Using chatgpt for searches

I cannot stress this enough: LLMs are not, have never been, and quite likely never will be search engines. You may as well ask your a auto-complete questions.

My guess, based off of absolutely nothing, is that they expected stronger growth out of the gate, given the rate at which r/Pathfinder2e had been growing, and hoped to see that community choose the Fediverse. But the mods there crated their own forum that drew very little traffic in its own right, a bunch of people shifted to the discord, and then everyone quickly filtered back to the subreddit when it became clear that there mods had no will to actually do anything beyond the symbolic.

So, they lost interest.

But that’s naked supposition and conjecture.

Yeah, I haven’t been able to access it for several months now. It still seems to be running, frustratingly enough, which makes it seem like it’s an issue of absentee admins who just haven’t really noticed.

But maybe my experience with it has been uniquely frustrated.

It’s a shame. I was really hoping for there to be an active – if quite small – Pathfinder community here. The subreddit is… Not my cup of tea.

Did one of your spellcasters know the Gate spell? If so, what stopped the PCs from pulling the BBEG out of their lair and beating them up from the comfort of their homes?

Anti-magic field?
The BBEG has taken great efforts to hide their true name?
Private Sanctum spell?
The fact that Gate is an inter-planar spell, and not an intra-planar spell?

As the GM, one of your jobs is to present challenges for the party to overcome. That means actively countering their abilities list just as often as it means giving them a bone and letting them shine. The big moments of flexing mean a hell of a lot less when all they do is flex.

I was under the impression that the whole thing has been about Tencent wanting to license the digital product rights to D&D, not the actual game. I’m not sure why that’s caused an uproar over the actual IP ownership.

Huh. I asked it to make me a level 5 Wizard for PF2e, and it spit out… python code to generate one myself???

And Tencent has a minority stake in, like, every functioning software company that’s ever done an investment funding around at this point. They make it a point to diversify their holdings across basically the entire software industry at this point.

They’re fairly hands-off in those endeavours, since they’re doing it to protect themselves against shifts in the market.

Their in-house made stuff, though, is… Well, let’s just say it’s efficiently monetized.

The new Starter Kit is out and about now. I grabbed one a few weeks ago for my step-son. Are you able to find that in stock? It seemed pretty good from my quick scan.

They 100% think of it as a lever that makes expenses disappear. They’re often just a little bit surprised when it results in labour disappearing along side the expenses, though.

Importantly, though, this kind of dehumanizing language is purposeful, and it’s extremely harmful. It makes it easier for management to treat people’s livelihoods and lives as disposable.

Keep in mind that “human resources” (sometimes called “human capital” at some especially icky places) is also one of these dehumanizing terms. Treating people as resources that are available to use or process is really gross, and that’s literally the name of the department.

I just came across this video, which, while still focused on GMs, I think has some very good seeds for players. It’s all about dramatic combat, and there’s a lot that players can do to initiate dramatic scenes in game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeGjsBcR3rE

Honestly, I’d take a woody window to replace the clear glass overlooking the scenic parking lot outside literally any of the apartments I’ve ever lived in.

Just add degrees to any ol’ unit. It’s fine. Unit multiplication isn’t implied, I promise!

I just biked 25 degrees kilometre!

Self checkouts tend to have a hand scanner too

I’m going to guess that this is regional or vendor specific, because I’ve literally never seen a self-checkout with a hand scanner. And if I ever did, I would expect it to transform into a broken, dangling cable within a few months.

Meanwhile, stores all but stop manning existing checkouts, forcing everyone to line up to check out their own stuff.

In business, all data are vanity metrics. If they make you look good, you slap that shit on everything; if they make you look bad, you “don’t have it”.

It’s just that sometimes you can use negative data to make decisions that look good to those above you, and sometimes you know that you can’t.

It’s the word of the day every day they be doing war crimes.

Not only is it impossible to evacuate that many people in that short a time, but they’re basically declaring that they’re going to use their military to targer and kill civilians.

Which is a war crime.

“Hamas did it first” doesn’t give them a pass here. If it’s not ok for Hamas, it’s not ok for the Israeli state. And inverting that, if it is ok for the Israeli state…

their value comes from them being relevant

The news’s value should be to society, though, not shareholders?

People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers’ minds, to reverse course. It’s the intended outcome.

Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.

Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a “spend money” button that players hit over and over again. That’s the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They’re all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.

He was “forced” to buy because he, uh, signed a contract saying he would. I’m sorry, but “voluntarily signed a purchase agreement” is only “forcing” if you believe people above a certain wealth level can do whatever the fuck they want with impunity.

He could have backed out and paid the fine he agreed to pay in the case he backed out, but he didn’t want to do that, either.

He’s not being investigated by someone else.

He can’t win because he’s a fucking idiot.

It’s litigation around what a machine can freely use in its learning model.

No, its not that, either. It’s litigation around what resources a person can exploit to develop a product without paying for that right.

The machine is doing nothing wrong. It’s not feeding itself.