Galaxies are closer together relative to their size than stars; but they’re still a few orders of magnitude farther apart than this.

The scale I’ve seen is: If the sun were the size of a ping pong ball, the next nearest star would be hundreds of miles away. But if the Milky Way were the size of a CD, Andromeda would be on the other side of the room.

And people rich enough to stupidly link those AI agents to their bank accounts.

I need to pay more attention to how rich people are using AI personally…

At this point, I question whether they’re even experts in that kind of finance, or if they’re just connected to each other well enough, and have a few willing experts in hand, to maintain their position.

I honestly think the only thing most of them have going for them is that it’s their name on the accounts.

Yeah, I was just poking at what I assumed was a day off the cuff response. Didn’t occur to me they might have tried formatting it, and failed.

Thanks for breaking them out!

…what kind of game is that?!

And yet it still keeps finding ways to tear him down!

I absolutely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and completely disagree with the second! That said, stories evolve at least as quickly as the language they’re built from, and I’m sure every family that hangs up stockings has their own unique spin for Santa. But intentionally gaslighting your kids in order to teach an object lesson about how people will manipulate you seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it, especially when the kid comes out ahead for it!

I think it started as a story to get kids excited, because that’s fun. In my family, the kids were brought into the act as they got old enough to understand that the point; and I assume this was very common back when kids had to help with everything as soon as they were old enough. The kids then get to practice giving without any intention of getting recognition for it, which helps make more charitable adults.

That’s not to say that the story doesn’t get used to enforce behavior - the existence of Krampus shows a long history of that! But I don’t think it’s used primarily for that anymore.

I was incautious with my phrasing, I should have said something like “humans have a singular capacity” etc. There may well be other storytelling species (in fact, I hope there are!) Whalesong seems like it could have the necessary complexity, for instance. I don’t think crows warning each other about particular faces quite constitutes a story, though - that seems more like spreading “we hate that guy!” without any of the context a story would provide. Would be easy to check for storytelling with the species that can imitate speech, though.

I suspect this is a big part of what we’re looking for when we’re exploring personhood in nonhumans, too - whenever talking to animals, aliens, etc comes up in fiction, people inevitably end up swapping stories with them. Suggests to me that storytelling ability is what people are actually looking for.

I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we’re storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.

Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it’s done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.

I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.

Do they do different dialogue styles well? I could see using it for NPC chatter

Right now, it’s just a fun toy, prone to hallucinations.

That’s the thing though - with an LLM, it’s all “hallucinations”. They’re just usually close to reality, and are presented with an authoritative, friendly voice.

(Or, in your case, they’re usually close to the established game reality!)

Perhaps. I’m not sure I agree, honestly.

But I’m certain there’s never a time to hit a person you’re responsible for, who depends on you.

Man, my kids love windows.

They keep opening their bedroom windows in the middle of winter and making igloos from their pillows and blankets!

He’s not accepting it, he’s declaring it!

Totally different thing!

The administration is characterizing her as an activist and an agitator, in order to try to retroactively justify her killing.

This story is putting the lie to that statement.

I absolutely would not

One of my kids left a piece of candy corn for the tooth fairy last night, hoping to fool them into leaving money for the “tooth”.

So I pretended to be astounded when he found a note from the tooth fairy this morning, saying essentially “nice try!” in my wife’s left-handed handwriting :p He did get a penny out of it, though!

Good and Evil are ideas that help perpetuate the idea of Society. Good can be considered as “anything that helps my people” and Evil as “anything that hurts my people”.

I would argue that they are some of the earliest memes, in the original sense of the word - they are ideas that spread through imitation and story that helped early people (likely at least as far back as protohumans) maintain themselves as coherent groups.

I struggle on two fronts with this - I don’t want to “burden” others with how I feel, and fairly often I don’t know what I feel.

Grew up in the American Midwest as a preacher’s kid. My parents are awesome people, but Dad’s job meant our family had to seem close to perfect for small town political reasons - we had their support for any kind of crisis, but we had to keep it inside the house so our single limited income wasn’t threatened.

Between that and a family full of neurospiciness, it felt like we were always on the edge of catastrophe. I was generally able to get by day to day, so I just kept quiet so we all had room to deal with whatever else needs handled.

So, I think I got in the habit of bottling things until I couldn’t even tell what I was feeling, and also developed an aversion to sharing what I could tell was bothering me. I’m open to the idea of sharing things, I just can’t often tell what needs shared until it pops out unexpectedly.

I wonder if the stakes just feel lower here - I’ve noticed I express myself a lot more readily when I’m not talking to a peer, for a similar reason (lower stakes)