I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

Oh that’s very interesting. The script was actually written for it to be Kirk/Spock/McCoy rather than Kirk/Scotty/Chekov, but Nimoy and Kelley both said no because they were happy with where TUC left things for the TOS crew - which is why (for example) Chekov ends up running sickbay despite no evidence before of him having any medical training.

I’d never heard they had a version claiming Uhura would be there too.

My recollection from interviews is that Dan Harmon and the cast found Chevy just didn’t get the show at all when they were making it. A huge amount of Community’s humour is a mix of meta humour and pop culture references. In the same way that Pierce claimed to never understand what Abed was talking about, Chevy didn’t understand most of what Community was on about - his frame of reference for what is funny hadn’t moved on in decades.

Even though he’s famously a dick, when he says he didn’t think Community was funny, he might actually be telling the truth - not just being petty.

Well done to Apple for telling their customers they won’t get viruses…

Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.

Apple: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/apple-threatens-to-pull-imessage-from-uk-iphones-rather-than-weaken-its-security/ar-AA1e8kgo

WhatsApp: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/08/whatsapp-could-disappear-uk-over-privacy-concerns-ministers-told

I’m looking forward to a proper app with more functionality, but for now the progressive web app does work fine and I have it on my home screen on my phone in the place where Baconreader used to sit (and open it multiple times each day).

Why do worthless internet points need to be made more secure anyway?

I’ve had Fitbits for years but I’m probably never buying another one.

The main thing keeping me locked into the Fitbit ecosystem was the social features - my family are dispersed around the country and all have Fitbits, so for years we did the weekly step challenges as a bit of friendly competition and a vehicle for staying in good contact. The competition made a genuine difference to our behaviour - especially for encouraging my parents to stay active in retirement.

Then after the Google acquisition they killed off the challenges on spurious grounds. It’s generally suspected this is part of a drive to gradually kill off the Fitbit brand and drive people onto Google’s own Pixel watches. Now Fitbit’s USP is gone and so I’ll probably just get a Garmin next time as people generally think that’s a better product.

I’m one of them! I didn’t even know about r/selfhosted when I was on Reddit but I found this place when I joined kbin. I’ve been thinking on-and-off over the last year about self hosting so subscribed. I still occasionally look at Reddit in view-only mode though (largely for legacy content) so I also subscribed to r/selfhosted over there too last time I checked it.

It’s not subscriber numbers that matter though, it’s active users and quality new posts - people who go to the sub regularly, upvote, comment, and create content that causes other people in turn to look at the sub. I’m still a subscriber to a tonne of Reddit subs that I used to post and comment regularly on, and now don’t. If every active Reddit user became a passive user then Reddit would grind to a halt overnight, regardless of how many users they notionally have.

The tragedy of the commons is an economic and ecological concept concerning situations where private parties will overuse a common resource because private incentives and public interests aren’t aligned. For example, overfishing or carbon emissions.

In this case, the problem as articulated in this article is that each party in the AI gold rush - Google, OpenAI, Baidu, etc - has an incentive to rush their AI development without adequate controls so they can get ahead of their competitors, potentially taking us into dangerous outcomes in which one of them produces AI that has far-reaching harmful consequences for humanity. I guess the ‘commons’ here is the future of human society, which AI developers have private incentives to take for granted.

The solution proposed is to adopt many of the classic solutions economists have devised for tragedies of the commons - points 1-8 in the article - and apply them to AI development in the ways set out in the article.

I think Lemmy.world is the new meta right now.

If I’m reading this right, kbin.social has 157k users as of today, and fedia.io has 39k. Does that not suggest the kbin instances are the new meta?