ART!
Legend
I was literally just reading this article: "The Empty Brain - Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge, or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer."over at Aeon.
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That explains how other branches of Homo were able to introduce genetic material into modern Homo sapiens during prehistoric times.Actually Ligers are fertile; just not with each other.
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"Liliger" Born in Russia No Boon for Big Cats
A liliger—the offspring of a liger mother and lion father—born in Russia may be cute, but it has no relevance in helping save big cats, experts say.www.nationalgeographic.com
@Lyxen, @Yaarel quoted the WotC Gothic Lineages Unearthed Arcana in a post on the first page of this thread.
The pertinent paragraph is
which states outright that monsters belong to a species or lineage (otherwise they couldn't belong to the "same species or lineage" as player characters).
It... doesn't make sense to insist that people can't show you "a monster that has a lineage" when there is WotC documentation that explicitly states monsters and NPCs are members of a species or lineage.
Computers are expected to pass the Turing Test in this decade, the 2020s, likely around 2025.
Yes to all this.That doesn't actually mean much. Even Turing posited the imitation game being played by a computer that was not generally intelligent, but purpose-built to give "human like responses". That's a very large issue with AI to date - it does not generalize.
And, folks have been positing a machine to pass the Turing Test "within 20 years" since the 1980s, at least. When your target date rolls on by without the mark being hit, nobody will remember you made this prediction, or care if they do. Making predictions is easy and basically risk-free.
Wolfdogs are fertile. And ring species are a thing.Ligers are not fertile. If lions and tigers could produce fertile offspring they would be the same species, rather than just very closely related species.
You could always said "the anthro-shrimp Oggs, the viscacha-like Hyrrans, and the plant-based Boobli," if you wanted to make sure that people realized that they weren't humans.Because it doesn't actually tell you what's going on. Like sure, if I say "humans, elves and dragonborn" you can conclude that these are actually different species as you're familiar with them, but if this was custom world, and I said "Oggs, Hyrrans and the Boobli" you wouldn't know if these were different species, or whether this was analogous to "French, Swedish and Chinese," cultures of one species.
And really has nothing to do with D&D races. Hybrid races are not species, warforged are not species, reborn are not a species.Species is actually a very fluid concept.
I honestly prefer it to race and definitely prefer it to something as vague as lineage or ancestry.And really has nothing to do with D&D races. Hybrid races are not species, warforged are not species, reborn are not a species.
Really, the word "species" needs to be dropped, it's a completely meaningless concept in a fantasy setting (and somewhat nebulous in the real word).
I honestly prefer it to race and definitely prefer to something as vague as lineage or ancestry.
I mostly dislike lineage and ancestry cause they sound even more pretentious than race which is the thing that WotC and other publishers should logically be trying to avoid.Race is a good word that has been used badly since there are, in its scientific definitions, no races of man, only ethnicities, and species is better because D&D has so many fantastic creatures.
As for lineage and ancestry, they are fine at an individual level, but they are not OK to describe groups of individuals who are mostly unrelated except in a very long and indistinct past and who share extremely strong commonalities. They are therefore OK for player characters if you want them to be fully individualised (I don't, honestly, I don't think that anyone needs that many options to create interesting characters), but they do nothing for the masses.
I mostly dislike lineage and ancestry cause they sound even more pretentious than race which is the thing that WotC and other publishers should logically be trying to avoid.
They are totally core now; they've said as much, and they plan to set them in stone in the core books in 2024. But that doesn't mean you have to use them in your game. You just have to (unfortunately) work a little harder to ignore them.There is no "logically" here, they are being the focus of attention for mostly wrong reasons and they are doing their best not to be caught in a storm that is right at its center but which unfortunately has negative side effects. The good thing is that I think that they are succeeding, it's just that they have to make some compromises that alters the game and, for me, make it more bland and less epic/heroic than what I like in it. But honestly it's fine, our games are private and we can do whatever we want, and all the changes are options anyway (although some militants like to overinflate them and make them seem like they are totally core now).
They are totally core now;
they've said as much, and they plan to set them in stone in the core books in 2024.
But that doesn't mean you have to use them in your game. You just have to (unfortunately) work a little harder to ignore them.
AI is going to surpass 'flying cars' as an example of the failure of science's promises while ignoring its actual achievements that, when you actually look at the practical and logistical ramifications was never a very good idea at all in the first place.
And I say this as a someone who writes books that include AIs and flying cars.