Comic Archive

Setting: the water cooler / coffee machine, only Zhang, Heidi and Max.
Zhang: Alana is right, I don't think we can turn this into a product anytime soon. Not only is it awkward, it's borderline dangerous.
Max: Heidi did a good job keeping Alana from finding out the truth behind OIB-A271.
Heidi: It was mostly luck. The LLM must have been confused by the ‘Deletium’ concept.
Zhang: Who wouldn't?

Max: Alana is onto something. The secret won't last long… Hey, what's that thing you still want to try?
Heidi: I think I can make the truth helmet work with certain animals.
Zhang: Really? How? What animals?

Heidi: Those that are the most compatible with humans, like dogs and maybe cats. I might have some usable datasets for training the system. I don't know how well it will work…
Zhang: Well, only one way to find out…

Setting: Steve and Adil are walking in a corridor.
Steve: Damn, I should have volunteered to test that truth helmet.
Adil: Why?
Steve: Then I could have unmasked Zhang as a spy.
Adil: You seriously believe he's a Chinese spy?

Steve: I don't trust him, even if he's supposedly born in this country.
Adil: Seems a bit of a witch hunt. But, he was very reluctant to be subjected to the helmet, while being pretty eager to use it…
Steve: You see? That's suspicious.

Adil: Can't you ask that ChatWSL thing? It knows everything!
Steve: I deem it very unlikely that Zhang somewhere openly declared he's a spy and even if he did, it is even less likely that such info got included in ChatWSL's training set…
Adil: Meh, I don't know much about how those A.I. things work, only how to sell them!

Steve: The only thing ChatWSL is useful for, besides surreptitiously plagiarizing the work of others, is quickly generating source code and configurations. Here, I'll ask it to generate an nftables firewall rule…
Adil: M.F. tables?

Steve: Aarghh! Wrong, it is mixing nftables and iptables syntax! “ctstate – is – wrong!”
Adil: Reply: “you are right, ‘ctstate’ indeed is iptables syntax. Here is the correct solution.” If it knew that, then why did it not say it from the start?

Steve: It doesn't know anything, it just glues words together. However, it nearly always acts like this, almost seems intentional. I'm starting to believe that whoever trained this thing, is a sadist with a twisted sense of humor.
Adil: You geeks really are weird.

Setting: The workshop.
Heidi: This is it, the Truth Helmet might now allow us to understand what dogs and cats are trying to communicate when they bark or meow.
Max: How can we test this? This set-up is not what one could call portable.
Zhang: I have a cat at home, I can bring her next week.

Heidi: There is a public park nearby where people often walk and play with their dogs. It is especially popular on Friday afternoons like these. With a UPS unit, we can run the system from inside a car for at least half an hour.

Zhang: We'll risk getting some strange looks when we're being spotted wearing that contraption in public…
Max: All for science!
Heidi: OK, let's get packing.