Sounds like London is a comparatively nice place to live in WoD land. Huh. Pity it takes a surveillance state to get it.

That was actually the original inspiration for the character. To take the nazi ideal being, and say, “what if he existed, but was nothing like you.”

All those “subversions” of Superman out there, including Snyder’s interpretation? Those aren’t subversions of Superman as much as simply going back to the original concept that Superman’s creators were deliberately trying to subvert. “What if the ultimate powerful person DIDN’T abuse his power, and was actually a good person?”

In D&D, the standard assumption is that elves mature just as fast as humans, but they are culturally treated as children until around hundred or just a bit higher. But I’ve started developing a campaign setting where elves really are the equivalent of kids until that age, and all the implications of that. One of which is that, if humans attended school alongside elven kids, they’re going to lose their reputation of mystique and wisdom— they’re going to be viewed as kinda slow and dimwitted, as the humans graduate through the grades and the elevens get held back a decade or so.

Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.

Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.

Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.

But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.

Not to me. Sounds more like someone who’s been in a lot of social media arguments, has a vague understanding of the counter arguments, and is trying to solidify their answer to it.

Can piefed be accessed through voyager? I heard people talking about it as a good way to avoid all the tankies, but I couldn’t find it on the instance search within voyager.

I remember roughly a decade ago I worked out that a gold was equivalent in purchasing power to somewhere on the order of $100, and $100 was a nice round number that’s easy to use to get a ballpark feel for what something is worth, so I pretty much always use that. I’m guessing inflation and/or doomsday preppers (or political culture) has significantly raised the price of gold since then. Inflation too.

Ironically, I think it’s actually rooted in the same cause of what makes trans people exist in the first place. Identity, who you are, is core to… well, who you are. It’s important. And gender is important to who you are. Not being who you are hurts, a lot. It can hurt so much that it can drive someone to suicide. We know this— this is the whole reason that accepting trans people is important, right? Not doing so can literally kill them in this way.

So is it so strange that non-trans people hold the same depth of conviction about keeping their same gender? “Oh, but why can’t they just accept that other people need to align their mental gender with their biological sex?” Because they don’t understand or believe that this is what is happening. Really. You know the thing where not having these thing aligned can KILL you? Well, they view being trans as actively CAUSING this state, deliberately inflicting it on someone. And that social pressure and acceptance of trans people is encouraging and/or driving more people to this horrible state of affairs. It’s killing more people!

It doesn’t help that it’s been hijacked by the culture wars to distract you from the class war and authoritarianism. But it being hijacked doesn’t mean there’s not a core misunderstanding, and it’s not a misunderstanding that can really be corrected or educated by simply saying “trans people exist”. Identity runs too deep, and threats to it are too scary— they can kill you, and kill you in a way far more terrifying than a bullet. Mere words and slogans are not going to cut through that fear. You need a foundational framework of understanding the world.

And that’s where the hijacking and red vs blue political nonsense comes into play. The culture wars doesn’t create the visceral fear of trans people— but it sure as heck makes it harder or even impossible to fix.

I mourned, legitimately mourned Terry Pratchett’s death. I don’t even have a parasocial relationship with him in the sense you get with streamers and YouTubers and whatnot. He was just a man who brought wonderful ideas into the world, who focused my understanding of life and so much more, and to hear of his end hurt me bitterly.

My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.

There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing

Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.

Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.

What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!

It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.

Yes! Mostly “That’s a car! That’s a truck!” And as his interest and vocabulary is growing, “that’s a hydraulic shovel!” and “a concrete boom pump!”

I am in fact learning the names of all kinds of construction equipment I never knew before. I never knew that a tiny front loader was called a skid steer before. Apparently, they’re called that because they turn by having one pair of wheels go faster than the other, literally steering by skidding. I’ve also learned the specific names of different varieties of fire trucks thanks to him. There’s pumper trucks, ladder trucks, refraction ladder trucks… there’s a special prototype in Japan with tank treads named the Red Salamander for disaster area work too. I also now know the difference between an excavator, a hydraulic shovel, a mini-shovel, and a micro shovel, on sight. I am also learning the names of specific Japanese bullet train models… that’s the the nozomi, that’s the hayabusa and komachi (they sometimes connect to each other by the nose), that’s the tsubasa…

As a DM, I’m not asking you to act, I’m not asking you to engage in improvisational theater, I’m asking your approach. I mean, I’m a “fade to black” DM when it comes to spicy roleplay, so I probably wouldn’t for the named situation in this meme, but let’s say it’s somehow relevant beyond the laughs of “horny bard”. Are you being cheesy and trying to get the bartender to laugh? Are you trying to be suave? Are you just socially indicating interest and letting the bartender decide what they think of that? These matter for what kind of reaction will come about from either a success or a failure on the roll, and it’s not my job as a DM to decide for you what approach is best for the situation… determining the approahh ch is the game. You can tell me your approach via ACTING! or just by describing it, but I really need to know what your character is doing.

But really, don’t worry about your own charisma. You don’t need to be suave or charming if your character is. I just need to know what they’re trying to do, not see you do it.

After research, I’ve found that same information. What I haven’t figured out is what kids mean when they say it. Like, I get yeet. I know it came from a video, but when spoken it has an actual meaning, basically “I have great enthusiasm but lack finesse”, most useful when hurling things. But skibidi doesn’t seem to have a meaning? It comes from the video, but as a word it’s meaningless? So… why say it if it doesn’t convey meaning?

I’ve sung “Sweet Child o’ Mine” to my son (with minor lyric changes, she->you for instance) in a soft voice almost every night since he was born… three and a half years now.

I’ve had a concept I’ve wanted to try for a little while for a special type of wild mage, but I’m not 100% sure how to implement it. Instead of wild magic just being a completely random chart of spell effects with no control over what you get, the spell caster would declare what he wants to end result to be… and the DM, or some more limited random mechanism, would choose what spell (of the appropriate spell slot level) might get them closer to that result. If they want to get past an ogre guarding a treasure, they might cast a fireball, or maybe invisibility, or maybe some sort of teleport effect… they all advance towards the stated goal, but without the caster’s control of how, leading to the wild magic feel without the insanity and campaign crushing randomness other wild magic can bring. And there’s still room for some silly danger, as maybe the fighter is next to the ogre when the wild magic chooses fireball.

You ever have an image of something like fire or mist or galaxies and stars or whatever taken with a black or white background, and you want to make it a transparent background instead? Color to alpha keeps the translucent elements intact at the appropriate translucency while removing the background color. Super useful for compositing images together.

Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.

And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.

Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.

GIMP isn’t quite as feature rich and useful as photoshop… except GIMP has the “Color to Alpha” function which I’ve still yet to learn how to imitate in photoshop, and I’m not sure it even can. And I use that function all the freaking time.

I do teach English as a Foreign language, I used to teach computer programming (at a beginner level), and sometimes I daydream about teaching math according to principles from the essay A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, but I am unlikely to be given the leeway to try.

I feel like “passing it through a statistical model”, while absolutely true on a technical implementation level, doesn’t get to the heart of what it is doing so that people understand. It’s using the math terms, potentially deliberately to obfuscate and make it seem either simpler than it is. It’s like reducing it to “it just predicts the next word”. Technically true, but I could implement a black box next word predictor by sticking a real person in the black box and ask them to predict the next word, and it’d still meet that description.

The statistical model seems to be building some sort of conceptual grid of word relationships that approximates something very much like actually understanding what the words mean, and how the words are used semantically, with some random noise thrown into the mix at just the right amounts to generate some surprises that look very much like creativity.

Decades before LLMs were a thing, the Zompist wrote a nice essay on the Chinese room thought experiment that I think provides some useful conceptual models: http://zompist.com/searle.html

Searle’s own proposed rule (“Take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one…”) depends for its effectiveness on xenophobia. Apparently computers are as baffled at Chinese characters as most Westerners are; the implication is that all they can do is shuffle them around as wholes, or put them in boxes, or replace one with another, or at best chop them up into smaller squiggles. But pointers change everything. Shouldn’t Searle’s confidence be shaken if he encountered this rule?

If you see 马, write down horse.

If the man in the CR encountered enough such rules, could it really be maintained that he didn’t understand any Chinese?

Now, this particular rule still is, in a sense, “symbol manipulation”; it’s exchanging a Chinese symbol for an English one. But it suggests the power of pointers, which allow the computer to switch levels. It can move from analyzing Chinese brushstrokes to analyzing English words… or to anything else the programmer specifies: a manual on horse training, perhaps.

Searle is arguing from a false picture of what computers do. Computers aren’t restricted to turning 马 into “horse”; they can also relate “horse” to pictures of horses, or a database of facts about horses, or code to allow a robot to ride a horse. We may or may not be willing to describe this as semantics, but it sure as hell isn’t “syntax”.