Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson.[12][4] The company was founded in Manhattan after the founders met at the Manhattan Institute.[1] The company initially raised $8.4 million from investors including Kirenaga Partners and Peter Thiel

Of course Thiel is involved. That guy should really be not around anymore.

I think “cultural values” are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it’s not an innate property of being from Ohio

One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the “for me it’s Tuesday” effect. For someone, this is the first time they’ve encountered “maybe orcs being innately evil isn’t a good idea”. They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It’s a day that might change their life. For someone else, it’s Tuesday. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before. It’s old hat.

It’s hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you’ve already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They’re bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they’re a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow.

It feels like “are you stupid? We just went over this”, but that’s an illusion. It’s new to them .

(This doesn’t account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)

Maybe, but the bug report was it was showing them in the “wrong order” in the UI. I could look at the API response but then I need to map that to what’s displayed somehow. I think I used the dev tools to run js on the page to get the actual dates in one go (since that was in the dom), but that kind of sucks. A customer certainly isn’t going to do that. They see a bunch of stuff that all says “yesterday” or “two weeks ago” and they need to do extra work to get information that we went out of our way to hide.

At work I had a page with 50 “friendly” dates and I had to figure out with ones were wrong. They all said like “yesterday”. Hell. Could have hovered over each one and taken notes, I guess, but that would suck. Had to use the dev tools and do a lot more thinking than just looking at them.

I kind of despise relative time. You see a bunch of stuff that says “yesterday” but can’t tell exactly when without taking more actions. Just tell me the date time I’m not a child.

On the one hand, it’s fun to fuck with players. “So you enter the room? Cross the threshold of your own free will? Ok who’s wearing metal?” when none of that matters, but you write it down anyway.

On the other, sometimes I’ve had to be like “ok guys seriously there’s no traps here. Put away the ten foot pole and chickens let’s just move along”

True. I just had a long discussion with a former coworker about that yesterday. I don’t buy the whole “people who go to college aren’t smart. the salt of the earth really know how the world works” that comes up sometimes.

Most people aren’t that bright. Even people who are experts in one field or another.

But more than that, most people don’t care about things. They don’t know how platforms work, and they don’t care. Just picture a boundless void where things fall in- that’s the typical user apathy.

That means that a goblin with a dagger is a real threat, especially if he has friends, because you might be able to hit his buddies with a 4 on the die, but he could definitely work together with his friends to get a crit on you. And if he has a dagger with runes on it, or poison, or something like that, your day just got really bad.

That sounds interesting, that weak monsters can work together to be mechanically threatening. I’ve heard about PF2e having more teamwork, but I’m not familiar enough with the system to comment on it. I have noticed that D&D tends to be very much “everyone does their thing on their turn, and then spaces out until they get attacked or are up again”.

I like how Fate lets anyone “create an advantage”, so your party face that can’t throw a punch can use their “Bravado” skill (or whatever) to distract the enemy, so someone can use that to land a big hit. I imagine PF2e has stuff like that

My character has grown in power, why is the rat from the beginning still able to down me?

I read an article online somewhere about bounded accuracy, and it brought a question like that as a litmus test for if you like the idea. Should a novice archer, no matter how lucky they are, be able to shoot the ominous black knight? For a scratch? Or a lucky hit in the throat?

D&D 3e says no. You can only hit them on a natural 20. I think PF2e also says no in the same way.

D&D 5e tried to say yes, the archer should be able to hit the knight. The knight’s armor is probably ~22, and the archer is rolling at +5, so there’s decent odds. But he certainly won’t be able to kill him, because HP is what scales up with power.

Other systems are more deadly.

Personally, I don’t like the “these goblins can’t even touch me anymore” mode that much. I prefer less superhero heroics, where a goblin with a knife can be a real threat

Ehh, not really. In D&D 3e-like games, a low level goblin that attacks at +4 can barely hit a mid level character with AC 30. You could have a thousand goblins, and they’d only hit on natural 20 (and for regular, non-crit damage).

How often do pathfinder games do the thing like “The soldiers in the first area attack at +4, but these basically identical soldiers two plot beats later attack at +12, because you’re higher level and I want the math to be challenging”? Because I’ve always disliked that in games. That’s more of a video game trope, but I’ve seen it leak into tabletop games before. I liked the idea of bounded accuracy, and how a goblin is always a goblin. You don’t need to make mega-goblins to fight the higher level party, because even the little ones can still hit and wear you down.

I haven’t really played PF2e, but from reading it I don’t really love that it does the “numbers go way up” thing. I did 3e and I didn’t like the “I rolled a 4, but I have a +47 on my check” thing. I’m told PF2e has a “without level bonus” mode, but I don’t know if anyone plays it.

Many people are illiterate. How many of them are trying to run Linux, I don’t know.

I read they’re using react, the JavaScript library, for the start menu. If true that strikes me as insane

Well, there’s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_literacy but that’s not written for children

I don’t think, of your examples, trackers and surveillance are a big part of it. Understanding subtext and credibility are more relevant. Like, recognizing when a newspaper always uses passive voice when cops do bad (eg: “man killed after violent police encounter” vs “police fatally shoot man waiting at bus stop”), but active voice for other people (eg: “Looters destroy small business shops” vs “Downtown shops damaged during anti-corruption protests”)

Also in fiction, being able to take away more than just the plot. Like you can read Dracula as just a book about a guy that bites people, but there are way more ways to read it. When someone makes a movie out of the story, notice what parts they keep, emphasize, and drop.

Right wing people seem to have no media literacy.

They want to emphasize certain words, but don’t really have the confidence and writing skills to do so in other ways

Yeah, that would help. There’s also the smaller risk of “I was going to click on something else, and this new window popped in under the mouse”

I think some applications also don’t accept input for the first couple seconds to prevent this. I vaguely remember something that had the dialogue boxes count down from 5 before you could click or keyboard-interact them.

Feels like the kind of problem with a lot of edge cases, but even catching 70% of the problems would be a big improvement