Marine heatwave off Oregon coast considered ‘extreme’ by NOAA
Dang it!
I have a business trip to Portland next week and I was looking forward to cooler temperatures than here in Tucson, but alas, it'll only be 5-10 degrees cooler.
Gee thanks climate change!
😅😅
I kinda wish the ALL feed could be a bit more intelligent. Also, sorry for gunking up your feed!
I'm of the opinion that bots are okay if:
- They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.
- They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
- They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there's a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that's great and what we want!
As for ChatGPT bots:
- All bots must disclose they are a bot.
- All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it's okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it's a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
- ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It's not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.
Similarly FPS-Z games like Tribes (Ascend, Vengeance, 2) and Legions Overdrive.
Fortunately MidAir 2 is almost here. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1231210/Midair_2/
Mid-air 2 Is inching towards release.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1231210/Midair_2/
I've got alpha access and can assure you it does a great job of bringing the good ol' days of Tribes 2 back. Though there is a ways to go.
I use it extensively! Both ChatGPT/GPT4 and StableDiffusion.
First off, I maintain likely the most flexible fork of the FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator. The original was only really compatible with a select few settings, particularly D&D and the author didn't want to make things more robust for other systems. So I basically exposed the underlying templates and data-structures to the user via the settings UI in an effort to port it over to Stars Without Number. It works pretty well now, and should allow people to get most things working with only the settings page. As soon as I get GPT-4 API access I'll upgrade it to that and use it more. Here's the link for anyone interested: https://github.com/th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator
In my development I learned a lot about how ChatGPT works and the most optimal way to structure my questions. Here's my main, most important takeaways from the capabilities:
- Context is most powerful from most recent word to oldest - that is the AI prefers instructions in the latter part of your prompt more than your former. Especially when using HUGE prompts.
- Everything is one-shot. Each subsequent request contains the request and response before it. But in API-land we also have "System" prompts which are invisible (and very useful) - but still add to length.
- ChatGPT and GPT4 have very different capabilities in how much context they can hold before it "falls off" so to speak. GPT4 can go quite long before needing reminders.
- ChatGPT's training includes MANY SRD documents already as well as different reddit discussion threads on rules - that being said - it's not consistent enough to do rules lawyering without plugins.
- ChatGPT's training also includes a lot of reddit narrative threads and questions about famous books. And sometimes even the books themselves can be quoted verbatim (usually stuff that's in the public domain).
- ChatGPT can't math, or keep count, or speak in turn very well.
First we tell the bot your system - not necessarily for the rules, but the included setting and details (i.e. D&D is high fantasy and has certain monsters, SWN is a spacefaring sci-fi RPG with entirely different classes, etc.). For my case, I use Stars Without Number, and I quickly came to believe that the Free Rulebook was ingested in ChatGPTs dataset. It wasn't perfect, but good enough to work with for my purposes.
I am running a table top roleplaying game. The system is Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition.
Then we need to communicate any setting expansions or modification. Definitely make use of names and events to further strengthen the association to the desired setting.
The universe (or setting) is Dragonlance. Particularly the era immediately after the defeat of the Dragon armies of Ansalon.
Once that's out, introduce your party.
The party consists of 5 mysterious heros:
- A Human Paladin by the name of Kaladrian - A devout and zealous servant of...
- A Kender Rogue by the name of Parup - A shifty little rogue who's brilliance is diminished by his own...
- A Nother Character by the name of John Doe...
... and so on ...
Now we're about half way to actually asking the AI what we want of it, Whoo!
Then get to their present setting. The specific place or town they're in, and as much set dressing as you can muster.
The party is currently located in the great Metropolis of Palanthas - it is a vast, sprawling city with.. The people of Palanthas are... The main people of power are... The main problems the city is dealing with are...
Next we go into a brief last game summary or "current status".
In our last adventure, the party successfully did X, which lead to Y and Z occurring... They now have these particular treasures... A party member has died in combat... They successfully did X for Y about the Z...
Next we go into the party's present goals and predicaments.
The party aims to... Unfortunately that's been complicated because... These party members have differing but parallel goals... These party members have different but conflicting goals. The party's goals conflict with...
Now we finally ask ChatGPT what we want:
Please help me with the following task:
Create a detailed, fun description of the party entering a crowded local tavern in the bad part of Palanthas. Make sure to communicate to the players that this tavern is NOT the place to start a brawl. Also create a quick roll-table for 10 hooks or leads the party might find here.
This formatting should be optimal for most things for a few reasons.
- The instructions are on the bottom, and are thus the most important context.
- The information is mostly structured from most relevant to least when going backwards.
- There is plenty of "seed" information about the system and the setting. This should "prime" the AI to give you more relevant output for that setting for a given situation.
I've used this style of prompt with great success. On ChatGPT the AI seems to keep most context for about 5-8 responses or so before worsening in quality. At that point just try to update the more recent summary section before starting a new chat and going from there. On GPT-4 it seems to last pretty long, sometimes surprising me with an accurate character description 20 messages in with it, only having mentioned the character's appearance in the first message.
I hope that this approach to ChatGPT prompts helps someone else! I know it certainly helps me!
I'll go into my use of Stable Diffusion and combining it with player art in another post...
I'm the instance admin of Tucson.social and I support this message.
You see, Lemmy is steeped in what I like to call "Tech bro culture" - maybe not the original devs, but definitely the community that espouses these "tips". These folks, despite their education, often fail to understand how non-technical people think, or even just how less technical (but completely competent) folks think.
Let me tell you what it requires to host an instance:
- Intermediate Linux Skills
- Basic to Intermediate Docker Skills
- Intermediate to Advanced Networking skills
- Intermediate to Advanced Information Security Skills
- LOTs of Time, especially when no one else wants to moderate or administrate.
And that's just the TIP of the iceberg. Sure you can run a completely private instance that negates the need for heavy moderation, but you still need to protect that instance and make sure it works from a wide range of devices and networks.
So yeah, we see many instances that were created that are now dead or dying because the instance admins didn't know they needed DDOS protection, or CAPTCHA, or any number of security tools, and now they are at the whim of bad actors or simply couldn't keep up with the poorly documented changes that have now broken their instance.
Then, once you get past that issue, and you have a popular instance, then Regulatory Compliance becomes an issue. This is intrinsically linked to the ability to moderate the content. Sure, there are ways to automatically report illegal content, but in say, a NSFW community that's a never ending battle that could could end up with a subpoena or 10.
So yeah, I recommend anyone who isn't a seasoned Infrastructure / DevOps / InfoSec / Full Stack Engineer stay away from creating their own instances for now because those that do end up creating "Bot Bastions" that make the fediverse worse, not better.
In lemmy's case, my perusal of the DB didn't really suggest that the queries would be that complex and I suspect that moving it to a higher performance NoSQL DB might be possible, but I'd have to take a look at a few more queries to be sure.
I wonder if this could be made to work with Aerospike Community Edition...
Obviously it could be more effort than it's worth though.
Lived there for 7 years - I think I got it.
Step one, do not be in downtown, inner SE, inner NE, Gateway, or anywhere near a Max line or bus station after dark. Step two, carry mace and a stun gun. Step three, leave Portland for good and only return if I must << We are here.
We got a lot of hate from certain left leaning folks in Portland for leaving "because of the homeless". It's like, "No, dude, I'm leaving because my wife was assaulted by homeless no less than 3 times (twice physically, once was almost a rape), and that's even when she was "safely on TriMet. You can 'but not ALL homeless' all you want. My wife is traumatized and we want nothing to do with this shithole of a city".
Yeah, after the 3rd one we left, and we can say with certainty that we'll never ever come back to live in PDX.