itslilith

This is infinitely funnier if OP is a woman

He's really good. I'm torn on the subject because the current AI hype is most certainly a bubble and a grift, but I find the technology fascinating. I do think there's potential for great things there, but the technology is almost exclusively in the hands of 3 companies and will have a terrible impact on everyone else. I enjoy just focusing on the technical details every once in a while

I follow a YouTube channel, AI explained, that has some pretty grounded analysis of the latest models and capabilities. He compared LLMs to the creative writing center of the brain, as in they're really nice to interact with, output things that sound correct, but ultimately are missing the capabilities of reasoning and factuality that are needed for AGI

Buy it yourself, get over 100, cash out

You misunderstand, for them it only counts if the children are white

I think a more efficient tactic would be to, once a month, execute the person with the highest net worth. Billionaires would be scrambling to get rid of their money

it is, at least for me and the people I play with, but it's still a game system, not just free-form improv storytelling. The rules give some guardrails to help with the process (and, mostly, to provide a way to do combat on even grounds).

The guardrails can and should be broken at times, but if you disregard them entirely, I think it's a better idea to start with free-form storytelling from the get-go. Which can be a great experience, but only if you're playing with a group you really trust to not descend into personal power fantasies

rule of cool to me means you bend the rules to make the players feel badass, it usually doesn't mean you disregard the rules completely and do whatever you want. At that point just run a systemless narrative storytelling game.

As for polymorph turning someone into an object, there is a spell that does exactly that: true polymorph.

I am by no means a rules absolutist, some of the best moments I've had in games were certainly not RAW, but from experience it feels really shitty to allow individual players to do things that their abilities specifically don't allow, because often that overshadows other players that either specialized into some abilities that are now obsolete, or might've had creative alternative approaches to the problem

There's no such thing as a safe car. Sure, you can have large crumple zones, but in a full on crash, it's still a toss of the dice if you make it out alive. You probably didn't mean it that way, but I despise the car industry selling ever-larger monstrosities under the pentence of safety, when all they do is put other people in danger

For me it's probably the way I self-host overleaf, a online LaTeX editor. The community version has a docker image that's horribly maintained (because they want to sell enterprise, I reckon), and instead relies on a horrendous amalgamation of setup scripts that wrap docker compose.

What I have is a Dockerfile that pulls the image, manually installs a second version of TeX with the right dependencies, unlinks the old one and links the second one. Then for the database, it uses Mongo replsets, which be to be manually initialized. So I wrote a health check for the container that checks if the repl set is initialized, and if that fails the health check initializes it.

It's horrendous, it's disgusting, and it's an all-in-one compose file to get overleaf running. Good enough.

You just discovered the field of calculus! If you look closely enough at any smooth function it looks locally linear, and the slope of that linear function is it's derivative

Not quite what's happening here, here the problem is if you consider geodesics on a sphere to be straight. In special geometry they are, for all intents and purposes, but in higher euclidian geometry they form large circles

You are absolutely correct, but to add on to that even more:

When we talk about space, we usually think about 3D euclidean space. That means that straight lines are the shortest way between two points, parallel lines stay the same distance forever, and a whole bunch of other nice features.

Another way of thinking about objects like the earth is to think of them as 2D spherical manifolds. That means we concern ourself only to the surface of the earth, with no concept of going below the surface or flying up into the sky. In S2 (that's what you call a 2D spherical manifold), and in spherical geometry in general, parallel straight lines will eventually cross, and further on loop back and form a closed loop. Sounds weird, right? Well, we do it all the time. Look at lines of Longitude, for example.

We call the shortest line connecting two points in curved manifolds geodesics, as you said, and for all intents and purposes, they are straight. Remember, there is no concept of leaving the sphere, these two coordinates is all there is.

What one can do, if one wants to, is embed any manifold into a higher-dimensional euclidean one. Geodesics in the embedded manifold are usually not straight in higher-dimensional euclidean space. Geodesics on a sphere, for example, look like great circles in 3D.