ineptech

Not sure how familiar you are with the rules of D&D, but "lesser wizard" in this context means suboptimal stat bonuses, not limitations on magic.

The problem is that some racial bonuses are things that can be plausibly explained away by background (stat bonuses, mental abilities, humans getting a feat) but a lot aren't (aarakocra flight, dragonborn breath weapons, halflings being able to hide more easily), and they're all balanced against each other. Does an aarakocra raised by humans get human bonuses, and still get to fly? Does a human raised by aarakocra lose their human bonuses but grow wings?

I find this mystifying. I think of "choosing a dwarf makes you a lesser wizard" as being a pretty core part of D&D. Have they released specifics on this? If race/species is going to become purely cosmetic, have they explained what will replace it, mechanically?

I think you're trying to force a narrative that doesn't really fit. This change isn't in response to "everything is woke now", it's in response to people playing with strangers more.

The point of single payer is to tell doctors and patients unambiguously how much they can spend. The free market puts the insurer(s), the provider(s), and the patient in a competition to see who can stick whom with the bill. The savings come more from not doing that than from the insurer's profit margin.

Understandable, but I guess it's hard to put much weight on this data given how easy it is to introduce the effect being studied intentionally. Were the subjects aware of D-H-M beforehand? I wasn't before today, but I've been able to fake a coin flip with precession for many years (a very useful skill for parents of two small children) and if I was participating in a study like this I would be pretty hyper-aware of how much "sideways" I was giving it.

Hi, thanks for replying. I have no complaints about your analysis, and agree that your results strongly support the D-H-M model (that there is a slight bias in coin-flipping over all and that it is caused by precession). However, it looks like about a third of your volunteers had little or no bias, presumably due to flipping end-over-end with no precession, and about a third had a lot of precession and a lot of bias.

Your paper draws the conclusion that coin-flipping inherently has a small-but-significant bias, but looking at table 2 it seems like an equally valid conclusion would be that some people flip a coin with no bias and others don't. Did you investigate this at all? In particular, I'd expect that if you took the biggest outliers, explained what precession is and asked them to intentionally minimize it, that the bias would shrink or disappear.

Agreed, and I suspect part of what made it great is that it was being ignored. I love all the dubious new features it doesn't have, and the complex larger platform offering it isn't a part of.

People will keep saying it, because that ratchet only seems to go one way. Consumer access to general purpose computing is something we take for granted, but every year it seems like there's a bit less of it, and once we lose it we will never get it back.

Well, I wish you luck then. I still don't think PPA represents capitulation to advertisers in any significant sense, but I can understand why a purist would disagree, and certainly the fact that they get so much of their money from Google makes me fear that the extent to which they constitute a real alternative may dwindle or disappear someday.

What browser do you use?

You're preaching to the choir, but even preaching needs to be truthful and I don't think calling Mozilla ad-tech or suggesting that it's just as bad as Google is remotely true. This is where "the perfect is the enemy of the good" comes from.

I mean, what do we have now? Google and a bunch of middle-man ad techs are hoovering up everything they can get, including a crap-ton of stuff that browsers can't affect at all, and wink-wink-promising that they anonymize some of it in some cases even though no one can verify that. A world in which the subset of that data that passes through a browser has been provably anonymized would seem to be strictly better, even if you still don't like it.

> Mozilla is an ad-tech company too now.

I'm sorry, this seems egregious. I agree that it should've been off by default but I challenge anyone to read how the implementation works (not just the blog post and the FUD responses to it) before calling it a giveaway to the ad industry: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...

FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom future, and before we start the meme that it's gone to shit we should be really really sure that's actually true.

> the warrant was issued because of his alleged failure to cooperate with the French authorities.

That would seem to be the key bit. Makes one wonder what level of cooperation is required to not be charged with a slew of the worst crimes imaginable. Is there a French law requiring that messaging providers give up encryption keys that he is known to be in violation of?

Relatedly, the author Robert Anton Wilson tried to manually implement a Markov-chain-bot in the 1960s by cutting up passages from various books, selecting them from a hat, and looking for overlapping words and phrase fragments. The best results were included in the Illuminatus! trilogy, some attributed to a character named Markoff Chaney.

Streaming was forced into existence by the invention of digital media. The ~20 years between the point where could stream and the point where we did stream seems in retrospect to be an artifact of having an entrenched industry clinging desperately to the concept of music as a physical product.

I would definitely take Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and so forth into account in hiring, if I had any faith in my ability to determine those things from the interview process without being fooled. But the only thing I am confident I can find out from a stranger under time constraints without being fooled is "Were you good at this job in your previous role" so I focus on that.

It so happens that toms recently tested this exact question (how much performance do you lose pairing a modern card with an older gpu, compared to the same card with a modern cpu). Full results at [0] but the short answer is that a $900 RTX 4080 gpu with a 2017 cpu will generally do 60+fps at 1440p in most games, but as low as 55 in a few.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/cpu-vs-gpu-u...

It's not that it would be embezzlement, it's that it pattern matches to embezzlement. People with purchasing authority generally can't choose vendors they are involved with because that's such a popular way to steal money.

Not to be that guy, but the article discusses this at some length. Find this bit:

> However, such tests rely on introspection and self-reported experience, which made some neuroscientists doubt that aphantasia was real. Could reported differences in visual imagery be a language disconnect, given the ambiguity in how we describe our inner worlds? “It could be the case that we’re all actually experiencing the exact same apple, we’re just describing it differently,” said Rebecca Keogh, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience...

The following ~8 paragraphs discuss the evidence for it beyond subjective reports.

He wrote the "Notebook" column in Harper's magazine regularly for many years, and one of the very admirable things about Harper's is that the entire history of the magazine is (for subscribers) available in PDF. Here's everything Lapham published there: https://harpers.org/author/lewishlapham/

And when I say entire history, I mean back to 1850 something. It's also indexed, subject tagged and searchable. If you search the archive for "Dickens" you'll see that several of his novels were published there originally in serial form, but you'll also find random non-fiction essays he published, as well as his contemporaries writing about him. It's kind of an extraordinary resource.

We've indisputably lost whatever Minecraft would be today if notch hadn't sold it. We can't know what that is, maybe it would've sucked. What we got instead feels like just another corporate studio game, a good one, yes, but we already have a lot of those.

I'm not super knowledgeable about it so I should just let someone else answer; but to clarify what I was saying, I'm not talking about the account migration, I'm talking about the fact that the new version ("education" edition, the one most kids use because of the steep discounts to schools) client can't connect to the old ("java edition") servers. The old server is still easy to run and hack on, but none of your friends will be able to connect to it, and while I don't know too much about the new server, all of the how-tos I looked at start with "go sign up for your free $100 worth of Azure student credits".

Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.

It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox.

It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

The vertical bars don't seem to be draggable on desktop, took me a while to figure out you have to click on letters.

Agreed, unless you're desperate it's madness to accept a job without having had a discussion with your prospective manager. And not just to make sure they're not a big jerk, this is your chance to find out what kind of team you're joining. Ask probing questions: What happens when there's a disagreement about how to implement something? What happens when it becomes clear that a major milestone is going to be late? Has that happened recently? What goal are you currently working on for modernizing your tools, and are you making progress on it? etc.

Can you post a summary? We're affected but I don't have access to that portal.

No offense but are you confident you know what PPA is/does? "volunteer their data" doesn't seem a remotely fair characterization to me.

Ignore the CTO's hand-wavey justification and go look at what it actually does and tell me if you still hate it this much. I agree with you ideologically but I think you're engaging in friendly fire here.

I don't think this is fair. It's not like we have great privacy now, and Mozilla is in danger of giving it away; advertisers already fingerprint your browser and tie your traffic back to a real-world identity today. I don't think PPA would help them do that any better at all.

Mozilla's position is, instead of the arms race to hide/identify traffic, if the browser builds in a way to measure conversions that doesn't rely giving up your identity then advertisers have less need of getting at your identity through other means. (And they haven't said this, but I assume the next step is, if advertisers can measure conversions then it becomes easier to envision legal countermeasures in the form of regulation)

I clicked on this with a rebuttal already half-written in my head, but (after skimming the CTO's post and then reading the detailed explanation of PPA[0]) I'll admit that I jumped the gun on assuming that PPA was just the latest name for storing an ad id. The idea behind it (that you have to give the advertisers an anonymous way to measure conversions to have a shot at getting them to give up tying your traffic back to your identity) is reasonable, and the implementation doesn't look crazy.

There's details I don't understand yet and I'd like to see someone smarter than me critique the details, but for now I'll put my money where my mouth is by going in to Settings and re-enabling it.

0: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...