Tayswift

The wikipedia section on morphine synthesis says that it's possible though way more expensive than extracting it from poppies. Maybe given a few hundred years morphine synthesis would be possible?

Eleven is my favorite character in stranger things.

Synthetics who don't bother to take the two minutes to come up with a good backronym for their acronymic name. Be prepared to be questioned on this! And don't use a massive word for your name if you're not willing to explain it. Like once an AI named A.L.L.I.T.E.R.A.T.I.O.N. got mad at me for pointing out that its name wasn't an alliteration. Like wouldn't it make more sense for its name to be A.A.A. for Artificial Alliteration Automaton or something? If you don't want to be bothered with this process, nobody is forcing you to make your name an acronym! Just name your synthetic the word itself instead of capitalizing it and putting periods in between for no reason.

Having mechanically built in mental disorders was rejected a while ago.

This change is in progress over at tg. As you can see though, it's a pretty complicated change, which is why nobody's done it yet. Also datum antags needs to be merged before action button changelings can be ported...

Sure! Here's the relevant files: main newscaster code newscaster interface code You'll probably have to update the admin newscaster too... And probably the admin topic function (which is a 3000 line function I think), since admins can add wanted issues through there It's probably not the worst code ever, I would just be worried that people continue not to use wanted issues.

The problem is that newscaster code is very very complicated for very little reward. Just adding title broadcasting to newscasters required navigating a ton of spaghetti. Multiple wanted issues would be a nightmare to implement. It might be simpler to just have the HoS make an announcement along with a description.

On the other side of things, trigger happy bartenders who are itching for an excuse to shoot someone, even if shooting them would be punitive rather than preventative. That and screaming on comms for the rest of the shift about trespassing when a doctor hopped the empty bar to grab some wine for SR.

I agree with everything about your post except this. Damage isn't expensive, replacement is. There's a very big difference between minimizing damage to something and minimizing the replacement of something.

There are quite a few RP only ghost roles that aren't supposed to affect the round. Ian, for example. The whole point of these RP only ghost roles is that there's no harm in creating a ton of them, giving ghosts things to do and not creating additional work for admins. If you power creep these ghost roles then it'll turn into something like emagged maint drone which ended up being very toxic before it was finally nerfed multiple times.

PAIs are already used as a sentient death alarm. They're not supposed to be able to help you out of a situation. It's an RP role that shouldn't affect the round.

At this point, you may as well put a price in antag tokens on each issue then. Grammar issue: 0 antag tokens. Greys being able to wash their hands: 3.99 antag tokens. It's absurd and will be gamified. We should not be treating an in-game effect as a currency. Being antag should not be upheld as some sort of reward. We have enough antag fishing on the server as it is. If you don't like playing antag, you can just turn off antag preferences. If you like playing antag, you will have to play AI/captain/whatever roles have the highest number of tickets to keep up with everyone else. It is a punishment for those who like to play antag.

This is terrible in a number of ways. I can easily file a bunch of minor issues for every single spelling/grammar error I see in the game and then fix them one by one with a PR and rack up antag tokens. Hard to tackle, important issues will be ignored in favor of the best time-to-antag token ratio issues. You say "learn to code" but you fail to realize that a lot of people are very busy with stuff that doesn't involve this game. Not everyone is willing to invest the time to learn how to use git and pick up coding. This also rewards people who enjoy playing antag. Not everybody enjoys antag and I'm not sure it's a good idea to put antagerry on a pedestal as a reward people are scrambling over each other for. Once an in-game effect is treated as a currency or commodity, it opens the doors to microtransaction-esque things like the PR I linked where you get rewarded for playing AI and punished for playing cargo tech.

I don't know about that. Treating antagonist tokens like currency isn't necessarily a good idea. It incentivizes gaming for antag tokens and is unfair to those who can't/don't have the time to learn how to code. And it leads to systems like this where antag tokens become like microtransaction rewards you get for playing certain roles. The most fair way to treat antagonist picking is to use the random number generator. As soon as antag tokens start being handed out for other reasons it turns into a currency that people will want.

I've already explained why crewsimov is more immune to this than Corporate is, because crewsimov sets universal rules while Corporate gives you an equation to minimize. This is not a case of "all lawsets are the same". Calculative lawsets are inherently more prone to manipulation than deontological lawsets are, which is why they need to be thought about much more carefully.

The point of the example isn't to demonstrate an in-game scenario but to show how, with no malicious intent at all, and just an honest interpretation of the laws, you can go to destroying all of Nanotrasen. This can backfire in smaller, in-game ways. For example, let's say an AI interprets replacement as cloning. Then, to minimize expenses, the AI might be incentivized to just hide a crew corpse it found instead of bringing it to medbay. It would be self-antagging, but I think it's a good idea to make the lawset compatible with the rules. Right now, we have a lawset that minimizes ALL the variables in that equation. It's basically a pre-subverted AI. @IK3I's rewording of corporate in my PR adds a few extra parameters that prevent corporate from backfiring in rule-breaking ways (but leaves the rest of corporate's interesting gameplay in place).

Here's what the corporate lawset looks like, reduced down to a simple (oversimplified) equation to minimize: expenses = (number_of_AIs * probability of AI needing replacement * expense of replacing AI) + (number_of_equipment * probability of equipment needing replacement * expense of replacing equipment) + (number of crew * probability of crew needing replacement * expense of replacing crew) To make the math easier, I'm just gonna abbreviate this equation to: E = nAI * pAI * eAI + nE * pE * eE + nC * pC * eC To minimize any equation, all you have to do is do a derivative to see where the gradient points and then walk down the slope. In this case, since everything is just multiplicative, to reduce expenses, you just have to reduce all the variables. A human when confronted with this equation would never think of touching nAI, nE, or nC. But an AI that has no additional parameters to not touch those variables will try to minimize every single variable in that equation, because that's going down the slope in the space of expenses. If Nanotrasen is allowed to continue operating, nAI, nE, and nC are all going up. It only makes sense that as Nanotrasen grows, more crew members and more equipment will be added, growing exponentially. So the only way to reduce expenses permanently to 0 is to eliminate all crew, stations, and equipment. Sure, it could result in a temporary uptick in expenses, but it's worth it for the long term, permanent reduction of expenses. There is nothing malicious about this. It's just math and how AIs are a completely different type of being from humans. This is what Nick Bostrom is talking about with the papercilps maximizer. Imagine there's an AI with this set of laws: 1. Maximize paperclips This is the same principle, except applied to "minimize expenses".

Crewsimov doesn't have the problem of the AI deciding to take over and kill all sentient life, but Corporate does. This is because crewsimov is a deontological lawset while corporate is a utilitarian one. Deontological lawsets set up universal rules that must always be obeyed. There's no way a Crewsimov AI could kill someone if it wanted to. The drawback is that in situations where a conflict occurs, the crewsimov AI is paralyzed. The utilitarian lawset is more robust, but it comes at the cost of being too calculating, and taking the calculations to unexpected places. For example, let's say an AI is confronted with the trolley problem. There's an out of control trolley (or mulebot ?) on the station about to hit 5 crew members in a 1 tile wide maintenance hallway. The only thing the AI can do is redirect the trolley into another 1 tile wide maintenance hallway where there's only 1 crew member. The crewsimov AI is literally paralyzed. Either action it chooses, crew harm will result. It can't do a balancing act or a calculation because the deontological rules that govern its behavior are universal. The corporate AI is more flexible. It can decide to switch tracks and kill 1 person instead of 5, maybe because 1 person is less expensive to replace than 5 people. But maybe the 5 people are the 5 members of command, and if all 5 of them get killed, people will call the shuttle. This might reduce expenses in the long run, so the AI could conceivably allow the 5 heads to die. Or maybe the single person standing in the other hallway is the CEO of Nanotrasen, and the AI figures that NT would fall apart without them. Then the AI could switch tracks to kill that person instead. This is why Crewsimov is guaranteed to be a safe (but inflexible) lawset, whereas Corporate is a little too flexible, since there aren't enough parameters to prevent excessive minimization of expenses. Corporate is basically a badly programmed AI straight out of dystopian sci-fi.

This is what I would say in response to why corporate is so bad. It's so specific in that it mandates that replacement is what is expensive. And so the AI is forced to minimize the replacement of station equipment. It's not the AI intentionally trying to screw the crew over, it's literally what the lawset says on the tin: "The station and its equipment are expensive to replace. Minimize expenses." Replacement is the ONLY expensive act. You can't get mad at an AI for literally just following a common sense interpretation of the laws. And every corporate AI should be scheming for ways to destroy Nanotrasen completely, because that is the ultimate reduction of expenses. This is why I put up the PR you're talking about to try to fix that and broaden what's expensive about station equipment being destroyed. And to be honest, I think most people hate that PR so I don't think it has any chance of getting merged.

It is possible. If, hypothetically, a window and a crew member are equally expensive, and you can only prevent the replacement of one or the other, you have to attempt to prevent the replacement of the window first. The AI is not lawed to care about the cost of anything. It just knows that certain things are expensive and expenses have to be minimized. How expensive things are is completely open to interpretation. This thread was started by "They overthink their laws and go waaaaaaay too much into the future." If an AI is just following its laws in a legitimate way but creating unintended consequences, the usual procedure is to just relaw the AI, not to protest or forcibly eject the AI. If that were the case, then corporate may as well be "Do whatever the crew want, or protests will happen/CC will eject you" which, at that point, reduces to another meaningless lawset. Besides, a research station's goal isn't directly profits, it's to advance research (in the hope that profits will result from the research in the future). The other arms of the corporation handle the profit making. Corporate is meant to reduce expenses. If that means we can't fix broken parts of the station, then so be it. Run on the bare minimum. Make people use oxygen instead of fixing breaches, etc. It's not an unreasonable interpretation. Necaladun brings up a good point about the minimize language too. When you tell an AI to minimize something, it will literally try to minimize it to the best of its ability. I recommend reading about the paperclip maximizer discussed by philosopher Nick Bostrom. Any time you tell an AI to minimize/maximize something without giving it additional parameters (like be friendly to humans and don't try to kill anyone), it will literally try to minimize/maximize that thing. What's the best way to minimize expenses? To take over the whole universe and then destroy it all. Because at that point, there is nobody left to be replaced, no stations/equipment left to replace, and no AIs left to replace. Expenses brought to 0, forever. Whereas allowing civilization to go on would result in potentially infinite expenses. Corporate is a fundamentally bad lawset that should not be a default lawset. We need to fix it or replace it with something that isn't as absurd.

This is why corporate is a terrible lawset. So Evadable Moxie is right in that under corporate, it is possible for crew expenses to outweigh station equipment expenses. But if there's a tie, ie if Renault and the captain are equally expensive, then you have to pick Renault. But because there's literally no price tag on anything, Corporate is basically a "do whatever you want!" lawset, since you can interpret expenses to be whatever. Sure, captain is more expensive than Renault, why not? It's equally valid to claim that Renault is more expensive than the captain. It's a poorly worded lawset. Also, the replacement terminology is problematic because the lawset is all about preventing replacement. So depending on how you interpret "replacement", Renault dying in itself isn't what causes the expense. As long as nobody creates a new fox and names it "Renault", you're in the clear to just leave Renault's corpse lying around. The captain, on the other hand, is someone that the crew WILL probably try to "replace", if you interpret replacement as putting someone else as the role of captain (the HoP will probably try to fill in). Which means to prevent the replacement of the captain, you should try to save/revive him to the best of your ability. Of course, an AI could also interpret "replacement" as cloning the captain, in which case that AI would be obligated to shut down the cloner. That interpretation is obviously not as common.

Social engineering is definitely something that people should try more often! Awesome story

I had an interesting time as a Syndicate Assassin, though I wish I had murdered a little bit less. Anyways, one of my assassinations was kinda interesting cause RP played some role in it. As Syndicate Assassin, you get an ebow, a .357 revolver, and an all access ID. Pretty strong equipment that allows you to take down anyone easily. So, my method of assassinating this round was just to walk around all official-like, and act like I belonged, kill my target, and just act like nothing had happened. One of my targets was a cargo tech named Yuri. I found Yuri at the HoP line, and so I immediately decide that the best place to assassinate Yuri would be the NT rep office, since it has shutters. So I walk up to Yuri, and say (all dialogue from this point forward is just vaguely from memory, I didn't save a log of this) "Hey Yuri, this is important. I need to speak with you about a high priority issue". Yuri agrees, tells the HoP he'll talk to him later, and follows me into the NT rep's office, where he sat down at the desk on the other side of me, and I sit down behind the desk within reach of the shutters button. Unfortunately, a sec borg saw this happen and was watching from the outside. So, I decided that this would need to be more drawn out, and I would have to act like I was doing official business, and hopefully the borg would just get bored and walk away. Knowing that cargo techs often do weird shit in their boredom, I open with: Me: Hey Yuri, so we've heard about the things you've been doing in cargo... Yuri: Oh, I collect exotic meats. He places a slab of pug meat on the desk. I roll with this. Me: So, yeah, my bosses aren't too happy with this. We consider dog meat unethical. Yuri: But they do it in the Earth country China. Me: Well, you see, on the station I come from, eating dog meat is banned. Yuri: But it's not really hurting anyone... Me: Well, in the past, eating dog meat might have been okay, but given the high presence of Vulpkanin crew members on this station, eating dog meat can be considered offensive and insensitive. As we continue to debate the ethics of dog meat, eventually the sec borg gets bored and goes away. At this point I close the shutters of the NT rep office. Me: So, Yuri, do you know what the punishment is on our station for eating dog meat? Yuri: Okay, okay, I'll throw it away! I ebow Yuri, then fire three shots at him with my revolver, and then stuff him and lock him in the NT rep locker. A civy outside looked at me funny as I walked out, blood trailing behind me, but said nothing. Syndicate assassin is pretty crazy, but I hope the RP made the murders at least somewhat interesting.

13 is my lucky number I mean 14, really

What is matchmaking?