I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

“Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

“Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

“Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.

I use a thumbs up reaction as “I acknowledge I’ve read and understood this, but don’t think you require a push notification” so I guess your mileage may vary

angry upvote

But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI

I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community

You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”

Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid

I believe this is indicating that it’s using the Python syntax highlighting.

Which is still a failure, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think that AI truly knows the difference between one language and another anyway

If you’re a roller coaster enthusiast, you might get a kick out of the Euthanasia Coaster, or as I like to call it The Sui-Slide

Obligatory XKCD

A common refrain I’m seeing in this post is that if there’s something wrong with the model you can just retrain it. There’s a couple problems with that assumption.

The state of the technology actually makes training a model somewhere between difficult or opaque. And what I mean by this is that in order to train a model you need to give it data. A lot of data. An amount of data that a single person frankly either doesn’t have access to or has no simple way to generate. And even then, there’s no way to be sure how the model performs until after the training completes, so even if you’ve collected all that data you won’t know it’s an improvement.

But for the sake of a hypothetical let’s ignore the current state of the technology and imagine that wasn’t a problem.

If an AI representative votes for me, and it gets that vote wrong, I won’t know about it until after it has voted for me. And by then it’s too late - I’ve already voted against my interest.

Also it seems that your position is that these AI reps are for people who care enough about politics to care, but don’t care enough to do. I don’t know that those people would ever confirm that their model is actually voting in their favour. If they don’t care enough to vote, then they don’t care enough to confirm their votes either.

The most damning thing about using AI for policy though - AI is NOT a decision making tool. Ask anybody who actually works on AI. It might fool the people who use it, and the people who sell it to you will tell you anything to make an extra dollar. AI is just a formula that spits out words instead of numbers. Sometimes it strings together a cohesive sentence and sometimes it hallucinates. There isn’t any Intelligence happening under the machine, it’s all Artificial.

AI is essentially autocomplete on steroids. It has no capacity to reason or argue, it just says what it’s trained for you to expect. It’s not a thinking machine and I sincerely doubt it ever will be

Is the idea here direct democracy, but instead of personally voting on each issue, you have a digital assistant cast your ballot?

I propose “direct technocracy” as the term. I also welcome the boom in dystopic cyberpunk media if this gets considered.

Ultimately, I think the problem would be that people are going to think even less about politics if they could abstract it away. It might seem counterintuitive since Lemmy is full of politics, but we’re hardly representative of the larger demographic and apathy rules the political landscape.

There’s also a bunch of issues with making sure that your AI would actually respect your wishes and vote accordingly. It sounds like we’re thinking of a hypothetical AI that’s easier to tune and doesn’t have the problems of today’s AI. But if we’re talking hypotheticals that have somehow fixed implementation problems, then I’d rather have a good, safe, and secure way to just vote online.

I think anybody who says they haven’t questioned their sexuality is likely to be lying. Then again, we’re all biased by our lived experiences and I’ve spent a lot of time questioning things, so I could be projecting.

At the end of the day I want to say to like who you like. What happens between consenting adults is nobody’s business but theirs, and the sun isn’t going to implode because you dig on a girly dude.

Hell, you don’t even need to put a label on your sexuality. Or your gender for that matter, although that’s a whole different can of worms.

Depending on where you are, you might be growing up alongside harmful anti-queer rhetoric. That kind of thing makes it very difficult for a lot of people to admit their sexuality with any degree of nuance. People living in fear will lie to their friends, family, and selves in order to hide their attractions. It’s sad and harmful, and it also makes it difficult for some people to be open about sometimes liking a person that is outside what they believe society expects of them.

You guys should get coffee or something. I wouldn’t pass up on a chance to learn more about myself

I’m not sure if this question is positing that women aren’t stimulated by porn visually, or if it’s using porn as an example of something to be stimulated visually by.

My wife likes cartoons and has a diploma in animation. Her class was like 80% female. Animation is pretty much by definition visual stimulation.

But if we’re talking exclusively about eroticism, there’s female directors making porn for the female eye too. IMO it relies less on the gonzo fake shit and tropes of mainstream porn too, so it might actually be healthier to consume (note: not a sexologist)

Either way, I’m not sure that this divide between men and women exists where you think it does

I agree that the behavior of these companies to hook their users using the darkest psychological patterns is disgusting. It doesn’t become any less disgusting once the user turns 17 though, and no framework is in place to prevent those teens from falling prey once they gain access.

Even if we all agree that a ban is warranted, my stance is that a ban alone isn’t enough. It needs to be accompanied by education and harm reduction.

And it needs to be honest, scientific, and good-faith education. We don’t need another DARE program demonizing something because misinformation can be more harmful than failure to educate

How does someone advance to “rationally thinking” without receiving education?

I don’t disagree that habits picked up in childhood are more difficult to break. But I don’t think it’s a problem exclusively for children either.

Many of us are growing up with parents and grandparents with brainrot. And sure, maybe they would have been more susceptible as kids if the technology existed then. But we all would be better off with decent digital and media literacy.

Plus, who’s giving the kids these devices anyway? It’s usually the parents - who have been raised not to talk to strangers- giving their kids unfettered access to all the strangers of the world

I don’t think a ban is coming at the issue from the right angle. Social media misuse is fundamentally a problem of addiction, and we have a checkered past of causing harm when banning things. For a historical analogue, look at the Prohibition era of the United States.

Ultimately, bans for these things don’t work because people will get around it anyway. And that’s exactly when dangerous things happen. Using the Prohibition example again, people poisoned themselves trying to make illegal hooch because they were determined to drink anyway.

I think education is the answer. And I mean honestly, isn’t education always the answer? But you’ve got to educate your kids about the content they’re using. We’ve got to educate the parents about the dangerousness of unlimited access to screens. If people don’t understand the danger, then they don’t recognize the danger, and suddenly they’ve stumbled on danger.

I’m sure everyone has heard a story about a straight-laced kid who grew up with strict parents, and then at the first opportunity to party in college goes on a bender to destroy their life. Those kids’ parents really did them a disservice by not preparing them for reality. If their only education on drugs and alcohol is “don’t do them,” then the child isn’t really aware of the risks. They just see that everyone else is doing them and having fun, and then they go off the deep end before they realize how bad things are getting.

Social media’s the same thing. The day your kid turns seventeen they’ll have every chance to succumb to brainrot on their own volition. Without being informed of how or why that happens, there’s nothing stopping someone from falling into any internet rabbithole.

Every other skilled trade just says “Fast, Right, or Cheap: pick two.”

It’s not my fault if they always pick fast and cheap

G…E…T…O…U…T…

Get out of what? Get outside? Have you been cooped up too much? Get out of your comfort zone? Have you been stagnating?

(jk I’m not fluent in Morse. For that you’ll need a radio operator or an exorcist)

All costs are passed onto the consumer. Heaven forbid the line doesn’t go up

I don’t understand, you didn’t get the jokes? I forwarded the chain letter to everyone

No joke, I opened this thread to comment on it last night and forgot until I saw it in my feed again today.

I started keeping a diary, and I found that helps. Something about writing things down helps encode memories, but then if you do forget you have a reminder.

In particular my gratitude journal is helpful. I often find myself in a state where I can’t think of a single good thing going on in my life. But then going through it I read about how a stray cat came to sit in my lap in the garden, and while I didn’t remember that before I read it the memories come flooding back.

Your gaming experience sounds similar to mine. I used to love MMOs (probably to the point of addiction tbh) but wouldn’t talk to people if I could help it. I don’t really play MMOs anymore, but now that also means I can avoid public matchmaking like poison.

It’s something about the anonymity of the internet, the unlikelihood of encountering each other again, or just the frustration present in some games which turns people into the nastiest sort of keyboard warrior.

And now I’m on Lemmy. The irony mounts.

It seems there’s a trend of pushing games towards community. And I’m sure that’s great for the people who like that sort of thing. But typically I want to play in a private lobby with my friends, and not have strangers running around goofing on me in public zones.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate a good goof, I just want to goof on my terms