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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Or even just a new DM in general. The whole thing is a group activity for mutual enjoyment. I ran a cyberpunk red campaign as the GM with 6 players for like a year, and it was my first time DM/GMing in general, and it was also a brand new system at the time. Everyone was very forgiving, lax and then serious in the story when it mattered. I certainly would have quit if people were assholes because my math wasn’t there or I had to flip pages to figure out like fire damage calculations without having them bookmarked or whatever





  • Obligatory Carl Sagan from 1995:

    I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

    The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

    Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark





  • They’re made to “Enhance the user experience profit”

    “Enhance the user experience” is just what the dev or documentation team writes when management dictates that they drop a feature. The only reasons they would have dropped it:

    • Dev work vs actual customer usage (e.g. it wasn’t getting a lot of users but devs had to maintain it with each update)
    • People were using it to intercept the stream and capture movies to pirate.

    Every decision is about increasing profits first, and UX almost always takes a back seat to that






  • As a software engineer who’s recently been using the latest advanced models in my workflow, I think that’s where it is most useful. It’s generally great for more tedious and mundane tasks like writing documentation, or building small functions with explicit inputs and outputs. And while that’s not crazy impressive, that previously was taking up a much larger part of my time, leaving me more time to focus on bigger picture stuff.

    That being said, it’s definitely wildly overvalued, and being shoved into everything, often where it makes no sense and is just a glorified chatbot.





  • On all my devices I automatically switch light / dark mode / blue light shifts based on sunrise / sunset. Granted my computer desk is against a window, but I find that my electronic screens generally aligning with outdoor brightness works pretty well for me