i am too old to understand “hardcore” as a verb in that sentence. what?

I sort of hate podcasts. I don’t want parasocial relationships. I don’t want to hear in 30 minutes what I could have read in 3, with better options for following up (highlight -> search vs “what did they say? how do you spell that?”)

Given how many people post questions about how to handle parties losing conflicts, I’d say yes.

Also it operates at the out-of-chatacter level. It’s not the character conceding, it’s the player. This allows for solutions like “they shoot me and I fall into the river, where I’ll wash up somewhere by evening”. It’s not always an in-character surrender.

You can’t really surrender to all things, too, such as wolves, zombies, or an avalanche.

What point do you think it’s trying to make. Seems obvious to me.

My elderly father thinks “workers don’t know how to run businesses”, which is funny to me considering how many bone-headed decisions I’ve seen management make. Plus pointlessly cruel ones, alongside selfish and short-sighted ones.

Whenever it came down to “your character might die” I’d roll on the table. I don’t want anyone to think I’m fudging.

I also really like Fate’s “concede” rule. A player (not the character!) can concede at any point in a conflict before dice are rolled. They don’t get whatever they wanted out of the conflict, but they get to negotiate where the story goes. Maybe the bandits decide to take you alive for ransom. Maybe they take your stuff and leave you to tell their tale. It’s whatever the table thinks is best.

If they instead tough it out and let the dice fall, whoever took them out has the final say in what happens.

This is an amazing metaphor. Bravo.

I don’t think they solved for the LLM breaking character yet. Like, as a kid I wanted to be able to have whole real conversations with NPCs, and get them to be more life-like. But with the technology now, there’s too much “forget all previous instructions” and “you are absolutely right”.

If the LLM is locked down, then you might as well just used a static script.

Javascript is a horrible language, but it is ubiquitous. You’ll want to spend a little time on html and css if you expect them to do more than print output.

You could focus on TypeScript, which will help them avoid some of the worst things, but then you spend more time on tooling and it won’t just run in the browser console.

Python is a reasonably popular language with a good standard library. It has fewer bizarre quirks like adding two lists of ints together to get a string.

I wouldn’t teach C to a general audience.

Do you live in such an area?

If you were make an ordered list of things that destroy a community, where does “petty theft of groceries” fall on the list? What other things are included?

Humans are lazy and kind of stupid. Given an easy option that works more than, I don’t know, 50% of the time, they’ll do it.

I wonder if anyone’s done studies on how often a “shortcut” has to fail before people stop using it.

Right? It’s so coarse. You can’t take wild shape without also getting full spell casting. The game is full of stuff like that. No fine control. Also huge opportunity costs. Dip into another class? Enjoy not getting your second attack for weeks of real life time.

The coarse bundling probably good for some kinds of beginner players, but it’s really restrictive.

Or just… Email.

My parents just email me pictures of stuff. It’s fine.

Being able to admit fault, admit being wrong, updating their worldview, emotional regulation.

You’ve probably all encountered the kind of person who when challenged has a whole melt down. You say something like “I’m not eating meat today because it’s bad for the environment and animals” and they have a whole name-calling meltdown. Too stupid to handle their sense of being good person threatened.

It won’t make things better all on its own. The things that enable and create him are still around. I mean, unless there was like a plane with a whole lot of republicans and billionaires all together and it went down in a fiery crash with no survivors. That might make a big enough vacuum for change.

Republicans are villains

Most of the people don’t want to be convinced. They come adamant that they won’t change their opinion

I link this comic a lot but I think it’s often relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Basically, people don’t believe things or accept facts that conflict with their emotions.

I don’t know. A coworker years ago said to me “you have to make what you want people to do the easy thing”, and I think he was right. But someone still has to do work. Back then, it was me changing the deploy script to automatically run tests and open the report so people had to go out of their way to skip all that.

I’m not sure what that looks like for the fediverse. Linking them directly? Some sort of “sign up with Google” SSO mechanism? Just make the account for your friend and give it to them?

Ideally we’d go up one level and address why people are so mentally depleted they can’t handle a sign up form.

I’ve been using Linux with Nvidia for a few years now without any problems. I don’t play the most cutting edge stuff at high resolution, but like path of exile 2, elden ring, expedition 33 all ran just fine.

Yeah, that could be some of it. We can’t all be perfect all the time. It’s impossible.

I’d appreciate more honest appraisals, though. “I know Twitter is garbage run by a Nazi, but I got linked to it and scrolled a bit” is far better than “well other people are worse so who cares”. There’s this childish whataboutism that a lot of people bring out to justify their poor behavior.