I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

I fully agree that’s it’s an authoritarian measure that needlessly targets a vulnerable minority.

But it’s also something we should laugh at the French state for. Orwell memorably mused that the reason the goose-step never made its way into British military marching drills - at a time when many other European armies were adopting it - was because if British civilians saw soldiers on parade goose-stepping down the road then they would laugh at them. He thought that instinct to laugh at pompous displays of authority was something that helped insulate the British from the fascist and communist totalitarianism that took root elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century. Fascists tend to have very thin skins.

The French state is making laws to regulate women’s fashion. They should know that doing this makes them look ridiculous to normal people.

The French state literally making laws governing fashion is the most French thing ever.

Right, I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m just observing that, for someone who remembers that time, seeing a politician eating for the cameras to prove some food is safe brings to mind this very specific unfortunate example.

In 1990, as the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis in the UK was unfolding and shortly after scientists had found proof that the disease could indeed cross species, the Agriculture Secretary John Gummer went on national TV to try to force his four-year-old daughter to eat a beef burger for the cameras, to convince the public to keep eating British beef.

Several hundred people ended up dying from CJD (the human variant caused by eating infected beef). It remains one of the most widely derided photo ops in British political history.

This is stupid. I don’t use Facebook and I’m certainly no fan of Meta, but they didn’t ban news links for the fun of it - they did it in response to the Canadian government making them pay news agencies for news links that gets shared on their services.

I think that’s a stupid law, but the Canadians are entitled to do that if they want to. But that means they’ve intentionally increased the cost to Meta of permitting news links, and Meta has made a commercial decision based on this, which it’s also entitled to do. Meta isn’t a charity or a public sector agency and to expect this company (of all!) to behave like one is ludicrous.

This is pure cakeism.

Pays civil servants way less than they would earn privately, claiming this is a prudent use of public funds.

Civil servants move to private sector.

Pikachu face.

Well done to Apple for telling their customers they won’t get viruses…

It’s been available to install as a progressive web app for some time. Other apps are coming.

Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.

Apple: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/apple-threatens-to-pull-imessage-from-uk-iphones-rather-than-weaken-its-security/ar-AA1e8kgo

WhatsApp: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/08/whatsapp-could-disappear-uk-over-privacy-concerns-ministers-told

I’ve had Fitbits for years but I’m probably never buying another one.

The main thing keeping me locked into the Fitbit ecosystem was the social features - my family are dispersed around the country and all have Fitbits, so for years we did the weekly step challenges as a bit of friendly competition and a vehicle for staying in good contact. The competition made a genuine difference to our behaviour - especially for encouraging my parents to stay active in retirement.

Then after the Google acquisition they killed off the challenges on spurious grounds. It’s generally suspected this is part of a drive to gradually kill off the Fitbit brand and drive people onto Google’s own Pixel watches. Now Fitbit’s USP is gone and so I’ll probably just get a Garmin next time as people generally think that’s a better product.

So is invading Ukraine.

ChatCCP

I’m one of them! I didn’t even know about r/selfhosted when I was on Reddit but I found this place when I joined kbin. I’ve been thinking on-and-off over the last year about self hosting so subscribed. I still occasionally look at Reddit in view-only mode though (largely for legacy content) so I also subscribed to r/selfhosted over there too last time I checked it.

It’s not subscriber numbers that matter though, it’s active users and quality new posts - people who go to the sub regularly, upvote, comment, and create content that causes other people in turn to look at the sub. I’m still a subscriber to a tonne of Reddit subs that I used to post and comment regularly on, and now don’t. If every active Reddit user became a passive user then Reddit would grind to a halt overnight, regardless of how many users they notionally have.

People talk about duplicate communities in the Fediverse as if it’s a new problem. Reddit has loads of these though - it’s not unique to the Fediverse. What happened on Reddit is that the communities in question eventually settled on one subreddit being the ‘main’ one for their community and then most of the traffic ended up with those ones.

He’s not tracking Elon’s jet. The activity of Elon’s jet is already public information. All he’s doing is republishing it on a widely used platform.

The tragedy of the commons is an economic and ecological concept concerning situations where private parties will overuse a common resource because private incentives and public interests aren’t aligned. For example, overfishing or carbon emissions.

In this case, the problem as articulated in this article is that each party in the AI gold rush - Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc - has an incentive to rush their AI development without adequate controls so they can get ahead of their competitors, potentially taking us into dangerous outcomes in which one of them produces AI that has far-reaching harmful consequences for humanity. I guess the ‘commons’ here is the future of human society, which AI developers have private incentives to take for granted.

The solution proposed is to adopt many of the classic solutions economists have devised for tragedies of the commons - points 1-8 in the article - and apply them to AI development in the ways set out in the article.

I see that argument and I want Ukraine to win quickly too. But if you follow that logic then there are lots of other weapons we could be sending them. I find it hard to make a case for sending them cluster bombs that wouldn’t apply just as well to sending mustard gas, nerve agent or tactical nuclear weapons - the use (or even possession) of any of which could improve the effectiveness of Ukraine’s defenders too. But the point about all of these weapons - including cluster bombs - is that civilised societies have decided that certain weapons that cause mass death and destruction are not appropriate to use in conflict no matter the scenario.

Globally, the victims of cluster bombs are disproportionately civilians, with a huge proportion being children. All the fighting currently is happening in Ukraine so it’s Ukrainian children who are going to be getting blown up by these for decades to come after the war has ended.