Higher infant mortality, and higher maternal mortality to boot, all while chasing the $5k bait with poor insurance coverage at public hospitals. Meanwhile, the haves can afford better private care. Since that’s where the money will be, they’ll be pulling better doctors and nurses to it, thus avoiding becoming statistics.

Edit: it all boils back down to “survival of the fittest”, where “fittest” has been redefined to mean “has the most money”.

I recommend going to Disboard and then searching for dnd, dnd5e, or avrae, or else finding an invite to the Avrae discord server and looking through the latest posts in its looking-for-community channel (Avrae is a discord bot that helps automate D&D 5e gameplay, so I find it to be a convenient search term–but if ypur partner prefers other systems, Disboard probably has searchable tags for them too). Then just make sure the description also includes LGBTQ+ and you’re probably golden (at least in terms of finding a community that is not vitriolic to your partner).

These communities are often “Westmarches” style, where players group up for short events, so the specific group of people playing at any given time rotates. Some servers are primarily focused on being a place to find groups for synchronous play (e.g. over voice chat for a few hours), while others focus on slow asynchronous play-by-post that has participation from each player once or twice per day. Some servers combine the two styles.

Good luck!

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf’s equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

• an app with good preexisting test coverage
• the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
• a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It’s as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it’s easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help… But it’s pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it’s more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren’t real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

Spelljammer campaign at level 11. We were hired to get a MacGuffin necklace off of a pirate, by his rival. We waltz into his stronghold, get an audience, and then Nat 20 a Persuasion check to convince him for a 1on1 with my bard, b/c for a pirate so tough, what threat could my bard pose? His guards and my party members leave the room.

Land a Suggestion to have him hand me the necklace, and then land a Modify Memory to have him think it was his idea: we would claim he was dead, use the necklace to get an audience with his rival to show her “proof,” and then double cross her and kill her. Then he’d swoop in, reclaim the necklace, and pay us handsomely.

Poor dummy. Hoodwinked!

Level 3 feels significantly more punchy for most classes, which is nice.

Most d&d podcasts and shows get a bunch of free stuff that they feature (dice, minis, dice towers, stuffed animals, drawings of their characters, etc).

I doubt they buy things that someone wants to sell them.

You probably have to choose: do you want to sell it, or do you want to see it featured?

If the latter, then probably send a letter with some pictures, asking if they would feature it if you had it shipped, to whoever you want (most shows and podcasts advertise a PO Box or some such). If they answer such things on their show, chances are they’ll give you a shout out and let you know on an episode. If they say yes, then you ship it to them, and that’s… It.

Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as mv to update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the .DS_Store files co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.

So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.

Look into your local game cafe(s). That’s the type of place that sells board games, dice, minis, but also has gaming tables and often a small food and drink counter. There are likely nights for newbies you might be able to join, to experience it live.

Watch some youtube videos of people live-playing the game you are interested in. You’ll see the character players interacting with the DM, propped up mostly by their shared understanding of the game mechanics, and the individual mechanics of their characters. Keep an eye out for how things are different in combat vs out of combat.

You don’t need minis or dice if you play online. E.g. there is a Discord bot called Avrae, and many small communities come together around use of that bot to play, where it handles most of the crunchy mechanics like dice rolls and modifiers and even maps. Some communities play live sessions over video chat, others play without video chat but with 5 minute turn timers, and others play asynchronously with 24 hour timers in a format called play-by-post (or pbp) where they roll the crunchy math in one channel, and then roleplay their characters’ actions in another. Disboard will let you search communities who are looking for members–filter by whatever tags interest you most.

Finding a live play group to play a campaign with can be… Hard. I recommend you start by educating yourself about a system via free resources, maybe finding a game cafe to experience it in a one-shot, and try some online play, before investing too much. As you learn more, you’re also more likely to encounter people looking to start or grow a group.

I introduced a “small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door” next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn’t believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It’s an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

Check out Disboard, and search for 5e or avrae (and optionally play by post) to find a discord server to play on.

There are plenty of small Discord servers that use a bot called Avrae to automate the crunchy mechanics of d&d 5e, with things like char sheets, initiative, monsters and combat, and even maps. Some servers are slow paced, where everyone is expected to act once per ~24 hours, so you get a nice asynchronous game going where you have time to learn your character’s abilities, bot commands, etc, all while typing up your roleplay that matches the mechanics of your turn. That format is great for learning and getting the hang of things in the system, IMO, because you have a ton of time to ask questions in a chat channel to have others help you. Other servers will do sync events, where you sign up for an event with a specific star time, hop into a voice channel, and play with ~5 minute turn timers to really crunch through some combat quickly. This is great once you have the basics of Avrae down (and by extension, the mechanica of 5e).

That’s usually a “westmarches” format, where the server has a large number of players who queue up for events, but each event can only accommodate a small number of players from the top of the queue. You get grouped with random others this way (contrast that to “campaign” play where you stay with the same players for many consecutive sessions). IMO westmarches really helps get you acclimated to D&D through broad exposure to lots of classes, monsters, mechanics, RP styles, etc. And it works really well for someone who is casual!

Only the wrapper containing the Android UI is addressed by the fork

Discontinuation of Syncthing will cause stagnation in the fork as well, unless the fork’s devs announce(d?) they are picking up more work

deleted by creator

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice

Singular: die or dice

In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.

The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”

Completely agree, and will definitely make that change. As soon as Panera Bread starts selling Chunks.

I find that system inconvenient, as it does not inform me of how I should eat any given item. Classification for the purpose of classification is insufficient. However, an alternative that allows me to prepare my ustensils based on the classification is useful, and therefore I propose…

Soup, salad, and sandwich are the three states of food, and they can go through phase transitions. They are closely accompanied by spoon, fork, and knife, respectively.

• A soup is any food that requires a spoon, and thus includes soups, drinks, cereal with milk, etc. Tipping a container is merely the use of the container as a large and unwieldy spoon, a straw is similarly a spoon when its topology is combined with suction.

• A salad then is anything bite sized that can be forked, and one’s hands are little more than fleshy forks, the fingers prehensile tines. Popcorn, salads, cut up steak bites, a handful of cheerios, etc.

• A sandwich is anything that requires it to be cut in order to be consumed, and one’s incisors are merely built-in knives. A sandwich is thus the vast majority of the cube rule’s content, and only because the cube rule focuses on the physical location of the starch. This is, of course, entirely irrelevant when it comes to the consumption of food.

• To observe a phase transition, one can cut up a sandwich without consuming it, thereby turning it into a salad; can drown a salad to turn it into a soup; can freeze a soup to turn it into a sandwich, etc.

Shredded cheese is a salad.

AI can draw fingers, Midjourney fixed that in their model over a year ago now.

So I’d say we have a real race on our hands!

Most people hear “<blank> bubble” and think “oof, that’s not a good thing.”

Capitalists (the ones with the actual capital) hear the same thing and think “just imagine how rich I’ll be if I get out right before it pops! Blow more hot air into it! Quickly!”

Make dndbeyond good/better, invest in 3rd party VTT integrations, and keep selling books through those channels. Keep partnering with 3rd party content creators to get a cut of their profits selling through dndbeyond.

I’d stop trying to disrupt the industry or chase massive profits, and just be okay with reasonable profits.

They’d oust me in a week.

I enjoyed watching Harmonquest, the episodes of which have parts video of the table and parts animated story. It’s a comedy show, for the most part, which genre appeals to me. Past, that, I enjoy a good actual play podcast, sans video, like BomBARDed or NaDDPod, both of which are also comedic stories.

Just watching a group play a game can indeed be boring. But if that game is just a format for the genre of entertainment you already enjoy, that’s the appeal.