thom

89 ms·

841.
by thom 4y ago
I’m making content for 11 year olds, perhaps I have more leeway than others. In my experience it tends towards riddles that map to certain interactions in a certain order, but obviously using it as a tool you can iterate however much you ne
842.
by thom 4y ago
Enjoy your life however you choose, but your cynicism is lazy and derivative. ChatGPT has created(!) a bunch of quests for me to play with my kids and we’ve all walked away with smiles on our faces. I was so impressed with the contents that
843.
by thom 4y ago
I started out with something as simple as “Give me an idea for a starter D&D campaign suitable for a beginner 11 year old” and was happy with the results. I followed up with “Give details of the monsters and their stats and abilities fo
844.
by thom 4y ago
I’ve not been hugely impressed by ChatGPT as a DM itself, compared to the humans I’ve played with. But as a tool to generate quests, encounters, puzzles, dialogue, it’s been incredible for me. It takes all the stress out of planning a campa
845.
by thom 4y ago
The article does appear to agree with you - it proposes 'centralized power' as one of the imminent risks of these technologies.
846.
by thom 4y ago
I was very impressed with Gambas when I was looking for a QBasic throwback to install on my son’s machine. We wrote a little arithmetic game with a UI and it took half an hour and reminded me of what programming was like before all the bull
847.
by thom 4y ago
They are, for the first dozen moves of most games.
848.
by thom 4y ago
Gimme something to make family passwords easy (eliminate passwords!) Enable Apple ID logins for kids. Throw your weight around to move safety settings into some sort of open web standard. I’ve got 1Password but the daily pain of managing a
849.
by thom 4y ago
Everyone seems to think their particular niche is going to be the last to be commoditised. Yes, you've saved some time marketing your product. But your product is just going to get replaced by equally lazy people who type "write a
850.
by thom 4y ago
I grew up around a bunch of these machines (and more besides, like the Oric). My dad wrote programming books for many of them, and was even on the front cover of the first Dragon User magazine: https://archive.org/details&#x
851.
by thom 4y ago
I primarily use gptel configured in Emacs right now, so I’ve found myself with a chat buffer always open. https://github.com/karthink/gptel In the last couple of weeks I’ve found it really useful chatting through ideas
852.
by thom 4y ago
One such function is “what happens next?” which may work as well in the real world as on textual training data. Certainly it’s part of how human babies learn, via schemas.
853.
by thom 4y ago
It’s a little more corporate than the museum in the article, but in Sheffield in the UK we have a National Videogame Museum: https://thenvm.org/ Although I personally think you’ll get a better hands-on education somewhere l
854.
by thom 4y ago
If you want the most passionate and entertaining takedown (not just of the man but the tradition that has accepted his output uncritically), it would be Michael Parenti’s in The Assassination of Julius Caesar. But you can read about Cicero’
855.
by thom 4y ago
Totally agree that there wasn't much for the plebs to compromise on and I hope I'm not both-sidesing here, just pointing out that the tradition of violence around any proposed land reforms goes back hundreds of years, indeed all t
856.
by thom 4y ago
For what it's worth, one Roman figure who had an insanely engorged ego, relied on huge loans for his business dealings, and assigned Rome's decay to a shadowy cabal of deep-state paedophiles, was Cicero.
857.
by thom 4y ago
The Marian reforms were very practical, but they also set the scene for later generations of armies that felt bound more to their general than to Rome itself. There's a reason Augustus nearly bankrupted the state professionalizing the
858.
by thom 4y ago
Yes. By refusing to come to an entirely reasonable settlement which allowed Caesar to return from Gaul peacefully and without being prosecuted. By working tirelessly to put a wedge between Pompey and Caesar.
859.
by thom 4y ago
If there's one thing the entirety of Roman history tells us, it's that managing succession is incredibly difficult. It was by no means the rule that someone 'winning' meant things were about to get peaceful (or at least,
860.
by thom 4y ago
Caesar was pretty popular, and ignoring that ignores many of the dynamics (reaching back to Marius at least, but really all the way to the Conflict of the Orders) that actually governed Roman politics. At the time he came to power, Rome was
861.
by thom 4y ago
The late Republic is one of the most fascinating periods of history you can study, not least because the sources are so rich (albeit largely written by a bunch of self-aggrandizing aristocrats or their lackeys). But Caesar was largely a sym
862.
by thom 4y ago
I've been extremely impressed with GPT-4 so far, generating a campaign for my kids. The encounters it created were very well fleshed out (monsters, minions, stats and abilities for all, including very flavourful lair actions for bosses
863.
by thom 4y ago
Well yes, but so did HSBC, Barclays and presumably all the other banks. So, reasons to be cheerful.
864.
by thom 4y ago
Tried to get an explanation for a crossword clue today: The answer "gnocchi" is derived from the clue "spouted pan I used for dumplings" using a type of wordplay known as anagram. An anagram is a type of wordplay where t
865.
by thom 4y ago
It's often overshadowed by events that followed shortly after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
866.
by thom 4y ago
The intuitive explanation I've found useful is: two-thirds of the time, he's telling you exactly where the car is. One-third of the time he can't help you either way. If you have a friend whose advice is more often right than
867.
by thom 4y ago
Or, for the case of errors, with exceptions, which happen to have their own very limited pattern matching syntax.
868.
by thom 4y ago
You can (and perhaps should!) do this with TDD, you just start with functional tests instead. Only commit to unit and integration tests when you know you’re not going to be throwing lots of stuff away through refactorings.
869.
by thom 4y ago
The stochastic parrot claim seems to crash people’s brains because they assume this is all about words. The fact that these models very clearly learn not just patterns of words, but patterns of ideas, and ideas about ideas, seems a very pro
870.
by thom 4y ago
Yeah, I can imagine that’s painful. But I hope joyful sounds balance it out! One that I always notice is the TiVo bi-bip - every time I hear it on a TV show I have happy memories of a great device.

More ›