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.

What I’m saying is that it suggests uncomfortable things about the ethical framework in which whoever is making the valuations is operating. Not because of any specific valuation schemas, but because reducing people to numbers (values) is inherently dehumanizing.

I’m not saying that there aren’t terrible people who do terrible things. But any ethical framework or decision that dehumanizes people I would consider inherently unethical.

So it lets us work out certain laws inherent in our universe? Wow, I did miss that implication…

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!)

Hadn’t heard of her before! The theorem sounds interesting, but the Wikipedia article is a bit dense - I got that “any system with symmetry will have conserved values”, but I got lost on the implications. Would you mind expanding on her theorem?

Declaring people to have a certain value relative to each other strikes me as uncomfortably close to treating people as things.

Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.

It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.

The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.

I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.

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!

The d in “dick” doesn’t quite have the top of the round part connected to the vertical part, so it looks like “click” - a homophone of “clique”

Yeah, from the article, it sounds like only a few organizations were in the lawsuit. They’re the only ones the judge ordered restored.

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.

Doesn’t say it wasn’t an apple!

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!

That was a surprisingly disturbing read…

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.