EnsignWashout @ EnsignWashout @startrek.website

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Joined

2 yr. ago

What do I do if adult tells me they want to play with hot wheels with me? I say yes.

Fuck yeah. Hot wheels are great.

I find it bizarre that people find these obvious cases to prove the tech is worthless. Like saying cars are worthless because they can't go under water.

This reaction is because conmen are claiming that current generations of LLM technology are going to remove our need for experts and scientists.

We're not demanding submersible cars, we're just laughing about the people paying top dollar for the lastest electric car while plannig an ocean cruise.

I'm confident that there's going to be a great deal of broken... everything...built with AI "assistance" during the next decade.

People forgetting that when you ran out of lives you used to have to go back to the start of the whole game.

We remember. It was bullshit back then. It's still bullshit now.

Edit: I beat many of those games on three lives. It was still some bullshit.

I can accept stupid decisions. I don't have to respect them.

Yes. Also folks who have never seen a container ship the size of a hotel pull up to the shipping pier in one of these "landlocked" states.

I figured if anyone would know, it would be Lt. Barklay - he is always helping people write holodeck programs.

He...didn't answer.

you'll just have to built your own apps too

We are well on our way.

I was confused before I made the switch. So many of the most useful kinds of apps weren't maintained anymore by anyone on the Google Play store. I had this surreal feeling that the app ecosystem was getting worse every year.

And then I installed F-Droid and figured out where all of my favorite app developers went. ¯(ツ)_/¯

Is it still compatible with all the money I wasted on 3.x Hasbro D&D?

While technically the answer is "no", people who emphasize the difference don't apply the "Rule of Cool" as liberally as I did.

I re-used all kinds of D&D 3rd Edition resources while switching to Pathfinder.

Sure, we absolutely shouldn't just dogmatically use the numbers given in a 3E book with Pathfinder.

But I didn't find it terribly hard to whip up Pathfinder monster and NPC number adjustments based on my 3E source books, more or less on the fly.

Many numbers given are close enough. Most abilities are easy enough to convert in a way that is fun. The Challenge Rating isn't tuned as carefully, but i find the usual GM toolkit can address that. For example, throwing in a few extras baddies from over the hilldside can scale an encounter up, and awarding the players various story advantages "for good role playing" can scale an encounter's challenge down.

If my napkin translation went too badly, I threw "Rule of Cool" at it, and just made sure the players were still having fun.

I will say, I relegated 3E stuff to filler encounters, just as I do with anything else I homebrew.

I don't mind being on my GM toes for a quick encounter, or a short story arc. But I don't like having something poorly balanced have a recurring role in my campaigns.

All to say I have used 3E source books liberally in my Pathfinder campaigns, and I'm not sure any of my players have ever noticed.

T

I hate investing

Mutual Funds / Index funds are your best bet. (Look for descriptive words like "broad", "mix" or "full market" in the description).

If you can, pick out one named "target retirement YYYY" with YYYY being within a few years of whatever year you will turn 67.

It will automatically follow investing best practices based on your current age - agrressive earlier, and very cautious later.

I'm not familiar with all the details of how it works

Perfect recipe to get ripped off. (Most people I know say that insurance/investment combined products suck. I've heard some disagreement whether they're just a bad deal, or such a bad deal they ought to be a crime.)

"Our kids deserve so much better than what this anti-education administration has to offer, and we will continue to fight to protect them from this president’s relentless attacks.”

the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 bars the president from unilaterally withholding funds designated by congress.

our banking app, if it was decently written by a sane programmer

That is a beautiful vision for a better world.

I can't prove anything, but:

• There's evidence that billionaires are taking much more than they earn, and that we (everyone else) would be dramatically better off without them (whether we tax them away or... Come to some other compromise.)
• Billionaires own most media outlets and social media sites, even those these don't actually make much money compared to everything else the billionaires own. This makes some people ask why they bother...
• There's a noticable tendency in billionaire owned media to focus daily on divisive topics. The specific topic changes, but the divisiveness continues.
• There is history of powerful authoritarians investing heavily in divisive propaganda, primarily to break apart and distract groups of people who could overthrow them.

What I have laid out is not proof that today's billionaires are directing their staff to verbally attack minorites at any opportunity.

But it certainly is something to think about next time a vicious rumor about a minority group comes along.

Edit: Yes. I do understand that neither men nor women are minorities. But there's still enough differences to allow pushing a divisive narrative, which I suspect is enough reason for certain motivated people.

And to the "could just be a shitty set of incentives" argument. Fair enough. It could be. It's highly suspicious, but it could be.

Would you accept "under-regulated capitalism" or "capitalism treated as an ideal rather than a tool" as a more specific root cause?

the need to constantly change jobs to move ahead financially also keeps people on unsteady ground with relationships.

That's a great point.

You've summarized the value of current generation AI well.

It excels exactly when the result doesn't matter in the slightest.

A college class introduced me to "The Birth of a Nation" aka The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan

Did you enjoy it?

Fuck no. It is a deeply messed up racist pile of shit.

It certainly opened my eyes to it's place in history.

Since the film itself is best left to the trash heap of forgotten awfulness, here's two points from Wikipedia that feel worth remembering:

• "the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history"
• was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House (for President Woodrow Wilson)

I grew to love Linux because I was hating Windows, I don't hate Windows because I love Linux. And I don't want to hate Windows, I wish they were slowly becoming anti-user, but they keep adding (forcing) features that are so unfriendly to the user.

Yes. If Windows was still like Windows XP, I don't know if I would have ever switched. It used to be fun, not soul sucking.

There's lots of other reasons I'm glad I switched, of course.

I find the windows update and Linux graphical updater processes identical. They only diverge at the end when the Windows one fails with a mysterious error message and offers to retry or open a troubleshooter that won't work.

Windows arguably is, indeed, two or three different systems stapled together. There's the C code kernal bits, the .Net runtime higher level bits, and the Electron "this didn't need to be fast anyway and we only knew how to write JavaScript" bits.