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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I feel like letting your skills in reading and communicating in writing atrophy is a poor choice. And skills do atrophy without use. I used to be able to read a book and write an essay critically analyzing it. If I tried to do that now, it would be a rough start.

    I don’t think people are going to just up and forget how to write, but I do think they’ll get even worse at it if they don’t do it.


  • But if the text you’re working on is small, you could just do it yourself. You don’t need an expensive guessing machine.

    Like, if I built a rube-goldberg machine using twenty rubber ducks, a diesel engine, and a blender to tie my shoes, and it gets it right most of the time, that’s impressive. but also kind of a stupid waste, because I could’ve just tied them with my hands.



  • Morrowind’s combat system is… if you’re feeling generous: weird. if you’re not: bad.

    You click on an enemy and it rolls dice to see if you hit. Your chance to hit is determined by your skills and stats, and your fatigue. yes, fatigue. If you’ve been sprinting and your fatigue is empty, you’ll probably miss more. This combos badly with the glacial movement speed of the game.

    You also want to hold the attack button a little longer to do more damage.

    If you start with a good axe skill (like 50), you can often hold to attack and knock people over, then finish them off. You might want to set “always use best attack” to true in the options- weapons typically have like a few moves, but one is usually better.

    The “bound weapon” spells are also good- they’re kind of cheap, and give you a high damage weapon that also boosts your skill by 10. There’s a merchant that sells a couple weapons that turn into bound weapons in Balmora.

    Blocking is also just a dice roll. I think it’s better to just get a giant two-hander and kill them faster, but opinions differ.

    Also fun: If you damage someone’s strength to 0, they can’t move. If you have a spear, your reach is probably longer than theirs. You can kill almost anything this way.

    also, while i’m here, the native leveling system is bonkers. You gain levels when your major skills improve. You get three stat increases based on any skills that went up. You can get up to +5 for each stat increase. This is not retroactive. If you level up and pick a +2 in strength, that’s what you get. This creates some utterly bizarre incentives. People would pick skills they don’t want to use as their major skills so they can control leveling, and pay trainers to bump skills tied to stats they want to increase. It’s horrible. You can kind of ignore it, but you’ll be much weaker than you would be if you play into it.



  • I don’t think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn’t understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn’t trust an AI summary for anything important.

    Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in “population of london”, i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don’t want a guessing machine to tell me.

    Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it’s hard to take any of it seriously.


  • Assuming what you’re describing works (and i have no particular reason to doubt, beyond the generally poor reputation of AI), that’s a different beast than “lol i fired all the copywriters, artists, and support staff so I, the owner, could keep more profits for myself!”. Or, “I didn’t pay attention in English 101 and don’t know how to write, so I’ll have expensive auto suggest do it for me”


  • I used a lot of mods, but I don’t remember all of them right now

    “Natural growth and decay” I think was the one I got for stats, because I didn’t want to deal with the original’s insane leveling system. It was pretty good, but had some bugs. Once you got money to pay for training, the wheels fell off because you could rocket up all your skills and stats.

    Once you have the skills for Frenzy100 and a spear, you can get unlimited money by taking out the guards that carry ebony weapons. Ok, that kind of wackiness is a little charming.

    I also got a mod so NPCs had more money, because hitting every merchant in town and advancing time so they refresh is really tedious.

    Oh, and I got one so Magicka regenerates, because constantly sleeping or chugging potions is tedious.

    And one so you can have up to 12 marks saved.

    If you have any recs let me know






  • This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

    There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

    Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.



  • I think “what’s good for me right now” is fundamental to the right wing viewset. Hypocrisy isn’t a factor because that doesn’t typically intersect with “is this good for me right now?”

    You can point out they said X and now they say Not-X, but that’s going to be as effective as someone telling you that your math is wrong because yesterday you were wearing green and today you’re wearing brown. it’s just a non-sequitur to them.


  • The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.

    I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.



  • Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

    Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

    Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.