[Ar-list] Continuing dialog

[W Isaac Carroll]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Carter Butts wrote:
> [The Machines MRS] would be particularly useful, I think; we had a lot
> of odd early ideas vis a vis trying to apply blockmodeling in some
> fashion, but didn't finish fleshing these out.  I will send you a file
> with some primitive notes of mine on this....

I see several kinds of people who will want to use the Machines MRS:

1- Reality designer
2- Machine builder (or tweaker)
3- Machine user/destroyer

Each type of user will have different, though overlapping, needs. So the
question is, which audience are we writing for in this MRS? Perhaps a
section for each?

> For my part, I'm a Linux user, so Word is not optimal for me.
> Personally, I use LaTeX these days for just about everything for which
> ASCII is overly limiting, but distributing LaTeX files is probably
> nonoptimal for others.  One possibility would be to use HTML, since this
> is A) universal, and B) fairly readily recoded into other, more
> layout-friendly, languages.  Or you could just offer us PDFs, and we
> could send you our notes as text.  Do others have thoughts on this?

Well, I don't (yet) know LaTeX (though it has been a wishful thought of
mine). However, I am fond of LyX, so maybe I'll get that working. In any
event, the content is much more important than the presentation, so for
now I'll just post stuff in text and make it pretty later.

Karim, the new look for the AR web site is very spifty. Keep up the good
work.

I have run into a problem in my Matrix RG: There is no good reason for the
Machines to keep humans around in the Matrix. I originally thought that it
would be enough to say they keep humans around because they need hardware
to run their AIs on, but I've come to feel that that explanation doesn't
hold water. So I'm left with an uncomfortable decision: Do I give some
hokey reason why they keep humans around? Or do I leave it unexplained?
Neither one sits well with me.

Anyone have any good ideas?

TTFN