halcy 
a common affordance in scifi is that spaceships can just video call each other, even spaceships of different races who have never met before. this implies that there is a sufficiently mathematically obvious RTC protocol that all spacefaring races eventually discover
„but halcy, the computer simply adapts the signal“ try piping an opus bitstream into chatgpt, see how that goes
„This situation where everyone uses their own protocol is ridiculous.“, says Alien A, „We shall develop one protocol that satisfies everyones ne-“ and before they can even finish, they are handed The Document. No one remembers where it came from originally, what the letters „XKCD“ mean, or the significance of the number 927
Thomas Tuegel@halcy Just the idea of _having_ a protocol presumes that the various species have compatible visual perception. A human video stream isn’t going to make to a species that isn’t using RGB-sensitive receptors, no matter how it’s encoded.
LovesTha🥧@ttuegel @halcy Current tech yes, but there is no physics reason you can't have each pixel sampling the waveform from IR to UV with say 1000 samples and storing that. And it's what you'd want if really caring about colour rendering.
But yes, you are very unlikely to do that before encountering, and probably starting to staff species with different eyes.
I guess you might start doing it if people start bio engineering replacement eyes with exotic receptors.
RRB
Daburu Dar
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
@ttuegel @halcy What if you didn't use RGB? Maybe they've all got full-spectrum cameras and can transmit the spectrum data. Or I wonder if there's some fancy signal processing way to produce a synthetic spectrum from an RGB-channels signal so you can convert it to a different-primaries color space.
This'd be a problem even on earth! Wolves don't have the same color receptors as humans, so if I ever somehow got to transition (I won't :<) I'd have issues with every existing display.
@ttuegel @halcy ... Apparently purple is weird. But it sounds like most everything else can be mapped to a wavelength.
I wonder how accurate such a mapping would be. I bet it'd fail for a bunch of stuff because it probably doesn't reflect one singular wavelength, just a mix that humans can't distinguish from that singular wavelength. Other critters with different eyes would be terribly confused.
Andreas, DJ3EI, he/himExactly.
"I wonder if there's some fancy signal processing way to produce a synthetic spectrum from an RGB-channels signal."
Can't be done, for mathematical reasons. If you pick only four different wavelengths out of the optical spectrum and amplitude-modulate each independently of the other three, you have a whole dimension of additional options than can be covered with the three RGB sensors.
Next, use 100 different wavelengths...
CavyherdBut is that truly the case? Couldn't RGB map comprehensively onto any trichromate system? (Cf space telescopes that work outside of the terrestrial visual range, but can nevertheless be made to produce imagery that makes sense to humans?)
Also, there are many cross-modality mappings that produce interesting & useful results. Print-to-speach being only one example.
sabik
KolaMagpie@halcy Especially since you know every single one of the aliens' protocols is so convoluted and hampered to be backwards-compatible with whatever that species' first audio-video display system was. The USS Enterprise has a VGA input on their big screen 1000%
@KolaMagpie conference rooms in intergalactic conference centers are, by volume, 10% seating area, 90% storage for adapters. and yet, the one you need is missing, for some reason
@halcy Exactly one person on the ship or station knows how to fix whatever problem the current conference is having (the problem changes each time); it's a matter of tracking them down and they'll be like "oh yeah I had that three years ago you gotta plug this into that first, /then/ connect your tablet and route the call through the /BOX/ not the tablet, and it should work fine :)"
Andrew@KolaMagpie @halcy trying to make a pun on Startech/Star Trek here but I got nothing
@KolaMagpie @halcy wherein VGA stands for Vulcan Graphics Adaptor?
Harper (they them)
Kyle Brown 
@halcy how do you say "your certificate is out of date and needs to be updated " in Klingon?
bluestarultor@halcy Maybe the systems are just banking on everyone having figured out some product of primes and the systems sling a ton of zeroes back and forth until they figure out a common one and then things get all weird for a few frames until it can figure out the light and dark sums of channels as things move around in the hi-res signals and then try to figure out the rest based on how many channels there are.
Meeting a new species is understood as everyone waving their arms around a bit and being weird and purple for a few seconds and then everyone just pretending it never happened. XD
@bluestarultor @halcy Everyone knows you start by showing a feed of the brightest star visible from the current location, it is the obvious sane way to calibrate streams.
I would love to see the VFX implied by this. Some skiffy production should really have a go at it. It'd be a marvelous opportunity for some stealth math education.
(Why does Darmok suddenly leap to mind?)
@cavyherd @halcy I feel like "Darmok" failed to anticipate Wikipedia. As a writer with some sci-fi in the works, it's reasonable to expect anyone with interstellar travel down is going to have a digital encyclopedia. Leeloo uses this method in The Fifth Element to rapidly update herself on everything leading up to her breakdown over learning about war, but it's a solid tactic. And something analytical A.I. would actually be good for to rapidly identify parallels in language. I mean yes it would burn down a forest, but if you can start with some concept of, say, "dog," you have domestication, carnivores, pets, friendly behaviors, probably agriculture, etc. Building that web would get you started on basic concepts. Would it be rough? Absolutely. But it would be a start.
My reference to Darmok is less about the story element of the language decoding than the way the story is structured to bring the audience along while the characters work out the puzzle.
Structuring a story to display the process you describe in the 1st paragraph of the reply I resonded to could be a lot of fun for at least one episode. (Though I imagine subsequently it'd just be implicit, in the way the transporter was first introduced, & then later just assumed.) >
There are a lot of critiques that could (& have been) made about the primary conceit in Darmok.
But as a piece of story-telling that also carries the viewer along through the experience of solving the puzzle, I found it to be a delight.
@cavyherd Ah, yeah, now that you spelled it out I see exactly what you mean. XD
Oh grumble. Now I really really wanna see somebody do that.
I mean, I love the comms hook-up conceit, but it'd be so much fun from a production standpoint to play with that.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)In Star Trek, the Universal Translator translates speech between aliens with entirely different frames of reference (e.g. humans and sentient gas clouds). Presumably it’s also doing some false-colour magic to video streams that come from species with totally different visual perception. Next to that, decoding some data stream that you already know is a video feed seems quite easy.
Okay, this legit made me LOL. I'm surprised I didn't scare the guinea pigs.
See also: "The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many of them!"
Jima 
bob@halcy you probably could generate SILK packets with char-rnn
@bob potentially hilarious experiment now that i think about it
LisPi@halcy Headcanon: They're sending analog audio & crt linescans.
CubeOfCheese@cubeofcheese @halcy There's some synchronization stuff involved with radio television but it's plausible to make a dumb program to automatically handle it if one expects that format (especially with an operator actively directing the program).
Arbitrarily-complex digital protocols, not so much.
Arbitrarily-complex digital protocols, not so much.
Piko Starsider 
@lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese And a not-so-dumb program (or ML model) that looks for circles in the picture and other clues to adjust the aspect ratio automatically, as well as orientation. Although most automatically decoded transmissions would be black and white, since color is much more complex. Maybe the same model that detects orientation can also detect color signals somehow.
Galbinus Caeli@starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese
Also "color" has a very species specific definition. Unless you transmit many, many wavelengths, and hope to hit the right one(s)
Also "color" has a very species specific definition. Unless you transmit many, many wavelengths, and hope to hit the right one(s)
@rrb @GalbinusCaeli @starsider @halcy @cubeofcheese Among other more simple or primitive options like "mechanical television" or SSTV.
@lispi314 @halcy @rrb @cubeofcheese @starsider Mechanical and SSTV have the same color/frequency issue. Unless you are transmitting simple greyscale across a broad spectrum, you have to pick frequencies (colors) that match the specific receptor cells of your audience.
Kevin Karhan 
@lispi314 @halcy @rrb @[email protected] @GalbinusCaeli @starsider given that any interstellar civilization will have Zettaflops of computational power in their ships and Petaflops in their communicators that sip Nanowatt, it's expectable to have some autonegotiation on speed -kinda system.
Kevin Karhan :verified: (@[email protected])
@[email protected] I guess that to an extend stuff like analog #NTSC or even #HiVision + #MUSE is not just trivial to modulate but also that basically any space-faring civilization will have a decently performant #SDR setup. - I mean, #Hamradio operators do #SSTV for decades so the only reason they don't do #TV at fluent frame rates is lack of #spectrum to do so. But in space, that problem isn't existing so quasi-optical links in like 24GHz & 60GHz bands are trivial to setup. - Compared to the challenges of superluminal or spacetime warping travel, [autonegotiation and frequency selection for bidirectional audio & video feed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhIEfxRLiPI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD) [if not compression] is an absolutely trivial problem that I'm confident elementary schoolkids in a *"Star-Trek" - esque universe* doodle in their free time like some folks nowadays do breadboard. Also a lot of #encoding / #decoding & #compression schemes can be broken down into mathematical formulas and that [is a universal languague](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCkD5GOjvx8) to the point that one could assume said communications to be like a sci-fi variant of [modem handshake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDhyayQ_Rk0) within a second as computational power and speeds should be abundant anyway... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi-Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Sub-Nyquist_Sampling_Encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television
@rrb @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese Interlaced formats are going to be even more problematic since they depend on two frame encoding mechanically, and on image persistence biologically.
Your best bet is going to be some form of bitmap, with a significant training/tutorial component.
@GalbinusCaeli @rrb @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese I'm sure a circle detector could detect any number of sub-frames of arbitrary order of interlacing: there's only few ways to make all circles match perfectly with all subframes, and of them, one combination will have the least amount of noise.
@starsider @rrb @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese Transmitting circles would be a useful form of tutorial/training.
Assuming all sapients have the same facination with circles that we inherited from the ancient greeks. (Note that the Egyptians were kinda into triangles.)
@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese I would go more for k dimensional simplexes with k going from 0 to ,,,
@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese Or maybe look at how insect, cephalopod, and corvid cognition works to see what generalizes better.
@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese My bad. You are right. I read Tchaikovsky's Children of {x} sequence during lockdown. That probably caused my memory glitch.
@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese Edit accepted and executed.
Thanks.
@rrb @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese
Yeah science fiction greatly simplifies by giving aliens binocular image-resolving eyes.
Yeah science fiction greatly simplifies by giving aliens binocular image-resolving eyes.
@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese Function of our imagination. We can not really imagine non-human intelligence. That is why the post-singularity books tend to be boring.
chexum@GalbinusCaeli @starsider @lispi314 @halcy @cubeofcheese in addition to all this, the shows often make the local and remote viewer look at each other, even when viewed from an angle. For the purpose of “don’t look at the camera”, which is guaranteed with all 2D screens, the view is then forced to be three dimensional, and not just stereo, but volumetric, rotatable, which makes all the brainstorming so far useless :S
I love the arbitrary crt scanlines idea otherwise, sounds workable from a hw implementation point of view (modulo colour)
veetee@halcy not sure about the protocol itself, but the codec shouldn't be a problem - the expanding radio shell will eventually transmit ffmpeg everywhere
