Kichae

Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR)

And combat encounter building is a core pillar of the game. It should not be a loosey goosey "rule of thumb". If anything, it should be the most reliable set of instructions in the book.

There is leaving space for the DM to inject some creativity, and then there's deciding that you don't need to actually produce a complete product because you know your customers will do it for you anyway.

I mean, it's not like any of the published rules are mandatory. Just because they're in a book doesn't mean you need to use them. But them being in the book means you don't need to come up with your own half-baked, undocumented, and inconsistent "rulings" if you don't want to.

And, frankly, it's not a symmetric situation. Published materials are suggestions that, ideally, are crafted by experts and well play-tested that may be ignored if chosen. Unpublished materials cannot be opted into.

"Ah, so you've invited me to cuck the shit out of your character. Got it."

Aye. I think part of the confusion is that... Who has a cake without having the intention of eating it? Another is that we tend to think of cakes as large objects that produce leftovers.

I would say to think about it as "to have your car, and to sell it, too," but we've reached an age of such rent seeking that people -- mostly car dealerships -- have been doing this for years.

My experience is that, in practice, players actually like secret checks more often than they don't. The feel-bad of "player agency" loss (what agency is there in rolling a die? It's literally an agency destroying mechanic) occurs at the conceptual level, long before ever experiencing it at the table. Telling a player that just hid that they don't think the guards can see them really heightens the immersion, and players tend (most of them, most of the time, on average) to get into that.

You can't have tension when the player knows they rolled a 19 on the die.

Everything is presented with an agenda, though. That's literally the job of the editorial board: to make sure what they're publishing is within the agenda of the publication and the publisher.

News outlets have used jargon and targeted exclusion of facts in order to present a certain take on a story without highlighting that they're editorializing for as long as there have been news outlets.

It's totally fair, and healthy even, to question the motivations behind the choices made in writing or presenting the news. Just deciding that some writers or publishers are impartial while refusing to examine how they actually present stories is just picking a team and going to bed.

Sometimes the agenda at play is valuable and pro-social. That doesn't make it not an agenda.

Searching

Literally the worst possible usage. They're syntax generators, not search engines, and not knowledge fonts.

And they should no more replace doctors in the future than x-ray machines did in the past. We should never want them to.

It wasn't a role change, just a salary rung. I went from information-worker 2 to information-worker II. My day to day responsibilities didn't change.

It's almost like he begrudgingly admitted my skills advanced to the point where the company had to give me the promotion.

When I was told I was getting a promotion at the end of last year, my manager said it in such a way that he seemed surprised, even as the one giving it to me.

"We're changing your title to . I guess that's, technically, a promotion. Your salary will now be $. Congratulations."

It definitely didn't leave me with the feeling that my manager was happy with me or my work.

Eh. Depends on which tech is being used and how. For a lot of things, relatively basic ML models purposefully trained do a pretty good job, and are, in fact, limited by the diagnoses in the training data. But more generalized "AI" tools seem rather... questionable.

Like, you can train a SVM on fMRIs to compare structures in the brain between patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder and those that are not diagnosed with it, and it will have an accuracy rate on new patients basically equal to the accuracy rate of the doctors who did the diagnosing in the training set. But you'll have a much harder time creating a model that takes in fMRIs and reports back answers to the question of "which brain disease or abnormality do I have?"

This stuff works much closer to advertised when it's narrowly defined and purpose built, but the people making and funding this work want catch-all doctor replacements, because of course they do, because there's way more money in charging hospitals and patience 10% less than a doctor's salary than there is in providing tools that make doctors' efforts in diagnosing specific illnesses easier.

Or, at least there is if you can pull it off.

The 15 year olds of the world often see the hypocrisy of people and society more clearly than those who are financially or socially motivated to ignore them. Their observations are not invalidated by their age.

If someone's job is to be an abusive authoritarian hypocrite, then they choose abusive power and financial gain over humanity. The Nuremberg defense is not valid moral shield.

This quote is almost a decade old now, and has gained recognition for its general insight countless times over. Why the naked, ageist contempt?