Welcome back; you’re always a welcome sight. And know that we’re 100% behind you whenever you need a break. Looking after yourself is important.

LLMs use even more resources to be even more wrong even faster. That’s the difference.

Some basic discussion of what the adventure or campaign is going to be about is of course necessary. A full-social adventure with a party of dedicated murder hobos won’t work. But if the characters fit mostly within the requirements of the adventure then everything else can be adjusted.

Let’s say the GM wants to do an adventure where the characters will investigate a murder of a member of the city council, which will lead into uncovering and fighting a cult that is infiltrating the city’s upper echelons. The players are only told that the adventure will involve investigation, combat, and high society interaction.

The players come up with a detective, a brawny priest, and a politician who likes dueling. So they’ve got the investigative and social skills, the priest and politician do reasonably well in combat, the priest can even provide some healing, but there’s no ranged firepower and nobody can break into anything. The GM can tailor the adventure to match that; there’s no need for anyone to redesign their character so that the party can engage flying enemies or obtain evidence from a locked room.

Likewise, if the party were to consist of three wizards from the local college, the adventure could still work. One of the players is suggested to hold a teaching position at the college to provide social clout, one should ideally have some experience with investigation or political scheming, everyone is recommended to keep Mage Armor prepared, and the cult now favors ranged combat. The plot might move a bit slower because of less plentiful healing opportunities and frequent rests.

All of this assumes a GM who primarily wants to work with the players to tell a story. If the GM wants to do an unforgiving grind where the players will need to use every advantage (in and out of game) to survive, this won’t fly. Bring an optimized roster or perish. (Of course, most unforgiving GMs I know won’t allow magical healing so that character injuries actually mean something.) I probably wouldn’t join that game but some people roll like that.

On the whole, I don’t find it that goofy when characters die in combat. At least not goofier than when parties always just happen to consist of people whose skills perfectly complement each other, especially ones that form by happenstance.

I find that a lot of D&D players seem to have a fairly mechanistic view of the game, more so than with other games. This is probably a result of D&D, as an offshoot of a tabletop strategy game, being designed in such a manner. Now, your approach is already a lot softer (and I agree that some preplanning is recommended) but the “every party needs a tank, a caster, a healer, a skill monkey, and one of the needs to be the face” I responded to is fairly common in the D&D world.

I don’t agree with that level of party planning. I find it awfully reductionist and belying a mechanistic view on how the game works. I also never found it necessary. Every single element in that list is optional if the players and GM can deal with it. Heck, I’ve never even been in a game with a semi-dedicated healer. For something with clear, limited in-world roles (like your starship example), you do need to allocate them but games like that are rare.

Of course, like I mentioned that D&D’s design informs the way it’s talked about, my experiences are colored by the systems I’ve played, particularly The Dark Eye. TDE affords players much less power than D&D. Spellcasters are much weaker due to slow resource regeneration – they use a mana point system and a high-powered spell will take multiple long rests to recover from. Sure, you can combat heal or throw a fireball but only when necessary. Also, there are way more skills so even with all party members pitching in you won’t have expertise or even competency in everything.

As a result, the idea of having a party that can take on any challenge (and/or deal with several high-stakes battles in a short time frame) is unrealistic. This actually frees up a lot of conceptual space since there’s no one party that can do every kind of adventure. So with some coordination you can make anything work, even a party with no combat or magical skills who Shawn Spencer their way through quests.

What absolutely needs to be worked out are things that could set the party against itself or keep a player from interacting with the others. But that’s more of a player behavior thing; e.g. you can play a perfectly selfish, evil character who still puts the party’s interests ahead of their own – if they’re played to consider having reliable friends worth more than short term gain. So yeah, I also expect a certain amount of character tailoring, just on the roleplay level rather than mechanically.

That is a lot more optimization than I’m used to. In my group people just come up with characters they want to play and the GM works with that.

Mind you, we do discuss what kind of game we’re playing so we don’t end up with four pure noncombatants doing a dungeon crawl. But ending up with four wizards? Yeah, that might happen or even be encouraged.

I really don’t wanna have to discuss who has to change their character concept because we need a healer or our party composition won’t be optimal.

Oh, please don’t take that remark as an excuse or endorsement. The intended tone is one of resignation – pseudonymity reduces the social cost of bad manners to near zero and there’s not much we can do about it.

I will forgive people for being blunt in their criticism, however. High-ranking politicians are exactly the people who have to be able to take a certain level of verbal abuse since their decisions can change other people’s lives in directions that justify the liberal use of expletives.

Which plays back into my perception that Fetterman is currently not suited to his role.

I can understand both sides here.

On the one hand I have empathy with him like with any victim of such a life-altering injury and wish him a swift and full recovery. I don’t want people to suffer and, quite frankly, “the brain doesn’t work right anymore” is one of my personal horror scenarios.

On the other hand this kind of behavior is a huge problem in someone capable of making decisions that can alter the lives of other people – millions of them, in this case. He has enough power to ruin a lot of people’s lives, intentionally or not.

Even as someone who isn’t impacted by his mental fitness in any way, I’d agree that removing him from office seems like a good move. That man needs rest, not the stress of a high-profile political office during interesting times. And his state needs someone with a level head, which doesn’t mesh well with a semi-recent traumatic brain injury.

And, well, this is a politics community so guess which part the discussion will focus on. (Also, this is online so people are inclined to be assholes.)

“Fiber” as a dietary term refers to plant material that humans can’t digest. Some (edible parts of) plants have more of it than others; for instance, lentils contain about eight times as much fiber per unit of weight as potatoes do. “Plants contain fiber” is about as accurate a statement as “plants contain vitamins”; not all of them contain it in equal measure.

It’s not that hard to construct a diet that is rich in plants but low in fiber, especially if you include plant-based foods like tofu, which can contain even less of it.

That’s not quite how AC outlets work. Line and neutral can intentionally have different potentials relative to ground depending on how the house’s electrical system is designed. This can become relevant in certain situations like very simple devices (think “lamp socket with a power plug”).

A plug that can’t be inverted makes this a non-issue.

(Edit: Added missing “not”.)

While that would be entertaining, remember that Vance seems to destroy everything he’s associated with. If we keep him around we can reuse him. Lunch with Putin → Ukraine war is over. He joins the board of a for-profit prison company → the USA outlaws slavery. He does a photo op in a coal plant → the USA go 100% renewable. All plausible outcomes.

This thanatotic Midas touch of his has great potential if used wisely.

If we can control it, that is. His mere presence might cause the United States to descend into a degree of senseless bloodshed that Games Workshop would call over the top so perhaps safe disposal might be in the best interest of humanity…

He should go on vacation with the CEO of Nestlé and publicly endorse single-use plastics.

I think the Swiss have the best Europlug-based system. Their three-conductor plugs have the same footprint as basic Europlugs, which makes for very dense plug arrangements. Unlike e.g. the German Schuko plug they only fit in one orientation so you get no polarity issues.

It’s pretty neat.

Conception begins at meiosis. If you don’t want to procreate, don’t produce ova/sperm. Produce a million sperm cells and only make one child? Off to death row with you, mass murderer!

Stop signs are octagonal.

They’ll investigate the Israeli government for several years and then conclude they can’t pass judgement because they accidentally replaced 2/3rds of the government with their own moles and can’t prove that the atrocities weren’t done by the moles.

(Explanation for those unfamiliar with German politics: That’s precisely what happened with an earlier extreme-right party.)

Well, the camera needs to talk to your onsite storage in order to store video. A simple consumer device like a Ring isn’t going to be hardwired; it just uses Wi-Fi (which every household can be assumed to have) to connect to your LAN and talk to the storage device.

The question is why the Wi-Fi could be turned off on the first place. Probably an ISP-managed router; I doubt they’d go and jam the entire spectrum between 2.4 and 7 GHz.

That’s one reason why people should use their own router and/or access point whenever possible.

Looks like Yotsuba with a skull for a head. Perhaps some 4chan thing?

On this blessed day we are all a girl.

And Paul Fisher really just wanted to make a cool pen that can reliably write upside down. Congress and The Party agreed that the pen was cool and bought a couple hundred each.

Of course you wouldn’t use an existing database engine as the foundation of a new database engine. But you would use an existing database engine as the foundation of an ERP software, which is a vastly different use case even if the software does spend a lot of time dealing with data.

If I want to build an application I don’t want to reimplement everything. That’s what middleware is for. The use case of my application is most likely not to speak a certain protocol; the protocol is just the means to what I actually want to do. There’s no reason for me to roll my own implementation from scratch and keep up with current developments except if I’m unhappy with all current implementations of that protocol.

Of course one can overdo it with middleware (the JS world is rife with this) but implementing a communication protocol is one of the classic cases where it makes sense.