It’s just emotions. The words conservatives pick are just to satisfy their emotions. Facts don’t matter. They are like children. Failures of people. They shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions of import.

Ted Cruz is a piece of shit and there’s nothing we could do to him to make up for his malice and ineptitude. Though I’d be willing to see some attempts.

I’m partial to Fate.

It’s very open. You don’t have to worry about looking up the right class or feats. You just describe what you want to play, and if the group thinks it’s cool and a good fit for the story, you’re basically done.

Now, the downside is this requires a lot more creativity up front. A blank page can be intimidating.

I like that players have more control over the outcome. You can usually get what you want, even if you roll poorly, but it’s more of a question of what you’re willing to pay for it.

Every roll will be one of

• succeed with style
• succeed
• a lesser version of what you want
• succeed at a minor cost
• succeed at a major cost
• (if you roll badly and don’t want to pay any costs) fail, don’t get what you want

It’s a lot more narrative power than some games give you. I don’t like being completely submissive to the DM, so I enjoy even as a player being able to pitch “ok I’m trying to hack open this terminal… how about as a minor cost I set off an alarm?” or “I’m trying to steal his keys and flubbed the roll… How about as a major cost I create a distraction, get the keys, but drop my backpack by accident. Now I’m disarmed, have no tools, and they can probably trace me with that stuff later. But I got the keys!”.

It’s more collaborative, like a writer’s room, so if someone proposes a dud solution the group can work on it.

The math probability also feels nice. You tend to roll your average, so there’s less swinginess like you’ll get in systems rolling one die.

Plus, I don’t know any other system that lets me pull my intestines out of my abdomen and use them like a lasso to climb a cliff when I forgot my rope at home.

Nitpick: more narrative systems like Fate let you do this, but then you typically don’t get a lot of crunch. Plus it can vary if your group isn’t on the same wavelength about what’s cool and appropriate for the story.

Self-driving cars were never a good investment. It’s a really hard problem that doesn’t really get us to a better world. All that money could have been spent on public transit, which has a whole lot of benefits.

I think one of my friends is a member there, and said it’s been pretty wild. Some very long emails were sent around.

I don’t know how anyone can still support Israel but here we are.

Unfortunately, most of the maga hats are idiots. They’d rather lose all their money if it meant they could be more racist

I’m reminded of “a libertarian walks into a bear”. Right wing folks have a poor model of the world

Capitalism is giving bad outcomes. Labor is divorced from the results of their work, and people who contribute little to nothing (or less than nothing) grow wealthy.

We don’t need to go all the way to full communism in one shot, but I’d like to think most of us can agree the current system is unacceptable

Right? This keeps happening when people try to sell me on LLMs. We already had better solutions for some of this stuff.

I think it’s a sharp contrast with the cops that let a school shooting happen while they were outside, for example

Yes, we should expect people to do their jobs. In an ideal world, that is. This world is far from ideal where we have ICE, trump, shit cops, etc.

You don’t understand small talk if you think it has no functional purpose. Small talk has several purposes.

One, it sends a bunch of signals. I see you. You see me. Neither of us are threats. We have a shared language.

Two, it’s how you find deeper topics to talk about. “What did you get up to this weekend?” “Oh, hung out with my friend. We saw a band I like - All Dogs - do a surprise anniversary show. You do anything big?”

Three, it lets people choose their level of engagement. “Cool, sounds fun. I stayed in, watched some TV” signals minimal interest vs “All dogs? Never heard of them but I love live music. What’s their genre?” signals interest, and now you can a little deeper on music.

If you just plunge directly into deep stuff that’s like skipping foreplay and lube. It’s probably going to make people uncomfortable.

Removed by mod

Sure, it wouldn’t be an easy live starting with $500k, but I think with strict budgeting and low costs you could stay in the black and grow your principle. And if you get any job at all on top of it, it’s even easier.

Anyway, yeah, was just spit balling how much a difference the money could make.

A lot of bosses think developers’ entire job is just churning out code when it’s actually like 50% coding and 50% listening to stakeholders, planning, collaborating with designers, etc.

A lot of leadership is incompetent. In a reasonable, just, world they would not be in these decision making positions.

Verbose blogger Ed Zitron wrote about this. He called them “Business Idiots”: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.

Time for the sartre quote again.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity

The assholes know what they are doing. They know they are hypocritical. They don’t care. You cannot engage in conservatives/anti-semites/fascists/et al with reason because they will not argue in good faith. They are bad people. Selfish, fearful, people.

All the leadership who made this mistake should be fired. They are clearly incompetent

But i guess it’s always labor that pays the price

I had the same thought, mostly because distracted driving is such a present threat that it’s hard to find humor in it.

But whatever. Someone’s probably going to be reading this while driving. Please stop.

Ideally the kind that doesn’t first have like death camps for the “undesirables”, famine, and disease. But given how many maga-hats are cheering for ICE even as their spouses get disappeared, I don’t know how things are going to go.

Also some lemmy moderators are such pearl clutchers they’ll take action about the slightest hint of violence, no matter how justified.