stolenmerch

Apology accepted

I'm getting downvoted simply for giving examples, thus proving my point. But if you need a concrete example, I once had a DM include a drag show in-game.

I believe you, but that's not the case everywhere. I've had DMs who have put drag shows in our game as part of tavern entertainment, for example. Even though I have no problem with them in real life, I have no desire to see them in my fantasy game because it just reminds me of contemporary culture war shenanigans. When questioned on it or asked if we could not do that, I've received nothing but pushback. Stuff like that.

Mostly political agendas that spill over from the real world, often surrounding themes of social justice and left-wing activism but sometimes right wing fascist themes as well. I just find it infuriating to have the DM shoehorn their extremist political views into a game. Especially with the leftist DMs, I've found that I'm usually expected to reinforce their beliefs and not question them, even with provided X-Cards or the like.

A problem with the X-Card concept is that it can only be used within the pre-existing Overton Window of the group anyway, so you might as well ditch it in favor of normal social negotiation. For example, X-Card guidelines always tell players they can use it to block anything they're uncomfortable with. However, you'll quickly learn you can't use it to block political ideology from the DM, even if you legitimately find it triggering and distressing.

I remember serious discussions about how we'd probably need to repave all of our sidewalks in the US to accommodate the Segway

I visualize some geographic location either in my home town where I grew up or in my current city. It's so vivid that I actually drive through some neighborhoods and can instantly recall what I was working on. I have a map with pins in each location I've visualized and what problem I was working on.

Exactly, there are numerous reasons other than it's not possible.

1.Time-travel will never become possible.

2.Time-travel becomes possible. Their time travel capabilities are inadequate to visit us.

3.Time-travel becomes possible. They do not wish to visit us.

4.Our archiving and preservation techniques are inadequate. Our message does not reach the future.

5.Time travel becomes possible. They are willing and able to travel to the past. Our archiving and preservation techniques are adequate. The message has not been accessed in its future database.

6. Time travel becomes possible. They are willing and able to travel to the past. Our archiving and preservation techniques are adequate. We are not able to perceive or become aware of their visitation.

Bebe Williams published this idea in issue #14 of Strange Magazine (1994) and has published the book "Instructions for Meeting Time Travellers"

https://www.artcomic.com/timetravel/intro.html

It's just campaign rules for Chainmail, their medieval weapon combat rules invented for the already existing Elastolin and Starlux figures. It was a system for wargamers much more interested in the weapon speed of pole arms rather than accurate political and social structure. They needed a world of treasure and magic to fuel the adventures, so a setting of accumulated Appendix N source material was pieced together into an entirely new setting.

Let's try to calculate an optimal prepping strategy using a back-of-the-envelope Bayesian approach with expected utility. We need to estimate the probability of a societal collapse along with its potential severity. Then, assign utility values to each combination of severity and prepping actions. I think we can actually make informed choices here instead of pretending we know how a highly chaotic, future system might function.

Prepping actions could be anything from a well-stocked pantry to fully equipped underground bunker.

EU(A) = P(C) * Σ[P(S | C) * U(S, A)]

EU(A) is the expected utility of prepping action A

P(C) is the probability of a collapse occurring

P(S | C) is the conditional probability of a specific severity S given a collapse

U(S, A) is the utility of action A given severity S

We can leave it to the reader to make their own decisions.

I got my Technicians license about a year ago but have struggled to find much to do with it. I check into my local nets every once and a while, but the repeaters are nearly silent otherwise. The CW privileges are ok but hard to use. Seems you need a General to do all the cool stuff. Any other technicians here who have found a great use for the license?

No, I have it stashed in the basement. I made it through a natural disaster in my area in the middle of a global pandemic and wasn't even tempted to crack it open once. Hope I never will.

They didn't just start, they've been selling these off-and-on for years. I have a 25 year food bucket I bought right around the financial crisis 15 years ago.

5 years ago I was running GPT-2 and generating D&D content with it. I expected much better text prediction loop and here we are.

A text file of a list of people from December 12, 1981. Originally had it on a floppy for the IBM PC 5150 and it's made the leap somehow to every new system for over 40 years.

They simply used the wrong link, its not really a lack of account or hostile UI

Because the effects of my actions in this case have yet to be demonstrated, let alone shown to cause harm. The author claims there is expoititive harm to labor, the environment, and maybe others. That is not at all obvious or provably true yet. As I said, I'm open to the discussion, but I can't defend myself in good faith when people claim some slam dunk moral certitude. Again, don't use generative AI if it makes you feel bad, but there is absolutely nothing clear cut yet about this radically brand new technology.

> I don't think this article even remote attempts this claim.

It's in the first sentence, "AI output is fundamentally derivative and exploitative (of content, labor and the environment)."

I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct much of the time. I'm open to that conversation and debate, but diatribes like this make it far too black-and-white with "good" people and "bad" people.

What's crazy is that the OSR movement itself is now 20 years old and is probably no longer a renaissance or revival but simply a bona fide style of D&D that people play for its own sake.

It gets colder in Minnesota during the winter.

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/68697~10405/Comparison-of...

The real-time global threat assessment tool powered by AI that allows "actionable intelligence to keep you one step ahead of potential risks" currently lists Ma Barker's gang as a high-threat terrorist event.

https://globalthreat.info/read/events:lzvpm79umypur2l1vh7v

"web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit."

So, building normal small websites like we've always done? I'm honestly struggling to see what's going on here other than a couple of devs blowing off political steam. The Kitten project [0] looks cool, but it's basically any small client-side stack unless I'm missing a really crucial piece.

[0] https://codeberg.org/kitten/app

I would love to see them add books as well

> "an off-putting nerd named Elon Musk won’t stop talking about an “everything app” called X that will help him manifest his extremist views"

> Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta.

A completely unserious take. It's fine if you hate Musk, you can hate anyone you want, but to slop praise on tiny little social media sites like Bluesky while demonizing new Twitter/X shows me you are completely prepared to lie and distort reality to fit your political agenda.

In 2015 The Atlantic wrote a glowing puff piece on how unstable Twitter was as if it was almost cute.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-s...

Now if outgoing links are broken for a few minutes it's "proof" of Elon's incompetence and how he's probably right-wing or something. If you don't believe that read the article The Year Twitter Died. C'mon.

"...leaving the platform virtually unusable for those who remained."

Sorry, but what? I use it everyday and it's fine. Oh I'm sure some of the author's favorite people decided to switch to mastadon or blue sky or something, but to claim the platform is wildly destabilized is hilariously hyperbolic.

Also check out the Principia Rewrite project, which aims to use the interactive theorem prover Coq to ensure each proof step is a valid step according to Principia’s axioms and that no steps are skipped, even by accident.

https://www.principiarewrite.com/

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, we must develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. Here we foreground the concept of role play. Casting dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms, without ascribing human characteristics to language models that they in fact lack. Two important cases of dialogue-agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely, (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness.