I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

He didn’t steal it. He took it to give to Spock’s son, who Kirk took to be raised by Spock’s family on the desert world of Vulcan for safekeeping … High ground!

I think for the Lego set it’s more that the average casual fan is more likely to recognise the name ‘Boba Fett’ than the name ‘Slave 1’. They’re a commercial enterprise and they want to sell these things to a wide audience, and marketing it under a name that was never mentioned on-screen in the movies wouldn’t exactly make that easier.

The whole thing is a bit of a storm in a teacup.

This is all a big misunderstanding. He’s fine with sand; he was saying he doesn’t like hands.

That’s why he kept letting people chop them off.

Han is the mahn.

Space-faring whale-like creatures are an extremely common science-fiction trope.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceWhale

Space whales that paid a key plot role in Rebels and now again in Ahsoka? If all you’ve watched is the Prequel and Sequel movies (not even the OT?!) then there are going to be an awful lot of Star Wars memes you might not get.

‘So long and thanks for all the fish!’ is what the dolphins say in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when they leave the Earth and fly off into space, shortly before the Earth’s destruction to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

The Purrgil’s in Star Wars are also a species of space-faring cetaceans and OP is making a meme linking the two.

Me when Prequel fans lament that the Sequels were awful and ruined Star Wars and it’s all the fault of the youth for liking this sort of thing: ‘I’ve heard that before’.

The Schwartz is strong with this one.

Well done to Apple for telling their customers they won’t get viruses…

Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.

Apple: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/apple-threatens-to-pull-imessage-from-uk-iphones-rather-than-weaken-its-security/ar-AA1e8kgo

WhatsApp: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/08/whatsapp-could-disappear-uk-over-privacy-concerns-ministers-told

I’ve had Fitbits for years but I’m probably never buying another one.

The main thing keeping me locked into the Fitbit ecosystem was the social features - my family are dispersed around the country and all have Fitbits, so for years we did the weekly step challenges as a bit of friendly competition and a vehicle for staying in good contact. The competition made a genuine difference to our behaviour - especially for encouraging my parents to stay active in retirement.

Then after the Google acquisition they killed off the challenges on spurious grounds. It’s generally suspected this is part of a drive to gradually kill off the Fitbit brand and drive people onto Google’s own Pixel watches. Now Fitbit’s USP is gone and so I’ll probably just get a Garmin next time as people generally think that’s a better product.

The tragedy of the commons is an economic and ecological concept concerning situations where private parties will overuse a common resource because private incentives and public interests aren’t aligned. For example, overfishing or carbon emissions.

In this case, the problem as articulated in this article is that each party in the AI gold rush - Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc - has an incentive to rush their AI development without adequate controls so they can get ahead of their competitors, potentially taking us into dangerous outcomes in which one of them produces AI that has far-reaching harmful consequences for humanity. I guess the ‘commons’ here is the future of human society, which AI developers have private incentives to take for granted.

The solution proposed is to adopt many of the classic solutions economists have devised for tragedies of the commons - points 1-8 in the article - and apply them to AI development in the ways set out in the article.