I think it might be, there’s no way Anakin would be able to buy proprietary hardware or software. So either he stole it, which his mother probably would not have allowed. Or he was able to scrap all the parts together because there is a template for humanoid protocol droids that we have also seen round Star Wars. And then the software itself either Anakin programed entirely himself, (which I know he’s very smart, but even that seems a stretch) or he forked it. So it would make more sense that there was an open source catalog of protocol droid software. It also would make more sense due to the fact that a lot of people have droids, but they are not all created equal. I would think many of the droids on Coruscant were proprietary, while many of the droids in the outer rim are open source.
my jawa friend says, and i qoute
Ibana Utinni! Togo m’bwa kwa chee kah
Make of that what you will
I’m rusty, but that’s either
“Hey! My hemorrhoids are flaring up”
or
“Hands off! That’s mine”
or
“Always drink your Ovaltine”
We will never know. The prequel trilogy is not canon.
Not canon? Why do you say that?
Have you seen the prequel trilogy
The only canonisation it deserves is being fired out of one
It’s the second best trilogy
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.
You promised me fleeesh! All I feel is paaaain! Why have you done this to me??
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).
In Legends canon, droid sapience was accidental. It was the result of a worm that infected droid brains, and was passed wirelessly via shortband communication frequencies. Once it escaped into the wild, there really was no stopping it since by that point it was self-writing and evolving, like a real infectious disease. Wiping droids’ memories regularly is supposed to prevent personalities from forming.
Every droid can develop a personality if you leave them alone long enough. R2 is one of the rare droids in the canon that has never had his memory wiped. Ever. Obi-Wan had 3PO wiped because he’s shit at keeping a secret, but R2 knows how to keep his trap shut.
I can’t remember which book it was, but R2 was reminiscing about his life experiences with I think BB-8. Talking about how he feels like it’s his duty to be an observer. A recorder, someone who’s close to history shaping events, and will always remember the moments that made the future. Which I think was cool.
Everything is open source if you can read Assembly! (Replace Assembly with whatever the Star Wars equivalent is, which is probably just Assembly.)
The binary language of moisture vaporators… obv
Really awful, undocumented, spaghetti code open source. But sure, technically correct!
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.
I mean, obviously I wasn’t a slave on Tattooine, but I was a poor kid in a rural community. I figure Ani learned how to fix droids the same way I learned how to fix bikes and computers; I needed it, and couldn’t afford a new one, so I had to teach myself how to make it work again, or face going hungry.
A lot of it is… well, kind of like figuring out where puzzle pieces are supposed to fit. Eventually, even if you don’t quite know what you’re doing yet, you can kind of guess where something is supposed to go. If you have a known good working model to compare to, and a good manual, you can teach yourself all kinds of things if you really need to do it.
That, and he was owned by Watto. Watto, as an employer (fuck that guy generally, but bear with me), had to teach his employee how to operate equipment. How to catalogue his junk and get it working again so it could be sold. Anakin was a smart kid, but he also literally built and scrapped droids for work. He had hours a day and nearly unlimited broken droids to take apart.
I’ve been accused of wizard shit more than once, and I’m nowhere near the same class as the actual tech wizards. I like to think I know enough to get by and call out bullshit. Honestly, the only gripe I have with how Ani’s technical talent was written is that he was unrealistically young. The rest was pretty believable.
The most relatable bit was forgetting to put 3PO’s eye back in when he powered him on.
Yeah, and I think that’s what they were going for. Just “I programmed this artificial being that feels emotions like happiness, fear, and frustration, has his own wants and desires, and can calculate the odds of arbitrary things on the fly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It feels similar to a kid building a computer out of spare parts (reasonable) and then programming his own OS and software for it (less reasonable).
But, to be fair, maybe it was more of a case of he found modules with those different languages on them and plugged them into a standard but customizable protocol droid program and is referring to that configuration as “programming” rather than the act of writing the software itself. Kinda like how flashing a new ROM onto your bios can be called programming it, despite the lack of coding.
If putting together a droid is anything like putting together a conventional PC, I would assume that he would have the tools for flashing the industry standard software onto a blank droid brain, just like I do with a blank hard drive. Hell no I didn’t write that, I just know the steps for copying it onto storage media so it runs.
In the Legends canon, droid sentience was the accidental result of an improbably successful computer worm. Wiping droids’ memories removes the malware, but it finds its way back eventually.
Yeah, in hindsight, I’m not really sure why I assumed it would be from scratch.
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.
Although, nobody ever asks Gandalf to fix their printer or build their app. He gets to dine with kings.
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).
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”
There are tons of protocol droids in universe. He cobbled scrap bots together. Clever, but he didn’t invent or program it. More like fancy legos
Incorrect. Anakin programmed Threepio with the desire to serve his mother and with the six languages he spoke at the time.
I would agree its more like modification than building from scratch, but he still had to get in there and noodle with everything. Programming was absolutely involved.
I could see this being more like code blocks instead of actual software engineering. He probably found the different language modules and stuck them all in, and then did the equivalent of changes to a config file.
Edit config.txt
“sentience=1”
“British_sassy_butler=1”
anus=ACCESSIBLE
With the other horny prisoners…?
Zere vill be no funny business going on hier in ze horny jail!
He did not “program” 6 languages. Even if he was a super genius and spoke 6 languages, there’s physically not enough time for Anakin to have typed the entire vocabulary and grammar of 1 language, much less 6.
Imo, his “programming 6 languages” was plugging in 6 hardware language modules and running a command to load them.
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.
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…
from language import *
Does not require access to source code though. Could still be closed source…
What does wookirpedia say… Apparently the 3po protocol droid series was manufactured by a company called cybot galactica. That page confirms that c3po was cobbled together from scrap. I don’t see anything about the cybot company running open source software though
Sounds like copyright infringement to me
There is no copyright if you lack the star destroyers to enforce it. Or enough money to pay the headhunters.
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.
I don’t understand. I didn’t talk about a romanticized idea of the past or a fictional universe. Help?
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.
I tried to depict my belief, that copyright is a artificial construct, which needs enforcement to be effective. If no one takes repressive measures in their hand, people will ignore copyright laws.
I then took some plot devices and organisations from SW which represent repression and control to desribe that train of thought.
I failed to see the connection between this and your response, since you replied to me. But if there is none, that’s fine by me. :)
PS: I think stories need to be larger than life to attract the audiences attention. It’s the same recipe since ancient Greece’s theatre works. Because people are people and they want what they always wanted.
You wouldn’t download a droid.
He’s a slave boy in a scrap yard on some backwater shithole of a planet. Sue him
Hes a slave. Gota sue his owner Quato or whatever his name is.
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.
The first step down a dark path if he’s not careful.
Look at it from the perspective of 1977 or just before, when the scripts were written. I wasn’t alive back then, but from what you read, it was a time when (real-world) devices came with manuals, schematics, block diagrams, and if they were missing you could probably find them or get them from the manufacturer.
Apple I and II are just hitting the market, with a strong background in DIY culture, and in the unlikely case you had access to one of these (or something like an Altair 8800 etc), you’d probably know how to fix a blown cap with a soldering iron.
Maybe I’m glorifying the past here but, Star Wars was written at a time when things, including computers, were expected to be repairable. So what you’re writing really only makes sense from a contemporary 2020-ies perspective, nobody would have raised an eyebrow at that detail in 1977 … probably.
Hard agree!
Star Wars was explicitly written by a greasemonkey as gritty and grungy in direct contrast to the sleek, clean, computer-controlled future that dominated SF in that era. Droids function much more like custom cars than assembly-line computers with wireless updates.
Even later in our time but earlier in the SW time line, the one example of mass production, the droid army, was comically bad: incredibly dumb, fragile, and incompetent.
Roger Roger
The cannon fodder droids introduced in Phantom Menace are, but the other droids used by the separatists are generally ruthlessly effective.
What’s the design/production philosophy behind those separatist droids? Been a while…
Little did we known he used two swimming pools worth of water everytime he translated for r2d2
This is the loveliest conversation I have seen all week. I have been incredibly burned out with Reddit of late, so this is refreshing.
Lemmy now is what Reddit used to be like in the early days. I hope the enshittification stays away!
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.
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.
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?
Actually, they did predict this. It’s been one of the classic ethical questions posed by hard sci-fi since we were feeding punch-cards into slots and soldering breadboards.
Isaac Asimov in particular wrote a lot of short stories tackling the ways that an AI could break the Laws of Robotics. Hell, he invented the Laws of Robotics specifically as a plot device for his setting to discuss the philosophy behind computer ethics.
The problem is, the tech oligarchs failed the reading assignment and didn’t actually read the books that were supposed to warn them NOT to do the thing.
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.
Isaac Asimov entering the chat like
C-3PO is proprietary. How do I know this? George told me it is supposed to be the first warning sign that Anakin is evil.
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.
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
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.
Canon typically is written after scripts are to fill in back story, his beeps and blips were entirely made because George Lucas was/is a technical guy and made his career out of incorporating new fx techniques
Literally, same movie, we watch R2-Motherboardfucking-D2 make complex fuselage repairs on an ambassadorial shuttle in microgravity while other droids are being blasted off the wing like sitting ducks. Did not flinch, did not look up, just had his tools in the breach, and did his job like the badass mechanic that he is.
You put 3PO in that position, he would have floated away screaming. (Which is completely sensible, because he was never programmed to do that shit. “I was programmed for etiquette, not destruction!”
Flip that around, would you trust R2 to communicate complex battle plans with a pre-FTL civilization of hunter-gatherers when the stakes of a bad subject-verb agreement can be measured in sentient life? Bro speaks Binary, and nothing else. But 3PO did. He has de-escalated conflicts that could have ended in bloodbaths, because he knows his job 6 million ways from Sunday.
They’re both awesome. We just like to bully 3PO because he has funny reactions to understandably terrifying and overwhelming shit.
If you read the thrawn trilogy back in the day, or maybe it was was the rogue squadron books, astrommechs have a memory reset that normally happens during maintenance , Luke refused to ever let Artoo get reset. In the past though Artoo has been reset (multiple different owners) he also has a particular personality quirk that he always ends up back in a position where he’s “operating outside normal parameters” or some such bs.
Luke liked Artoos quirk so he encouraged it and preserved Artoos personality by preventing that maintenance
Star Wars has a data transmission problem in that software isn’t easily distributed across the galaxy.
Its much more likely Anakin found the programming or just a part with the “OS” installed and put it into a bunch of spare protocol droid parts. Maybe it took some tinkering but I don’t think he did a bunch of low level stuff as he’s a slave without real education, and I don’t believe anything of that level of skill comes up again.
Also noted, I don’t think the droids in Star Wars are 1 for 1 “operating systems” as we know them as they (can) have advanced personalities in a way that our software certainly doesn’t do.
but I don’t think he did a bunch of low level stuff as he’s a slave without real education
You know, back in the not-so-far-away days, the best programmers didn’t have educations and the worst ones did.
The movies do imply he’s a pretty savvy scrap engineer, so I’ll give him that.
Its just the environment he’s forced to work in.
Yeah, and it’s perfectly fine for a kid to be an advanced engineer/mechanic and championship podracer at 9-years-old who also saves the day in a key battle, just as long as they’re not a girl because Mary Sues absolutely suck and it’s not sexist at all to say that because Marty Stu exists as an entry in allthetropes. /s
I was a kid when I watched episode 1, and I was so confused by how any of it made any sense.
Midichlorians. Obviously.
Oh right, that shit made me wonder why they weren’t just transfusing blood around to induct new members… Or, you know, giving the power of the force to every person.
Honestly I think knowing he was vader made it a lot easier to accept. Like a main character not dying in a prequel. Still though, it was pretty wack looking back. lol
