peto (he/him)

I sometimes suspect that the push for decimalisation was in part to avoid having to teach computers the old system.

If your prompts aren’t good enough, consider getting an AI to write them for you.

My maths prof wrote his own textbook, we had to buy it but it cost I think £40 new and covered everything we needed for a 3 year physics degree and you could easily find a used copy near campus. Still got my copy somewhere.

I think it was the only textbook I actually needed, all my lecturers wrote their own courses and extra reading tended to be from journals. Only other book I remember using regularly was the CRC Handbook and those were just scattered here and there around the department.

Well, he’s clearly not talking about small people like say, me or you compared to Trump or Musk. And let me be clear, he is probably wrong about that as well. If Trump is anti-google that is likely nothing more than a negotiating position.

It’s probably just a language thing. When he says small people he means sub-mega corporations. Actual humans probably pass beneath his notice.

SteamOS is all well, and good, but does it have a dedicated button to launch an AI app (but not the one you can use at work) that can be reprogrammed to only do other things that also don’t need a dedicated button? I think not. Check and mate Gabe.

If lead acetate is bad for me why does it taste so good?

The cactus hybrid or the tomato cultivar?

What, at the youthful age of 69? Kid needs more experience.

Though it does appear to reduce rates of postmarital twitter.

Relevant article from the Guardian basically ‘because power plant operators could’

Even if it used to be worse, it certainly didn’t get better because people were content with it.

My issue is in pretending that sin taxes are anything but profiteering on human weakness. If the goal is to stop people dying, then it is limp, ban the advertising, take it out of supermarkets, require ID and impose limits. If the goal is to deal with the social harms of alcohol then it is the opposite of effective, pushing addicts closer to poverty, and hitting the poorest the hardest. Minimum pricing has zero effect on anyone who can afford to shop half way up the shelves.

If the goal is to extract money from drinkers, specifically poor drinkers, then it is just fine. The reason why I focus on those dependant on alcohol is that those are the people underpinning the whole industry, and are the ones that end up paying the bulk of the tax, because they don’t have a choice in the matter.

Only allowing the luxury of alcohol induced recklessness to the rich does not seem like a good idea. Further, if we are talking about benefit to society, that it doesn’t work on the most corrosive type of damage suggests it is much more about the extraction of money than it is about trying to achieve a net good.

Sales tax is different from customs or exise paid on specific items (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) sales is generally levied on the seller, customs and exsises by the importer or manufacturer, and that is generally where the sin tax goes in and allows the state to influence the market by making supply more risky rather than attempting to simply price people out of demand.

Of course the question is do sin taxes work as a way of influencing behaviour, my gut tells me know, because affordability isn’t something on an addict’s checklist, but I don’t care to do a lit review so don’t cite me. What they are good at though is giving the government its share of the whale-meat.

How does this differ from an alarm clock app with (say) a 5 min snooze, or do you want something less intrusive than a loud alarm clock?

Florida crystals sounds like something else.

A lot of their trouble is that they see the art as being the thing that the artist makes, the product, and believe that it is something an artist jealously hoards unless paid sufficiently to part with some of it. Capitalist brain rot basically, but most of these folk are so deeply immersed in capitalism they can only think in those terms.

Likewise artists who have grown used to being paid for their art see their livelihoods threatened, not because thier ability to make art is being taken, but because they can no longer control access to the product of art. Those who appreciate the process will still try to buy their work, but that is a much smaller market and it’s only going to shrink as artists need to push up the per piece price because they can’t sell in bulk to corps.

Of course I think we can keep furry smut in business. Even if we don’t buy often there are a lot of us, and I think we can maintain a culture of favouring human process.

How you run possession (or any forced action really, madness, mind control, etc) is heavily dependant on both the skill of your players (as roleplayers) and what they are comfortable with. For most groups I have played with, I will generally privately communicate with the player, and let them know the personality, goals, capabilities of the possessing entity and trust them to roleplay it. I also trust the other players to notice something is wrong with their friend and take steps a bit more elegant than killing the host.

In cases of non-total control, I prefer to incentivise going a long with what the entity wants with xp (either bonus awards or an xp freeze) or possibly special powers. Especially with demons I like to offer deals. One of the best patterns here is big, brief effects for small, permanent costs. Maybe you can buy a critical hit for a hit point. If they like that the cost might go up. Turning that 1 into a 20 against the boss might sound good, by the way that one cost you 5. What would you pay for one more spell slot, what about a wish? Maybe 30 minutes of your time? The goal is to give the character reason to keep the demon around. Ideally think things are under control.

The most advanced form is much like what is used in Wraith: the Oblivion, you assign the demon to another player, give them some rules about what they can offer and cost, and leave it to them to meddle. Wraith is a game all about sharing your reality with the darkest of urges. If you are really interested in diving deep into these kinds of concepts it is well worth a read, even if you never find a group to play it. Though I do warn you, even if you don’t regularly use safety tools, Wraith is about abusive psychological manipulation and the death-drive. It’s not in itself toxic, but should be handled with care.

I severely hope that people aren’t using LLM-AI to do reasoning tasks. I appreciate that I am likely wrong, but LLMs are neither the totality or the pinnacle of AI tech. I don’t think we are meaningfully closer to AGI than we were before LLMs blew up.