they're selling anti-ai slogans on sweatshop-produced t-shirts. i don't need to write the poem for you to get it do i
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@jaffacake6
they're selling anti-ai slogans on sweatshop-produced t-shirts. i don't need to write the poem for you to get it do i
i gotta be real with you guys im just sort of stunned tumblr has been running an open-front ZenDesk form for tumblr TOS reporting this whole time that doesnt require any kind of validation except a fucking email address. this one fact alone explains every single "why did so and so get banned for no reason" event of the past X years. however it is equally baffling that i didnt notice it before now. i would say it is baffling they implemented it in the first place but like i said, the management of their website is verifiably not well
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
“Big Pharma” okay are we talking about how privatization and monetization has deeply corrupted the field of medicine or are you talking about how you think chemicals in the water are making the frogs gay
“GMOs”? Are we talking seeds that grow sterile plants and patenting genetic modifications then destroying any competition no matter how small they are? Or are we talking life saving rice with vitamin a to make sure kids don’t go blind in regions not suited for other high vit a veg? … or are we talking about your chidoodle?
So with voting do you cum when a person get bitten into or when a person is swallowed or does it depend on the moment
usually you just mark a ballot with a pen or you select the candidate you want on a screen. sometimes you hole punch the ballot though
whenever i accidentally like a comment/reply on a post so i unlike it bc i think it makes me look nosy but then im like well shoot it's gonna show up in their notifications and i dont want it to look like i DISLIKED their comment so let me put my like back. that's when i know i need to log off for a day bc why am i thinking that hard about it.
my best friend linen my brother in arms cotton my partner wool my beautiful sister silk
our sick deranged enemy polyester....
the demon lord, prince of lies, "Vegan Leather"...
unauthorized fucking Noise in my house so i might be in agonizing pain for either the next 24 hours or the rest of my life
whichever gamefreak employee invented perish song circa 1999 was right, there is a noise that will cause me to faint in three turns if i do not immediately remove myself from the situation
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m beginning to understand what certain Welsh words mean but I haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce them without sounding like a fool, which is how I feel about many words in my native language of English because I’m from the American south.
It’s also quite difficult to do the whole ‘watch a show with subtitles to understand the cadence of the language’ thing that you could do with Spanish or French. Yet another reason we need a show about King Arthur entirely in Welsh. Until then, do any of you have any recommendations for Welsh language media or media where characters speak Welsh?
@becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
Clic is S4C's equivalent of BBC iPlayer, so if you can get that to work where you are (might need a VPN), take a look at children's/learner programming. That's usually good because people will speak slower and use simpler language
Or, maybe try Hansh? A lot more Wenglish, but a super fun company that produces web content for young people; sometimes skits, sometimes mini documentaries, sometimes a round up of the Welsh language gigs across the country that week. They're on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc
Pob lwc!
"she holds the record for the most days spent in space by a woman!" this "she was part of the only all female space walk!" that, she's on the list of people who have spent the most time in space, period. she's spent more time in space than any of her crewmates - one of whom hasn't been into space at all. her time in space is only three days less than what all of her crewmates have combined. she has had as many spacewalks as all of her crewmates combined. she's not there because she's the best female nasa astronaut they could find and they wanted the diversity quota or whatever, she's there because she's part of the most qualified and experienced nasa personnel they could send up there
Is there Anything Better in cat wrangling than meeting The Cat Who Will Not Be Pet, putting in copious work for several hours to Achieve Pets, meeting the cat again several MONTHS later for only the second time, and immediately being allowed to pet again?
No.
No, there is not.
happy pride month for it/its users, polyamorous people, xenogenders, non-transitioning trans people, and other "weird" identities. btw
As Aromantic Visibility Day (June 5th) approaches this year, friendly reminder from an aroace: it's Aromantic Visibility Day, not "Aroace" Visibility Day! Not all aromantics are also asexual — there are aromantics who are allosexual (aroallos for short), aromantics who don't separately label their sexual orientation at all, and aromantics whose sexual orientation doesn't fit into an ace/allo binary, as well as likely even more aros who don't fit into "aroace" for even more reasons — and all of them are equally included in Aromantic Visibility Day, because they are equally aromantic! In fact, those aros who aren't ace are disproportionately erased and in need of visibility, even more than aroaces are (which is really saying something, because aroace visibility itself is already terrible), so including them in Aromantic Visibility Day is vital, and using the correct name for the occasion instead of calling it an "aroace day" is a start.
Overall: again, speaking as an aroace myself, we aroaces will not be offended if you just call Aromantic Visibility Day the thing it is actually called! I care about sharing this upcoming day with my fellow aros, so stop excluding them, even accidentally! We aroaces celebrate this day but it is not for us exclusively!
Today, some of the Grade 6s asked if they could hang out in the library instead of going out to recess (fair enough; it's soggy and miserable out there today).
One of them sat in a corner and did some coding on his laptop, while another decided she was gonna help me organize one of the drawers in my desk. Another two helped to put up some posters that had fallen down.
I spend so much time with people I know and love that I forget I'm actually a shy introvert so when I make an effort to meet up with a new person it's like being slowly roasted over friendly coals (meeting up with an old coworker for happy hour)
I don't want to be overly dramatic and overly negative about the AI translations I've been working with. They are bad, yes, but I don't want to overstate their badness because that would obscure the specific points I'm making. Some AI translations, the best AI translations, are not that bad. Some of them are still bad to the point of being unusable, but others are better. They're not good, but they're mostly serviceable, and it's extremely impressive that a machine can come up with something serviceable, something comparable to the work of a very mediocre human translator.
A client who hires a subpar translator who accepts being underpaid, in order to avoid paying professional rates for a professional, is getting subpar work. A client who uses AI to get work cheap and fast is getting worse than subpar work. But AI is getting better, it might soon be at the point where laymen can't tell the difference, and then, using AI instead of paying a human will mostly be a labour rights issue, and that's a far thornier question. (Note that I'm not talking about using AI translators to read something for yourself, or to communicate in your daily life: I'm talking about AI translation for publication, using AI for something you expect other people to pay money for.)
My actual point about AI translation is that even when it's fairly good, when it makes few errors and conveys the message intelligibly, it lacks something. I'm not talking about heart and soul here, nothing to do with some intangible human quality: I'm talking about specificity. AI works with great averages, and so it automatically irons out nuance. If you write something unusual, AI will assume it's an error, instead of an intentionally unusual statement. This is regression to the mean, and based on the texts I'm working with, it's an Anglophone, American mean. If you say something that's true of 1980s Hungary, it might slightly alter the sentence to "make sense" for 1980s US. Some alterations are factual, these are more serious errors but also easier to edit out. But other things are harder to catch, slight shifts in tone and valence, an erasure of the original, specific, non-American perspective, and the end result is a text that doesn't have anything wrong with it, but is markedly simpler and dumber than it should be. And flattening complex, knotty, peripheral perspectives into something closer to a monoculture is, in the long term, intellectually devastating.
A while ago, I was proofreading AI translations of subtitles. The video was an interview with a couple of game devs talking about their game. “The game” was frequently mentioned. And then, all of a sudden, the translation talked about football. I did a double take. Where had that come from?
The original sentence went somewhere along the lines of “from the veterans who have been with us for a long time to young people only just getting into the game” and the AI translation assumed that there was only one game young people could be getting into. It had to be football. So that’s what it put in.
That moment really clarified for me this regression to a cultural mean described above. Only one thing made cultural sense, right? Too bad the actual video was about something entirely different.
Yes that's such a great example of what I was talking about! And this one is obvious enough and weird enough that you could catch it in proofreading, but if the mistake is subtler (or if there's no proofreading, and let's face it there usually isn't), someday soon we'll end up in a world where everyone likes football and drinks beer and does, says, thinks, believes only the most statistically average things to do, say, think and believe.
also sexy ronald reagan will be at dashcon this year if that appeals to you
i don't know. i'm scared.