EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going “cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow” and no you most certainly can’t. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there’s no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It’s the representative of the company, that’s what “customer service representative” means. If a customer can’t trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can’t even replace customer service reps with “AI” tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can’t do that job.

Agreed that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it’s just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don’t even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

Evergreen headline.

Maybe Hasbro is finally realizing that they never understood why D&D is valuable, and are coming to the conclusion that they’ll never be able to monetize it properly.

With seemingly-comparable game franchises, a lot of the value is in either a business model that’s good at generating consistent sales (selling cards or miniatures) and/or the setting and characters that can be used to sell merchandise. D&D has neither. No one really cares that much about the D&D lore, and the business model is selling books that aren’t even that necessary to play the game.

The value in the D&D franchise is that the game mechanics (which aren’t protected by IP laws) are well-known by a large user base, plus there’s a lot of existing material that is compatible with that system. People play D&D because lots of people already know how to play, and it’s easy to find material to play with. Stuff like Baldur’s Gate is popular incidentally, mostly because the developers have been good at making games, but no one is going to get excited about a mediocre D&D game in the same way that people would for a 40k game.

Hasbro has shown that they don’t understand this dynamic. When they tried to monetize the game system itself with the OGL nonsense, people just said “Okay, I guess I’ll just switch to a different RPG system” because of course that’s what you’d do. The community is interested in the hobby, not the franchise, and if the franchise is going to make it difficult to engage with the hobby, then the hobbyists, including content creators who do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the franchise relevant, will go elsewhere.

Hasbro likely thought they could take D&D and do the usual “we have this user base and we can get X amount from merch, Y amount from video games, Z amount from some sort of subscription service, etc.” not realizing that no one actually cares that much about D&D as a franchise, at least not in the same way as with stuff like Warhammer or Star Wars. It’s a hobbyists hobby, and the hobbyists aren’t going to go full “consooom!” on D&D lunchboxes and funko pops.

TTRPGs are, to their credit, extremely difficult to monetize. It’s hard to squeeze money out of a game when the players can buy a couple of PDFs and then play for years, only buying new material when there’s an update or a setting book that looks interesting to them. It’s a bad business, which makes it a terrific hobby, and I wish Hasbro a very lmao get owned if they do try to pass it along to someone else.

Give us Mario Kart 9, cowards.

That’s the point. The US has effectively unlimited money, or let’s say unlimited liquidity, so their ability to repay is purely based on political issues. That they can’t get their shit together enough politically to avoid their own borrowing costs going up is extremely funny and embarrassing.

The US credit rating has fluctuated since 2011. At one point I think it was as low as A-. Regardless, the idea that it would ever be anything other than AAA is hilarious.

Despite its AA+ credit rating

People do not make fun of the US for having their credit rating downgraded nearly enough. Imagine being the wealthiest country in history with control over the most ubiquitous reserve currency on the planet and the credit rating agencies are like “it’s not that we don’t trust you, but we have standards to maintain.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sure you aren’t a Nazi, either.

But yeah, the Hitler and slavery apologia is also really bad and you should probably stop that if you’re not a Nazi.

Some may consider these statements to be (insert trendy prefix, here) phobic, but they are also factual

The first is subjective, the second is a counterfactual. By definition, neither can be factual statements.

This is genuinely very disheartening. A lot of people have died and more will continue to die, but NATO can’t even talk openly about how the conflict might be ended. They really do want Ukraine to be the next Afghanistan in the forever war.