festus @ festus @lemmy.ca

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4

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267

Joined

2 yr. ago

Would they maybe consider Pathbuilder? I do think the export to Foundry is a premium feature though.

Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have '000123' turn into '123', now it keeps it as text.

I'm not sure what version got this, but there's a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it's amazing.

https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates

The US Supreme Court has some tough choices to make. On one hand you have a piece of the constitution that, at least to this layperson, would seem to clearly disqualify Trump - but absent any clarifying law from Congress it's really hard to figure out how to implement it. Do you let States do it? What if a Republican state official says Biden is an insurrectionist? How would Biden challenge that? What court would hear that challenge? If it's the state supreme courts, then what if one court disqualifies him and another doesn't? Do you allow for some states to disqualify candidates and others not, or does the Supreme Court have to take up these cases each election year? What's the threshold for insurrection? Should it require a criminal conviction? What if Trump were charged with insurrection and later acquitted - can he now run again?

Maybe they might punt it off to Congress and say that it's Congress' responsibility when counting electoral college votes to decide if a candidate is qualified or not, but now you've just given cover to Republicans to reject presidential election results they don't like if they happen to win enough seats in Congress.

Tl;dr - from my perspective they have to either ignore the constitution and invite the chaos of another possible Trump presidency, or acknowledge the constitution and invite (additional) chaos into the election system. If Congress functioned maybe a decent law could be written but fat chance of that.

I rebooted my game recently and made the players promise to commit to at least one game per calendar month, which we schedule immediately after playing. Players who weren't willing or able to make/keep that commitment were dropped and replaced and now I have a pretty good thing going on. There's more people who want to play than want to GM, so if you're GMing you can afford to filter out uninterested players.

Correction it was the St. Petersburg zoo.

There was that story of a stray cat that lived with a big cat at the Moscow zoo so they can get along, but I have no idea how common it is in nature.

Not a lawyer, but bankruptcy laws sometimes won't apply to criminal penalties / restitution.

I wouldn't call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I've been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I'd still have my games.

Apple claims their OS needs less RAM (I have no clue) but for OP running Windows 8GB is no where near enough.

I'm pretty pro AI but I think their point was that the generated images were near identical to existing images. For example, they generate one from Dune that even has whisps of hair in the same place.

Sometimes I like to think of the economy as a small village where people directly goods with each other. The invention of money means you can make a living off of selling to just one person and still have something to offer the farmer, but for this thought experiment this I want to focus on the actual, real, goods and services of the economy.

So imagine a small village. You have the farmer who grows food. You have the blacksmith who builds car parts, and the mechanic that builds cars and tractors. And you also have the village fool who makes people laugh in exchange for tips. The mechanic gives tractors to the farmers in exchange for food, and gives some of that food to the mechanic in exchange for parts. When any of them need a laugh they'll give something to the fool to hear a joke. And you have your other industries, etc. One day a new person comes to town, who will represent the new tech industry. They realize that they can build a machine that tells the farmer the best days to plant and harvest which will help the farmer grow more food. The farmer happily accepts, paying the tech person some food in exchange. Similarly they're able to help optimize the other industries, and with the value they're providing and them being in short demand they're able to get great wages.

With their prosperity, other tech people start coming to the village and helping the other industries get more efficient. Most of the concrete efficiencies are optimized, so they start working on more abstract ones. Someone builds an app to help the villagefolk find someone to trade with ("I have 2 gears but I need 3 loaves" gets matched with "I have 2 wheat bushels and need 2 gears" which gets matched with "I have 3 loaves and need 2 wheat bushels"), in exchange getting a small cut of those resources, and a larger cut if someone pays for preferential matching (advertising). Other tech people find work helping the other tech people at their jobs (IDEs, libraries, issue trackers, etc.) And other tech people build animatronic village fools to entertain the village themselves (video games).

More tech people come as they've heard of how much they can earn at this village. Eventually they start having some trouble finding work to do, everything seems optimized. Some of the wealthy members of the town (let's say the farmer of the biggest field) says to many of these tech people that they'll pay them food in exchange that the farmer gets a portion of whatever the tech person ends up earning with what they build (low interest rates). With all the good ideas used up, the projects these tech people are working on aren't working well (crypto) or are duplicates of already existing tools (how many social media apps do we need, etc.). Still though, the farmer is giving them a lot of food so yet more tech people come to the village, and many of the children of the village (like the farmer's son) are becoming tech workers too.

Eventually, after a bad crop season (maybe because the farmer's son didn't help harvest), the farmer is short on food and stops lending out food to these tech workers. They try to go around to the other villagefolk but most have already been optimized. The tools that optimized life are already built and the required tech people for maintenance is a lot less than those needed to build it, and the number of truly new opportunities to help new industries isn't enough to provide work to all the tech people.

TL;DR

Tech people earned their crazy salaries when they were helping migrate the non-digital world to the digital world. There were so many obvious opportunities for efficiencies and not enough tech people to go around. 'Spreadsheet' calculations literally used to be a day-long affair with a team of people - of course a business would pay anything to a tech person to automate that. Now that times the whole economy.

These obvious efficiencies are finite but we treated them as infinite and kept training new tech workers. Low interest rates helped keep us employed for longer than we should have as we were paid to work on bad products in the hope that maybe there'd be a diamond in the rough and yet we STILL kept training new workers. Meanwhile other careers that provide more concrete value, like mechanics & HVAC professionals, have had a labour shortage as Tech attracted so many young people to itself. This eventually led to persistent inflation which then ended low interest rates. With higher interest rates a lot of speculative tech can't get funding; Tech is only getting paid for the actual new value it can provide today, which is way less than it used to be.

I have pretty decent savings, but I also live in a country with public health care. With some health incidents in the last few years that required the ER, I suspect that in the US I'd be broke.

I'd like to see an active Pathfinder 2e community, and I also miss the /r/LocalLLaMA community (running LLMs locally).

Yeah I think for the typical user non-rolling distros introduce more problems than they solve. It makes sense in a server environment, but it was so frustrating to look up a severe bug, find its bug report, and see that it had already been fixed upstream 6 months previous. Glad that there are better options now for users of different skill levels.

That hardware issue I encountered was actually because the Nvidia drivers bundled by Ubuntu were old and didn't support my card, not because Nvidia's latest drivers had issues. Crazy that Ubuntu was okay with having their latest release just not work on a mid-range GPU (Nouveau also didn't support the card yet).

I've used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:

• I'd encounter a hardware driver issue I didn't know how to fix (Nvidia...)
• I'd dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
• I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment's control panel didn't support, and I'd have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn't understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
• Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn't know how to fix.

The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren't a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.

Found on HackerNews. Kind of scary that merely ordering toddler stuff on Amazon can result in criminal charges.

In the case of the creator of the video, they literally don't.

The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterizes himself as Christian and a man of faith but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church.

Source, which then links to a video also on the NYTimes.

I wish that was my reason. In practice it's because my friends will never GM so this is the only way I can play.

FYI I've had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.