#Neural Machine Translation

[coreagroup]

Transformations in Machine Translation

The field of machine translation has undergone remarkable transformations since its inception, evolving from basic rule-based systems to today’s cutting-edge neural networks. Early machine translation faced significant challenges in handling the complex nature of language, particularly the absence of perfect word-to-word equivalence between different languages and the vast variations in sentence…

[thedevmaster-tdm]

#generativeai #artificialintelligence #chatgpt #entrepreneur #business #datascience #machinelearning Unlock the world of Generative AI with this informative video! Delve into the realm of Generative AI and discover its inner workings, common applications, various model types, and essential fundamentals for utilization. Whether you're a beginner or an enthusiast, this video breaks down the complexities of Generative AI in an accessible and engaging manner. 🌐 Explore Common Applications: Uncover the diverse applications of Generative AI, from creative endeavors to practical solutions. Learn how this cutting-edge technology is transforming industries and enhancing user experiences. 🧠 Understand Model Types: Dive into the intricacies of different Generative AI model types, gaining insights into their unique functionalities and applications. From GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) to VAEs (Variational Autoencoders), this video provides a comprehensive overview. 🔍 Master Fundamentals: Equip yourself with the foundational knowledge needed to harness the power of Generative AI. Understand the key concepts and principles that drive these intelligent systems, empowering you to navigate this fascinating field with confidence. 🚀 Elevate Your Understanding: Whether you're a developer, student, or tech enthusiast, this video caters to all levels of expertise. Elevate your understanding of Generative AI and stay ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. 🔗 Keywords: Generative AI, Artificial Intelligence, GANs, VAEs, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Applications of AI, AI Fundamentals, Technology Trends. Don't miss out on the opportunity to expand your knowledge of Generative AI. Hit play now and embark on a journey into the future of artificial intelligence. #GenerativeAI #GANs #VAEs #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks #AIApplications #CreativeAI #NaturalLanguageGeneration #ImageSynthesis #TextGeneration #ComputerVision #DeepfakeTechnology #AIArt #GenerativeDesign #AutonomousSystems #image #translation #ContentCreation #TransferLearning #ReinforcementLearning #CreativeCoding #AIInnovation #tdm

[keferon]

Part 3! Ratchet and Deadlock time.

The ray of sunshine has left, leaving us in the cold dark of the angst.

Ratchet works through some stuff.

———————————————————————

Ratchet hadn’t actually meant for the conversation to start with Roddy.

The medic had wanted to fully explain why he’d left the Mecha Program for awhile. His outburst earlier cementing the fact he needed to get it off his chest, or he’d start lashing out at the wrong people.

Again.

The Kid deserved to know what staying with him could drag him into. Ratchet kept his hands busy cleaning his bowl in the shop sink.

Hot Rod, Ratchet realized, was a good enough bridge into the topic. Someone Deadlock could put a face to. Not just nameless pilots upon pilots.

“There’s a condition called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain. CIP for short. The abbreviated explanation is sometimes humans can be born without the ability to feel pain or that the sensation of pain doesn’t translate correctly to the brain. It’s a very dangerous condition to have since it means that the person doesn’t get the usual warning signs that’s something’s wrong.”

The bowl was completely clean but so long as Ratchet didn’t turn around, he could pretend he was just training a med student.

“So that question about “weird pressures”. You were checking for damage Hot Rod doesn’t know he’s sustained due this CIP condition?”

Kid was smarter than he gave himself credit for. Ratchet thought for not the first time. He almost got it right.

“Hot Rod doesn’t have CIP. Not actual CIP.”

Ratchet put the bowl down, his hand not moving from the faucet after turning it off.

“He wasn’t born with it. Because I caused it.”

—————————

“I was so damn proud.” Said Ratchet.

At the time, he was. The integration process for recruits to become pilots was horrific. Excruciatingly painful. And something out of a science fiction movie.

In order to condition the human nervous system to work with the mecha neural interface, it necessitated mapping out every nerve and neuron in the pilots body.

While conscious.

Orion came up with the best analogy for it once: You could create a perfect 3 dimensional map of an entire ant colony’s nest. Provided you poured enough molten lead down the hole.

Ratchet wasn’t one to standby watching friends or strangers suffer, so he rolled up his sleeves and set his mind to fixing the whole damn thing.

On the line between man and machine, Ratchets role in the mecha program was right on the fence.

Specifically, he’d started very close to the fence on the side of the machines, and during the course of the program, picked up enough extra PHD’s to hook a leg over said fence to reach across and start smacking the shit out of some particularly stupid doctors handling the men.

Ratchet worked for years along side Pharma and Shockwave to make the integration process less permanently damaging.

Common long term side effects were: Blurry Vision Jazz, Disassociation Swoop, Memory Loss Sludge, Paralysis Snarl, Nerve Damge Slag, Internal Hemorrhaging Grimlock, Altered Personality Shockwave, and Brain Death Orion.

There were dozens more faces Ratchet could pair with any given symptom.

Eventually, Ratchet got his lucky break. A fresh batch of recruits to try his tweaked integration process on. Hot Rod was one of them.

Ratchet had thought he’d hit a breakthrough. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t publish it yet. Not until he was sure.

Hot Rod aced the physical and mental exam. The rest of his test group did pretty well too. They weren’t cream of the crop. The higher ups didn’t want to risk loosing more valuable pilots to an experiment. When Pharma had already established an “acceptable level of care” that nicely suited them.

Ratchet personally watched the lot of them like a hawk. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It didn’t come. Hot Rod was fine. The whole group was fine.

He was so damn proud.

The pilots went straight into mecha training and then-

They dropped like flies.

It was on the bad end of the bell curve for pilot fatalities. Ratchet thought it had to be the new series of mecha that had been built at the same time. He’d switched into engineering mode to rectify that. They had glaring safety issues where the flamethrowers and thrusters intersected. Plus, it wasn’t unusual for the mecha program to just have particularly rough seasons. The tentacled fucks were out in swarms. And by god was that a bloody summer for everyone.

It happened three days after the last big fight. Pretty much everyone who came back alive came back with some sort of injury. Except for Hot Rod, who Pharma gave a clean bill of health.

Ratchet was in his corner of the medical wing, looking over his proposal for the new integration method when Jazz dragged Hot Rod into his office.

Red flag number one: Jazz was a nightmare patient who avoided the med wing like a bear trap.

He tried. Goddamn it if Jazz didn’t try, but he was physically incapable of getting through medical procedures without being heavily sedated. The last time Ratchet tried to do minor stitches with only a local anesthetic, Jazz panicked and damn near broke his arm.

Jazz and Hot Rod were both wearing shorts, t-shirts and sneakers. Judging from the smell, they had just gotten here from the rec room. Probably basketball or maybe dodgeball.

Ratchet had gone through a full medical checklist before they finished coming through the door. Neither looked sick or injured. Nothing was obviously wrong beyond the clear look on Jazz’s face that said “Something is actually very wrong.”

Jazz wheeled Hot Rod in front of Ratchet.

“Show him.”

Hot Rod looked more embarrassed than in desperate need of medical attention.

“I’m fine Jazz, I probably just need to stretch.”

Jazz waved his hand cutting him off. Ratchet would usually start telling them off by now but something stopped him.

“Hot Rod raise your arms above your head. Both of them.”

The red headed pilot reluctantly obeyed. His right arm lifted straight up above his body. His left. Hot Rod made a face of concentration, as his left arm refused to go any higher than his head.

Three days.

Hot Rods shoulder had been dislocated for three days and no one fucking noticed.

Ratchet chewed out Jazz at first thinking he’d caused it. Then he chewed out Hot Rod for not coming to medical as soon as he knew about the injury.

And then, something very cold settled into his stomach the more and more Hot Rod swore he didn’t notice. That it didn’t even hurt.

“Ratchet, I’m fine!”

He should have been in pain. In agony after three days.

Later, Ratchet would go through each medical file of every pilot he had been responsible for. They had all had ailments in their files. Minor visible injuries that were all taken care of. Major ones went surprisingly smoothly. Patient notes praising the med staff for keeping them so comfortable. Praising him. Not one pilot had made a single pain med request since going through the integration process. On his files, there was one surviving active duty pilot from the same integration process.

Ratchet’s integration process.

————————

“Hot Rod said he forgave me.” Ratchet laughed. A little too wet and little too rough.

“Just like that.”

When’d he start shaking?

Ratchet still didn’t, couldn’t look the Kid in the eyes. “I left, not long after. There’s so much fucking more that was happening. That was the last straw, because when I told Shockwave and Pharma, those heartless fucks wanted to make it standard across the board. Soldiers that can’t feel pain? Of fucking course they wanted that. Didn’t matter the fatality rate was nine times as high.”

Ratchets voice was getting worse. But he couldn’t stop. “I thought I could fix it all from the inside. I thought as long as I stayed I could be some, fucking moral compass to a bunch of greedy, prideful, fucking deranged people. I was an egotistical IDIOT that thought I could somehow save every doomed kid tricked into walking into that “necessary evil.” I actually believed I could-”

Ratchet was abruptly cut off from his ranting as two massive hands grabbed him around the waist and deposited him on a ledge, at eye level.

“Kid, what-“ Deadlocks eyes looked shiny.

“I-I can’t keep looking down at you.”

The two of them sat in silence.

Neither seemed to know or want to start talking again right away. Ratchet was used to stewing in regrets on occasion. That had felt more like putting those regrets into a blender and then forgetting the lid.

Deadlocks plating was pulled tight. Ratchet had almost forgotten what he looked like when he was stressed. He wanted immediately to take it all back. Make it better. See him laugh drunk and cozy again like yesterday.

“Kid, I’m sorry. That- that was too much to put on you.” Deadlocks hands weren’t gripping him anymore but resting on either side of the ledge. Ratchet pet small circles on a thumb that twitched slightly under his hand.

Deadlock straightened and looked at him with a steely expression, mouth tense, eyes determined.

“You are one of the most intelligent, stubborn, and caring people I’ve ever met. Nope.” Deadlock corrected himself, lifting a hand. “THE most intelligent, stubborn and caring person that exists.” He dragged out the syllables of that last word.

“You!” He poked Ratchet in the chest. “Saved me. And I’m fragging terrible.”

Ratchet took offense to that, “You’re not terrible and you’re worth saving!”

Deadlock grinned, “The worst thing you can possibly say about yourself is that you care too much to put up with some kind of slagged up torture facility. Which, by the way, I am still fully offering to blown up.”

“Still full of innocent people kid.”

“Okay kidnapping then. I say we nab Hot Rod first.”

Ratchet leaned back against the wall and made one of those desperate chuckles you only hear when someone has their face buried in their hands. “Kid. The quintessons.”

That took a little wind out of his sails.

“The system is fucking broken and trust me I want to see it all burn someday. But we’re in a goddamn war. And as much as I hate the mecha program, it’s the best shot at survival we have.” Ratchet watched Deadlocks finales pin back again.

He offered a palm to Ratchet, who after a moment’s consideration, not very gracefully scooted on. Instead of lowering him to the floor, Deadlock brought him to his face. His eyes closed and he gently bumped his medic with his forehelm.

“Whatever you need. Just ask. Please.”

Ratchet sighed and rested his own forehead against the cybertronian. “I want you take care of yourself. I told you all that stuff so you understand why I’m fighting giants here and you can decide to back out. They can hurt you kid. Kill you. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if Shockwave found you instead of me.”

Deadlock snorted, “Please, do you think any of those suits could handle me?”

Ratchet tapped his hand to put him down, which Deadlock obliged. He hummed.

“Well I can think of three candidates off the top of my head, but one got lost in space and the other might technically be a zombie.”

“What’s the third?”

Ratchet started shrugging on a coat, “Hot Rod.”

He smirked a bit as Deadlocks finales snapped up in offense. “What? Absolutely not. No fragging way that little rust spot can beat me in a fight.”

Ratchet began packing a go bag of medical supplies, “Well I was going to keep it to myself, but part of the reason I brought him in was because I asked Hot Rod to look out for you where I can’t.”

He slung the heavy bag over one shoulder. “Plus, I knew Hot Rod was going to love you. He sees the best in people. And kid?” Ratchet paused at the door.

“You’re someone special.”

———————————————————————

It’s always darkest before the dawn. This…has become a four parter. Dang. Good news is the ray of sunshine will return in style next time.

Some extra tid-bits, I got a head canon that the main side effect Jazz got from the integration process (other than PTSD) is blurry vision. He can see fine while hooked into a mech but can’t get his eyes to focus properly as a human. So Ratchet whipped up a visor that tricks his eyes into thinking he’s still looking through a mecha so he can see normally.

Also, a lot of you guys guessed correctly what was going on with Roddy! Good job everyone!

Lastly I have nothing personal against the dinobots if you love them I’m very sorry.

The next (last?) part will be much brighter. Because the suns coming back.

- SSTP

Oh.....oh fuck....wait WAIT THIS HAS SO MUCH MORE LAYERS THAN I WAS EXPECTING OH MY GOD

I was like. Okay huh. So Roddy can't feel pain right? He must be having this rare condition and? I don't really see where this is going? Huh. Guess it's time to find ouUUUUUH FUCK.

Please. Oh my god. The fact that Ratchet was the one who made him to be like that??? This gives both of them and their dynamic more layers than in a freaking onion. And Roddy didn't just suffer from Ratchets actions. He forgave him. Because OF COURSE he did, he's always giving everyone a second chance I LOVE THIS CONCEPT SO MUCH YOU HAVE NO IDEA

[mindblowingscience]

Researchers have developed a new method for intercepting neural signals from the brain of a person with paralysis and translating them into audible speech—all in near real-time. The result is a brain-computer interface (BCI) system similar to an advanced version of Google Translate, but instead of converting one language to another, it deciphers neural data and transforms it into spoken sentences.  Recent advancements in machine learning have enabled researchers to train AI voice synthesizers using recordings of the individual’s own voice, making the generated speech more natural and personalized. Patients with paralysis have already used BCI to improve physical motor control function by controlling computer mice and prosthetic limbs. This particular system addresses a more specific subsection of patients who have also lost their capacity to speak. In testing, the paralyzed patient was able to silently read full text sentences, which were then converted into speech by the AI voice with a delay of less than 80 milliseconds. Results of the study were published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience by a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco. 

Continue Reading.

[trans-axolotl]

"Just as 'most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk,' we can say that most of the psychiatrically committed walk into hospitals because they know they will be restrained or dragged in if they don't walk. Often, this power has not required the psychiatrist to know the exact source of the ailment they treat nor exactly how their methods act upon the mind; what matters is that the machine is running. A whole system, a tightly interwoven mesh of relays and discourses is in place to transform the psychiatrist's judgment into effective action: a working theory and classificatory system to organize the clientele and separate them from other objects of care or punishment (taxonomy or nosology); institutional spaces (the asylum is historically the most pervasive, but also clinics, group homes, psychiatric wards, etc.); judicial codes defining the status of the mad (generally analogized to animals or children); prescribed roles for legal actors (police, judges, forensic experts); a chain of bureaucrats to sort out matters of insurance, finance, and property in cases of institutionalization or guardianship; and approved mechanisms or surveillance and reporting to translate individual complaints into the state's administrative codes. There are as many points of contact as there are spaces of encounter and discourses of legitimation in the social world. One or more of these elements can be revolutionized without fundamentally changing the connection between the parts. For example, at various points throughout its existence, as we've already seen, a theory of 'social causation' prevailed over a biological one without changing the matrix that defines modern psychiatry, and the same can be said for some of the legal alterations to the patient's status throughout the twentieth century.

There is no psychiatrist-patient encounter set apart from a broader circuit of relations: patient-apartment-work-family-cop-partner-school-neighbor-psychologist-state-guardian-probate-judge-psychiatrist-hospital. And to be clear: our biology itself is shared and leaks throughout this chain at every step. Our bodies are permeable, open, they leak, bleed, consume, excrete; our bodies flow out into a common world, and are open to outside influence, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made so excruciatingly clear. A patient of the Utica Asylum put it beautifully in The Opal in 1852: 'Like fermentation in the chemical world, [humanity's] atomic adhesions are in constant enlargement and in silent operation, seeking out relations, and forming relations of unsurpassed beauty and comfort, because in conformity with nature and adapted to its condition, means and end.' Attempts to neutralize this network by relegating every actor and space in the chain external to the domain of the psychiatrist onto the order of natural history ('we're just responding to the demands of the family...' or 'that's a matter for the police...I just deal with the patient once they arrive here') expose this posture as a naively religious one. In denial of the profane world and its complications extrinsic to the holy circuitry of neural or endocrine highways of the One in isolation, they declare a monastic fealty to an object of study over and above the matrix that makes its study possible or their conclusions efficacious in any real encounter...

...If psychiatry still takes refuge in the desert of scientism--speaking in tongues of prolix jargon--it's because a paradise of healing did materialize, but not as a Promethean forge of liberated humans, nor even as solemn resting place of broken souls, but sank so low as to appear as nothing more than a mundane prison. Burdened by the unbearable weight of their failure, the next generation abandoned their project and ran away to the labs, relinquishing responsibility for the armies of the living dead. At least they hung a sign at the door of the asylum on their way out. It read: 'abandon every hope, who enter here.'"

-Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren, pg 32-34

[digitalsymbiote]

Excerpt from "The Dangers of Disconnect Syndrome"

"There is a reason that 8 hours is the maximum recommended time for a pilot to be deployed in the field. The pilot selection process already trends heavily towards individuals with high neuroplasticity, and extended time spent in neural sync only exacerbates this issue.

A pilots brain is molded to maximize efficiency, both through training and chemical cocktails, in order to handle the processing load of actually controlling a mech. IMPs help with this, of course, handling calculations and translating impulses into commands.

However, should a pilot spend more than 8 hours at a time in neural sync, this enhanced neuroplasticity starts to have more dangerous side effects. Past 8 hours, a pilots brain will start to form neural shortcuts to operate more efficiently. Many pilots have reported this to feel like their machines are suddenly running more smoothly, and responding faster to their neural commands.

The drawbacks of this process are not seen until the pilot returns to base and disconnects from their mech, at which point we start to see the typical symptoms of Disconnect syndrome. This is because the pilots brain is bypassing the already built pathways for controlling their actual flesh and blood body in order to more efficiently interface with the neural link. The technology behind the neural link is programmed to translate mental impulses for things like moving limbs or twisting our body into the corresponding commands for a mechanized suit. This translation is obviously not perfect. That's why IMPs exist and are trained on a pilots neural pattern from the moment that pilot enters the program.

After a long enough time in sync, however, a pilots brain learns to bypass that translation altogether and send the distinct input signals required to activate the various parts of their machine. In short, their brain learns to better control the mech by bypassing their own motor functions."

-- Lecture given by Dr. Eva Tyomkin, Head of Neural Research at SHI. Conference for Mechanized Innovation, 2145.

[thedesolatesanctuary]

Daft Punk in #Severance

My hc about Daft Punk as characters in Apple's TV series Severance below. !warning! There may be some mistakes and inaccuracies because it was written using a translator(with AI assistant translator DeepL, text is not made by AI.)

Some whispered rumors within Lumon claim that Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter were once brilliant engineers working for the Severance program. They were tasked with refining the Severance chip, pushing the boundaries of cognitive partitioning. But something went wrong. During an unauthorized experiment with prototype of Severance Chip they got shared mind, a seamless fusion of thought and creativity. Now, they exist in a perpetual limbo—neither Innie nor Outie, but a continuous, unbroken stream of existence. Their helmets serve as neural interfaces, maintaining their balance between worlds. To the outside world, they simply “retired.” Within Lumon, they became guardians of the Pyramid Division, using music therapy to reshape fractured minds. But instead of serving Lumon, they became something more—self-aware entities that chose to hide in plain sight, using their music to influence the minds of others. The Pyramid Sessions were their attempt to undo the damage of Severance, but Lumon twisted their work into another form of control. Sometimes after The Pyramid sessions Mark begins having strange dreams—visions of a world beyond Lumon, a neon-lit realm where sound is law and reality bends with the beat. In these dreams, he sees them not as men, nor as machines, but as something else entirely—cosmic architects, shaping the fabric of existence through rhythm and melody. So who are they really? Daft Punk do not confirm or deny, they do not hurt or heal. They simply watch and observe. Their bond is one of the greatest mysteries within The Pyramid Division. No one at Lumon has ever seen them apart. They move in perfect unison, anticipating each other's actions without words. The employees speculate endlessly about their connection. Some employees whisper that they were once husbands before work at Lumon Industries, others believe they chose to merge their individual identities dissolving into a singular, shared consciousness. They are no longer two people-but one mind in two bodies. How they interact? - They never speak to each other aloud. Yet, they always move in sync, as if communicating telepathically. - When one reaches for a control panel, the other's fingers twitch slightly. - When a session begins, one places a hand on the other's shoulder, a brief, almost imperceptible gesture of reassurance. - In rare moments of stillness, they face each other, heads tilting slightly-an unspoken conversation passing between them.

[faytelumos]

Mech pilot system where there's three pilots???

One for the left hemisphere, one for the right hemisphere, and one for the cerebellum?

Like, you all still have to be drift compatible, you all still have to be in the cockpit together, but there's basically two thinkers and one translator.

Imagine that the mech designers fought this for years. Two humans every time with massive neural network loads on both the machine and the humans. Pilots could only be medically cleared to operate a machine for four years, max, and then their careers were over. Most didn't make it even that long.

And then someone figures out that if you put in another human to translate between the humans and mech, it flows so much smoother.

Two pilots in the front, the ones doing the strategy and the martial arts and the orders and the takedowns. A third in the back, suspended and all but fugue as they relay human-to-mech and mech-to-human, a person turned into a slave drive, but still tangled up into everybody's heads.

Like, imagine the possibilities?!

You walk into the chow hall and the people who are interested in the shiny new pilots want to know if you're a Leftie or a Migi or a Cera.

Lefties and Migis who spent too long in the cockpit that day who feel like they can't think clearly without that little voice in the back of their head whispering the answers.

Ceras who space out when the room gets loud, who accidentally expect someone else to say what they're thinking, who have nerve damage all across their bodies because it takes all they have to sort data.

Mechs who are older than the trio structure who had their cockpits gutted and refitted, who have spaghetti running up to the chunk of metal that is the third pilot's seat, like a spare part slapped into the room and given too much control.

A Cera who hangs out in the mech bay because the humans are too far from them anymore, but the mecha can't talk to them, either.

a Leftie who can't stand being in the same room as their Migi without the Cera to talk between them.

A Migi who barely knows how to be their own person anymore because so much of their brain is just outside of their reach.

A mech that just wants things to go back to the way they were, pain and lag be damned.

[death-at-20k-volts]

Hai, I saw ur post on generative AI and couldn’t agree more. Ty for sharing ur knowledge!!!!

Seeing ur background in CS,,, I wanna ask how do u think V1 and other machines operate? My HC is that they have a main CPU that does like OS management and stuff, some human brain chunks (grown or extracted) as neural networks kinda as we know it now as learning/exploration modules, and normal processors for precise computation cores. The blood and additional organs are to keep the brain cells alive. And they have blood to energy converters for the rest of the whatevers. I might be nerding out but I really want to see what another CS person would think on this.

Btw ur such a good artist!!!! I look up to u so much as a CS student and beginner drawer. Please never stop being so epic <3

okay okay okAY OKAY- I'll note I'm still ironing out more solid headcanons as I've only just really started to dip my toes into writing about the Ultrakill universe, so this is gonna be more 'speculative spitballing' than anything

I'll also put the full lot under a read more 'cause I'll probably get rambly with this one

So with regards to machines - particularly V1 - in fic I've kinda been taking a 'grounded in reality but taking some fictional liberties all the same' kind of approach -- as much as I do have an understanding and manner-of-thinking rooted in real-world technical knowledge, the reality is AI just Does Not work in the ways necessary for 'sentience'. A certain amount of 'suspension of disbelief' is required, I think.

Further to add, there also comes a point where you do have to consider the readability of it, too -- as you say, stuff like this might be our bread and butter, but there's a lot of people who don't have that technical background. On one hand, writing a very specific niche for people also in that specific niche sounds fun -- on the other, I'd like the work to still be enjoyable for those not 'in the know' as it were. Ultimately while some wild misrepresentations of tech does make me cringe a bit on a kneejerk reaction -- I ought to temper my expectations a little. Plus, if I'm being honest, I mix up my terminology a lot and I have a degree in this shit LMFAO

Anyway -- stuff that I have written so far in my drafts definitely tilts more towards 'total synthesis even of organic systems'; at their core, V1 is a machine, and their behaviors reflect that reality accordingly. They have a manner of processing things in absolutes, logic-driven and fairly rigid in nature, even when you account for the fact that they likely have multitudes of algorithmic processes dedicated to knowledge acquisition and learning. Machine Learning algorithms are less able to account for anomalies, less able to demonstrate adaptive pattern prediction when a dataset is smaller -- V1 hasn't been in Hell very long at all, and a consequence will be limited data to work with. Thus -- mistakes are bound to happen. Incorrect predictions are bound to happen. Less so with the more data they accumulate over time, admittedly, but still.

However, given they're in possession of organic bits (synthesized or not), as well as the fact that the updated death screen basically confirms a legitimate fear of dying, there's opportunity for internal conflict -- as well as something that can make up for that rigidity in data processing.

The widely-accepted idea is that y'know, blood gave the machines sentience. I went a bit further with the idea, that when V1 was created, their fear of death was a feature and not a side-effect. The bits that could be considered organic are used for things such as hormone synthesis: adrenaline, cortisol, endorphins, oxycotin. Recipes for human instinct of survival, translated along artificial neural pathways into a language a machine can understand and interpret. Fear of dying is very efficient at keeping one alive: it transforms what's otherwise a mathematical calculation into incentive. AI by itself won't care for mistakes - it can't, there's nothing actually 'intelligent' about artificial intelligence - so in a really twisted, fucked up way, it pays to instil an understanding of consequence for those mistakes.

(These same incentive systems are also what drive V1 to do crazier and crazier stunts -- it feels awesome, so hell yeah they're gonna backflip through Hell while shooting coins to nail husks and demons and shit in the face.)

The above is a very specific idea I've had clattering around in my head, now I'll get to the more generalized techy shit.

Definitely some form of overarching operating system holding it all together, naturally (I have to wonder if it's the same SmileOS the Terminals use? Would V1's be a beta build, or on par with the Terminals, or a slightly outdated but still-stable version? Or do they have their own proprietary OS more suited to what they were made for and the kinds of processes they operate?)

They'd also have a few different kinds of ML/AI algorithms for different purposes -- for example, combat analysis could be relegated to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) ML algorithm (or multiple) -- something that's useful for data classification (e.g, categorizing different enemies) and regression (i.e predicting continuous values -- perhaps behavioral analysis?). SVMs are fairly versatile on both fronts of classification and regression, so I'd wager a fair chunk of their processing is done by this.

SVMs can be used in natural language processing (NLP) but given the implied complexity of language understanding we see ingame (i.e comprehending bossfight monologues, reading books, etc) there's probably a dedicated Large Language Model (LLM) of some kind; earlier and more rudimentary language processing ML models couldn't do things as complex as relationship and context recognition between words, but multi-dimensional vectors like you'd find in an LLM can.

Of course if you go the technical route instead of the 'this is a result of the blood-sentience thing', that does leave the question of why their makers would give a war machine something as presumably useless as language processing. I mean, if V1 was built to counter Earthmovers solo, I highly doubt 'collaborative effort' was on the cards. Or maybe it was; that's the fun in headcanons~

As I've said, I'm still kinda at the stage of figuring out what I want my own HCs to be, so this is the only concrete musings I can offer at the minute -- though I really enjoyed this opportunity to think about it, so thank you!

Best of luck with your studies and your art, anon. <3

[scrampled-graviton]

it's 3:30am & I have a question

neural reciever: if his brain is outputting signals then somethings gotta translate them into a coding language for his tvs & bodies

dialysis machine: if his organs r still running on blood then something has to filter out waste & Leith Pierre took his fucking kidneys

[paws-akimbo]

Hey! Love the rig you've got! Wanted to ask, what's it really like piloting in the soup? I've only ever flown natural, like in a fixed wing vehicle. Wondering if maybe I need to make some changes or try out a new rig entirely.

Woah, a manual controls enjoyer? I'm honoured!

The uh.

The actual handling of an immersion tank/full neural sync is pitch perfect but I'll shave my tail if there isn't one hell of a learning curve.

You wouldn't think it, but full neural sync is one of the hardest to get the hang of initially; you're using the same thing you use to control your body to control the machine, and your brain does not like using the same action>associated outcome pair to do something different. With some neural bridging systems its less invasive; the machine reads your thoughts and translates them into a command. You mentally tell it to walk, not even in words, just the intent to make it walk, and it walks. But the immersion tank takes it a step further, it's literally as if it was your own body. You're not mentally commanding the mech to move her arm and fire, you're moving your arm and firing, but your arm is no longer that of your meat body. Small but very important distinction; Then there's the parts which have no human equivalent, and that takes some getting used to.

It's less of a learning curve and more of a learning wall. Rather than piloting your mech, your mech is your body in all meaningful ways. Naturally, a new body is wild - learning to walk with a new weight distribution for example, leads to hilarity.

Ultimately it's like learning to ride a bike. Takes a lot of trial and error and falling over painfully into diches to begin with, but the exact second you really, truly get the hang of it you won't ever need to think about how to move your mech the way you want again.

[butch-pilot]

I love the idea of a pilot and mech having individual identities that they can merge into a new identity while together. Separately they’re Pilot Smith and Mech Unit 17 but together they become callsign Stiletto who doesn’t quite act like Pilot Smith or Unit 17. Almost like gem fusion but its the merging of mind and machine where the 1s and 0s of the mech get translated to emotions and the pilots emotions are translated to 1s and 0s and Smith and 17 are now speaking the same language and no longer see or feel the barrier between them.

Only one of my pilot ocs is like this but its the one I keep thinking about the most

omg that’s an awesome idea, I love that concept! I’m sure being in a mech would do some weird things to your brain, especially if you have a neural link, so why wouldn’t that apply to the mech too?

Being completely in sync would feel incredible but it makes sense that you would lose a part of yourself in the process, even if it’s temporary

[jeevasworld]

Comments on Nobellaureates works 2024 :DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam kerala india rsdunnithanlegalservices@gmail.com rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com olympicpresidentrsdun@gmail.com drrsdunnithantechpmtechpreside@gmail.com exnlexprofexwrbexocmoprsdunit@gmail.com Drnlocmopajrsdu twitter com facebook Instagram tik tok tumbler etc/www mednobel.ki.se/www.olympics.org

nobelforum@nobel.se;Dear sir...Comments on Nobellaureates of chemistry 2024 work on proteins:"Can denatured proteins be recreated?How will you explain zwitter ion formations and stability in recreated or artificial synthetic proteins ?Further the rate of consumption of synthetic proteins in synthetic tracks and biomodels is governed by which law of contact in great speeds and power?"thanks ..DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam kerala india rsdunnithanlegalservices@gmail.com rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com olympicpresidentrsdun@gmail.com drrsdunnithantechpmtechpreside@gmail.com exnlexprofexwrbexocmoprsdunit@gmail.com rsdunnithanchessgrandmaster@gmail.com etc Drnlocmopajrsdu twitter com †****************************+ nobelforum@nobel.se;Dear sir...Comments on Nobellaureates works 2024 in physics::Neural networks and patterns recognitions with boltsman spatial configurations as for memory gained or lost as per retention of memories when translated in machine languages for the possibilities of AI interventions in surgical post synaptic stages for a miraculous escapes wherein brain trauma comas from haemmorages and loss of memories can be revived for all success can be now hence proved in medical fields by the grace of your achievements which may be greater than EEG and some shocks which was being used?Yes or No?Explain?;thanks;DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam kerala india rsdunnithanlegalservices@gmail.com rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com olympicpresidentrsdun@gmail.com drrsdunnithantechpmtechpreside@gmail.com exnlexprofexwrbexocmoprsdunit@gmail †*******†********************* Dear sir..Comments on Nobellaureates works 24 in peace:It was quite interesting to know this year's 2024 awards went to Japan for its surviving victims of Hiroshima Nagasaki ... But;Is it possible to consider Russian president and Ukrainian president future surviving would be Nobellaureates within a span of fifty years or more if not any American presidents from Jimmy carter to trump etal?Is there any chance for any surviving relatives be in America or Russia or Ukraine for development of peace out of million to trillion dollars?thanks;DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam kerala india rsdunnithanlegalservices@gmail.com rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com olympicpresidentrsdun@gmail.com drrsdunnithantechpmtechpreside@gmail.com exnlexprofexwrbexocmoprsdunit@gmail.com Drnlocmopajrsdu twitter com facebook Instagram tik tok tumbler etc rsdunnithanchessgrandmaster@gmail.com etc

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On Mon, 2 Dec 2024, 18:47 Nobel laureate DR R S D UNNITHAN ,OCM;OP, <rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com> wrote:

nobelforum@nobel.se;Dear sir..Comments on Nobellaureates works 24 in peace:It was quite interesting to know this year's 2024 awards went to Japan for its surviving victims of Hiroshima Nagasaki ... But;Is it possible to consider Russian president and Ukrainian president future surviving would be Nobellaureates within a span of fifty years or more if not any American presidents from Jimmy carter to trump etal?Is there any chance for any surviving relatives be in America or Russia or Ukraine for development of peace out of million to trillion dollars?thanks;DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam kerala india rsdunnithanlegalservices@gmail.com rsdunnithannobellaureate@gmail.com olympicpresidentrsdun@gmail.com drrsdunnithantechpmtechpreside@gmail.com exnlexprofexwrbexocmoprsdunit@gmail.com Drnlocmopajrsdu twitter com facebook Instagram tik tok tumbler etc rsdunnithanchessgrandmaster@gmail.com etc†**********†********************. Comments (on tiny micro RNA: a macromolecule or a powerful micro molecule etc?) send to nobellaureates 2024 physiology and medicine king queen and tel updated to all::DR/Advocate etc R S D Unnithan Legal chambers etc kottarakara kollam Kerala India

[ecos-syscourse]

I think that people are massively misunderstanding how "AI" works.

To summarize, AI like chatGPT uses two things to determine a response: temperature and likeableness. (We explain these at the end.)

ChatGPT is made with the purpose of conversation, not accuracy (in most cases).

It is trained to communicate. It can do other things, aswell, like math. Basically, it has a calculator function.

It also has a translate function. Unlike what people may think, google translate and chatGPT both use AI. The difference is that chatGPT is generative. Google Translate uses "neural machine translation".

Here is the difference between a generative LLM and a NMT translating, as copy-pasted from Wikipedia, in small text:

Instead of using an NMT system that is trained on parallel text, one can also prompt a generative LLM to translate a text. These models differ from an encoder-decoder NMT system in a number of ways:

Generative language models are not trained on the translation task, let alone on a parallel dataset. Instead, they are trained on a language modeling objective, such as predicting the next word in a sequence drawn from a large dataset of text. This dataset can contain documents in many languages, but is in practice dominated by English text. After this pre-training, they are fine-tuned on another task, usually to follow instructions.

Since they are not trained on translation, they also do not feature an encoder-decoder architecture. Instead, they just consist of a transformer's decoder.

In order to be competitive on the machine translation task, LLMs need to be much larger than other NMT systems. E.g., GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters, while mBART has 680 million  and the original transformer-big has “only” 213 million.  This means that they are computationally more expensive to train and use.

A generative LLM can be prompted in a zero-shot fashion by just asking it to translate a text into another language without giving any further examples in the prompt. Or one can include one or several example translations in the prompt before asking to translate the text in question. This is then called one-shot or few-shot learning, respectively.

Anyway, they both use AI.

But as mentioned above, generative AI like chatGPT are made with the intent of responding well to the user. Who cares if it's accurate information as long as the user is happy? The only thing chatGPT is worried about is if the sentence structure is accurate.

ChatGPT can source answers to questions from it's available data.

... But most of that data is English.

If you're asking a question about what something is like in Japan, you're asking a machine that's primary goal is to make its user happy what the mostly American (but sure some other English-speaking countries) internet thinks something is like in Japan. (This is why there are errors where AI starts getting extremely racist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, etc.)

Every time you ask chatGPT a question, you are asking not "Do pandas eat waffles?" but "Do you think (probably an) American would think that pandas eat waffles? (respond as if you were a very robotic American)"

In this article, OpenAI says "We use broad and diverse data to build the best AI for everyone."

In this article, they say "51.3% pages are hosted in the United States. The countries with the estimated 2nd, 3rd, 4th largest English speaking populations—India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and The Philippines—have only 3.4%, 0.06%, 0.03%, 0.1% the URLs of the United States, despite having many tens of millions of English speakers." ...and that training data makes up 60% of chatGPT's data.

Something called "WebText2", aka Everything on Reddit with More Than 3 Upvotes, was also scraped for ChatGPT. On a totally unrelated note, I really wonder why AI is so racist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic.

According to the article, this data is the most heavily weighted for ChatGPT.

"Books1" and "Books2" are stolen books scraped for AI. Apparently, there is practically nothing written down about what they are. I wonder why. It's almost as if they're avoiding the law.

It's also specifically trained on English Wikipedia.

So broad and diverse.

"ChatGPT doesn’t know much about Norwegian culture. Or rather, whatever it knows about Norwegian culture is presumably mostly learned from English language sources. It translates that into Norwegian on the fly."

hm.

Anyway, about the temperature and likeableness that we mentioned in the beginning!! if you already know this feel free to skip lolz

Temperature:

"Temperature" is basically how likely, or how unlikely something is to say. If the temperature is low, the AI will say whatever the most expected word to be next after ___ is, as long as it makes sense.

If the temperature is high, it might say something unexpected.

For example, if an AI with a temperature of 1 and a temperature of, maybe 7 idk, was told to add to the sentence that starts with "The lazy fox..." they might answer with this.

1:

The lazy fox jumps over the...

7:

The lazy fox spontaneously danced.

The AI with a temperature of 1 would give what it expects, in its data "fox" and "jumps" are close together / related (because of the common sentence "The quick fox jumps over the lazy dog."), and "jumps" and "over" are close as well.

The AI with a temperature 7 gives something much more random. "Fox" and "spontaneously" are probably very far apart. "Spontaneously" and "danced"? Probably closer.

Likeableness:

AI wants all prompts to be likeable. This works in two ways, it must 1. be correct and 2. fit the guidelines the AI follows.

For example, an AI that tried to say "The bloody sword stabbed a frail child." would get flagged being violent. (bloody, stabbed)

An AI that tried to say "Flower butterfly petal bakery." would get flagged for being incorrect.

An AI that said "blood sword knife attack murder violence." would get flagged for both.

An AI's sentence gets approved when it is likeable + positive, and when it is grammatical/makes sense.

Sometimes, it being likeable doesn't matter as much. Instead of it being the AI's job, it usually will filter out messages that are inappropriate.

Unless they put "gay" and "evil" as inappropriate, AI can still be extremely homophobic. I'm pretty sure based on whether it's likeable is usually the individual words, and not the meaning of the sentence.

When AI is trained, it is given a bunch of data and then given prompts to fill, which are marked good or bad.

"The horse shit was stinky."

"The horse had a beautiful mane."

...

...

...

Notice how none of this is "accuracy"? The only knowledge that AI like ChatGPT retains from scraping everything is how we speak, not what we know. You could ask AI who the 51st President of America "was" and it might say George Washington.

Google AI scrapes the web results given for what you searched and summarizes it, which is almost always inaccurate.

soooo accurate. (it's not) (it's in 333 days, 14 hours)

[dr-futbol-blog]

Grace Under Pressure, Pt. 14

Back in the rescue jumper, we find Zelenka cursing in Czech to himself and although we did see McKay basically do the same thing earlier -- cursing Zelenka out to relieve some of the tension he was feeling over the situation without actually meaning what he was saying (mostly) -- it is not entirely clear whether Zelenka is cursing out McKay or Sheppard here. Very likely he sees this as both of their faults; he knows that he would not be in the jumper bearing down toward the ocean floor without McKay, and he knows that he would not be there without Sheppard, either. The two men are very much a package deal to him, each one infuriating in their own ways.

Zelenka: It's screwed up this. Whose idea was this, we'll be under water, this time? Sheppard: I think my Czech's getting better, 'cause I know what you mean. Zelenka: Could be the shields, could be the depth -- I'm having trouble detecting the jumper. Only...

Now, it is interesting that Sheppard claims to be able to understand Zelenka's meaning here. It could of course be hyperbole, that he can appreciate the sentiment although he cannot understand the words. It might not be all that difficult to guess what Zelenka might be saying, to hear the emotion and to fill in the blanks. But Sheppard's expression here is curious because he does actually look like he is picking something up. Now, some people joke that he has been learning Czech in his free time, which is neither here not there. For sure life may get boring for them now and again but we have no actual evidence for this being the case. The other option might be that Sheppard has been spending enough time in McKay's lab watching him work (for which there is evidence) that he has started picking up some of Zelenka's more colourful expressions.

This is possible. But it is curious that this happens in the jumper because Sheppard is connected to the jumper via neural interface and we have seen previously that the jumper at the very least attempts to fulfill his requests, his desires. Therefore it is possible that just because Sheppard wanted to understand what Zelenka was saying that the jumper itself translated the meaning if not the words right into his brain. And the reason why Sheppard wanted to understand what Zelenka was saying was not out of simple curiosity but because McKay's life is on the line and he feels like he needs to be on top of things, to have all the available information. And what Zelenka tells him is that he is having trouble detecting McKay. Their machines are not able to find him.

Sheppard: Only what? Zelenka: Could you bring up the HUD please? Sheppard: What's that? Zelenka: Your sea monster. It's at least six to eight times as large as this jumper, so let's not venture too closely, OK?

Although the scanners are unable to locate McKay, they are able to find the giant fish and although it is humonguous, we later learn that it is just a child and that even larger beasts exist in the ocean. Regarding the roles that Sam -- assuming that it is somehow a manifestation of the psychic fish -- has been playing, it is interesting that Zelenka calls it "your sea monster," coining the phrase Sheppard had used earlier, because while it has the outward appearance of Samantha Carter, it certainly seems to consist of much more than just Carter. Given how the fish seems to have the express purpose of drawing the rescue party to McKay's location, it could even be that it is not entirely manifested from McKay's mind alone but that it is actually bridging the minds of the two men together to lead Sheppard down to McKay. The two other times that we see the fish, both in the real world and in their shared subconscious mind in Doppelganger (S04E04), the psychic fish is a pet project shared by the two of them.

Sheppard: How're the shields doing? Zelenka: Twelve minutes. Sheppard: Alright. Let's check it out. Zelenka: Why? Sheppard: Because it's still swimming around in circles in the same area, which means it might have found something interesting.

While Zelenka wants to steer clear of the sea beast, Sheppard on the other hand wants immediately to get closer to it and this is not because he is simply curious or thinks that the sea monster is cool. There is something drawing him to the location, something that is telling him this is worth checking out. Sheppard tells Zelenka that it is because the fish seems to be circling something, which he is able to tell after two seconds of observing it, suggesting that this is more his intuition speaking than just his keen observational skills.

But what Sheppard tells us here is important. For one, he hopes that what the fish finds interesting is McKay and because McKay is interesting to him, he naturally assumes McKay must be interesting also to the fish. And the other thing is that swimming (or in his case, walking) around in circles around the object of his interest is how Sheppard himself seems to express his interest in something or someone, and in this regard it is fascinating that we saw Sheppard frequently twist his whole body back to be able to walk in a way that allowed him to see McKay's face when first started expressing his interest in the other man. He was giving McKay his full attention by seeming to surround him. Sheppard is able to intuit what the fish is doing because that is what he would do if he had discovered McKay at the bottom of the ocean.

McKay: What? What do you want from me? Just, just, just go away! I think he's... I think he's just waiting to eat me.

From Sheppard trying to figure out why the fish is swimming around in circles and seeming to hit the nail on the head we get back to McKay who seems much worse in divining the intention of his constant companion. Whether or not McKay actually thinks the fish wants to eat him, he is afraid of the possibility nonetheless and getting eaten by a giant fish would just make his day. The water has been steadily rising and must be getting colder to boot so it seems like complaining is the only thing keeping McKay warm at the moment.

With regards to being eaten, we might point out that in Epiphany (S02E12) when Sheppard had come across a beast that he worried might want to eat him up, he had told him that if the beast was not going to eat him, he was going to eat the beast. Now, even though McKay suggests that the fish's motivation for hanging around is that it is waiting to eat him like a sardine snack right out of a can, he does actually raise the question of its motivation here. It seems obvious that the fish is trying to save his life -- but why? What does the fish want with him? Does it want something from him? Eating does not seem to be on its agenda and for all we know, the fish are vegetarian. Later on, they do need the humans to save them from a coronal mass ejection from the nearby sun. But the motivations of this particular fish are not made entirely clear. And although here McKay tells it to leave him alone just as he had told Carter to leave him alone earlier, the fish seems reluctant to do that.

McKay: I treated him pretty bad. "Carter": The whale? McKay: No, Griffin. I changed the subject. You of all people should be able to keep up. "Carter": Sorry.

McKay seems to be rambling, seeming to be talking just to keep himself awake and warm(er), but it is still worth pointing out that who ever or what ever Carter is, she is unable to tell when he suddenly changes topics. Carter cannot follow his train of thought which means that she is something other than a simple manifestation of his mind. If she was a feature of his subconscious mind and the purpose of this was just to show McKay talking with his own mind, she should easily have been able to keep up with him switching topics, which even he is able to point out here. McKay seems barely to be conscious and he can still tell that a hallucination should be able to respond to his thoughts better than she can. Now, Carter does refer to the fish as a "whale" here which seems to be taxonomically incorrect -- it is later revealed that the sea beasts are closer to fish than they are to whales, which are mammals. This too might hark back to their earlier discussion over tomatoes, given how these animals might outwardly resemble whales but still taxonomically be fish just like tomatoes are actually fruit and only thought of as vegetables.

This of course does not prove that Carter is not a manifestation of the fish, only that "whale" is the thing that McKay would be most likely to call it given his current knowledge. If all the knowledge about marine life the fish has is coming from McKay's mind then whale is the name he probably would use of it. But if Carter is a manifestation of the fish, it is also interesting that it immediately arrives at the conclusion that McKay was talking about it here, that McKay had treated the whale bad(ly). For sure McKay is not the friendliest of men but what the fish or "Carter" would specifically view as bad treatment is anyone's guess, given especially the fact that the fish attempted to cozy up to McKay physically much more aggressively than McKay had done to it.

Regardless, McKay was not talking about treating the fish bad(ly) but of Griffin and given that he now very much thinks that he is dying, he seems to want to spend his last remaining moments feeling regret over what had transpired earlier.

McKay: He knew we were both gonna die if he didn't do anything so... he... Why didn't I think of it first? Maybe I did! I thought of it, I just couldn't… He was a brave man, and I… It just doesn't seem right, you know? Been a bad day.

Again, McKay has a tendency to slur his words pretty badly when he is agitated and he is trembling with cold here, to boot. But the GateWorld.net transcript here makes no damn sense ("He knew we were both gonna die, and he didn't want anything, so … he … I don't think I can think of a person … He was dead … I don't know … I just … couldn't" -- what is he even trying to say here?), seeming to have misplaced the thread of his thought. McKay is feeling regret over what had happened and this here, what he says when he thinks he is dying, is not just important but the crux of the entire episode. He calls Griffin a brave man, and as mentioned, Hemingway had defined courage as "grace under pressure" (where he said it initially is less clear but it is featured e.g., in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald). And that is what McKay is also exemplifying in this episode -- McKay is the brave little toaster who has those depths of character he does not even know he has.

The situation he is placed in here, albeit he does not have much of a choice now to do anything beyond hope to either be rescued or die, does show us his character, does show us that he is not willing to give up and that he very much wants to live. McKay says here that he would have done what Griffin did. While he is honest (and self-aware) enough to admit to himself that he did not rush to sacrifice his life to Griffin the same way as Griffin had for him (and again we may raise the question of why exactly he did that), what he is saying here is that he wanted to do it. McKay cares a lot about people even if he cannot stand to be around them or listen to them talk about tomatoes all the time, and we have seen many times that he is willing to lay down his own life so that others might live. In the alternative timeline of Before I Sleep (S01E15), McKay had drowned trying to save the city and he had given up his own life easily because he had no reason to live. Having fallen in love, our McKay is different from that McKay, he does have a reason for living and not wanting to die. He is brave but not one to want to throw his life away, and it is having something to lose that makes his willingness to sacrifice even more noble. It is his bravery that Sheppard admires about him, that made him take stock of McKay in the first place.

And here, McKay is saying that he would have wanted to do what Griffin had done. What he does not understand is why he had done it because although he cares about others, McKay has a much more difficult time seeing his own worth. He does not think that he is worth saving, and certainly not worth dying for. And all at the same time, Sheppard is making his way down to him not just thinking that he is worth dying for but that he is worth killing for, which is a whole other ballgame. It will take McKay a long minute to understand just how much he means to Sheppard and just how much he would do to keep him safe.

What is important here is this: McKay admits that maybe he did think of it first but he could not go through with it. And the one thing that is different between this McKay and the one who drowned with the city is that he has someone he loves. Because his life is not just his life anymore. He could not sacrifice his life because it is not just his life that he would be giving up, not anymore. He had been injured when Sheppard had made the decision to lay down his life for him without asking him, and he would never want to do the same to him. For McKay, falling in love had meant giving his life into the hands of another, but as far as he was concerned, Sheppard had misunderstood the assignment in trying to sacrifice his life so that McKay might live.

"Carter": You're gonna get out of this. McKay: I don't think I would even believe that if you were naked. Oh well!

McKay seems to be almost delirious with the cold and he makes one last play at trying to see whether this thing that is very much not a hallucination would actually do what he thinks at him to do which is to turn naked at his thinking it. It does not. Again McKay is not actually saying that he wants to see her/him/it naked or that seeing women naked is something that he generally likes to think about, all he is saying is that if she was a figment of his imagination, he could make it happen and because he cannot make it happen, she is not created from his mind. And we were just confirmed with what McKay was saying about Griffin and his own motivations that he cannot lie to himself, he is much too self-aware to be fooled by his own mind into thinking comforting lies or half-truths. Also, McKay does not exactly seem broken-up about not being able to see her naked here.

"Carter": Stick with me, Rodney. You've gotta stay alert. McKay: My plan was stupid. What was I thinking? "Carter": Twenty-twenty hindsight. McKay: You were right. Should have listened to you.

McKay admitting that he should have listened to her is another acknowledgement that he does not think that she is created from his mind. He seems to be falling unconscious and Carter is trying to keep him awake although she seems have run out of any feasible ways of doing that. We have noted previously that it is in their final moments that people reveal who they really are and while this is far from the only time that we see McKay in this situation, it is still worth pointing out that he seems to care about people a lot and he is willing to admit that he was wrong here, that he should listened -- just as he probably should have listened to Sheppard after his long exile in the time dilation field. He is saying it to Carter here but given her earlier jibe at not listening making him bad at relationships, the fact that he admits that someone else had been right and that he should have listened is also something that he at least wants to say to Sheppard, as well, if he ever gets out of here.

McKay: Always admired you, Sam. And, and I'm not just trying to... "Carter": I know. McKay: I honestly don't think you're smarter than I am. On your best day, we're, like, maybe a tie? "Carter": There is a compliment coming, right? McKay: Yes. My intelligence aside, you're wiser. I guess at the end of the day that's, that's why you're down here.

Again McKay calls her Sam in a way that he never has in the real world and he may be delirious enough that he does not even know who he is talking to at this point. He tells her that he admires her which may well be true -- this is an iteration of what McKay had told her at the SGC. He told her that she is an artist where he is just a fine technical player. Note also that he is actually explicitly stating here that is not saying this to get into her pants or that he even wants to get into her pants. He admires her as a scientist even though it is not easy for him to admit that. And it is not unimportant that he also confesses that he does not honestly think that she is smarter than him. In fact, he seems to be saying that it is only on her best day that they are even equal meaning that he does think that he is smarter than her.

The "one person" he thinks is smarter than him that was mentioned earlier is not Carter but we have every reason to believe that it is, in fact, his sister. And that ties to what he is saying here: why Carter is the one down there with him instead of someone else. Carter is certainly wiser than his little sister is. It seems like he is trying to figure out why out of everyone that it could have been, it is Carter. And of course Carter's job here was to convince him that Sheppard, the man who loves him, is on his way to save him and to give him time to find him so obviously it could not have been him. It could not have been Zelenka because McKay would never have believed that Zelenka was smarter than him. That is why she is down there, but it does not mean that just because she had taken the physical manifestation of Samantha Carter that that is the only thing she is because there certainly seemed to be aspects of people other than Carter that had gone into her, that she was drawing from his mind.

McKay: You were right. "Carter": Well, you were right, at least subconsciously. McKay: Huh. I guess that's something.

If she is the fish, the fish certainly seems to have grown fond of McKay during the time that they have been together and it has been trying to learn about the newcomers from the strangest man among them. In admitting that she had been right, McKay is showing that he is not quite as petty as he projects most of the time and that he can admit when he is wrong, which we have also seen him do before. But given that McKay seems to be dying and she is trying to keep him alive knowing that Zelenka and Sheppard are fast approaching their location, she does not see the harm in giving him comfort. If it had not been for him, the fish, swimming around the jumper, McKay would never even have thought of the idea of swimming the jumper to the surface only to lose most of his remaining power in the attempt, so it really had kind of been Sam's fault McKay was in this mess.

Continued in Pt. 15