This misconception is widespread enough that I can only think that it is deliberately perpetuated by the ruling class to save them money. The number of people who are convinced that going up a tax bracket could mean you make less total money is astounding, and many of them are like your uncle— utterly convinced to the point that being informed correctly sounds like naivety to them.
As a DM, I’m not asking you to act, I’m not asking you to engage in improvisational theater, I’m asking your approach. I mean, I’m a “fade to black” DM when it comes to spicy roleplay, so I probably wouldn’t for the named situation in this meme, but let’s say it’s somehow relevant beyond the laughs of “horny bard”. Are you being cheesy and trying to get the bartender to laugh? Are you trying to be suave? Are you just socially indicating interest and letting the bartender decide what they think of that? These matter for what kind of reaction will come about from either a success or a failure on the roll, and it’s not my job as a DM to decide for you what approach is best for the situation… determining the approahh ch is the game. You can tell me your approach via ACTING! or just by describing it, but I really need to know what your character is doing.
But really, don’t worry about your own charisma. You don’t need to be suave or charming if your character is. I just need to know what they’re trying to do, not see you do it.
Soap is extremely moldable and formable, which makes it reformable too. All the scraps can EASILY be reused without loss of quality. You can do the same at home— shred the soap ob a cheese grater or food processor, melt it in a cooking pot on the stove, pour it into the mold of your choice, pull it out and you have soap of the same quality as before in a new shape.
After research, I’ve found that same information. What I haven’t figured out is what kids mean when they say it. Like, I get yeet. I know it came from a video, but when spoken it has an actual meaning, basically “I have great enthusiasm but lack finesse”, most useful when hurling things. But skibidi doesn’t seem to have a meaning? It comes from the video, but as a word it’s meaningless? So… why say it if it doesn’t convey meaning?
I’ve sung “Sweet Child o’ Mine” to my son (with minor lyric changes, she->you for instance) in a soft voice almost every night since he was born… three and a half years now.
Possible, but super tricky. Good luck trying to sell a producer on minimizing dialog!
I’ve had a concept I’ve wanted to try for a little while for a special type of wild mage, but I’m not 100% sure how to implement it. Instead of wild magic just being a completely random chart of spell effects with no control over what you get, the spell caster would declare what he wants to end result to be… and the DM, or some more limited random mechanism, would choose what spell (of the appropriate spell slot level) might get them closer to that result. If they want to get past an ogre guarding a treasure, they might cast a fireball, or maybe invisibility, or maybe some sort of teleport effect… they all advance towards the stated goal, but without the caster’s control of how, leading to the wild magic feel without the insanity and campaign crushing randomness other wild magic can bring. And there’s still room for some silly danger, as maybe the fighter is next to the ogre when the wild magic chooses fireball.
I don’t think your premise is correct. From memory, and scanning a couple episodes illegally uploaded to YouTube, it doesn’t look like Captain Planet flies away at the end. Usually, the scene just transitions to later after he’s gone, but the few times we see it, he dissolves into light, presumably returning the rings powers to the planeteers and disincorporating. He doesn’t go anywhere, he bodily ceases to be.
Where does his mind go? I think he’s a spirit. Where does team spirit go after the football game is over and everyone goes to bed? It still exists, but it’s not… here. It has to be activated to be tangible.
Chesterton’s fence applies here.
You ever have an image of something like fire or mist or galaxies and stars or whatever taken with a black or white background, and you want to make it a transparent background instead? Color to alpha keeps the translucent elements intact at the appropriate translucency while removing the background color. Super useful for compositing images together.
Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.
And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.
Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.
GIMP isn’t quite as feature rich and useful as photoshop… except GIMP has the “Color to Alpha” function which I’ve still yet to learn how to imitate in photoshop, and I’m not sure it even can. And I use that function all the freaking time.
I do teach English as a Foreign language, I used to teach computer programming (at a beginner level), and sometimes I daydream about teaching math according to principles from the essay A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, but I am unlikely to be given the leeway to try.
I feel like “passing it through a statistical model”, while absolutely true on a technical implementation level, doesn’t get to the heart of what it is doing so that people understand. It’s using the math terms, potentially deliberately to obfuscate and make it seem either simpler than it is. It’s like reducing it to “it just predicts the next word”. Technically true, but I could implement a black box next word predictor by sticking a real person in the black box and ask them to predict the next word, and it’d still meet that description.
The statistical model seems to be building some sort of conceptual grid of word relationships that approximates something very much like actually understanding what the words mean, and how the words are used semantically, with some random noise thrown into the mix at just the right amounts to generate some surprises that look very much like creativity.
Decades before LLMs were a thing, the Zompist wrote a nice essay on the Chinese room thought experiment that I think provides some useful conceptual models: http://zompist.com/searle.html
Searle’s own proposed rule (“Take a squiggle-squiggle sign from basket number one…”) depends for its effectiveness on xenophobia. Apparently computers are as baffled at Chinese characters as most Westerners are; the implication is that all they can do is shuffle them around as wholes, or put them in boxes, or replace one with another, or at best chop them up into smaller squiggles. But pointers change everything. Shouldn’t Searle’s confidence be shaken if he encountered this rule?
If you see 马, write down horse.
If the man in the CR encountered enough such rules, could it really be maintained that he didn’t understand any Chinese?
Now, this particular rule still is, in a sense, “symbol manipulation”; it’s exchanging a Chinese symbol for an English one. But it suggests the power of pointers, which allow the computer to switch levels. It can move from analyzing Chinese brushstrokes to analyzing English words… or to anything else the programmer specifies: a manual on horse training, perhaps.
Searle is arguing from a false picture of what computers do. Computers aren’t restricted to turning 马 into “horse”; they can also relate “horse” to pictures of horses, or a database of facts about horses, or code to allow a robot to ride a horse. We may or may not be willing to describe this as semantics, but it sure as hell isn’t “syntax”.
Remember when windows said 10 would be the last version of windows, and they’d just keep sending updates from then on? That lie didn’t last long…
And they’re EoLing it this coming October! Can’t they wait until 12 at least to do that? I can’t remember the last time the end of life came before two versions had gone by. Wtf!
Mine was just all repeated digits of whatever hour. 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11 all “counted” in my mind when I was entering university, and it happened so freaking often it was really weirding me out. It seemed like anytime I glanced at a clock without other intention, it would be one of those times. There were probably times I looked at a clock normally, but of course confirmation bias reinforces things. But it really did seem far more often than you’d expect. My bet is that my inner clock was prompting me to look at those times because I got an adreneline or dopamine or something spike, so my subconscious got trained into finding it.
Live service means the content comes from the company’s servers, and likely changes rapidly. The quintessential example is Fortnite. Updates are expected, not merely necessary fixes. Duke Nukem 3D had all the content installed on your computer from day one, without expectation that it would change (unless you made your own maps, or downloaded maps other USERS made).
Yes and yes. I followed the rules as a kid. I played the games with the full rules multiple times even, in defiance of everyone saying that everyone only does so once.
Looking at YouTube playthroughs for nostalgia, it looks like the game rules today have the trap set up to start? When I played, the rules were that you had to build it up slowly over the course of the game, one piece at a time, and only once it was built could it be activated. Yes, I played that way.
The Ixians and Tliaxu expansion is pretty good, and even if you don’t play with the new factions at all the technology mechanic helps a lot, particularly for the fremen, who I always found need all the help they can get. YMMV of course, but my table loved it. The Ixians really change up the game too with their mobile fortress that counts as a victory point. And having the Tliaxu in a game means that you can barter for the resurrection of leaders early, which is another potential game changer. Pretty neat gameplay interactions.
I technically have the CHOAM/Richese expansion too, but haven’t actually had a chance to play with it yet. The game takes some real time investment to actually play…
Agreed. The “it’s not really food” idea came from labeling requirements that to be labeled cheese, it needs a certain percentage of its ingredients to be cheese. Once upon a time, American cheese slices were made from the offcuts of cheddar, but the popularity of American cheese means that there literally aren’t enough offcuts to be economical… you’d have to make cheddar just to turn it into American cheese.
But guess what cheddar is made from? Milk. Turns out, when making American cheese, it’s possible to skip the aging and culturing process and simply go straight from milk into the cheese slice we know, with less than the mandated amount of aged cheddar added. That means they had to write something like cheese product instead of calling it cheese directly.
But it is still food! In fact, it’s still American cheese… skipping a step in the recipe to get a very similar if not identical result doesn’t change what it is! It uses the same raw ingredients, for crying out loud! It’s still the same stuff!