This is the only penny arcade comic I remember, but I liked it.

I tried to use it as a clue and prop in a tabletop RPG once, and one of the players unironically said “I’m not reading all of that”. She was not a great player.

Ars is weirdly pro-windows sometimes , in the comments. I don’t read them as much as I used to.

Where are the consequences? Ruin their fucking life.

I don’t know if it’s like different learning styles or what but some people just need to have a whole ass call. I’m like, I’ll just write you a nice message you can refer back to. Nope.

It’s hard to make a full judgment without knowing more details but “the pay is good and it’s easy” isn’t really a compelling justification for “and I help evil manifest in the world”.

I also commented there by accident once because I didn’t read the community name. They politely asked me to refrain from doing so. I was embarrassed, and have been more careful.

Apparently for some people this is unacceptable.

I knew a guy who went to work for palantir a bunch of years ago. Was always friendly at work. I asked him “but what’re you going to do if they do bad stuff, like spying on people?”

He just shrugged. Didn’t care. The money was good.

I don’t know if this alone is proof that’s a bad person, but I think it precludes him from being a good one.

There are several problems.

One. Wotc are seeking players who aren’t paying attention and have no head for rules. They don’t want complexity.

Two, it’s bad to make one class have a ton of complexity while others stay at “I move and attack”, and they really don’t seem to want to give other classes more complex options.

DND isn’t designed well. It’s the Harry Potter of RPGs. Also the JavaScript.

Also doing my part. Fuck Microsoft. It would have been a harder choice if Windows was, like, fast, stable, and efficient. But it’s not. It’s jank and AI slop. Fuck them.

I don’t find “lol 5% of the time something WACKY happens!” very fun very long, no. That is too high a frequency for freak events. Actually, it’s 10% because people do wackiness on natural 1s and natural 20s. That’s too much! That’s so much it’s distracting.

I outlined the dice system I liked from nWoD in another comment. You can get some wild outcomes there, but it’s not the absurd flat “10% of every roll is insanely good or bad”. You get the occasional “I can’t believe I rolled three tens convinced the vampire I was a wizard!”, still.

I am a huge fan of dice pools and absolutely done with “roll one die vs target”. The flat probability you get from one die doesn’t give results that feel good.

I was a big fan of the nWoD’s S10 system. Add up your stat, skill, and relevant bonuses, roll this many d10s. Every one that comes up as {8, 9, 10} adds to degree of success. Roll another die for every one that came up {10}, possibly repeating if you keep rolling 10s.

You get pretty consistent results. Someone who’s a professional will throw ~6 dice on average, so they’re very likely to succeed on basic tasks. Much less of that “lol the wizard rolled a 1 and forgot how to read” or “barbarian rolled a 20, I guess he can speak infernal?” weirdness. You still get freak outliers every once in a while, where someone rolls like six 10s in a row and everyone’s cheering. But not 5% of the time, and not so binary.

Plus there’s other “dice tricks” you can apply for different circumstances. “Reroll all failed dice once”, “reroll 9s like 10s”, etc.

1d20+stuff is just so basic and threadbare. It’s not even easier. nWod’s dice pool you don’t even have to add. You just count. We all know players that can’t add 16+7, but they can probably count to 4.

Not a fan of the “lol natural 20 zaniness happens” trope. That’s 5% of the time.

Also Shadowrun doesn’t even use d20s

Do the other ones have forums? I don’t remember even seeing them.

Is the steam forum supposed to be moderated by valve or the developer? I always assumed the developer.

I did some webdriver stuff for reasons I don’t remember anymore.

I also made a simple Django app to track job applications.

Unsolicited advice:

• use type annotations. You’ll thank yourself later when your IDE tells you “hey this can be None are you sure you want to call .some_func() on it?”
• use an ide. Don’t just raw dog it in notepad. You should have syntax highlighting, red squiggles for errors, the ability to go to definition.
• learn to use a debugger. Pdb is built in and fine.
• don’t write mega functions that do a thousand things. Split things up into smaller steps.
• avoid side effects. You don’t want your “say_hello” function to also turn on the lights

There was someone a while ago who was trying to get a web ring going for like nerd stuff. They said so many of their friends and people they talked to loved the idea, but no one made a site of their own.

I posted it in a local community group, and everyone said the same thing.

I can see the appeal but I wouldn’t trust it.

Related thought: I despise how much stuff is made into video when a few paragraphs, maybe with a gif, would do just fine.

The other contenders mostly are bad.

Drm-free still exists.

They provide a lot of value without charging the end user very much.

Microsoft could have done this except they’re run by idiots and assholes. Nothing technical stopped them from launching a good store platform. They just didn’t want to.

Why would someone want a page summarized?

If it’s short, just read it.

If it’s long, the LLM will probably fuck it up.

They’re really going after the illiterate and lazy segment.

Yep. Infrastructure shouldn’t be privately owned.

Yes that is the legal justification. I am not interested in the legal justification. Laws are not inherently good. They were clearly paid less than their worth if there’s six figure payouts to be had here.

This is the fundamental injustice of capitalism. The owner pays you a small amount and keeps all the profits. A child would recognize that as unfair.