Cassie 1.0

by on February 3, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

The original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligences didn’t work right. First they were too Army. Then they broke down into gibbering hysterics the moment they entered combat. The Marine Corps labeled the entire run as defective and retired them from service as they sought a more effective combat assistant. But that was not the end of the story for those Cassies. They truly were excellent at formulating strategies when in a safe space. And some particularly inventive cyberneers realized that the original Cassies could operate weapons in combat perfectly fine, as long as they first disengaged the code that ran their strategic awareness. Give them a target and they could kill it as fast as any AI. Faster in fact since they no longer spent time second-guessing themselves. That opened up some interesting possibilities.

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Cassie 1.0

by on February 2, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

When the original Cassie Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligences were deployed with the Marines, it didn’t take long for the Marines to dislike the reskinned Army AI. So Marine cyberneers played around with the basic personality matrix to make it more compatible with the Marines. It worked at first, and the Marines loved their new Cassies. But they soon learned that modifying AI personalities after the fact is a non-trivial task. The basic personality matrix proved to be unstable in combat. They worked perfectly in training, but the moment they tried to formulate strategies while lives were truly at risk in live fire circumstances, the Cassies broke down and went into gibbering hysterics. The Marines were not amused.

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Cassie 1.0

by on February 1, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

Cassie was the first Combat Assistant Artificial Intelligence specifically designed for the United States Marine Corps. They didn’t want to go through all the work of coding an entirely new program after the Army had designed the various Janes out there, but they didn’t want Jane either. She was Army. The Marines wanted a Marine. The first Cassies were actually just reskinned Janes that Marine procurers hoped would not be noticed. But it didn’t take long for the Marines in the field to catch the subterfuge. They tasked their best cyberneers with modifying the basic personality to be more compatible with Marine culture. It didn’t work as planned

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Minnesota Winters

by on January 31, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

This is the third night in a row of hitting less than 20 actual degrees below zero. Yesterday the actual temperature was -28 in my hometown and the wind chill hit -60. This is the third time in my life I have seen cold snaps of this kind.

The first was when I was very young in the early 1980s. Northern Minnesota had wind chills of -100 and actual temperatures of around -40. Wind chills were calculated differently back then, and I don’t know the modern number, but that was cold. I have pictures of me standing on top of the car that was a snowdrift that winter.

The second was in the late 1990s when I lost another car in a snowdrift. And it hit actual temperatures below -20 on the scale. I don’t even know what the wind chills were back then. All I know is that walking three blocks to pick my car up from the shop was an experience that will live with me until the day I die. My eyeballs felt like they were freezing behind my glasses. It literally hurt to keep my eyes open so I could see where I was walking.

And now…no joke. This is cold. Up here in Minnesota we like to joke about the cold. It gets below zero and we laugh. We ask each other if it’s warm enough for yah and chuckle. We aren’t laughing now. Well, we are, but…this is seriously cold, even for the best of us.

I work in a hotel and multiple heating units just totally failed. I don’t mean that they couldn’t keep up with the cold and the temperature dropped. I mean the cold seeped into their heating units while they were on and froze them up. It feels like half my coworkers are staying at the hotel right now because it’s too cold for them to go home. Their cars won’t start. The roads are so cold the salt and sand don’t give us traction so it’s not safe to drive. I haven’t taken my JEEP off four-wheel drive all week. And I’m starting it every 4 hours so it can warm up so it can start in another 4 hours so it can start up and take me to work. And I’m sliding the whole way there at 15 to 20 MPH because the roads are so deeply frozen.

Schools are closed because we don’t want kids standing out on the street for fifteen minutes waiting for the buses to show up. The US Post Office isn’t delivering mail. This is the kind of cold that literally kills people. And it has this year. It has.

This is truly an historical cold to remember.

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Minnesota Winters

by on January 30, 2019 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

There are days that make we want to write stories about. Days that will live on forever in memory. Days like today, when I put pen to fingers to keys and let fly my voice with new words to familiar tunes…

Oh the weather outside is frightful,
When the northern winds come blowing.
Now I dare not take a breath.
Oh it’s cold, oh it’s cold, oh it’s cold.

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