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    Spoilers SW: Skeleton crew discussion thread

    Mildly entertaining, but the one that pushes buttons really annoys me. I can see the others locking him in the brig until he learns to behave. TomB
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    AD&D 1E Old Timers: Remember G1-2-3, D1-D2, D3, and Q1?

    How about a view of the steading from one of Lloth’s planar mirrors. (Were they mirrors?) That encapsulates the campaign from top to bottom, and could be done in a way obscures the viewer. A shadow on a brocaid curtain next to an ornate frame, through which is visible, at a distance, the...
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    D&D General Why Were the Dragon and Dungeon Magazines Discontinued?

    Umm, the history is that the license was pulled from Paizo, then the format was changed to all digital, then content trailed off. The line seems to have died from neglect. That 4e did not succeed as a full digital platform didn’t help. I rather enjoyed a monthly fix of reading new adventures...
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    D&D 5E (2014) 11th Lvl Wizard and Cleric OK to Take On Two Banshees?

    Adding the second banshee considerably worsens the players chances. If saves are 10% likely to be successful, the chances of two failures go from 1% to 3.6% if the number of banshees is increased from one to two. This issue of stacking saves is a problem of encounter design: There are big...
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    Electric Car Ownership - Any Experiences?

    Wow! My charging unit was originally mounted outside .. and unsecured. I never considered that someone might park in my driveway and steal charge. I moved to a new house and now have the unit inside my garage. Actually, with a minimum of tools, I’m thinking the whole unit could have been...
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    Electric Car Ownership - Any Experiences?

    US Tesla owner. Having a charging station outlet is almost a requirement. Here, that is either a 240v outlet, or a 240v outlet plus charging unit. You will also need to have an electrician calculate the total load — you may need an upgrade of the feed to your dwelling. Here that would be...
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    Does Everyone See the Same Similar Threads? Do you use it?

    Huh, how about that. I never scroll past the reply box so I never see them. Having the new banner ads appear at the bottom has added a level of aversion to glancing at the bottom of the screen, so there's that, too. (Grumble, grumble, banner adds, grumble grumble.) TomB
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    Bombarded with spam threads?

    Would it help to have an option that prevented notifications for new accounts for a predetermined probationary window? "Don't notify of new threads created for one week." TomB
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    D&D 5E (2014) Is trafficking in soul coins ostensibly evil?

    I suspect folks are having different meanings of slavery. In the us, children of slaves were slaves, and slaves could be separated from their families. I doubt that would be allowed in a LG society. TomB
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    D&D 5E (2014) Is trafficking in soul coins ostensibly evil?

    I was commenting on rules that you quoted. (IMHO), those rules don’t fit with some notions of the outer planes and of the nature of souls. Souls become too easy to destroy, and too easy to send to a plane other than where they are judged to go. Again, in my opinion, souls should be nearly...
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    D&D 5E (2014) Is trafficking in soul coins ostensibly evil?

    Ugh, just no. I don’t know that I would ever use this in my games. Souls judged to go to a particular afterlife should, absent exceptional circumstances*, immediately ascend or descend to their designated plane. They might resist this, perhaps, but would ever feel a pull. * I can see means...
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    What if you drained the oceans?

    Ah, then the answer is incomplete! What happens on Mars with all of that water? Does it freeze solid in an immense incrementally collapsing mountain of ice? Does it heat the surface sufficiently to remain liquid, eventually covering the entire surface — except, perhaps, one very tall extinct...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    I’ve heard mostly of cases of professionals misusing AI, where the professional was due chastisement for their clumsy use of it along with creating sub-par output. The most prominent that I’ve read about have been lawyers using generative AI and submitting un-validated information. The other...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    While there have been dramatic improvements in the energy cost of cryptocurrency related computation, I’m not sure crypto is a good direction to go: An answer provided by google: TomB
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    Hmm, I was under the impression that the underlying software was open. Or at least widely known. The current major cost is in training the models, which has become horribly expensive computationally, which translates directly into an energy cost. “Sam Altman stated that the cost of training...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    Eh, can you support this? (“I did not hear artists speaking up from them”, which I presume you mean “Artists did not speak up for them.”). My presumption is mostly the opposite. I wonder how many Appalachian folk songs are about mining life. Also, there are many categories of work which has...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    To be clear — arguing that people and computers “think” differently is not the same as arguing that computers can or cannot achieve consciousness, either in practice or in principle. I believe the first (computers think differently) but not the second (I believe that computers can achieve...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    Looking further, I’m finding evidence for contrary legal opinions on whether data mining is fair use. My conclusion is that “data mining is fair use” is a position of some, including, unsurprisingly, companies that use data mining for AI training. For example: TomB Edit: The following seems...
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    I’m not finding the Quang paper convincing: Essential steps are simple declared to be true. For example: Bold added by me. This is the heart of the analysis, and it cannot simply be declared to be true. TomB
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    The AI Red Scare is only harming artists and needs to stop.

    There are ongoing programs to simulate neural activity. See: Simulations. As I understand it, these simulations are for research purposes: Figuring out how brains actually work. They don't seem anywhere close to being used as AI platforms. TomB
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