it's fucking crazy to me that we have a real life Voight-Kampff test and it fucking works

Ursula Le Guin: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.”

A Sociology of Tabletop Roleplaying Games

I. Dear Reader, Every once in a while, one must embrace hubris. In today's post, I'm going to try and explain everything I understand about the TTRPG hobby. Yeah, everything. I've called it a sociology because that's the best word I can think of. Let's start with play. Play is an important part of life - mentally, spiritually, emotionally, physiologically, grammatically.

https://ttrpg.in/2024/06/16/a-sociology-of-tabletop-roleplaying-games/

Changing the metaphor for LLM unreliability: they're bullshitting, not hallucinating:

https://www.psypost.org/scholars-ai-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/

#AI #LLM

Playing around with Godot Engine and Non Photorealistic Rendering

#gamedev #godotengine #godot

🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍🌈
❤️ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 💜

2018: Deeply skeptical of companies plastering rainbow flags all over everything for one month a year

2024: Deeply suspicious of companies that don't plaster rainbow flags all over everything for one month a year

'“The union” is an organization you build with your coworkers, not a service you receive. Say it again. And again. And again.'

#Union

Let's make a megathread together! 🧵

What #LGBTQIA-led studios and games are using Godot?

Let's start #PrideMonth the right way, by spreading some love 🌈

#godot #godotengine #gamedev

Your experience of self is the laws of nature anthropomorphizing a human.

I've noticed a big shift toward, "We should be teaching kids how to cite AI."

That's antithetical to citations. A citation points you to the original source. Citing AI is effectively erasing original sources in a misguided effort to "teach students how to responsibly use AI tools."

Responsible use is teaching people that AI tools are plagiarism machines. Period.

Self-hosted Free Software federated Torment Nexus

Huge yikes.

Kagi is now partnering with Brave to power its search results — and they seem to be dismissing their users’ concerns regarding this partnership with a company that’s notorious for being led by a proud anti gay rights supporter.

Just as I’ve consistently advised against using Brave’s products, I now advise against using Kagi as long as it contributes to a homophobic business.

There can be no neutral politics when it comes to people’s rights and lives.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave

A lot of people don't know that the reason there's not a "rating system" for books like there is for movies, video games, music, etc. is an intentional and explicit stance of librarians. Librarian associations have long, and correctly, insisted that categorizing books into specific ratings or age categories is censorship. The decision of an outside group of people about whether a book is or is not appropriate for someone of a certain age is censoring content to them.

As we've seen with the right's attacks on libraries for LGBT content in books, they would LOVE if some outside party had already done the work of classifying books into a particular category, and they could simply lobby that one central body into insisting that any mention of gay people means it's Adults Only. Then in one fell swoop they could brand the entire debate as "we just want to make sure that our libraries only carry age appropriate books" without having to have the debate on a case by case basis on each individual book across each individual library and across each individual library patron.

After all, does it even make sense that literally the diary of a tween/teenage girl is not appropriate for a tween/teenage kid to read? If you ask conservatives, the uncensored Diary of Anne Frank should be Adults Only. Despite it being written by a teenage girl and having real historical value in humanizing the victims of the Holocaust. But if they could do that fight once, centrally, at a ratings board, they could get it banned from all libraries in one fell swoop.

I am seeking transgender people from Finland to speak about their experiences with transition in that country.

I know that Masto has a lot of Euro users, so please boost for visibility.

About me: I'm a transgender US journalist interested in exposing barriers to treatment experienced by trans people in Finland bc some Finnish researchers are making a big splash in anti-trans activism internationally.

It would be particularly valuable to find someone who attempted to access care as a minor.

If at first you don't succeed, don't sweat it, your parents are rich.

Wait. Your parents aren't rich?

Oh, man. This is embarrassing. Sorry, all of these success aphorisms are meant for people with privilege and resources.

You're on your own. Good luck.



#success #SelfHelp #advice

transphobes: you can't take part in sports team because you went through puberty

trans people: please can i take blockers to stop puberty

transphobes: no

Quote of the day: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"

Who called it “intellectual property problems around the acquisition of training data for Large Language Models” and not Grand Theft ̶A̶u̶t̶o̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ Autocomplete?

W4 Games have just launched W4 Cloud.

It's a complete, free & open source networking solution for #GodotEngine. Host your own servers, it costs you nothing to use.
https://gamefromscratch.com/w4-games-launch-w4-cloud-complete-godot-multiplayer-solution/

#gamedev #indiedev