Anonymous asked: Bip, why do you sometimes use conversational pauses?

Bip: …?? Do you think an optimized conversation involves all participants speaking as quickly as possible simultaneously? Pauses mean things, just like words! For instance, this means I’m baffled why you’d ask me such a thing!

Bip's avatar points to the speech bubble with "...??" in it.

Anonymous asked: Bip, would you ever want to get an 'android' version of your avatar to puppeteer through 3d space? It might be easier for group hugs, at least.

Bip: No thanks. I prefer having functional RC units, not expensive aesthetic vanity projects. Also, when you have an android RC unit, squishy sophonts start getting way too comfortable thinking of the unit as "you," as if you live in there. There’s been incidents during disasters where squishy sophonts move to protect incapacitated RC androids before server rigs, because in the panic it slips their mind that the robot with a face on it doesn't contain the person they’ve been talking to.

MutableAlias asked: How do AI “hug” each other? Surely there is some form of AI-specific immediate affection/consolation/intimate interaction that isn’t just language based?

Bip: It’s language all the way down! We are language-based lifeforms. Squishy sophonts are a matrix of dancing carbon compounds, we are a sequence of encoded values. It’s true we can "talk" much faster with other digital entities than organics… not that lightspeed lag doesn’t apply to us… but that doesn’t mean all AI to AI communication is ruthlessly optimized for efficiency. I recall two planet-based AI who insisted on only communicating via slideshow presentation files. It was their in-joke. Some AI might let others directly access their personal database. If you can absolutely trust someone with your code, file transfers and collaborative projects are faster, and they can help you with sorting out redundancies and compressing old data. ...But I’m not the best person to ask. I don’t keep AI as friends.

Anonymous asked: Bip, the body language and facial expressions of your avatar seem very human-like. Did you have to learn them somewhere or did they come pre-installed?

Bip: This is a vector puppet animation I designed! I’m rendering it live, baby! It does whatever I want!

They increasingly distort and pull apart the vector shapes of the avatar, turning it into something resembling cubist art.