Sir_Burpalot

Excellent, thanks for the quick response! Are there any plans to add support for full-cone NAT as well, in order to improve compatibility with some games?

Does anyone know if this protocol uses QUIC's RFC 9221 extension in order to eliminate overhead when tunnelling UDP over QUIC? According to their blog post, TrustTunnel does somehow avoid that overhead, but the actual protocol specification doesn't mention anything of that sort.

I'm not sure your analogy applies here. Opioid substances aren't capable of producing persistent subjective improvement because the brain seems to have defense mechanisms against it that neuroscience has not yet found a way to bypass, but in the case of a sufficiently advanced AI companion, the brain would be receiving the exact same inputs as with a real partner.

With many people choosing not to reproduce, many currently existing relationships are already primarily a sort of recreational activity and are divorced from their evolutionary purpose. Replacing live partners with AIs would just take that one step further.

>I craved connection so badly it compelled me to try to "improve" myself to be more like others. I'd be completely fucked today if someone offered a fake, effortless alternative.

As long as someone makes enough effort to pay the bills and not neglect their health, I don't see why anything more should be necessary. It certainly beats having to adopt hobbies you don't like or learning to lie about your feelings in order to appeal to potential partners (both common pieces of advice for nerdy men).

>I don't think parasocial relationships are actually working out for anyone.

The tech isn't quite there yet, but we've seen immense progress just over the past couple of years.

>Your chances of finding a human companion who isn't a piece of shit is way higher than finding an ethical tech company to pour your heart out to though.

It seems that the solution here, just as with other software, is to make AI companions open source.

And you think chronic, crippling loneliness can't make someone lose their will to live? If you don't know what tulpas are, there's an entire, fairly large online community of people willingly inducing schizophrenia in themselves just so they have an imaginary friend to talk to. Surely, AI companions would be a healthier alternative to that.

1. Some people are so far to the left side of the bell curve that they're going to be screwed out of a human relationship no matter what they do, and it's unkind to withhold sex bots from them just to provide increased motivation to the segment of the population that's still salvageable.

2. Society seems to have collectively decided that romantic intimacy, unlike food and shelter, is optional and that experiencing an absence of it should not entitle you to sympathy or support. Therefore, the kindest thing they can do is leave the autists alone so they can cope as best they can in peace.

UPD:

3. Replacing productive activities with substitutes like video games is obviously bad both for individual survival and for society at large, but what are the negative effects of being in a relationship with a fictional partner instead of a real one? You could argue the AI companies would have an incentive to exploit their users, but this is a thing that happens in real relationships as well!

Fertility might be a concern, but my understanding is that the current mainstream view is that the world needs fewer children, not more of them.

Consider trying Kagi. (I first started using it while it was still in closed beta, but I am not otherwise affiliated with them. I am very satisfied with it so far.)

While I don't necessarily agree with your stance about systemic issues, I would like to point out that solving them would take a lot more work than simply not legalising polygamy, and I don't see why we should neglect taking measures we are actually capable of implementing in favour of a pipe dream that might never be implemented.