“Use a different language” is a common defense of javascript, but kind of a weird one.

Yeah. My last job, a PR with commented out code typically wouldn’t get approved. Either leave it in version history, or stick it on a branch

Some games ask the players to define the stakes and goals when a conflict starts. This can help keep players on track.

Like, the players are on a journey through the mountains, and as they pass through a tunnel they encounter a giant spider. The default mode is “fight the spider to the death!”. But if you ask the players again “what is your goal here?” they might remember it’s “get through the mountains”, not “kill everything we meet.” Now they might focus on how to get past it safely.

If the DM rewards players for advancing their goals instead of just murder, that can also encourage non-murder behavior.

Yes, being out and visible is helpful. You can form bonds, and get people off the fence when they see they’re not alone, or you’re just people like anyone else. But as I said, that’s not enough on its own.

Without the plausible threat of action, you will be ignored. Action could be violence (eg: throwing a brick at a cop), or economic (eg: we’re all going to stop working for you, we’re all going to stop spending money at your business). But there needs to be something.

When it’s just “we meet up for an hour on saturday, sing, and go then home,” that’s just not very effective on its own. You can sing and dance, but there needs to be a backing of “If you don’t treat us well, we can hurt you” if you want to be taken seriously.

In one of my old groups, I’d usually verify the player and I understood each other , and they understood the likely consequences. Like, “You can shoot her, but remember this is her club, with her friends , and she’s a vampire so she probably won’t die. But if you want to roll, it’s at -4 from her Celerity you’ve seen her use.”

One player was always like “you never let me do anything!”

I was like you can do it, but I don’t want you to be surprised and mad if there are consequences.

Another player, by contrast, would listen to me clarify what was likely to happen, and be like “cool bro let’s do it.”. We still talk about the time his character jumped out a 20 story window to save his friend’s girlfriend. Great player. Took a lot of damage, as warned, but lived.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

Yeah, I mostly play Fate or nWoD. But a lot of people are really emotionally invested in D&D, so sometimes I think of ways to try to trick them into playing something different while they think they’re still playing D&D.

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I bet some obsessive nerd has converted DND to point buy (like wod, gurps, etc) instead of class and level based.

You get XP for stuff, and you can spend that as you like on all the stuff you’d get from leveling. Follow the recommended route and get a standard looking fighter. Or go crazy and buy nothing but hit dice. Or make a glass cannon by buying all the sneak attack dice and second attack (in case you miss) and nothing else.

Or, per this meme, buy superiority dice and maneuvers, and then also buy extended crit from champion.

It would be a mess. I think part of why dnd is popular is its comparably small decision space. There’s just not a lot of room to fuck up your character

This doesn’t seem like a good idea.

One, releasing should be easy. At my last job, you clicked “new release” or whatever on GitHub. It then listed all the commits for you. If you “need” an Ai to summarize the commits, you fucked up earlier. Write better commit messages. Review the changes. Use your brain (something the AI can’t do) to make sure you actually want all of this to go out. Click the button. GitHub runs checks and you’re done.

Most of the time it took a couple minutes at most to do this process.

I made a rogue bird-guy (aarakroka?) that built for strength. I really wanted to pick someone up with grapple and fly them off a cliff, but i never pulled it off.

Oh I’ve seen this joke before, slightly better, but now I don’t know which was the original.

It was like

Bard: I cast vicious mockery

Dm: cool. What do you say to him?

Bard: “You’re none of your best friends’ best friend”

Dm: …

Other players: …

Bard: So do I roll damage or…?

Dm: No… No, he’s dead.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

There’s still going to be production, and I don’t think we should continue with the capitalist class extracting value and making bad decisions

If you introduce basic income without addressing that, you’ll still have all the enshittification

Basic income seems like an obvious solution.

Many people would pursue happy lives. Do some art. Do some gardening.

You’d also want to have like public housing or something so you don’t have parasitic landlords and homelessness.

My understanding is the most “useful” thing a CEO typically does is schmooze with other rich assholes. A lot of companies need funding, and a lot of funding is handed out based on vibes. A good CEO makes friends with the assholes handing out money. That’s hard to replace with AI, probably.

On the other hand, CEOs routinely make stupid decisions. Maybe cutting that out makes up for the loss in funding opportunities?

Also this capitalist hellscape sucks. labor should unite instead of letting business idiots take most of the value they create.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

dangit i was going to make the same pun. well done.