jjjalljs

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jjjalljs,

I just saw that on Google maps yesterday. Had a laugh. Didn’t go, though.

jjjalljs,

It doesn’t help that these dating apps are all deeply enshittified. The free experience is kind of shitty, and the paid is suspect and expensive.

They could do more to focus on matching by something other than pictures. Shared interests, maybe.

They could do more to deal with bots, scams, and low effort users.

They could stop showing me people that live in Thailand. For some reason tinder likes to show me people that live 8000 miles away. Probably because they’re paying for it, but it makes the app worse for me.

I can’t speak to what college kids are up to these days. I’m old. I’ve never had a lot of luck “just meeting” people in real life, though. I always struggled with figuring out if someone was available and interested. I have several unpleasant memories of asking people out in college that I’d been spending time with, only for them to be like “sorry my boyfriend [you’ve never met and I never mentioned] and I are exclusive”. (Which may have been a lie to let me down gently, I guess.)

Also when you have a deal breaker or two, having that up front is helpful.

jjjalljs,

I like the bangs better :(

jjjalljs,

“What’s really behind this movement is part of the agenda to make driving as miserable and as difficult as possible so people don’t drive so much,” Beeber said.

Shit. He figured my plan out.

But seriously people driving less would be a win. Cars are awful.

jjjalljs,

This metaphor and pun worked really well.

Meanwhile I’m going to spend my afternoon with some witchy metal and probably go back to pop punk tomorrow.

jjjalljs,

Recently? This song is just the kind of menacing I like: wolvennest.bandcamp.com/track/accabadora

I was making a playlist for my friend’s Halloween party and found this album. Though a different friend was like “this song makes me feel… something I don’t know if I like it”

jjjalljs,

I think I gave my wizard trauma by having NPCs shout “geek the mage first!” and then proceed to geek him. He’s not the most tactical player, so that didn’t help.

jjjalljs,

Feels like a post written by someone who’s only really played D&D and close relatives.

It is helpful to have a shared understanding of the world and how difficult things are. In real life I can look at a fence and judge if I think I can scale it. In some RPGs, I can’t. Typically bad things happen when the DM’s imagination diverges from the players’. Having consistent rules can help keep things unified.

Also, as others have said, don’t roll for things that aren’t interesting.

D&D and most of its relatives are lacking fail-forward and good succeed-at-cost mechanics.

Also 1d20+stuff means every result is equally likely. You’re just as likely to roll a 1 as a 10 as a 20. I think that kind of sucks, and that’s a bigger gripe I have with the popularity of 1d20 mechanics.

jjjalljs,

Yep. Agreed. Sometimes the phenomenon you’re describing was called a “fantasy heartbreaker”. Clearly they were passionate but didn’t have the breadth of experience to really go somewhere new and exciting.

jjjalljs,

I just talk about books I’ve read when relevant, or during the “whatve you been up to?” small talk.

jjjalljs,

Nothing to test? Lol what.

def add(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a * b

All types are correct. No side effects. Does the wrong thing.

jjjalljs,

My favorite anecdote from “the cold start problem” is how zoom got funding not because they thought it was a good idea - the investors thought it was a solved problem - but because they were personally friends with the founder of zoom.

That’s the quality of decisions we’re dealing with.

jjjalljs,

Fines should scale with wealth. If a billionaire gets a parking ticket, the fine should be tens of thousands of dollars.

Fun side effect is this might encourage the cops to bother the wealthy instead, which might lead to police reform.

jjjalljs,

They could just run contextual ads for much less effort and privacy violations, and still get the same or better result.

jjjalljs,

It’s how advertising worked for literally the entire history of advertising before the modern internet. You put ads for car stuff on the cars website. You don’t need to build an entire dossier on me. If I’m looking at the star wars wiki, you can be pretty confident that I’m interested in sci-fi and fantasy. You don’t need to spend billions of dollars tracking me to know that.

This is not an expert opinion so I could be wrong, but I think it would be a better system. Simpler to implement, less stalking, less “oops we didn’t show any house ads to black people” potential.

jjjalljs,

Maybe. I guess it makes it easier for Google to sell many different ads in the same time/space. Still sucks for everyone else though.

jjjalljs,

You target the ads based on the content of the page rather than the identity of the viewer. That’s how tv radio and print ads work.

jjjalljs,

I don’t think hipsters have been into pbr for like ten years, but it’s possible I’ve just aged out of hipster circles.

jjjalljs,

I make games a fallback activity. If I can go be social, I’ll pick that instead. I date people so I try to spend time with them.

I set timers. Every hour or two the timer goes off, and I have to go do something else. Either something productive like an errand or just something not on the computer.

I have a full time job. I never play games when I’m supposed to be working. I work from home so it would be easy to fire up the other computer and play a little between work stuff, but that’s a horrible idea so I don’t.

I have a self imposed bed time. I had to use an alarm for this for a while but now it’s just habit. Also I’m getting old so I get tired sooner.

What got you into coding ? (aside from money)

To give some context, I’m a developer myself and once I had a conversation with someone who has not “tasted” programming, but was wondering about passion and career. I was asked what I like about programming. My answer was that my interest in it came from writing small scripts when I was young to automate things....

jjjalljs,

I’m a little old.

I liked video games as a very young child. Naturally I wanted to make my own.

We didn’t have the Internet because this was the early 90s, and my parents didn’t think it was worth the hassle.

The computer we had did have BASIC on it , and it had some help files. I think I got a book from the library, too, but I was too young to really do well with books written for adults. I made some progress making some games, mostly text adventure style, but they were incomplete and messy like you’d expect from a kid. A kid with no Internet to look things up on, too.

High school had some programming classes. They were pretty okay.

Then in college I hit the trope where the smart kid who never had to study finally hits difficult material and doesn’t know what to do. Woops.

jjjalljs,

Conservative media probably has a lot of blood on its hands. Pumping people up with fear of outsiders. Fox news is a relatively new entity.

jjjalljs,

If not wearing a mask meant only that person died, I’d be extremely happy to let the idiotic right wing die. Unfortunately, they affect everyone else.

We really need to stop treating right wing extremism as the same “difference of opinion” tier as “i like my bedroom walls painted blue vs green”.

jjjalljs,

Perhaps some sort of collectively owned service.

Or a non profit like Wikipedia that all it does is host and sell music.

Whatever it is needs to be resistant to the standard shifty capitalism problems. It should focus on providing a good service and making enough money to support itself. Not infinite profits forever.

jjjalljs,

I wonder if this is a pendulum swinging, and gen z’s kids will drink to excess.

Me I limit myself to one or two drinks, only in social spaces/never alone.

How crucial texting is to modern dating

I am 23 and I am currently in the dating scene. I’ve had no success and I’ve had the fourth person lose all interest in between setting up the date and the long wait between the date. It typically goes match on dating site, set up date, try to get to know each other over snap and then interest lost. I do tend to respond...

jjjalljs,

I’m old (almost 40) so my advice may not be relevant.

Why is there a long gap between setting up a date and the date?

Why are they cancelling the date?

I generally match with someone, chat briefly to check for red flags and if they can message ok, then ask them out. Once the date is arranged I don’t keep texting. There’s too many ways to fuck up over text.

jjjalljs,

I hope the lesson they take is “selling complete games with no online bull or micro transactions is popular and profitable”

jjjalljs,

I vaguely remember a friend in middle school telling me about how The Weird Kid stuck his head under the stall wall and into my friend’s stall while shitting was happening. I don’t even remember what The Weird Kid allegedly said. Something like “HEY BEN WHATCHA DOIN?” probably. My friend panicked and kicked him in the face, and I don’t think any adults were informed.

jjjalljs,

“there must be outgroups the law binds but does not protect, and in groups the law protects but does not bind”

jjjalljs,

Honestly in my games I’ve made it so the different species all have similar lifespans, similar to typical humans in real life. Otherwise there’s just too many uninteresting questions that come up about the world.

jjjalljs,

If one species lives 1000 years they’re probably going to have a tremendous amount of political and economic power. I don’t really want my elves to be like Vampire.

jjjalljs,

I only know a couple. Unless you count the world of darkness games as a lot of games, but I don’t. But also unknown armies and don’t rest your head. And exalted, but I don’t know it well. And gurps, but I only played it once. And fate, of course. And Shadowrun I know of but never played. Still want to do Shadowrun in Fate. And then I’ve skimmed a bunch of d20 stuff, but if I never read another “roll 1d20 and you have six stats” that’s probably okay.

jjjalljs,

I think the player types is important.

I’ve had players who will engage with stuff and make good things happen, and then I don’t need to play very much. They’ll see the awkward tavernkeeper and the village blacksmith and run cheering into ROM COM TIME. Can’t really plan for that.

But I’ve also had players who are just wallflowers. They don’t take initiative. They don’t push for their own goals. They’re timid and easily discouraged. “The tavern keeper doesn’t want to give you the staff. It was his grandfather’s, he says, and he doesn’t want to hand it out to just anyway.” “Uhh… uh… ok… i don’t know what to do. Can I charm person him?” “You can, but that’s an escalation and people will be mad if they find out.” “Oh nevermind I don’t know what to do.”

Meanwhile the other party got the staff by getting him and the blacksmith to finally go out on a date, and now they’re all on great terms.

The timid party needs more planning (but still only a session or two in advance) because otherwise they’re going to just stall out and get frustrated.

Maybe one day I’ll have a group that’s consistently engaged, thinks about the game between sessions, and knows the rules of the game reasonably well.

What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games?

I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....

jjjalljs,

One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that’s great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.

But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it’s real nice even if it’s not the traditional rogue like.

jjjalljs,

Weighing in with my anecdote: none of my friends were that excited about it. Lots of friends, even ones who are kind of casual about games or don’t prioritize them as much as they used to, were real excited about Baldur’s gate 3.

Nothing I heard about starfield made it sound especially new or exciting. I’ll probably get it when it’s on sale for cheap, but I paid full price for bg3 and felt like it was worth it.

jjjalljs,

Looks like tinder, bumble, or a similar dating app.

They kind of suck because they want you to pay more money , so they do annoying push notifications like this.

How do they even manage it? (ttrpg.network)

This meme uses the “Anime Girl Hiding From Terminator” template, in mexico filter, where the text ‘I, who can’t even write 100 spells for my TTRPG’ is layered over the anime girl, and ‘Rolemaster casually having 2000 spells in 162 spell lists and 15 magic classes’ in the Terminator, which is referring to the...

jjjalljs,

I was going to say something similar. If your book has hundreds of bespoke spells that’s kind of a minus. If they’re examples of what you can do with the underlying system (like mage the awakening does) then fine. But a dnd style list of unique effects with no real coherence is not good. Inelegant. Crufty.

jjjalljs,

If you’re using a manually managed venv, you need to remember to activate it, or to use the appropriate Python.

That really doesn’t seem like a big ask.

I’ve been using python professionally for like 10 years and package management hasn’t really been a big problem.

If you’re doing professional work, you should probably be using docker or something anyway. Working on the host machine is just asking for “it works on my machine what do you mean it doesn’t work in production?” issues.

jjjalljs,

But at least the old tested solution still works unlike in Python where the main goal seems to be breaking the backwards compatibility as often as possible.

lol what. Node does a new major release every six months. And you’re shit talking python? There’s probably never going to be another major version change, and minor versions have several years of support

In like 10 years of python development I don’t think I’ve ever been mad about breaking changes in python.

jjjalljs,

Where do you live that sucks so hard?

I live in an ivory tower in Brooklyn where there’s like 5 groceries, urgent cares, and pharmacies within a 10 minute sidewalked walk. (and not fancy Brooklyn). Sometimes I forget most everywhere else kind of sucks for transit, but I’m lucky enough that I can choose not to live those places.

jjjalljs,

Who is hotly anticipating skins? Stop. They don’t do anything. You are wasting your money. Find joy elsewhere.

jjjalljs,

I thought it was going to be “they blend in with all the trunks” or similar

jjjalljs,

I get mildly mad all the time when writing SQL because I feel like it’s upside down

Instead of


<span style="color:#323232;">select u.id. u.email, p.name
</span><span style="color:#323232;">from user u
</span><span style="color:#323232;">join persona p on p.user_id = u.id
</span><span style="color:#323232;">where u.active = true
</span>

where the columns are referenced before they’re defined (like what is u.id? Keep reading to find out!)

it should instead be


<span style="color:#323232;">from user u
</span><span style="color:#323232;">join persona p on u.id = p.user_id
</span><span style="color:#323232;">where u.active = true
</span><span style="color:#323232;">select u.id, u.email, p.name
</span>

Now nothing is defined before it’s used, and you’re less likely to miss your where clause. I usually write the joins first anyway because I know what tables I care about, but don’t know which specific things I’ll want.

I can’t think of any other languages that use things before they’re defined except extremely dysfunctional JavaScript.

jjjalljs,

You all run queries against production from your local? Insanity.

jjjalljs,

I didn’t downvote but some people like ideologically dislike orms. The reasons I’ve heard are usually “I can write better SQL by hand”, “I don’t want to use/learn another library”, “it has some limitations”

Those things can be true. Writing better SQL by hand definitely is a big “it depends”, though.

jjjalljs,

With that amount of instruction you’ve done well

There’s probably lots of stuff you don’t even know you don’t know.

Automated testing is a big part of professional software development, for example, and helps you catch things like this issue before they go live.

Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish (infosec.pub)

Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....

jjjalljs,

Sometimes I forget people like watch YouTube on purpose. I pretty much exclusively use it for music that’s not on Bandcamp, short clips of old shows, and the occasional guide for something that’s too visual to be described well in words.

Old man out of the loop, yells at clouds.

jjjalljs,

I’m the outlier in that I don’t really watch anything. I’ll play a game or read a book, go for a walk or bike ride, but I usually don’t really like just watching stuff.

I think it’s because growing up my parents were really restrictive on all that stuff, but were always like “sure go watch TV”

jjjalljs,

That one trident that returns to your hand and so makes a thunder explosion is a lot of fun

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