thom

37 ms·

571.
by thom 3y ago
That’s really useful, ta! The advantage of ChatGPT is that I can ensure a certain kind of setting or flavour, or push it to include particularly thematic actions or terrain. Or if the party arrives at a marketplace in a new city, I can quic
572.
by thom 3y ago
Good luck! I’m slightly ashamed to say this but I have found ChatGPT 4 an absolute godsend to design small quests and encounters when I’m pushed for time (or more regularly when my party decides to do something utterly random). Your mileage
573.
by thom 3y ago
I DM for my son and his friends after school on Fridays. Every week is the same: I try and prepare some grand sweeping conspiracy to uncover, some memorable encounters, a few funny accents. I sort out the relevant terrain tiles, prepare the
574.
by thom 3y ago
This is the _Nicholas_ behind Neal’s Yard Dairy, there’s no Neal (it’s named for Neal’s Yard which is off Neal Street in London, named for Thomas Neale, a 17th century property developer).
575.
by thom 3y ago
Regarding number 5, one company I worked for had the donut rule: if you left your computer unlocked, everyone was within their rights to send an email to the whole company offering to buy everybody donuts. It was expected that you would fol
576.
by thom 3y ago
It’s funny reading some of the responses here because it’s clear many people have lived as if responding to a completely literal reading of only the first paragraph of the book of life.
577.
by thom 3y ago
One phenomenon I’ve seen several times during recent conflicts is people swearing blind that an image must be fake, and even insisting some vague shadow is a sixth finger proving their point, even when the photo later proves to have pretty
578.
by thom 3y ago
Knuth makes this argument more clearly elsewhere, in Computer Programming as an Art: "Another important aspect of program quality is the efficiency with which the computer's resources are actually being used. I am sorry to say tha
579.
by thom 3y ago
I'm pasting the famous passage below, and I don't know how to interpret it as anything other than a call to correctly identify the performance critical part of one's code before spending significant time on optimization. If y
580.
by thom 3y ago
Worth pointing out that this is actually what Knuth meant by premature optimisation. Nothing to do with optimising too early in a project or some sense of YAGNI, but rather optimising before you know where the actual time is spent.
581.
by thom 3y ago
Exactly. And go take a swim in a river if you want to experience actual consequences of the mismanagement of our water infrastructure. There is still hope for Grenfell prosecutions after the inquest, but justice repeatedly delayed for no go
582.
by thom 3y ago
This was coupled by the victims being lied to that they were the only ones. Had they known this was systematic they could have mounted a more effective defence.
583.
by thom 3y ago
This is a British scandal, and we’re quite capable of avoiding consequences for malfeasance in every sector of our economy, not just IT thank you very much.
584.
by thom 3y ago
The key here is to always have some structured intermediate layer that can allow people to evaluate what it is the system thinks they're asking, short of the full complexity of SQL. You'll need something like this for disambiguati
585.
by thom 3y ago
Given that we clearly had an exhaustive list of all of these miscarriages of justice, I too would have preferred that we fixed our absolutely shambolic and chronically underfunded court system to process the backlog properly. But given that
586.
by thom 3y ago
I have offline Wikipedia and maps for similar exigencies.
587.
by thom 3y ago
MtGox, Tether?
588.
by thom 3y ago
There's also a later Easter Egg that implies it's in the same universe as Wing Commander.
589.
by thom 3y ago
Yeah this is one of the things that made me sad when dialogue heavy - especially voice-acted - games became the norm. Wizardry VII was another good example, it really increases immersion when you have to remember things and prompts aren&#x2
590.
by thom 3y ago
I dunno, there’s a pretty convincing episode of Lovejoy about this.
591.
by thom 3y ago
Not sure why this got so heavily downvoted, let people reminisce.
592.
by thom 3y ago
UKC was on Janet so it shouldn’t have been so terrible compared to other institutions. One of the biggest issues back then was people running remote X sessions on shared departmental machines so everything would grind to a halt at the start
593.
by thom 3y ago
Certainly in the 90s through HENSA and the UK Mirror Service it was responsible for hosting huge amounts of useful software. I always chose mirror.ac.uk as my mirror in Debian for sentimental reasons.
594.
by thom 3y ago
I suppose I’m guilty of conflating dreaming spires and river punts with Anglican dioceses, I just didn’t want prospective students to rock up on an open day disappointed. :)
595.
by thom 3y ago
Shame there's not always something worth typing though.
596.
by thom 3y ago
Yeah, I mean with autocorrect. Without that I don't think I could type a single word tbh. The AI they rolled out in the last year or so has been noticeably better too, but still my thumbs are clearly not in the normal human range.
597.
by thom 3y ago
It’s incredibly rare that I can type even a single sentence correctly on the iPhone. In that one it came out ‘in’ and not ‘on’ for example. In that one I typed sample not example. I got that last one right! I see the arguments from both sid
598.
by thom 3y ago
Rare piece of Kent content on HN! I went to the University of Canterbury, and there's a beautiful walk all the way from Canterbury to Whitstable - absolutely lovely part of the world. Canterbury is a slightly smaller version of other c
599.
by thom 3y ago
Yeah, how naive we were building operating systems without linear and dependent types. Savages.
600.
by thom 3y ago
Bit of a blast from the past for me, as we used Perfect Table Plan when we got married. I heard about that from its creator Andy Brice who frequented the Joel on Software forums, a spiritual precursor to HN. https://www.perfectta

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