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…

Lutfur Rahman and his mob are doing the Tories’ work for them.

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’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.

Dinner with a couple who are in town for a week. Then with another. Each pair, unknown to the other, expresses an itch to move to London. Each testifies that it is more “cosmopolitan” than their present habitat. No news there. A common report.

Now, if I tell you that one of the couples lives in Paris and the other in New York, you might perk up a bit. No one, after all, walks round those two cities and bemoans a lack of human diversity.

And that is the point of this column. Being diverse is not the same as being cosmopolitan. One is a material fact: this many ethnicities in a place, this many languages spoken, this many religions professed. The other is — what? — a mental state. Defining it is hard but here is my best shot: knowing about the world, and not much caring. It is a sort of informed indifference. Some people fall down on the first point. However well they mean, their experience is narrow. Others flunk the second test. Their focus on ethnic or other group identities can be draining and even dehumanising to be around.

Fail on both counts and you are, well, you are “woke”, aren’t you? My grievance with that movement isn’t the statue-felling and the person-cancelling. Most ideologies are intolerant. Having seen tabloids attempt to intimidate judges, I wouldn’t sooner trust conservatives with cultural power. No, what grates is something else. They’re so provincial. So hazy about the non-western world they pretend to bat for. The ignorance manifests as treating “Africa” as though it were a state, empire as something European, and all non-white people as more or less on the same side.

They are expert diversifiers and hopeless cosmopolitans. It is why, when lots of Hispanic voters went Republican, and Asian students petitioned against affirmative action, the cultural left couldn’t see it coming. A worldlier lot would have known that “people of colour” is not a coherent bloc. (Let me tell you about a place called Sri Lanka.)

If a city can be diverse while not being cosmopolitan, can it be cosmopolitan while not being diverse? Jan Morris, the great travel writer, might have put in a word for Trieste or Venice at various points in their histories. Above all, to qualify as cosmopolitan, a place has to be multicultural, I think, not just multi-ethnic. A melting pot is a noble thing. So is assimilation under the French republic.

But neither suggests a nonchalance about difference. No, that takes a special degree of self-esteem in the host territory to pull off. The unspoken statement is, “The essence of this place can survive all change”.

Eighteen Julys ago, terrorists set off lethal bombs around my city, killing 52 people. By way of response, the then mayor told those who supported the murderers’ cause to watch our airports, seaports and international train terminal in the subsequent days. People from all over would still come in their droves, he said, because London allows them — how the words have stuck — “to be themselves”.

Telling phrase, isn’t it? He might have said “to become British”. Or “to improve their lives”. Or some such. And look, you can do those things. I had done both by then. (I am a mediocre cosmopolitan. Much too grounded in one place.)

Instead, what he dwelt on was the absence of pressure, not just from the state but from other citizens, to be like this or like that. It can verge on nihilism, this live-and-let-live code. It is what Joseph Conrad is getting at in The Secret Agent. But having been back for a year, I recognise it as the distinct achievement, even the point, of London.

And while some of the same spirit permeates Dubai, Toronto and Bangkok, I don’t expect another city to match this cultural looseness in my lifetime, resting as it does on things that can’t be magicked up just anywhere: centuries of habit, geographic location, the English reverence for the private realm and ultimate confidence in the law as the one binding agent. West London in particular, for all my gripes about its erratic taste, is masterly at this. There might be some slab of Earth more replete with and yet more insouciant about national differences, but fortune hasn’t taken me there.

“Defend diversity”, said a sign held up at a protest last week at the US Supreme Court ruling against positive discrimination. Well, I suppose. But diversity is learnable. Look at Germany two generations ago and Germany now. Look at several of the highest office-holders in the UK. Japan is loosening up on immigration. Cosmopolitanism, even trickier to achieve than it is to define, is the real feat

No, that’s never what downvotes were for. It’s not a ‘disagree’ button. It’s just that Reddit got a bit toxic as it grew and the masses started treating it that way.

Yeah, I had a good natured discussion with a Lemmy user on feddit.uk the other day where they were still inexplicably downvoting my responses each time, despite us both being polite and constructive.

It made me realise that a) they use the downvote button quite differently to how I use it and b) they probably didn’t know that I, as a kbinaut, could literally see they were the one downvoting.

There’s been lots of discussion of this on kbin. I tend to like it. I think it encourages people to stop and think ‘why’ before they downvote things - compared to Reddit, where people tended to downvote thoughtlessly and often, and which contributed to a culture on some subs that was quite toxic.

I do drive and I also welcome the ULEZ expansion.

The ULEZ is not a burden - it’s the bare minimum. I don’t even need to think about it because my car isn’t >16 years old (and if it was, I would seize the opportunity to accept some of this grant money they’re doling out to people with old cars who want to replace them with something newer and cleaner).

They can get another van though. They just need a petrol vehicle from the last 16 years, which isn’t that much of an ask; and there’s a £110 million scrappage scheme that will pay grants of up to £9.5k for small businesses, sole traders or charities to scrap or replace a non-ULEZ van if they’re based within the 32 boroughs. Individuals can also apply for smaller grants to replace their personal cars.

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/ultra-low-emission-zone/scrappage-schemes

When you hear people complaining, I think most of them are just complaining for the sake of it.

Remember Digg? He’s back - in Pog form!