jjjalljs @ jjjalljs @ttrpg.network Posts 3Comments 3,627Joined 2 yr. ago
I was on a grand jury some years ago in NYC. It really did a number on my faith in people and the legal system.
Now, a grand jury is different than a regular (petit) jury in a few key ways. First, you only need simple majority to move forward with an indictment. You can't 12-angry-men hang a grand jury. Second, as I learned later, even if you do convince a majority to not indict, the prosecutor can just try again. So all those times the police didn't get indicted for murder and the prosecutor just gave up? They could have tried again. They didn't, because they didn't want to.
All of that said, the cases were largely about drugs. People selling weed and heroin and the like. No violence. I suggested to the jury that we maybe just say no, and don't ruin people's lives over marijuana. You don't have to show your work. You can just say whatever. The whole rest of the jury was like "are you insane?" Some of them were just anti-drug, full stop no context. Some of them were like "We have to do what they tell us" very obedient. Some of them just wanted to go home, and thought an indictment would be the fastest way.
They all voted to indict on every charge. The guy who was sleeping, and the lawyers and cops laughed at him snoring, also voted to indict.
I asked the little old white lady sitting behind me a hypothetical. I asked if she was on a jury in the 60s, and the charge was a black man eating at an all white's diner, if she would indict. She was like, "Hmmm maybe."
I tried. One of the cases the cops said they found a gun in the man's house, so they charged him with intent to use it in a violent crime, or something. I was like, they didn't even try to prove it was his or that he was going to use it. Everyone voted to indict. I'm just like, why do you have to make it easier for the police?
But don't LLMs not do math, but just look at how often tokens show up next to each other? It's not actually doing any prime number math over there, I don't think.
WHEN games do inevitably become 80-100 dollars,
I'm always like, if people stopped paying that price they'd stop selling at that price. Like imagine if a new Assassin's Duty launches at $100 and sells like thirty copies. It'd be big news.
But people don't work like that. And if they did, we'd probably just see more "the game is $40 but half the content is in $60 of dlc"
Oblivion is the go-to example of how not to do level scaling. It's impressive how badly they fucked it up. Like, they managed to make exploring pointless and unexciting.
You find a tomb, but you know that whatever's inside will be "level appropriate". If you're low level it'll be steel weapons, and if you're high level it'll be daedric. There's not really any point in going in at low level. Might as well level up some other way and come back when the loot will be good.
On top of that, the gameplay is so bland and unresponsive that you can't really punch above your weight class. The game is very much a levels game. It's not like Dark Souls where someone can get really good and beat the whole thing while naked (and in the game, too). There's a lot of "well, this guard is level 30 and you're 10, so no matter how many times you hit him with your hammer he's not going to flinch." Knowing you're always going to get kind of bland treasure wouldn't be so bad if the act of getting it was fun. Like, sometimes a tomb or whatever in Elden Ring will have crap loot, but it's still a solid core gameplay.
Morrowind had a lot of these problems, but it was also kind of wacky and heartfelt.
That feels like an easy loophole to patch- Treat loans as income. Maybe tax it at some separate progressive rate so people using small loans as intended don't get fucked. But if Muskerberg has $100 million in loans taken out against his stock, taxing $90 million of that as income would make a difference. Especially if the top rate is like 90%.
There are many things wrong with the laws in the US. I'm not even sure where I'd start
But the other bigger problem is enforcement. Some people do a murder and get a nationwide search. Others the victims family get a "lol can't help you".
Recommend reading "the new Jim Crow" for one look at one part of this.
Makes sense. Many people are living paycheck to paycheck and can't tank a $500 surprise bill. Maybe that's not the market for what these people are selling, but it seems to be the general state of the us.
The rich have too much money and everyone, even the rich, suffer for it
Looks pretty typical to me (longtime nyc resident). It's rare to see trash, and graffiti is pretty uncommon. People sometimes think the subway is still like The Warriors where it's just a wall of spraypaint, but not so much.
Anyone who thought doge was a good idea should not participate in politics, nor make decisions of greater import than "what flavor ice cream do you want?"
Yeah, I think there's a big difference between "I thought they were going to investigate the smith, but they're really suspicious of the wizard now and want to check her out first" and "they decided to forget about the whole civil war for the throne thing and open a BBQ joint for the local goblins"
Nowadays I'd probably just explicitly be like "Hey, so, when we started this game we agreed on a certain tone and direction. Specifically, it was going to be about a power struggle for the throne. Running a restaurant business in D&D sounds wild, but that is really a different kind of story and a different game. If you want to do that, let's talk about it. Otherwise, I'm asking you to stay more on theme."
Though I say that and my best game had plenty of "beach episodes". One time literally, after they saved some sahaugin from being subjugated by a siren.
Idk, I’d be really upset by my partner knowingly doing this without talking to me about it
What is the "this" you'd be upset about exactly?
We'd probably be in a better timeline if Thiel hadn't survived his trips to Saudi Arabia, then. The man's a real scumbag.
I don't think Musk reads books. I think he's stupid. Intellectually deficient. Maybe he read a couple pages, then got bored and read half the wikipedia summary.
Oh, I fully support shooting nazis and their collaborators dead. I was taking a shot (pun intended) at the moderators who remove comments like "the guys running today's concentration camps should be shot"
I think this is one of those pearl clutching instances that won't take kindly to that kind of language. You need to use the legal system to oppose the corrupt legal system, I guess.
Software engineer.
Morning meeting that's supposed to just be "what you did yesterday, what you'll do today, and if you need help". People fuck that up and go off on tangents. What should be a ten minute meeting takes 30.
Product owners at some point told you what the features to work on this month will be. For example, we need to add the ability for some reasons to bulk delete appointments.
Chat with product and other engineers about what that entails. Product probably won't give complete, clear, requirements so you need to pull it out of them. (Hard delete or soft delete? Do you need an audit log? Are you sure with no take-backs you don't need an undo? Do you want to notify anyone when it's deleted? One email per request or per event? Do you have designs for that email? No? Of course not. And what do you want the UI to look like? If I "just put a button somewhere" we both know you won't like it. Give me details or that blank check in writing.)
At some point sit down and make code changes to do the thing. Change the backend server code to accept your new request. Write automated tests. Change the frontend to make the request. Write more tests. Manually bang on it. Probably realize some requirements were missed (you guys know there's a permissions system, right? I hooked this up to the existing can-delete permission. What do you mean CS doesn't use permissions? You made them all superusers??)
Manually bang on it a little. Deploy it to dev or some non-production environment. Have product and other stakeholders look at it and sign off. Probably get feedback and either implement it, or convince them to do it "later" (or: never, because they'll forget and it's not actually important).
Get code approval from other engineers. Make changes as needed.
Merge and deploy. Verify in production.
Meanwhile, do code reviews for other people's work. Context switch. Feels bad. Other guy is working on a progress report tool that's in a whole other part of the code, so every time you look at it it's a shifting of brain gears.
Also look at dependabot for libraries that need updating. Read release notes. Make changes if needed. Test. Pray.
Also periodic meetings to go over work in the backlog. A meeting to discuss how the team is doing that usually doesn't produce results, but can be a vent session.
I imagine from the product owner it's something like:
Get a mess of contradictory ideas from leadership. Try to figure out what they actually want and in what order. Manage their emotions because they have all the power and don't like being told no or otherwise feeling bad.
Talk to customers and other users. Try to figure out what they want. They say things like "make it go faster" or "can you make the map bigger?". There's no map on the website.
Talk to engineering. They ask so many questions. Why can't they just do the thing? They're always going on about stuff that doesn't seem important (like security and permissions and maintainability). This needs to go out Friday because the CEO wants it out.
Write tickets (a short document describing work to be done). People don't read them. Or maybe don't finish writing them, and leave a vague "as a user I want to be notified about changes to my project", without specifying any details. (Notified how, Ryan??)
I don't know what else they do.
Startups are a mess. Anyone who says they want to run the government like a startup should be banished from the land.
Also Uber just sucks. It's a private for profit solution (that lost money for years) to transit, which should be a public problem to work on.
Conservatives are like toddlers. Emotion driven to the point of having no mapping to reality, truth, and causality.
This is my favorite new to me song of the month: https://pearlcharlesmusic.bandcamp.com/track/does-this-song-sound-familiar-12-version
tagged as rock, desert rock, folk rock, garage pop, psych folk, psychedelic pop
But if you so much as joke about how maybe we should shoot a couple republican leaders well that's inappropriate violence is BAD, but only when it's visceral and fast. Slow deaths are cool, I guess.