Fri, 2012-10-05 13:53
#10
Fion Ravenwater
Jaberwo wrote:How about
The point of this system is that when making a decision about taking a contract even hours of difference might matter. If Fion is on a mission and things go bad for whatever reason, that may seriously affect his availability and he really doesn't want to default on contracts as it'd be hard on his reputation
Those sound like good points. Thinking about it, I'd be fine with hiring people for different stations in the microcorp, but as Fion is going to be the one at the sharp end of the stick he wants to be personally involved in the decision making process.
Fion is specifically trying not to end up like the Pax Familae, so he's not going to be forking himself all over the place doing stuff, just for these decisions about contracts.