Having read the compared stories now, I have to say I’m deeply offended at the results. The AI stories are quicker to read because they are chains of cliches which state and restate the theme of the story (as stated in the prompt) outright instead of demonstrating it through the charged and personal perspectives of the characters. The LLM generated text is meaningless word sausage formatted to be easier to read for people who don’t read much. I have never read something more cynical, and I have read plenty of trash by authors who hate their audience and consider them all to be idiots.

This is like comparing landscape paintings to photographs of the same landscape from the same perspective and asking random people to judge which one they think is better. This is an insane comparison.

It’s a traumatic part of growth. Every culture has a defined path you’re supposed to go down and pretend like you enjoy it but the reality of people is so much more complex than that we all hit the point where the contradictions between ourselves and the lives we are living becomes too much and changes need to be made. You can’t go back to pretending you are completely fine with what you thought you were fine with, you can only move forward. As for how to deal with this world in all its beauties and horrors now that you see it a bit more clearly, being around other real life humans who also see it clearly helps a lot. We weren’t meant to go through this alone.

LLM companies may now freely commit corporate espionage because the news media is locked into reporting the claims that LLMs are capable of things like this as fact. This is like when the US bombed the girls school in Iran and blamed it on AI and the news reported it as fact until it was clear reasonable people weren’t willing to accept that excuse in that context. Corporate espionage is certainly not as bad as the mass murder of little girls, so people are willing to buy it since it doesn’t matter as much.

For practical purposes, this being illegal means the City of New York cannot unilaterally extradite the international fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu for processing at the ICC facility. The federal government and likely the state of New York would impede the extradition through force of arms. The NYPD can’t win a battle against the US military.

How?

I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.

I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.

At some point having a hard drive will become illegal.

If only there were a drummer on stage

No, it’s a lot worse than that . Your friend is into you at the same time as not being capable of being honest with himself. I’m not saying it’s necessarily the case here, but people get murdered in this situation even after being friends for years.

There is plenty of potential here for you to get hurt very badly if you pursue him, or worse out him, while he is trying to appear totally straight for his community. Once again, you did nothing wrong and the signals are pretty clear even to read, but this form of homophobia is very, very dangerous to both of you in every way.

Please don’t press him unless he comes out on his own, otherwise there is great potential for danger for both of you. It’s an awful situation and I hope you’re able to navigate it and go on to get everything you deserve from someone who’s available and safe.

This has everything to do with your friend and your status as a gay person, nothing to do with who you are. You can’t fix your friend no matter how much you may want to. Only he can come to terms with his own issues. It’s not fair that you are collatoral damage in his identity crisis, but it’s his crisis that you didn’t cause. You are only guilty of being a good enough friend to him that he felt comfortable exploring intimacy with you. Please believe me when I tell you the biggest issue you have now is the sunk cost fallacy. Again, it’s extremely unfair to you and it’s a shitty situation. Now that you know you can’t get what you need from him, you can either waste more effort on him or save your effort for someone who can reciprocate.

If anyone deserves to die, billionaires deserve to die more than anyone who has ever lived. Regardless, I personally don’t think anyone deserves to die. What I would prefer is that billionaires be put on trial for their crimes and sentenced to rehabilitation, and afterward live as equals with other humans. China made the last heir to the old empire a farmer who lived a happy life. That’s the happiest solution I can think of for everyone.

What would you be risking if you were honest? There’s a reason you believe you shouldn’t be authentic when you’re around others.

When you are dealing with people or institutions which hold power over you, it is an exhausting obligation to put on the performance that they want. No getting around it unless you find a different situation.

When you are with people who don’t hold power over you, masking is only a benefit if you are seeking to run confidence schemes. Unless you are seeking to deliberately defraud your peers, the best thing you can get from masking is that you will have to continue to perform the character they like and keep yourself suppressed to keep knowing them. If you are authentic around your peers, they will like or dislike you based on who you actually are, no acting required.

If you are suddenly authentic around the people who are exhausting you because they need you to play the character, they will not react well. You may be afraid of that. I promise you that losing your ability to connect to others because you believe you must always suppress yourself should scare you much more. It is a good thing to lose people who require you to not be yourself.

The historical record doesn’t cover any culture at all which does not in some way have to deal with agricultural and imperial societies, even if those cultures are resisting these forces.

Exactly my point.

Agriculture is not the enabling factor of human existence in most areas. Agriculture is the enabling factor for settlements of many people in most areas. Humans populated the entire Earth prior to agriculture.

Again, exactly my point. Agriculture is the thing enables hierarchies like this. Personal agrarian community is a compromise to me because we already have people to support who wouldn’t survive a transition to a system we know hierarchy can’t proliferate, which is hunting and gathering. I think civilization is possible (however unlikely) only at the most personal level, and every step beyond that personal level we see the consequences of empires.

The problems shared by cultures according to historical records are the problems of cities I’m talking about. Whether you would call them cities or not, among the fertile crescent civilizations there were definitely empires and there have been empires ever since. The written records history is based on are more modern than either empires or agriculture. I struggle to think of any issue which exists in my lifetime which was not caused in some way by the effects of empires.

Agriculture is the enabling factor for empires, so in my opinion agriculture must be practiced in a deliberate way which prevents the formation of empires. To this end I think people living intentionally in agrarian communities which minimize the burdens of regular life is less likely to plant the seeds of caste and hierarchy than a community in which people are alienated from the influence of their labor or have weaker connections to the people sustaining their lives.

What’s the most obvious question?

It’s weird that I’ve spent most of my time living in a post-economic world of abundance which I’m not allowed to acknowledge or encourage others to acknowledge because the pretend economy of valuation and confidence depends on exclusively on showmanship and nothing else. The LLM bubble may persist because the work being “saved” never needed to be done in the first place, so it not being done makes no difference to investors being told what got done as usual.

I’m biased against urban agriculture since it caused all of the problems humanity has been beset with for the last 10,000 years. Maybe if there was some kind of check against a city that starts using its massive resources to be predatory on less defensible communities as they always have.

There are too many people to live in a way other than agrarian at this point.