The first step down a dark path if he's not careful.

7,000,000 variants of "oh dear" vs Sir Killalot

He's remote controlled. 3p0 controls himself.

This is the loveliest conversation I have seen all week. I have been incredibly burned out with Reddit of late, so this is refreshing.

Fleshhhh you promised me flesssh master.

Good one. I didn't remember that.

I mean, I say the same thing to the mechanic when I take my car in for work. We can have sentimental value in stuff we own, doesn’t mean we identify them as independent agents, or sentient beings.

What's the design/production philosophy behind those separatist droids? Been a while...

He’s a slave boy in a scrap yard on some backwater shithole of a planet. Sue him

I think the reality is that Anakin was written as a tech wizard by writers that saw a lot of technology as just magic that tech wizards can do.

He was able to build a droid out of spare parts not because there was an open protocol droid system that enables technically inclined people to learn how to build their own custom versions. He built a droid because that's what a child tech genius would do. How did he program it? More tech magic. He's impressive, you aren't supposed to understand anything of what he did, it was just a plot device to show what the chosen one was capable of before the Jedi even found him.

Not trying to be a wet blanket, just so much of technology in media is written this way.

Can't sue him as a kid because he has no money to pay you.

Can't sue him as an adult because he'll force choke you to death.

What a grift. He got it all figured out.

He translates R2 for Luke which is how he finds out he's carrying the secret message.

Little did we known he used two swimming pools worth of water everytime he translated for r2d2

Lemmy now is what Reddit used to be like in the early days. I hope the enshittification stays away!

Edit config.txt

"sentience=1"

"British_sassy_butler=1"

Hes a slave. Gota sue his owner Quato or whatever his name is.

from language import *

In Return of the Jedi, he communicates with the Ewoks, ultimately enlisting them against the Empire, probably the most he actually "did."

You wouldn't download a droid.

just so much of technology in media is written this way

Especially with star wars, where it's closer to "space fantasy" than "science fiction"

anus=ACCESSIBLE

When I was a kid and thought about robots I never considered their intelligence would require a massive physical infrastructure just to make the best guess of the next word.

Everything is open source if you can read Assembly! (Replace Assembly with whatever the Star Wars equivalent is, which is probably just Assembly.)

On the one hand I can understand your meaning there.

On the other, Threepio's famous boast of "six-million forms of communication" kind of precludes having room for six-million physical modules anywhere in his chassis.

Enter: science-fantasy.

Really awful, undocumented, spaghetti code open source. But sure, technically correct!

Did anyone expect that? Like, there was enough different thinkers, and takes, that somebody probably suggested it.

Usually, people gravitated in the opposite direction, though: To be smart, an algorithm has to be beautiful and profound and sublime.

Since the universe of Star Wars is a similiar Corporatopia as in Rimworld, maybe there's SOC-like Personality Cores, that just adapt to the available actuators and sensors (there was a self-learning 4-legged robo-spider 10 years ago already, that teaches itself walking no matter what).

I agree with you, and the part that always sinks this within SW is that all he did was put together a very commonly used droid from spare parts. Protocol droids are all over the place!

Is it impressive to put together a Honda Civic from spare parts in your spare time? Yes. But it's also just a matter of collecting the right parts and having the time to assemble them right. No one is inventing anything new, and it always seemed like that was what EP1 was trying to sort of say.

It can't really enshittify, in the original sense of the word, since nobody controls it. It probably will follow the Reddit trajectory, up until the point when the admins started to be evil, though.

It would have to be a large number of languages per module, but the universe was written in a 20th century kind of way where hardware is single-purpose.

The actual answer is of course that Star Wars isn't believable, but ignoring that...

Which people love in Star Wars, but then they want their real life to be, like, a slick, nonviolent, white-picket version of 1984 (edit: the novel). I get the psychology, but man, it's weird. A modest amount of risk seems worth it for, I guess, basic honesty.

With the other horny prisoners...?

According to a comic released in the early 2000s. Anakin found the husk and most of C3P0's parts in the junkyard before he rebuilt him.

So how much of him was originally there vs. Rebuilt by Anakin is unknown. But we have seen other protocol droids and they have the same body shapes and parts. But those are the exterior parts. The interior could have been different hardware all together.

Zere vill be no funny business going on hier in ze horny jail!

Sort of?

Open source was the historical default. The settings on your radio are just the settings on your damn radio, nobody "owns" that. Ditto for mechanical looms a century earlier. Intellectual property for records, works of literature and (very relevantly) player piano scrolls anticipated software, but in all cases that was down to an aspect of being a kind of performance, rather than purely technical. Patents have their own weird history, but they evolved directly from mercantilist/feudal government-granted monopolies, rather than from them being a kind of product.

The earliest computers were bespoke, so the teams responsible for building and maintaining them also programmed them. Open vs. closed isn't really a relevant question for the programs themselves, then. The algorithms you might use in the programs made their way around through academic publications, or word of mouth.

AFAIK, the Apollo missions were the first time large-scale software engineering happened, the way we're used to. Lots of effort was put into the hardware, but then the overlooked software part became an unexpected grind. It was all in assembly, people weren't talking to each other, and the wheel was reinvented many times. To everyone's surprise, it was the money pit and source of delay, and the finished product ended up having issues during the flights, as well.

Obviously, from there, proprietary software became more and more prevalent. It was the era where businesses were buying up mainframes and minicomputers, and software companies could be just another contractor component sold in whatever smoke filled boardroom. I don't know if open source would have been practical, when you only have 50 users, but still a sizeable, ugly code base that does everything from scratch.

Once you move into the personal computer era, you start to see open source as we know it grow back, and very slowly start winning. Since you can copy software easily and infinitely, whatever collection of volunteers turns out to be enough. There's no scarcity to drive an actual market.

Yeah he is a translator/protocol droid he isn't the most useful in a crew who all speaks galactic basic and is running from blaster bolts. But he did everything he was supposed to do just fine. People just don't care to see a droid plugged up to a moisture evaporator doing "nothing"

He served as a translator when Padme was a senator

People mention the ewoks

He was a diplomat for the Jedi for a bit

Believe he I infiltrated the first order as a spy or some shit as well...

But one could argue Luke would be dead if C-3PO hadn't told him R2 had taken off and subsequently followed him.

Although, nobody ever asks Gandalf to fix their printer or build their app. He gets to dine with kings.

Probably, for there to be scraps you can easily turn into C-3PO, the official droids are also built up from standardised, open-source parts. Like, I've reused screws or bolts in an unintended context before, since they match that description, but how much could you build from a dead IPhone?

If the Empire kept more careful control over their education and production, they would probably have an easier time. It's just that a North Korea-type space opera, where the rebels have no ships, and can only get radios that continuously play Empire propaganda with no off switch, wouldn't make for good action sequences.

So in A New Hope R2 trudges off looking for Obiwan at the beginning of the movie. They are both captured by jawas and are going to be sold for parts. Owen needs a droid that can communicate with his moisture evaporators and diagnose issues. R2 is useless in this capacity. He buys C-3PO. C-3PO tells him to buy R2. The entire series would have been over right there as R2s memory would have been wiped by anyone without a translator there. 10 minute short film about how the Almighty Empire who does no wrong thwarted a terrorist organization.

Oh and Empire Stikes Back famous hyperdrive issues are diagnosed by "plugging C3PO up to the hyperdrive" so he could download/diagnose and spit out any hardware repairs needed while performing any software changes needed himself.

It seems shortsighted of science fiction authors to have not predicted the problems we're currently having with AI. They had decades to think about it. Did any of them predict that people would be using it to cheat on homework, create scams, disrupt social media with spam and terribly off-putting fake images, publish books and songs nobody wrote and nobody wants, all while using obscene amounts of energy? The world doesn't seem more futuristic or in any danger of getting wiped out by some autonomous AI thing that's been given access to nukes, both typical major themes. The world to me just feels more empty and boring. It's just a new tool hucksters can use to defraud people.

Some of the other things the tech oligarchs are pursuing are also cliche themes of science fiction: space exploration, the metaverse, the meta glasses, Musk's Neuralink. So if AI did not turn out as expected, how's the rest of this stuff gonna work out?

You promised me fleeesh! All I feel is paaaain! Why have you done this to me??

Though he does get asked to go back to middle earth and fix it after dying, and the task was a bit more... involved than the typical printer maintenance job (though a laser printer does have some high voltage dangers tbf).

I think real droids would be like smartphones - once a good commercial design is found they all just end up looking like that.

If R2D2 was cheaper to manufacture than C3PO, theyd all eventually look like R2D2.

I don't understand. I didn't talk about a romanticized idea of ​​the past or a fictional universe. Help?

my jawa friend says, and i qoute

Ibana Utinni! Togo m'bwa kwa chee kah

Make of that what you will

No they are built for different purposes. Artoo is an astromech droid. Meant to be used in something like the x wings.

C3p0 us a protocol droid meant to assist with cultural functions and protocols as well as other diplomatic needs

No, but you did talk about the internal logic of the Star Wars universe, and people like Star Wars. So, I launched into a small rant. My bad!

I meant 1984 the novel FWIW, where everything is really centrally controlled.

Yup, protocol droids needed to be bipedal to integrate better with the average lifeform. Astromechs were tools that were exposed to atmosphere and vacuum. I do find it a little strange that canon chose to make the astromechs only communicate with beeps and boops that skinbags needed to learn the language of instead of just having them do speech synth.

The binary language of moisture vaporators... obv