What is a ‘banna’? I thought you might have meant ‘banana’, but you tripled down so now I’m not sure. The internet only tells me of the Banna Strand, a beach in Ireland

Your disdain for these manuals of style is blatantly visible in your omission of the serial comma, which all three recommend using ಠ_ಠ

Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in… I want to say 2027?

I recommend going to Disboard and then searching for dnd, dnd5e, or avrae, or else finding an invite to the Avrae discord server and looking through the latest posts in its looking-for-community channel (Avrae is a discord bot that helps automate D&D 5e gameplay, so I find it to be a convenient search term–but if ypur partner prefers other systems, Disboard probably has searchable tags for them too). Then just make sure the description also includes LGBTQ+ and you’re probably golden (at least in terms of finding a community that is not vitriolic to your partner).

These communities are often “Westmarches” style, where players group up for short events, so the specific group of people playing at any given time rotates. Some servers are primarily focused on being a place to find groups for synchronous play (e.g. over voice chat for a few hours), while others focus on slow asynchronous play-by-post that has participation from each player once or twice per day. Some servers combine the two styles.

Good luck!

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf’s equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

• an app with good preexisting test coverage
• the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
• a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It’s as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it’s easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help… But it’s pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it’s more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren’t real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

Can we stop posting this headline? Again and again and again?

It’s not news.

If a sizable portion of the population did want to do something stupid, that’d be news.

This is… It’s not even propaganda. It’s just a waste of our limited time and emotional capacity for idiocy.

This looks like the story board to a CGP Gray video. Which is to say, the content is good, but the delivery should be a CGP Gray video.

He needs to put his money where his mouth is, and subsidize healthy food and move to single payer insurance so that healthcare can be affordable, if he’s going to spout off like that.

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Spelljammer campaign at level 11. We were hired to get a MacGuffin necklace off of a pirate, by his rival. We waltz into his stronghold, get an audience, and then Nat 20 a Persuasion check to convince him for a 1on1 with my bard, b/c for a pirate so tough, what threat could my bard pose? His guards and my party members leave the room.

Land a Suggestion to have him hand me the necklace, and then land a Modify Memory to have him think it was his idea: we would claim he was dead, use the necklace to get an audience with his rival to show her “proof,” and then double cross her and kill her. Then he’d swoop in, reclaim the necklace, and pay us handsomely.

Poor dummy. Hoodwinked!

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Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as mv to update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the .DS_Store files co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.

So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.

I introduced a “small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door” next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn’t believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It’s an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

I’ve seen this episode of Black Mirror

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No need for the entire rehash–feel free to just cherry pick some votes from her track record that her base expected her to vote one way, but she voted another. Since she’s apparently done so again and again and again, that shouldn’t be too hard for you, as you seem to follow her career closely. When politicians do that kind of thing frequently enough to build a reputation, someone usually compiles those instances. A link to such a compilation would also work to sway your detractors.

Legitimately curious about this. Since the sources I read don’t mention this, I am afraid I’ll be doomed to relying on propaganda unless someone educates me. Please help me by providing examples of AoC selling out, and ideally link to the sources so that I may enlighten myself in the future. Thanks!

Do you even read?

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.