I’m highly biased, but I know @Ashkuri well enough to say “just fuck my shit up fam” because when he fucks my shit up it’s never pointless and always contributes to the story.
Also, bad stuff happening raises the stakes, adds to the suspension of disbelief, and makes people forget that every character has plot armour until it’s decided otherwise.
@Ashkuri @Trashcan sometimes I really like being proven wrong, but this is not one of those days. Why ya gotta take me out of my imaginary fantasy world where AI is a fad that will disappear by itself?
JFC I thought it was still writing absolute slop but now it takes only ten minutes to train the damn thing to write passable poses? I’m sitting here very annoyed lol.
I don’t think using an AI to generate creative writing is worth the trade-off of contributing to AI’s eradication of jobs, the environment, creativity, reliable and accurate information etc.
@Rathenhope said in AI Megathread:
two potential clients (the biggest we’d have) both went “we consider any use of AI to be high risk and we don’t want client information anywhere near it”
Just casually send me the names of these clients so I can get our CEO to try and sell to them, I really want to see that metaphorical ice bucket tipped all over him when he hears that.
With the amount of time investment needed to get AIs these days to do absolutely anything right (see the other thread where I said AI is getting dumber), by the time you carefully cultivate an LLM to write a pose that actually makes sense within the context of the scene, before even making it fit your writing style, you might as well have just written it out yourself.
It’s one of those traps where it’s doing more work for a worse result because it’s been advertised as the opposite.
I work in fintech. We are involved with some big cranky banks. The current AI push driven by our CEO is several GDPR breaches waiting to happen and my security guy is sitting there pulling his… actually he has no hair so I suppose he’s pulling his beard out! I’m right there with him, both on the frustration and lack of hair.
Devs, infra, solution design et al, we don’t get paid to write lines of code, we get paid to write the right lines of code. That’s why we have PRs and reviewing them is where all the productivity maybe-gained is being absolutely-lost.
I’m not even on the dev teams, I’m in infra, and even I’m copping it from product people trying to push code to my repos now. UGH.
@Clarion said in AI Megathread:
Maybe in a few years it’ll be a 100% technically viable option and turn back into an ethical question
The reliability of AI when it comes to cutting code (and to a lesser extent, just having accurate information) is coming more and more into question because the data the AI is training itself on is getting shittier and shittier.
Note this loop:
I’ve been watching this continual enshittification take place as my company is forced to use AI (someone very successfully marketed to my intelligence-challenged CEO) and I’m getting more and more PRs across my desk that are full of slop. The decrease in the human element and the consistent marketing of “AI is gonna do it for you don’t even worry about it” is causing entropic damage to the AI’s ability to actually create something worth a damn.
Six months ago, it could spit out a CloudFormation template that was mostly passable, with a couple of fixes, and now it doesn’t even understand a WAF rule statement. It used to be possible to use ChatGPT for boilerplate BASH code but now it can’t even do that.
Can’t even use Google anymore, because the first five pages of results are AI articles that tell me less than nothing. Like, search engines give me results that are actively detrimental to what I’m trying to do.
For someone who keeps getting told AI is going to make my job easier, boy is it making it a lot harder.
I genuinely hope this bubble bursts with the force of a nuke because at some point in the near future an AI will introduce a genuinely serious problem that requires human resolution and there’s no humans around who have the knowledge to fix it for them.
tl;dr if you let dumb AI learn from dumb AI, AI gets dumber.
@Lemon-Fox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@dvoraen You could app a character in? 2000 bonus xp right now.
Oh look, I was waiting for his patented stfu bribe Grid Appeasement Tactic #23 to show up.
We’re running through the Cujo Conflict Resolution Handbook again, which looks something like this.
@Jumpscare This person definitely has time for a civil conversation about sea lions.
@Jennkryst you cannot bait me with the idea of a BattleTech MUSH then suddenly waylay me with Exalted! All I want is to take a contract in my MAD-5M against some Capellans and drain two cases of Timbiqui Dark when I get back to the mechbay!
Aw yis a topic near and dear to my heart.
Ever since I found Copilot in Notepad, that was it. 2025 was the year of Windows going from “passable” to “steaming manure”. All the adware and telemetry and forced AI and bunged-up local search reminded me too much of using Internet Explorer 5 instead of an actual operating system.
In July I got a new SSD for my boot drive and was able to set up Linux Mint (Ubuntu for cowards like me, if you believe the internet!) for dual-boot. I say “dual-boot”, but I haven’t booted into Windows ever since I got the Linux distro up and running. I genuinely haven’t needed to.
The worst issue I’ve had on Linux is one that actually ate up a few hours last night, where my wifi card decided after a kernel update (which didn’t resolve on rollback, itself a super-easy process) that it would make one connection total, and if you tried to swap SSIDs it’d just kark it and NetworkManager would crash. That led into a deep dive that taught me a lot more about how NetworkManager works, the joys of wpa_supplicant, and why my excellent crash-hot infinitely-tweaked tri-band router configuration was more of a hindrance than a help. Fixing that, and accidentally making the household wifi a lot better, I feel like I learned something.
Had that been Windows, I never would have known it was a problem, and it would have been “wait for a patch”.
When it comes to gaming, praise be to Gaben our lord and saviour for Proton. The only game I’ve found that was more than plug-and-play was Bannerlord once you start installing mods, because those need a few Windows dependencies which are easy enough to install with Protontricks once you do some research. When it comes to Anticheat, I’ve found most of the stuff I’ve played worked great out of the box. The only exception is, to no surprise, EA, which is actively preventing Linux machines from playing their games because “omg piracy lol”.
A lot of this pontificating on my part is because Linux works for me. My day job is DevOps so I’m always writing BASH and spinning up containers and virtual machines etc. I will absolutely dig into an OS to get it running to my specifications and I will constantly prune things that I don’t need. For the average user who may well use the AI more than my blistering hatred permits, who doesn’t care about the telemetry, who isn’t fussed about localhost suddenly being inaccessible, yeah Windows is fine. I wouldn’t tell my wife to stop using it. But for myself, I really like how this stuff isn’t being (re)installed now with every update.
If you’re looking for a change, willing to get into the weeds, and bothered by what Microsoft is doing, I recommend at least investigating swapping the OS. If you’re a daily user, then to be honest you don’t lose much if anything by staying on Windows.
@labsunlimited The second someone spins up a World of Mild Discomfort set in Minot I am there.
I’ve never seen a game set in North Dakota.
I was about to say I’ve never seen a game set in Australia either but an old memory is tickling my brain on that one.
@Aria Small update here, the angel cat I’ve been speaking about got into a territorial dispute on my driveway at 2AM today that woke my wife and I up. With it being so early in the morning and noting the pattern of activity, I can now solidly argue that the cat has been abandoned. I’m going to be looking into trapping her for her own good.
@mietze First off, thank you for responding like this. I appreciate a differing opinion because I have a hard time assessing a situation from beyond my own viewpoint.
These are the friends where we’ve gone against our gut, given it another five goes, and been optimistic about the future. This, however, is the first time we’ve spent an extended period with them and their kids and it has been very telling.
There were a lot of things I didn’t get into in the last post, it would have been too much and it would have been a wall of text that’s just whinging. There will be some more details below.
@mietze said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
But yeah, there are a handful of folks where I have been, “You know, I enjoy doing X Y, or Z with you but I think we should do it without the kids,” too.
This is perhaps the core of the whole thing. Sometimes it is better to do things without the kids, but when the kids are there, it is unfair/dangerous to act like they are not. Approximately 90% of the holiday, the mother of those children was interrogating my wife about something or other while the father was on TikTok watching memes. This happened at the holiday house, at kid-friendly events, when we were out to eat, etc etc. It was happening while their baby was hanging out of a high chair held in only by their neck. It was happening in a car park while their oldest kid was walking into traffic. These are the aforementioned “saved from serious harm” incidents that I remember.
Part of my issue is that I consider parenting a 24/7 task, so I cannot turn off my instincts. It doesn’t help my own wellbeing much, but it does mean I’m aware of what the kids are up to even if I’m not actively watching them. To have children around who are visibly not having their emotional, physical, or safety needs met triggers extreme caution in me.
The number of times I turned and found myself next to their infant with them nowhere nearby was approaching double digits. One of those times, they were fifteen metres away arguing over a frozen drink they were going to buy for themselves.
Finally, I will never forgive a parent that scoffs and walks away when their child asks for a kiss and cuddle good-night.
I would never consider them aunty or uncle to my children. After this trip I wouldn’t allow them within fifty metres of my children without me being there.
We recently went away on a trip for an extended long weekend with some close family friends of ours.
For four days, myself, my wife, and my kids (!) were used and abused for free daycare and hospitality by these “friends” that were more interested in TikTok and yelling at each other than the basic responsibilities of parenting. They contributed nothing to the holiday whilst actively-if-ignorantly sabotaging any activity we tried to do as a group, even something as simple as making dinner.
They didn’t exchange a word with their eldest son (who’s four) beyond telling him off for misbehaving when he’s clearly acting out for any sort of attention, and happily ignored their youngest (who’s not even one) as he pulled small coffee tables on himself, fell half-way out of his high chair, or climbed half-way up the stairs with no supervision. I was told later by my wife that I’d saved each of their kids from some form of serious injury at least once, something which didn’t occur to me at all during the trip.
One of those four days, and the one that showcased their worst behaviour, was my birthday.
This is… I mean, this is simple shit. Keep an eye on your kids, don’t shut them out or ignore them, maybe think beyond your immediate gratification. I get it! I get that it’s hard! I get that parenting takes everything out of you! I’ve been there, I still am there! But at one point late on my birthday when I was carting their baby down from the stairs for the fourth time that hour I’d had enough and I was one hair away from just saying get off your fucking phone.
There is at least one positive from all this though. It’s completely dismissed all the worries I have of being an inadequate dad. For now. It’ll be back lol.
Suffice it to say there’s agreement between my wife and I that we’re terminating this near-decade of friendship immediately. My heart goes out to their kids, but I’m ashamed to see this from people I once called friends.
@MisterBoring said in Missed Settings:
@Hobbie said in Missed Settings:
“why has no one made a Magic The Gathering MUSH?”
My guess at an answer is: Because everyone on the game would throw a fit if they didn’t have a Planewalker Spark.
You could go two ways with that.
We can tack my personal loathing of FCs on to #1 and say that “only player characters are Planeswalkers” so NPCs remain as such, aside from the occasional GMPC for plots and the like. Or, you go with #2, and Planeswalkers are these exceedingly rare Unknowable Things that are something like final boss territory. Whilst I prefer #2, for the sake of actually getting players, #1 is better. People like being super speshul.
Then there’s the system. Do you create something new based on abilities within the setting that’s more RP-oriented and using coloured/colourless/no mana? Or, do you go full ham and transpose the actual MtG card game in? My ego right now demands I fully code the card game and I’m having to argue with it that it’s too much work right now lol.
I sat and thought about it for a sec, and wondered “why has no one made a Magic The Gathering MUSH?”
Serenity MUSH.
In my mid/late teens.
I’ll let you all guess how that went.
I love a good Actual Death For Realsies. It contributes to the scene, it raises stakes, it opens the door to the idea that this isn’t a sandpit of make-pretend toys, and it can evoke strong feeling, which is always one of my highest goals as a storyteller. Even an Actual Death For Realsies that is in-universe pointless has an OOC effect.
While I do get attached to characters, and there are some I would never kill off no matter how much they deserve it because they’re too fun, it’s sometimes refreshing and electrifying to sacrifice a character you’ve invested in for the sake of the story. Sometimes it’s a snap decision, sometimes it’s calculated and planned as a story beat.
And to be fair if I’m retiring a character to make way for an alt I like to kill them off in a good story for the benefit of others. I say this, knowing that one of those deaths got my next character tangible XP benefits, so perhaps I’m biased!
I do believe a character’s Actual Death For Realsies should be in the hands of the player the vast majority of the time. The times where it isn’t? That’s when we get “Aim for the bushes” from @MisterBoring, with whom I disagree, reading that I thought it was very funny.
After thinking for 5min, you could probably make a short Consent To Actual Death For Realsies checklist:
If those two points are not met, then there is no Actual Death For Realsies.
So yes, I love this topic, I love exploring it, and I love seeing it done for many many reasons. I could ramble about this for hours but my RL time to post this has run out lol.
Couple things today.
Firstly, to everyone I RPed with before getting on the ADHD meds (which is everyone I’ve ever RPed with), holy crap I am sorry you had to deal with someone so horrifically erratic and scatterbrained. I’m currently on the fifth and thank god final day of my psychiatrist-advised no-medication break so the meds don’t lose efficacy and it’s absolute torture for me, the wife, the kids, the wife, the dog, and especially me, and definitely the wife. I understand now why the psychologist who did my initial assessment said “if you weren’t a genius, you’d be completely crippled”. I thought he was joking!
Secondly, perhaps more pressing because the above nonsense ends tomorrow, the cat situation.
You know the one.
This is the mother of next door’s litter of cats and has always loved my family. I found her sitting in the regional park across the road from my house. She’s always been very friendly and came hopping over the road when I made a single pspsps. We had lots of head and chin rubs, plenty of belly showing, and we even played with a twig in the grass. She’s a wonderful and affectionate little cat.
Once again:
This happened at 11:30PM.
11:30PM.
Unfortunately, limited by a keyboard as I am, I can’t unleash my frothing annoyance appropriately at what I’ve dealt with. It’s the middle of the night and this friendly little girl is at the mercy of snakes, spiders, kangaroos, emus, and especially snakes all alone. Next door’s lights were on so maybe they took her back inside later I don’t fucking know!
I cannot stress enough how many dangerous snakes we get here. It’s so bad that last time I played Pokemon GO it kept spawning Ekans and I’m like “this tracks”.
I’m starting to think this is no longer a question of legality. Seeing a roaming cat at 11:30PM with at least two laws broken, I definitely have moral grounds to catch her (and maybe her kids) and maybe I’ve got legal grounds as well. At what point is it animal neglect? I don’t know but emotion keeps winning out over logic and I’m going crazy every time I see this colony-in-the-making.