[An4ximandros]

That makes me want to reevaluate this:

secondary: selective pressure for resumption of panontic function. secondary: suppression of destructive firewall strategies."
"PRIMARY: imperate! metastatic ontovoric acatalepsis event! subversion of noosphere un - TERMINATE"

And it makes me think Noemi's question might have almost triggered a request that was too resource hungry to be calculated.

And then there's the firewalls, denying precious processing power that may or may not be infinite.

The great darkness might not be a species or a thing at all, but a description of "Nagari-space" lost to invasive firewalls.

And the there's the ancients and the xenocide they committed... and the fact we lack data on what they did with Nagari. Edit: Well, sort of. We know they did manage to use it.

[Phantom Hoover]

hahaha, the idea of the GD being the result of paranoid security systems dogpiling on some tiny thing until they become dangerously obsessed with it is brilliant

[InsaneBaron]

Ahhhh I don't want to be an asshole tease, devs are jerks when they do that. But I don't want to just point at either. So maybe I can judo this into an interesting discussion - I think one of the core phenomena we have to understand in building systems, whether civilizations or individual bodies, is how local vs. global incentives compete.

So, as one example: a cell will only survive in the long term if an organism it's part of survives. So individual cells have to be coerced to behave in a way that's good for the organism globally, even if it hurts their own reproductive success. So our bodies create laws - apoptosis, limited telomeres, tumor suppression genes - to punish rogue players who switch over to the defect strategy in the prisoner's dilemma: reproducing wildly, hijacking the resources of cooperative cells to feed their own growth.

Occasionally these rules break down - there's a vulnerability that something learns to exploit. Boom! You get a tumor, or a sociopath, or a predatory megacorporation, or a meme, or any phenomenon that's learned how to exploit the rules to propagate itself. This seems to be a fundamental truth across all kinds of systems, from the molecular (DNA is a molecule that's learned how to replicate itself, and then to jacket itself in organisms that further promote its fitness) to the civilizational (a peaceful artistic country won't succeed in the long run if its neighbor is an aggressive invader).

And the bigger the system, the more resources it's assembled, the bigger the payoff for the defect strategy that learns to exploit that system. A sociopath in a little village might learn how to steal some extra food. A sociopath in a world-spanning civilization might become emperor of Rome, and that's a much better place to be if you're selfish.

Then I assume the important word was Cancer...

In which case, the Shivans could be described as a sort of immune system...

to eliminate any species which starts killing off other species for its own gain (i.e. the Ancients)

The question is... how is the elimination of a species a threat to the universe itself?

hahaha, the idea of the GD being the result of paranoid security systems dogpiling on some tiny thing until they become dangerously obsessed with it is brilliant

Like the time I killed my computer by mistaking Systems32 for a virus. (a learning experience, to say the least).

But back on topic... that could explain what the GD is. Somebody didn't want just anyone hacking into Nagari. But who made it? The Brahmans? The Big Three working together?

(The Ancients? Did they have Nagari capabilities?) EDIT: No, it couldn't be.

[An4ximandros]

In BP canon, the Ancient monologues were Nagari visions given to Alpha 1. Given their context, they were likely Ancient recordings, or something along those lines.

[Phantom Hoover]

old snippet of fairly relevant irc discussion:

In the time HLP was down we had some very good conversation about this!

[22:39] <authortuttaway> basically i think that in attempting to criticize what seems like an unusually structured and teleological bit of shivan behavior
[22:39] <authortuttaway> you're unintentionally attributing too much structure and teleology to the shivans
[22:40] <authortuttaway> so what if the anima sticks around and does stuff and leads to misadaptation and gets defeated
[22:40] <authortuttaway> there are more shivans out there
[22:40] <SpardaSon21> infinite Shivans!
[22:42] <Phantom_Hoover> authortuttaway, ooooooh, right
[22:42] <Phantom_Hoover> that is... better
[22:42] <authortuttaway> yeah
[22:42] <authortuttaway> i mean i won't pretend you're not making a good point!
[22:42] <authortuttaway> but i think it's a point that ultimately points (har) back towards the robustness of the shivan design
[22:43] <authortuttaway> now what WOULD be a problem
[22:43] <authortuttaway> and hrm, this is very interesting
[22:43] <Phantom_Hoover> is there some kind of anima lifetime, though?
[22:43] <authortuttaway> is if you got an anima that could, like...recruit shivans out of the basal state to some disproportionate extent
[22:43] <authortuttaway> that was badly put
[22:43] <Phantom_Hoover> yeah, this was discussed earlier
[22:44] <Phantom_Hoover> analogous to a tumour, right?
[22:44] <authortuttaway> right, exactly
[22:44] <Phantom_Hoover> and having a forced shutdown on animas is analogous to apoptosis
[22:44] <authortuttaway> an anima that would cause issues by locking everybody into a fixed state that might be locally optimal
[22:44] <authortuttaway> yeah
[22:45] <authortuttaway> but the solution might lie in the fact that the animae are fundamentally pretty ad hoc, built out of smaller units; their traits may not be able to feed back down the way you'd think of with DNA mutations
[22:45] <authortuttaway> you can't have a tumor without changes in the individual cells
[22:46] <authortuttaway> also, shivan cognition is very - i'm not sure this is apparent from the existing stuff - but extremely ruthless and elimination-driven; it's a mode of thought that is fundamentally hostile to organization
[22:46] <authortuttaway> it's constantly trying to kill itself
[22:46] <Doko> So they are basically teenagers
[22:47] <Phantom_Hoover> so how did the ancient anima survive a few millennia of doing not very much
[22:47] <Doko> (except for the whole killing themselves part)
[22:47] <Phantom_Hoover> (insert tasteless joke about emos)
[22:47] <authortuttaway> well, you might have answered your own question - it wasn't doing very much!
[22:47] <authortuttaway> but also, i'm not convinced a few millennia is necessarily that long for them, structurally
[22:47] <Doko> emos are always fair game in my book
[22:47] <authortuttaway> also i think there's the hint in there that the local threshold is a bit inflamed
[22:48] <authortuttaway> there was trouble recently in the form of the ancients; the anima may have been left online to deal with any flare-ups

[Aardwolf]

IMO "suppression of destructive firewall strategies" is obviously talking about us Terrans collapsing the damn jump nodes.

[MatthTheGeek]

"Suppression of destructive" (which is a double négative) sounds more like repair, which sounds more like the activation of the Knossos in GD and the construction of the Sol Gate.

[General Battuta]

You're thinking of 'suppression of destruction' (which would be kinda redundant) but here it's '[suppression of] [destructive firewall strategies]'.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

[off topic]I'm noticing a lot of GD being thrown around on this forum . Great Darkness, Gamma Drax, General Discussion, etc.[/off topic]

[redsniper]

Life is cancer.

[Luis Dias]

Cancer is just one simple metaphor that explains the kinds of sorts of limitations the Shivans will put up with until they'll try to clean up whatever is seemingly causing apparent trouble. Local anima like Ken might be overreaching for the sake of humanity, for example.

I read that "TERMINATE" line in multiple ways. It could mean that a global command was terminated by a local anima like Ken. Or it could mean that the message itself was terminated because it revealed too much information. In this second case, it could be because it was very dangerous for the sanity of the human reader, or it was just too vital an info to be revealed to Laporte. Or the sneaking was spotted and "terminated".

The noosphere subversion bit is interesting, because it might be about either a possible Shambhala noosphere in the near future, or about Ken's own small noosphere, or it could also be about (more likely) Al'Dawa's own noosphere being subverted or in danger. From either the Shivans themselves or another phenomena related to GD. Either this info is being terminated or the process itself. However, in the mission itself, Laporte is continuously "hacked" through different set pieces and experiences after this point.

[An4ximandros]

She gets hacked around by the Vishnans after that... Maybe the Vishnans are the Cancer.