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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • The campaigns my players consistently voice as their favorites are ones where I created an overarching plot, and then incorporated their backstories as significant and impactful portions of that plot. Being the sole input for character motivations for a story (as with a book) makes it easier to end up with a coherent vision and story, but more difficult because of the amount of content you’re responsible for. Conversely a good DM can offload work to players and end up with a result that everyone is personally invested in.

    I will say though that some DMs end up writing thousands of pages over the course of years spent in an ongoing campaign and might cry at your characterization.

    It’s definitely POSSIBLE to run a campaign without ever writing a page, but good luck when your characters get attached to an NPC you forgot about if improvisation isn’t your forte.



  • Between the demand to install an app we are prohibited from even "decipher"ing and the theft of content, I don’t think this service is anything I want to be a part of. I thought they were trying to be something better.

    The contract language that informed my opinion follows.

    When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section.

    As a user of the Services, you agree not to: Except as permitted by applicable law, decipher, decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer any of the software comprising or in any way making up a part of the Services.




  • Black hat and Defcon just ended and I’ll share my impression from LLM related talks given there. Microsoft VPs charged additional money to CISOs attending the summit talking about how AI will disrupt and be the future and blah blah magical thinking.

    Meanwhile Microsoft engineers and others said things like “this is logarithmic regression for people who are bad at math, and is best for cases where 75% accuracy is good enough. Try to break use cases into as many steps as possible and keep the LLM away from any automation that could have any consequences. These systems have no separation between the control plane and user input, which is re-exposing us to problems that were solved 15 years ago.”

    I think there are some neat possibilities that are lost in marketing hype as venture capitalist anger grows that they might have been scammed by yet another hammer in search of nails.








  • It’s valid to point out that we have difficulty defining knowledge, but the output from these machines are inconsistent at a conceptual level, and you can easily get them to contradict themselves in the spirit of being helpful.

    If someone told you that a wheel can be made entirely of gas do you have confidence that they have a firm grasp of a wheel’s purpose? Tool use is a pretty widely agreed upon marker of intelligence and so not grasping the purpose of a thing that they can describe at great length and exhaustive detail, while also making boldly incorrect claims on occassion should raise an eyebrow.