What an idiot. It’s an airplane obviously it has to fly up into the air and then down again

Thank you for the detailed answer!

I played Pathfinder for a few sessions, but didn’t care much for the combat system. I tend to favor conditions over hitpoints these days, and from what I recall Pathfinder was very A+B-C. “Wounded-Dying-Dead” systems are a bit too simplified, but I find around 15 hp to be the maximum I enjoy tracking.

Fate looks interesting for sure. It isn’t what is was looking for, but the quick rules’ overview I just watched was very intriguing. I might try to find a session to watch to get a better idea of how the system plays out.

Now Chronicles of Darkness… is not the medieval-fantasy setting I was looking for, but the system hits all the right spots. Around 10hp max, but with pretty much “wounded-dying-dead” superimposed - 9 attributes which combine to give various sub-stats - enough skills to cover basic situations, but room for specialisation as you see fit - rolling lots of dice for epic situations, but counting them fairly simply - and role playing elements integrated into the system through vices and virtues.
From what I quickly watched, I love it. I might try to adapt it to medieval fantasy, or just play a a short campaign in the intended world to get a feel for it. Really cool any way, thanks again.

I would love a few recommendations, if you don’t mind. I played mostly Warhammer 2nd edition but can’t seem to get around to the latest 4th edition. It feels convoluted and not “balanced”, if that makes sense. Every few sessions I keep thinking there has to be a better and/or less complicated system out there.

I mostly want the rules to get out of the way of the story we are playing, but still want some depth, differentiation and player choices. And I need a decent magic system, which seems to be the hardest to get right.

Any ideas ?

I agree with the general idea of the article, but there are a few wild takes that kind of discredit it, in my opinion.

“Imagine the calculator app leaking 32GB of RAM, more than older computers had in total” - well yes, the memory leak went on to waste 100% of the machine’s RAM. You can’t leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine. Correct, but hardly mind-bending.
“But VSCodium is even worse, leaking 96GB of RAM” - again, 100% of available RAM. This starts to look like a bad faith effort to throw big numbers around.
“Also this AI ‘panicked’, ‘lied’ and later ‘admitted it had a catastrophic failure’” - no it fucking didn’t, it’s a text prediction model, it cannot panic, lie or admit something, it just tells you what you statistically most want to hear. It’s not like the language model, if left alone, would have sent an email a week later to say it was really sorry for this mistake it made and felt like it had to own it.

I was about to answer something about “never” being a bit too absolute for my taste and try to give a nuanced perspective about it being OK to get back to an old job if you feel it’s better for you.

Then I realised I am just 100% projecting and creating excuses for myself, which whether I am right or wrong is a really bad basis for giving out advice.

I am leaving my current job in 3 weeks to go freelance, and I am definitely anxious about it. Somewhere in the back of my head I was keeping a door open to allow myself to go back in case it does not work out. Fact is, I know why I quit and it would indeed be a terrible idea to go back to the same company. So, thanks for helping me sort this out!

Also, autonomous bodywide scratching

rsync -avzhP gang unite! I knew someone would have posted my standard flags. I used them enough that my brain moved them from RAM to ROM at this point…

That is well said and something I often struggle to express without sounding super creepy. If someone is attracted to kids, but would never touch one because they know it would be profoundly wrong, I believe they should be congratulated and directed to therapy. Prison, a public lynching or self loathing and isolation are not going to help.

Which doesn’t have much in common with pedo island, obviously.

My interpretation was that pink lady shouted out some crap formula FBI guy does not understand anyway so they would be left alone again.

Last panel half contradicts it, half just leans harder into the absurdity of it all. I wouldn’t expect physicists to care much about Rubik’s Cubes, I think even the cliché fits mathematicians much better.

Basically, my spontaneous takeaway was “government and media are so science-illiterate that nobody understands anyone anymore”.

I would just like to add that the french people don’t actually have grenade launchers on hand, since they are not sold in supermarkets here.

So we just march, shout, sing, hold signs, and get tear-gassed at some point. Admittedly we’re usually in the tens of thousands in medium sized cities and we sometimes burn a few cars and trash cans for good measure.

The last large protest was on September 18. and had between 500k and 1.1M protesters, according to the police and the protesters respectively.

Meine Mutter fand eigentlich, ich sollte die alten Bücher aus ihrer Kindheit lieber gar nicht lesen, oder auf jeden Fall mit ihr drüber reden.

Max und Moritz war absurd genug, um in meiner Erinnerung OK zu scheinen. Das eigensinnige Kind hingegen fand ich grässlich.

Obligatorisches “Sorry, ich lebe schon lange nicht mehr in Deutschland und kann weitgehend kein deutsch mehr”

Am I an idiot for trying to match the "DODOdo"s with Darude - Sandstorm?

They don’t match. Don’t try.

As evidenced by the facial expressions in the meme. That does not look like lost time to me!

Excuse me? Is this theonion? nottheonion?

Oh, just plain normal USA news. OK…

I completely agree: if the (hypothetical) perfect LLM wrote the perfect book/song/poem, why would I care?

Off the top of my head, if an LLM generated Lennon’s “Imagine”, Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Skies”, or Eminem’s “Kim”, why would anyone give a fuck? If it wrote about sorrow, fear, hope, anger, or a better tomorrow, how could it matter?

Even if it found the statistically perfect words to make you laugh, cry, or feel something in general, I don’t think it would matter. When I listen to Nirvana, The Doors, half my collection honestly, I think it is inherently about sharing a brief connection with the artist, taking a glimpse into their feelings, often rooted in a specific period in time.

Sorry if iam14andthisisdeep, I don’t think I am quite finding the right words myself. But I’ll fuck myself with razor blades before I ask a predictive text model to formulate it for me, because the whole point is to tell you how I feel.

I still feel this whole conclusion is akin to “we won’t need money in a post-AGI world”. An implied, unproven dream of AI being so good that X happens as a result.

If an author uses LLMs to write a book, I don’t give a fuck that they forget how to write on their own. What I do care about is that they will generate 100 terrible books in the time it takes a legitimate author to write a single one, consuming a 1000 times the resources to do so and drown out the legitimate author in the end, by sheer mass.

I don’t think anything hooked me quite like Worm! I completely agree with Taylor evolving a lot throughout the story, and I feel the whole scope of the story gets so much larger, in such a satisfying way.

I read a few arcs of the Worm sequel, Ward, but it didn’t really click for me. From the same author, I found Twig to be really interesting. It takes place in a very different setting and has a darker tone, but I feel some of the narrative techniques are the same as in Worm. For example, the characters know more of the world than the reader does, who gets to discover it piece by piece, and the characters themselves are the important part, not whatever magic or science powers the world. The scale and stakes do not explode like Worms’ do, but the story definitely does not stay stale either.

To me very personally, Ward felt a bit like “more Worm but not quite”. I didn’t really want more Worm. Twig felt like a new, very different story, in a somewhat similar style. It didn’t hook me like Worm did, but it scratched a similar itch of discovering an atypical world, with its rules, characters and unreliable narrators.

Same here! I stumbled onto Worm a few years ago and read it way too quickly. I taught myself some (very basic) editing skills, corrected a few typos and paid ~300 bucks to get the whole story printed out on paper so my wife would read it as well.

I would add that despite being a story with superpowers, it is very much a story about people, and not about powers. You progressively discover the rules of a world that make perfect sense in retrospect, the stakes scale up really well and I found the ending to be a culmination unlike anything I have read.

I mean, 40% of the population biking to work is nothing to sneeze at, compared to the US’s 6-or-so %

“OK, Mr president, that’s great, now please hand me the - no, no! Ugh…”
“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER”